Event

THE HEARTBREAK KID in 35mm - introduced by Joe Swanberg!

Tuesday, January 9 @ 7:00 PM / Music Box Theatre
THE HEARTBREAK KID
Directed by Elaine May 1972
Elaine Mays Hollywood directing career may have been unjustly cut short by the failure of 1987s Ishtar to recoup its outsized budget, but the four narrative features she currently has to her name are all essential. The Heartbreak Kid is Mays only directorial effort to feature a screenplay by somebody else, but the seething, brutally pointed line-readings from which the film derives most of its comic energy are all her own. (Neil Simon is the sole credited writer, although much of the film was purportedly improvised under Mays direction.) Charles Grodin, in his breakout performance, plays Lenny Cantrow, a Jewish newlywed on his honeymoon in Miami Beach with wife Lila (Mays daughter Jeannie Berlin) who sets his sights on Midwestern Gentile coed Kelly (Cybill Shepherd), ignoring the inconveniences of Kellys ever-present father (an apoplectic Eddie Albert) and Lennys own very recent marriage. Given Mays astonishing gift for comedic timing, its no surprise that each of The Heartbreak Kids four principals gives an accomplished and hilarious performance (Albert and Berlin were rewarded with Academy Award nominations for theirs), nor that May is triumphantly successful in making a masterpiece unlike anything seen in the American cinema before or since: a sunny, light, anti-romantic comedy that manages to be one of the bleakest films of the 1970s. (CW)
106 min Palomar Pictures 35mm from Academy Film Archive, permission Bristol-Myers Squibb

Introduced by Filmmaker Joe Swanberg