bunco: the art of the con may 5 -20, 1999 photo: JACKIE BROWN

This program was curated by Ray Schnitzer and Kent Jones. Thanks to John Cocchi for contributing stills from his personal collection. about the program calendar HOUSE OF GAMES David Mamet, USA, 1987; 102m "What's more fun than human nature?" quips Mike (Joe Mantegna), HOUSE OF GAMES's preeminent con artist and the very devil of a guy. With a come-on like that, it's no wonder Margaret Ford, up-tight shrink and best-selling author of Driven: Compulsion and Obsession in Everyday Life (Lindsay Crouse), can hardly wait to get lost in Mike's seductive scamming. When one of her patients--an addictive gambler--tells her that he's in the hole to the tune of $25,000, Margaret is primed to test her professional skills to see if they have any real power in the game of life.

HOUSE OF GAMES THE SPANISH PRISONER PAPER MOON THE STING NOTHING SACRED THE LADY EVE THE MUSIC MAN YOLANDA AND THE THIEF

Diving into Rain City's neon-smeared night world of layered stings and cons, this innocent is way out of her depth. In critic Hal Hinson's words, Mantegna's scamming Mephistopheles "makes scummy amorality irresistible...[he's] like a walking oil slick; pure sleaze in a sharkskin suit." David Mamet makes a brilliant directorial debut here (he also scripted), creating an existential climate where everything is "fun and games"--unless, of course, you lose--and language is just another kind of cardtrick. Wed May 5: 2 pm & 6:15 pm; Thurs May 6: 4:10 pm THE SPANISH PRISONER David Mamet, USA, 1998; 110m Enterprising yuppie researcher Joe Ross (Campbell Scott) has made a theoretical breakthrough with such vast commercial potential (read McGuffin) that his smooth-operator boss (Ben Gazzara) sends him off to a resort island to meet with some big-time investors--and enjoy some time in the sun. There, a superfluous secretary (Rebecca Pidgeon) and a silver-tongued mystery man (suprisingly seductive Steve Martin) put various kinds of moves on Ross. By the time he gets back to New York, this rather priggish soul finds himself neck-deep in byzantine--and increasingly dangerous--corporate, emotional and criminal games. A deliciously Hitchcockian entertainment in which everyone manifests--to the last turn of the screw--an all-too-human penchant for creepy self-deception. Wed May 5: 4 pm & 8:20 pm; Thurs May 6: 2 pm PAPER MOON Peter Bogdanovich, USA, 1973; 102m After the phenomenal success of What's Up Doc?, Bogdanovich reteamed with Ryan O'Neal to create a lovely, altogether more relaxed comedy, a gorgeous black-and-white evocation of rural America in the midst of the Depression (shot by the great Laszlo Kovacs). Ryan is Moses Pray, a grifter who attends the funeral of a former girlfriend and is saddled with the woman's orphaned daughter Addie (played to a T by O'Neal's daughter Tatum), an impossibly wise, foul-mouthed nine-year old going on 40. The two argue their way through the Midwest, playing out a string of picaresque adventures and swindling the rubes who cross their path, until John Hillerman's spiteful sheriff catches up with them. PAPER MOON is pure charm and pleasure, with a typically outstanding performance by the great Madeline Kahn as sleazy Trixie Delight; a soundtrack of wonderful 30s classics; and an invaluable lesson in how to turn $20 into $40. Fri May 7: 2 pm & 6:30 pm; Sat May 8: 4 pm & 8:30 pm Mr. Bogdanovich will speak at the 8:30 show on May 8. THE STING George Roy Hill, USA, 1973; 129m Anyone who lived through the heyday of THE STING is probably still trying to get the tune of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" out of his head--but watching this gorgeous, juicy, intricate movie, the very definition of star charisma and Hollywood virtues, you hear it for the first time all over again. Paul Newman and Robert Redford reunited with BUTCH CASSIDY director George Roy Hill for this pungent celebration of con artistry, set against an unashamedly nostalgic version of Chicago in the 30s. Green young grifter Johnny Hooker (Redford) enlists veteran bunco artist Henry Gondorff (Newman) to help him pull off a big con on gangster Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw)--to avenge the death of his partner (Robert Earl Jones, father of James). This multiple Oscar-winner features an army of great character actors, including Harold Gould and Ray Walston; gorgeous set designs by Henry Bumstead; and, of course, those lovely Joplin rags. Fri May 7: 4 pm & 8:30 pm; Sat May 8: 6 pm GASLIGHT George Cukor, USA, 1944; 114m One night in her house at 10 Thornton Square, celebrated opera