This year's Vintage Film Festival celebrates Great Directors!
Alfred HitchcockWhat is it that makes a director a Great Director? Is it the critical or box office success of their movies? The number of Oscar or Golden Globe wins and nominations? Dominance in Hollywood? Election to auteur status by French film critics? The staying power and artistic significance of their body of work?
It can be any or all of the above, of course; and the thirteen directors we've chosen to highlight this year all check many or most of those boxes. Here are the directors, and the representative films of theirs which we plan to share:
- Robert Wise – West Side Story (1961) – starring Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer and Rita Moreno
- Billy Wilder – Some Like It Hot (1959) – starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe
- Alfred Hitchcock – The 39 Steps (1935) – starring Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll
- Buster Keaton – Sherlock Jr. (1924) – starring Buster Keaton
- Yasujiro Ozu – Tokyo Story (1953) – starring Chishū Ryū and Setsuko Hara
- Orson Welles – Citizen Kane (1941) – starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten
- Roman Polanski – Chinatown (1974) – starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston
- Stanley Kubrick – Dr. Strangelove (1964) – starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and Sterling Hayden
- Agnès Varda – Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) – starring Corinne Marchand and Antoine Bourseiller
- Lois Weber – The Blot (1921) – starring Claire Windsor and Louis Calhern
- John Huston – Key Largo (1948) – starring Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Edward G. Robinson
- John Ford – The Searchers (1956) – starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles
- Preston Sturges – The Palm Beach Story (1942) – starring Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrae and Rudy Vallee
John FordThis remarkable list of films includes many which are widely acknowledged to be among the greatest ever made. Eleven of these 13 movies are included in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die; and six of them ranked in the Top 100 in the British Film Institute's 2022 Sight and Sound poll – including #3 (Citizen Kane) and #4 (Tokyo Story). This may be the greatest program that the Festival has ever presented!
VFF favourite, pianist Jordan Klapman, will accompany the two silent movies, Sherlock Jr. and The Blot. For our Sunday lunchtime film talk, a Western University professor will tell us about London, Ontario native Al Christie, "Hollywood's Forgotten Film Pioneer" – a producer of silent comedies to rival Mack Sennett (also a Canadian) and Hal Roach. And, as usual, there'll be free single tickets for everyone aged 25 or younger, and free popcorn all weekend!