SFFILM 62 Day 10: Midnight Cowboy

The 62st San Francisco International Film Festival is entering its final weekend; it runs through Tuesday, April 23rd. Each day during the festival I'll be posting about a festival selection I've seen or am anticipating.

A still from John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy, playing at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival, April 10-23, 2019. Courtesy of Park Circus.

Midnight Cowboy (USA: John Schlesinger, 1969)
playing: 8:45PM at SFMOMA

I haven't seen Midnight Cowboy since watching it on videocassette as a teenager, but my dim memory of it is that it's quite good, probably the best of the late-1960s Best Picture winners. I've put off revisiting it for years, even passing up 35mm screenings to my later regret. Now it's available on DCP format, and will be screening tonight that way tonight along with a personal appearance by director John Schlesinger's partner Michael Childers, has just given an excellent interview for the 48Hills website. Though Childers' official credit on the film was "assistant to the director" he played a big role in the film, including being key to populating a Greenwich Village party sequence with Andy Warhol's factory superstars as extras. He was also set photographer, which I assume is behind the unusual look to the above still provided to press by the film festival; if it's not a production still taken by Childers I'll be a for-real-cowboy's uncle! Tonight will surely be filled with wonderful behind-the-scenes stories from filming.

SFFILM62 Day 10
Other festival options: Today's the day YBCA will be screening a nine-hour version of BBC Arena's Night and Day for FREE to any visitors to its Lobby Gallery that wish to watch, whether for a few minutes or for as long as they desire. It's also the last day to see a festival screening of Qiu Sheng's controversial Suburban Birds, which plays the Roxie tonight at 9:00 PM (though it will also get a commercial release there in May). Tonight also is the night of the festival's annual pairing of silent films with modern-day rockers, in this case two members of Warpaint will accompany digital projections of four Maya Deren shorts at the Castro at 8:00PM. I'm torn about recommending this program after my utter exasperation at the last such SFFILM match-up; I couldn't take more than fifteen minutes of seeing a 35mm print of Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece I Was Born, But... projected in the wrong aspect ratio through a lens intended to make the image smaller on the screen, so as not to compete so much with its musical accompanists' stage antics. And don't get me started on the music itself, which had essentially nothing to do with the onscreen action (although I'm told by someone who stayed throughout the entire presentation that they finally synched up a bit for the final reel, at least). I have a hunch that tonight's presentation will be better than that; the fact that it's only a couple members of band has me guessing they won't just use it as an opportunity to play their usual tunes, but that they'll arrange something specific to Deren's image. On the other hand, Deren was, unlike Ozu in 1932 or any of the filmmakers featured in the upcoming (less than two weeks away!) San Francisco Silent Film Festival, a filmmaker unused to having her films accompanied by music other than what she chose for them. All accounts I've found indicate that she preferred to screen At Land and Ritual in Transfigured Time with no music at all. She never considered The Very Eye of Night complete enough to screen until it was given a score by her future husband Teiji Ito, who also composed a score for Meshes of the Afternoon that she approved many years after its original release. Still, the thought of seeing Deren's images projected large on the Castro screen is pretty tempting.

Non-SFFILM option: Most Friday nights throughout the year the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco's Financial District hosts a (digital) screening and discussion of a movie selected by one of my favorite local film writers, Michael Fox. Tonight this series, called CinemaLit, brings in film historian Matthew Kennedy to screen and discuss one of my favorite Preston Sturges films, The Great McGinty, which I've written about fairly extensively before. Next week it's an Edward G. Robinson vehicle directed by John Ford, The Whole Town's Talking. That one I haven't seen.