Event

FLESH & THE DEVIL

Tuesday, July 28 at 7:30pm
Live Musical Accompaniment by BEN MODEL on the Cinemas Miditzer Theater Organ
$9 Members / $12 Public / Includes Reception

Active Membership Will Be Checked

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert star in this classic silent about a love triangle between two boyhood friends and the amoral seductress who comes between them. Best friends Leo and Ulrich are cadets at a military academy when Leo falls madly in love with the gorgeous and aristocratic Countess Felicitas von Kletzingk (Garbo). However, Felicitas neglects to tell him that she has a husband who, upon discovering the affair, challenges Leo to a duel. Leo kills von Kletzingk and is sentenced to five years of foreign service in Africa. Felicitas promises to wait for her brave young lover, and Leo asks Ulrich to look after the grieving widow until his return. After three years, Leo returns to discover that his bosom buddy has married Felicitas in his absence. She rekindles her illicit romance with Leo but refuses to give up the comforts of married life with the now wealthy Ulrich. Determined to have them both, Felicitas drives the former friends into a deadly rivalry that culminates in a beautifully filmed finale that director Clarence Brown shoots almost entirely in silhouette. Greta Garbo gives an incendiary performance as the smoldering femme fatale; she and John Gilbert supposedly began their torrid real-life affair while filming this movie.

USA, 1927, 113 min.

For over two decades Ben Model has served as resident silent film accompanist for The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Ben composes and improvises all his own scores and performs in a style that both evokes the silent era and reflects a contemporary (and younger) audience's appreciation of music and film scoring.