United Artists 90th anniversary

A traveling series showcases some of the strangest classics ever produced in Hollywood.

Trying to survey any studio’s history in a single series is a fool’s errand, and for better or worse, the traveling United Artists 90th Anniversary retro doesn’t try. The sample Chicago gets doesn’t even include films by the studio’s founders, Chaplin, Pickford, Griffith and Fairbanks. What it offers—hardly peanuts—are 35mm prints of movies that every self-respecting cinephile should have seen, or be ashamed not to.

You can watch Griffith’s muse, Lillian Gish, natter about the resilience of children at the end of The Night of the Hunter (1955), the most lyrical film ever made about kids on the run from a frocked con man (Robert Mitchum). Directing his first and only movie, Charles Laughton treats the plot as a pretext for baroque lighting, fire and brimstone, an outsize performance and a disarmingly hopeful vision of humanity. The climactic abandonment of the loot is nearly as stunning as the one in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), one of a handful of perfect heist movies.

At least as iconic is Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Robert Aldrich’s bullshit-free Mickey Spillane adaptation, which opens with Nat King Cole crooning over upside-down credits and only gets weirder as Ralph Meeker’s Mike Hammer starts sticking his mug where it isn’t wanted. Depending on whom you ask, this was the movie that shut the door on film noir, and the lost–Los Angeles location work gives it an antique quality. Yet it’s also as far ahead of its time as any movie could be said to be, looking forward to Pulp Fiction and literalizing the atomic fear that runs through much of noir.

Barely more conventional, The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is infinitely watchable, in part because it’s hard to believe so much paranoia, Freudian psychodrama and broad satire can be crammed into a single movie. The elisions are haunting; is Janet Leigh head over heels for Frank Sinatra, or is she one of his controllers? The movie’s politics are as much of a Möbius strip as the film’s most famous shot, a 360-degree pan that shows brainwashed soldiers imagining they’re at a New Jersey garden-club meeting.

For pure delight in filmmaking, you can’t do much better than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), the best of Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name films; it’s also our candidate for the Western with the tensest showdown of all time. If Ennio Morricone’s twangy score doesn’t stick in your head, there’s always Leonard Bernstein’s music from West Side Story (1961).

One of the minor cinephile mysteries is the universal popularity, at least among critics, of Raging Bull (1980), which—make no mistake—is one of Martin Scorsese’s masterpieces. But this demanding, abrasive and deeply personal film hits the viewer like a series of jabs to the skull. It’s remarkable that at the height of the Rocky franchise, Scorsese could make a boxing movie whose protagonist—from his opening ring ballet to his Tourette-like valediction (“I’m the boss I’m the boss I’m the boss”)—persists in fighting with himself.

But there’s no question as to why Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) ranks as such a perennial favorite; besides Ernst Lubitsch, had any director perfected urbane comedy to such a degree? We love Bananas (1971), Woody, but nobody’s perfect.

United Artists' 90th anniversary series plays at the Music Box through April 10.

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