singer Alice Alquist is murdered and her young niece, Paula, spirited away to grow up on the Continent. Years later, Paula (Ingrid Bergman, at her most vulnerable) returns to the Alquist house with her new husband, Gregory Anton (charming cobra Charles Boyer). The soul of devotion, Gregory takes superb care of his increasingly distracted wife--good thing, too, because Paula's taken to stealing small items from hubby's bureau and secreting them among her own possessions. There are other signs of dementia--and unctuously patient Gregory is always there to soothe "poor Paula." Lucky audience, getting to watch two bravura Oscar-nominated performances under the masterly direction of George Cukor, in a legendarily creepy war of nerves played out in a very long con. With Angela Lansbury as a wonderfully saucy maid (her debut, also Oscar-nominated), Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty. Sun May 9: 7 pm; Mon May 10: 2 pm & 6:15 pm WHIRLPOOL Otto Preminger, USA, 1949; 97m "I cannot remember anything about this picture," Otto Preminger once said, with a mixture of self-deprecation and utter contempt for his interviewer. Which is ironic, since it's one of his most intriguing films. Ann Sutton (Gene Tierney, owner of one of cinema's sexiest overbites) has a shoplifting problem, and help arrives in the form of hypnotist David Korvo (José Ferrer), who convinces the store where she's caught to drop all charges and leave her in his care. Hypnotism seems to be the cure-all, until Ann gets into even hotter water--emerging from a trance next to a dead body and charged with a murder she didn't commit. One of the most fascinating and least known films of Preminger's Fox period, when he brought his dry, mean poetic eye to bear on a variety of genres. (Benoit Jacquot unofficially remade Whirlpool's first half in his recent Seventh Heaven.) Sun May 9: 9:15 pm; Mon May 10: 4:15 pm & 8:30 pm NOTHING SACRED William Wellman, USA, 1937; 75m "This is New York, Skyscraper Champion of the World...where the Slickers and Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks to each other ... and where Truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye!" This terrific screwball comedy's opening title clues you in at once to the con artist's paradise (courtesy of scriptwriter Ben Hecht's sardonic wit) where hotshot reporter Wally Cook (Fredric March) thrives. Discovering a small-town girl (luminous, hilarious Carole Lombard) on the verge of death by radiation poisoning, Wally trades an all-expenses-paid dream trip to the Big Apple for her exclusive sobstory. Naturally, New York takes Hazel Flagg to its heart, and Wally is a great success. Problem is, the hard-boiled reporter's fallen hard for the flagging Flagg, and just to muddy the waters, it turns out Hazel isn't really a goner! Great dialogue, great comic performances, great music (by Oscar Levant)--the kind of apparently casual movie art contemporary comedies can't even dream of. Wed May 12: 4 pm; Thurs May 13: 2 pm THE LADY EVE Preston Sturges, USA, 1941; 97m In 1938, Preston Sturges wrote a script called TWO BAD HATS about a father-daughter card-shark team, with Claudette Colbert in mind. Following the success of THE GREAT MCGINTY, he decided to direct the script himself, fought for Barbara Stanwyck to play the lead, and changed the title to THE LADY EVE. Astonishing to remember that Paramount thought they were gambling big time by paying through the nose for Henry Fonda as the bumbling male lead, or that Sturges was nervous about getting good reviews. Flawless is the adjective for this classic about a maladroit brewery tycoon with a passion for snakes, who falls twice for the same sly, curvaceous grifter. With William Demarest as Fonda's loyal valet-protector, Eugene Pallette as his permanently exasperated father, Charles Coburn as Stanwyck's politely crooked father and the unforgettable Sturges stock company. Wed May 12: 2 pm; Thurs May 13: 3:40 pm THE MUSIC MAN Morton Da Costa, USA, 1962; 151m "Pockets that mark the diff'rence/Between a gentleman and a bum/With a capital 'B' and that rhymes with 'P' and that stands for 'Pool'!" Meredith Willson's phenomenal Broadway hit has a remarkable grasp of the musical rhythms of the American idiom, but it's an understatement to say Willson was lucky to get Robert Preston to play Professor Harold Hill, the crooked travelling salesman who tries to sell a marching band to the town of River City, Iowa, only to have his heart stolen and reformed by Marian the librarian (Shirley Jones). Though many other actors have played the role, Preston's mixture of exuberance, twinkling charm and Midwestern straight talk makes it difficult to imagine anyone else handling the sing-speech sermonizing with more ease and authority. Fri May 14: 2 pm & 7 pm; Sat May 15: 6:40 pm

