Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with another Porky Pig Looney Tunes cartoon, the 1937 Porky's Road Race, directed by Frank Tashlin.
The caricatured celebrities are, in order of appearance: Men on seesaw: Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy; Little Tramp: Charles Chaplin; Man with big nose: W.C. Fields; Old lady: Edna May Oliver; Woman with big feet: Greta Garbo; Floating Power: Charles Laughton; Borax Karoff: Boris Karloff; Knee Action Special: Stepin Fetchit; Cheerio Special: George Arliss, Leslie Howard, Freddie Bartholomew; Caliban and Ariel: John Barrymore and Elaine Barrie; Hitchhiker: Clark Gable.
Before the start of our feature presentation, the staff of The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour would like to share with you, during Pride month, this beautiful clip from the folks at Letters Live
Nathan Lane, a marvelous comic actor, can draw tears from a stone.
We've picked another entry from the excellent reference book, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die by Steven Jay Schneider. Today's film is the 1977 drama The Ascent , (AKA Voskhozhdeniye), directed by Larysa Shepitko, and starring Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Sergei Yakovlev, Lyudmila Polyakova, and Anatoly Solonitsyn.. The Ascent was was nearly banned because of it's subject matter: the partisan effort during WWII . Larysa Shepitko's husband, Elem Klimov, also a film director, invited a top Soviet official to a private screening of the film. The official was so moved by the power of the film and the fact that a woman directed it, that he immediately through his full support behind the film. It a film many of us had not seen before but enjoyed a great deal. So just push away from the table, get ready to enjoy this feast for the eyes and join us in watching The Ascent.
In order to achieve the desired performance from the actors, Larisa Shepitko sometimes talked for a long time with them out in the cold. For example, despite the crew's full readiness, the director would talk for a long time with Boris Plotnikov, whose character she carefully directed during the filming. Shepitko's habit of clearly stating her thoughts contributed to a successful transmission of information; she did not use abstruse terms that might mask the lack of clarity. She waited for the necessary expression of emotion, for the right facial expression and gestures and then suddenly would give the order to start filming. Plotnikov later said that he would have liked to repeat this experience in other films, but never did. On working with Shepitko, Plotnikov spoke of "a meeting with a living genius." Vasil Bykau also shared a similar opinion about the film's director, he called her "Dostoevsky in a skirt." Bykau valued Larisa Shepitko very highly and once admitted that had he met her before, he would have written Sotnikov differently.
Demand Euphoria!
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