Event

UPSTREAM

Tuesday, November 15 at 7:30pm Members $9 / Public $13
Live Musical Accompaniment by Ben Model on the Cinema's Miditzer Theater Organ!

UPSTREAM

Directed by JOHN FORD (Stagecoach, The Searchers, Rio Grande)

Here's something you don't see everyday: a new film by John Ford. Thought lost for more than
80 years, this delightful comedy was recently rediscovered in the New Zealand Film Archive
and restored by the Academy Film Archive and 20th Century-Fox. The central focus of the film is a
love triangle between a knife thrower (Grant Withers); his "target girl," Gertie (Nancy Nash); and
the egotistical Brashingham (Earle Foxe), a hammy Shakespearean actor. With the action confined
mainly to a low-rent boarding house for scuffling vaudevillians, Ford's skill at effectively defining
and depicting characters finds space to flourish, featuring among others a pair of dancers, a
squabbling sister-act, a long-suffering landlady and an aging actor long past his prime. Filmed at a transition point in Ford's career,
Upstream is the last completely silent film Ford made and was filmed at the beginning of what would become a 13-year break from the
Western genre that had defined many of his earlier works. USA, 1927, 61 mins., 35mm print courtesy of 20th Century Fox Archive