THE FORTUNE COOKIE THE PRODUCERS BLONDE CRAZY THE MIND READER HIGH PRESSURE I LOVE YOU AGAIN THE GRIFTERS

YOLANDA AND THE THIEF Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1945; 108m Yolanda Aquaviva (Lucille Bremer), last surviving member of the biggest landholding family in the mythical nation of Patria, prays to God for a guardian angel. Her prayer seems to be answered with the arrival of American con artist Johnny Parkson Riggs (Fred Astaire), whose motives are strictly larcenous but whose heart is up for grabs. A notorious failure at the time of its release but a subsequent cult favorite, Vincente Minnelli's second Technicolor musical is a delirious explosion of pure style, and it plays like a fever dream.The Ludwig Bemelmans-Jacques Thery story takes a back seat to Minnelli's vibrant color scheme and hypnotic set pieces, the most breathtaking being the "Coffee Time" number. A singularly heady concoction, YOLANDA also marks the inauguration of Fred Astaire's mature period, when his acting caught up with his dancing and youthful archness gave way to mellow, middle-aged melancholy. Fri May 14: 4:50 pm; Sat May 15: 4:30 pm & 9:30 pm THE FORTUNE COOKIE Billy Wilder, USA, 1966; 125m If you were at a football game and saw a runner crash into a spectator on the sidelines you wouldn't think much of it, but Billy Wilder zeroed right in on a bonanza of comic possibilities. In an effort to do his own end-run around the box office disaster of KISS ME, STUPID, Wilder cooked up this acerbic, sharp-tongued satire of American greed and vindictiveness. He also created one of the most successful comedy teams in movie history. Jack Lemmon is CBS cameraman Harry Hinkle, who is knocked flat by Cleveland Browns halfback "Boom Boom" Jackson (Ron Rich). When he goes to the hospital for a routine check up, he's hounded into faking a serious injury by his shyster brother-in-law, "Whiplash Willie" Gingrich (no relation to our former Speaker -- though perhaps spiritually), and milking the network insurance cash cow. Lemmon is predictably wonderful as a sad-sack, ordinary guy, but Matthau (in an Oscar-winning performance) was a revelation as the blunt, impossibly lofty ambulance chaser. As was the pairing of these two actors, who complemented one another like death and taxes. Sun May 16: 4 pm & 8:15 pm THE PRODUCERS Mel Brooks, USA, 1968; 88m Prepare for mind-boggling, side-splitting, transcendently tasteless comedy as only unholy trinity Mel Brooks, Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel can dish it out! A pair of down-at-the-heels Broadway producers--Leo Bloom and Max Bialystock--dream up the idea of putting on a over-financed show that's built to fail in order to scam lots of bucks from investors. The result: Springtime for Hitler, an effervescent romp about Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, written by a neo-Nazi (Kenneth Mars), directed by a fatuous cross-dresser (Christopher Hewett) and starring hippie-freak Lorenzo S. Dubois, LSD for short (Dick Shawn). The theater audience sits in stunned silence as they witness the play's first--utterly appalling, supremely funny--production number, and it looks like windfall time for bamboozlers Wilder and Mostel until ... but you'll want to enjoy this deeply disturbed comedy without any further blurbal intervention. Sun May 16: 6:25 pm BLONDE CRAZY Roy Del Ruth, USA, 1931; 79m Technicians may have been officially responsible for bringing sound to the movies, but it was the cocky young New Yorker James Cagney and the army of magical character actors around him at Warner Brothers who taught them how to move and talk in thrilling unison. Fresh from the phenomenal success of The Public Enemy and Smart Money's solid hit, Cagney made this brashly entertaining burst of spontaneous energy, in which he and the great Joan Blondell play a pair of Manhattan con artists who fleece, among others, Guy Kibbee, Louis Calhern and a very young Ray Milland. The first of Cagney's "cuff operas" (in which he and his fellow actors improvised a lot of their high-speed dialogue "off the cuff"), BLONDE CRAZY was also the movie that cemented his stardom and gave him the confidence to walk out on his contract and get more money from the stingy Warner brothers. Mon May 17: 2, 5:20 pm & 8:40 pm THE MIND READER Roy Del Ruth, USA, 1933; 74m "Try one o' these narcotics--a buck a smash," says reformed