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Kevin Thomas

Filmmakers in the indie, experimental, foreign, avant-garde or,until very recently, documentary fields desperately need critics. Lacking money for a promotional campaign and forced to rely on word-of-mouth, these filmmakers have found no better friend over the past 40-plus years than Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times.

Hard to believe there once was a time in antediluvian Los Angeles when major critics shunned anything with subtitles. And drive-in movies were certainly beyond the pale. So it fell to Kevin to alert Angelenos to the French New Wave and to such giants as Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Andrei Tarkovsky. He also discovered talented newcomers doing interesting work in films from Roger Corman and American International Pictures. Indeed, he was the first journalist to interview a young actor named Jack Nicholson.

His love of avant-garde and experimental films led him to be the only Los Angeles Times critic to review films by Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. Since 1984 his "Special Screenings" column in the Los Angeles Times has been the lifeblood for venues that exhibit films for brief runs or even one night. In short, no one in the Los Angeles critical establishment has done more to create an awareness and appreciation of film culture than Kevin Thomas.

-- Kirk Honeycutt, Los Angeles Film Critics Association

For my second series of favorites I have chosen the theme of films by friends, which encompasses pictures made by people I knew well over many years—Budd Boetticher, George Cukor, Fritz Lang and Mae West—and those with whom I had warm acquaintances over the decades—Akira Kurosawa, Vincent Sherman, Billy Wilder. I interviewed Sir Carol Reed on location for FLAP, here represented by ODD MAN OUT. I did meet Dame Judith Anderson, the co-star of that Pre-Code gem, BLOOD MONEY. I must confess I never met Max Ophuls, who died while I was still in college, but his son Marcel Ophuls, the great documentarian, shared with me memories of his father. When LOLA MONTES proved unavailable for my first series I was determined that, as one of my most favorite directors, Ophuls would be represented by another of his great films, in this instance THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE… I will have plenty of stories to tell, especially of Budd Boetticher, that dashing romantic figure with a character of granite; of George Cukor, the finest mentor anyone could ever have; of Fritz Lang, who was like a father to me; and of the incomparable Mae West, who managed to sustain an 80-year career and who always knew how to enjoy life to the fullest. --- Kevin Thomas

Wednesday, January 17 – 7:30 PM

LIFE OF OHARU (SAIKAKU ICHIDAI ONNA) 1952, Janus Films, 137 min. Dir. Kenji Mizoguchi. Based on one of Japan’s first novels, the 17^th century The Woman Who Loved Love by Saikaku Ihara. Kinuyo Tanaka is Oharu, a samurai’s daughter expelled from her station as a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial Palace for falling-in-love with a man below her rank. Driven into exile along with her parents, she soon resorts to being a kept woman then finally a common prostitute. Mizoguchi expertly walks a tightrope, delivering an unflinching examination of a sensitive woman’s emotional brutalization without manipulative sentimentality. Another masterwork. With Ichiro Sugai, Toshiro Mifune. Film critic Kevin Thomas will introduce the screening.

Thursday, October 18 - 7:30 PM
Kevin Thomas’ Favorite:

THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE, 1953, Janus Films, 105 min. "Director Max Ophuls' THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE... is a romantic tragedy at its most sublime, in which the beautiful wife (Danielle Darrieux) of a rich, titled general (Charles Boyer) falls in love with a handsome, equally aristocratic Italian diplomat (Vittorio De Sica) amidst the most opulent Belle Epoque settings. A pair of diamond earrings triggers a chain of events that set a deceptively light tone for the 1953 film." – Kevin Thomas. In French, with English subtitles. NOT ON DVD Film Critic Kevin Thomas will introduce the screening.

SCARLET STREET, 1945, 103 min. Fritz Lang's classic film noir reunited his WOMAN IN THE WINDOW stars Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea in a reworking of Jean Renoir's 1931 LA CHIENNE. Robinson's middle-aged bookkeeper and amateur artist becomes hopelessly ensnared by the seductive Bennett and her lover-pimp Duryea. The result is a terse, tense psychological thriller with Robinson's increasing desperation contrasting with his predators unremitting ruthlessness. As with WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, Lang revealed the potential criminal in the average citizen. Introduction by Kevin Thomas.

Friday, December 14 – 7:30 PM

Kevin Thomas’ Favorites – silent night!

THE CROWD, 1928, Warner Brothers, 104 min. One of the greatest of all silent films, King Vidor's film is a supreme example of perceiving the universal in the particular--in this instance a typical young couple (James Murray, Eleanor Boardman) full of hope for their future but buffeted by fate and the grind of daily life. The film is justly famous for its image of a vast office with a sea of desks in which Murray seems literally lost in 'the crowd"; effectively contrasting with the film's starker moments is the couple's exuberant day at Coney Island. THE CROWD should have launched Murray on a major career, but he was overcome by alcoholism and either fell or jumped to his death in the Hudson River in 1936 at the age of 35. --- Kevin Thomas With live piano accompaniment.