{"id":6939,"date":"2022-01-15T00:29:39","date_gmt":"2022-01-15T00:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/?p=6939"},"modified":"2022-01-15T00:54:45","modified_gmt":"2022-01-15T00:54:45","slug":"films-this-week-1-14-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/films-this-week-1-14-22\/","title":{"rendered":"Films This Week 1\/14\/22"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Regular viewers of our “Talk Back” Zoom-cast on classic movies may have noticed that I sometimes use the phrase “Six degrees of New Plaza Cinema”\u00a0when some inadvertent\u00a0connection arises \u2014\u00a0as it often seems to \u2014<\/span><\/span>\u00a0on a new program with\u00a0actors and filmmakers whom we’ve celebrated on a previous one. \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The passing last week of both Sidney Poitier and Peter Bogdanovich seemed to bring that home to me in an especially\u00a0poignant\u00a0way.<\/p>\n

Two of Poitier’s early films were featured in our first year of\u00a0the New Plaza Cinema Classic\u00a0Talk Backs. No Way Out<\/a><\/em>\u00a0showcased\u00a0his debut performance as a young doctor struggling against the dual burdens of social responsibility and withering prejudice, and we speculated how he must have felt those same burdens in real life, early 1950s America.<\/p>\n

NY Times<\/em> critic Manohla Dargis this week described the 1961 Paris Blues<\/a><\/em>\u00a0as “a film that I love despite its flaws, including his marginalization.”<\/p>\n

Still, the film has Poitier and Diahann Carroll (whose daughter,\u00a0Suzanne Kay, joined us via Zoom!) playing lovers and they’re beautiful, and shown as desiring and desirable.\u00a0Poitier was disappointed with how the film turned out and said the studio had “chickened out on us” \u2014\u00a0he was always being sold out, it seems by the white powers that be, however ostensibly well-intentioned those powers.<\/p>\n

That is a topic worthy of impassioned debate, but there’s no denying Poitier’s on-screen power and his central position in mid-1960s popular culture with films like To Sir With Love, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”<\/em>\u00a0I recall watching Heat<\/em>\u00a0two decades ago with my son, then in his early teens. In the famous scene where small town southern sheriff Rod Steiger, sparring in his humid office with big city homicide detective Poitier, asks him, “What do they call you up in Philadelphia?” the latter replies “They call me MISTER Tibbs!\u201d<\/p>\n

I turned to my son and said, “Now that’s a movie star.”<\/p>\n

And forever a beacon of courage and grace for generations of Americans.<\/p>\n

Peter Bogdanvich merits his own column, which I will deliver next week.<\/p>\n

Gary Palmucci,\u00a0Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Regular viewers of our “Talk Back” Zoom-cast on classic movies may have noticed that I sometimes use the phrase “Six degrees of New Plaza Cinema”\u00a0when some inadvertent\u00a0connection arises \u2014\u00a0as it often seems to \u2014\u00a0on a new program with\u00a0actors and filmmakers whom we’ve celebrated on a previous one. \u00a0 The passing last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-garys-corner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6939"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6955,"href":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6939\/revisions\/6955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newplazacinema.org\/test_area\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}