con man Allen Jenkins to soon-to-be-reformed con man Warren William as he hands him a great big cigar. That particularly flavorful patch of dialogue is typical of this swift, pungent programmer, a vehicle for the greatest lounge lizard in the history of movies, Warren William. Here he's a con artist touring the Midwest with a mind-reading act: bedecked in a swami's turban, feigning deep concentration, he sonorously intones pronouncements about the suckers in the audience in that wonderful voice that sounds like a plummy British accent acquired after a half a night of practice in a room at the local Y. With an impressively neurotic turn by Mayo Methot (Mrs. Humphrey Bogart #3), whose self-destruction causes the mind-reader to renounce his rotten ways. Early Warners at its unassuming best. Mon May 17: 3:40 pm & 7 pm HIGH PRESSURE Mervyn LeRoy, USA, 1932; 74m Everybody gets conned in this eminently satisfying, built-for-speed Warner Brothers gem. Scam artist Gar Evans (William Powell) gets dollar signs in his eyes when he hears about an invention that can convert raw sewage into artificial rubber. He sells corporate stock to finance his rubber plant (no pun intended) before he finds out that he's the one who's been scammed. A perfect vehicle for one of the greatest comic actors to ever grace the medium with his presence. With Evelyn Brent, the ubiquitous Guy Kibbee, and the ever-magical Frank McHugh. Tues May 18: 2 pm I LOVE YOU AGAIN W. S. Van Dyke, USA, 1940; 99m Few of the films William Powell made were up to the level of his formidable talent, but this inventive, beautifully conceived MGM screwball comedy was a shining exception. Powell plays a dull, upstanding businessman who is unexpectedly dragged overboard during a pleasure cruise by his good friend (Warners loan-out Frank McHugh) and bonked unconscious with an oar. When he wakes up, he suddenly realizes that he is an amnesiac, and that previous to his boring, unpredictable life he had led an excitingly disreputable existence as a con artist. Meanwhile, he falls in love all over again with his soon-to-be ex-wife Myrna Loy. A terrific premise, and a beautifully airy execution by "One-take" Woody Van Dyke. With "Alfalfa" Switzer and little Bobby Blake, better known in his adult years as Robert Blake. Tues May 18: 3:40 pm & 8:30 pm JACKIE BROWN Quentin Tarantino, USA, 1997; 151m For his follow-up to Pulp Fiction, hotshot Quentin Tarantino crossed into more soulful territory with this adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch. His most striking alteration of the novel: making Jackie Brown, a middle-aged stewardess who runs drug money on the side, into an African-American, thus allowing him to erect a veritable cinematic shrine to blaxploitation star Pam Grier. Tarantino's camera all but genuflects to Grier, and he surrounds her with a vivid gallery of actors, including Samuel L. Jackson as the coolly frightening Ordell, Robert De Niro and Bridget Fonda as his two stoned satellites, Michael Keaton as an ATF agent and, most memorably of all, Robert Forster as a square, john bail bondsman who falls hard for Jackie. L.A. has never looked seedier, nor has it ever felt more achingly romantic. Wed May 19: 2 & 7:15; Thurs May 20: 4:15 pm PANEL DISCUSSION Participants are scheduled to include: novelist Donald Westlake, Lieutenant Robert Groth, psychiatrist Harvey R. Greenberg, MD, consumer representative Annette Buchanan, and Neil Schorr of the US Postal Inspection Service. Wed May 20: 7:15 pm Discussion will be followed by the 8:30 show of THE GRIFTERS THE GRIFTERS Stephen Frears, USA, 1990; 114m With the able aid of suspense novelist Donald Westlake, who worked the Jim Thompson novel of The Grifters into a sharp-toothed script, director Stephen Frears delivers a low-down, bracingly amoral movie. Roy (John Cusack) is a small-time grifter, happy to work "short cons" because they keep him out of jail and out of anyone's eye. Unfortunately, he's (tainted) sweetmeat to two very smart, utterly ruthless scammers: his girlfriend, Myra (Annette Bening), a feline beauty with a taste for the good life; and the elegant, white-haired Jocasta who abandoned him when he was a kid. This is film noir in the sunny, over-exposed climes of Southern California, where life is the longest con of all, and gorgeous succubi are likely to devour your soul for fun and profit. But the Westlake/Thompson/Frears axis, along with that impeccable cast, mines such voluptuous pain out of getting screwed.... With a deliciously nasty turn by Pat Hingle. Wed May 19: 4:50 pm & 9:50 pm; Thurs May 20: 2 pm & 8:30 pm