CHICAGO in San Rafael, July 14 2008

[Rodney]

When touring to California, we always love playing at the Rafael Theater in San Rafael. It's a renovated (rather than restored) vintage theater with an intimate auditorium that is always ideal for our sound, and it has the top-notch projection you'd expect from a modern repertory art cinema.

After considerable discussion, the Rafael Film Center decided to run CHICAGO (1927), the lively and long-unavailable silent version of the well-known murder-and-celebrity-trial story. This is a bit of a risk for them, as their silents in the past have almost all been the big-name comedians.

CHICAGO
Rafael Film Center
Monday, July 14, 2008
Start time and price TBA (check Mont Alto's web site or the Rafael Theater web site).

Phyllis Haver stars as the seductive, shallow, and manipulative “jazz slayer” Roxie Hart, and Victor Varconi plays a sympathetic and complex Amos Hart. Unlike later film versions of the story, the silent version is not a nostalgic look at the 1920s—it was made in the time itself, and holds no romantic illusions about the era. The film is funny and dramatic by turns, and cruelly satirizes the perversion of justice by celebrity. A lively jazz-era score, using music suggested by the original musical cue sheet, will be provided by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra.

And, as announced previously, we'll be playing for Harold Lloyd's THE KID BROTHER on Friday July 11 at 7 pm, and THE SILENT ENEMY on Sunday July 13 at 1:10 p.m. at the Castro Theater in San Francisco as part of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.