Un Flic (October 4th, 5th, and 6th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[UN FLIC screens Friday October 4th at 9:25 pm, Saturday October 5th at 7:30 pm, and Sunday October 6th at 4:00 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Picture's called UN FLIC, huh? So it took the French to make a whole movie about the sidekick from A CHRISTMAS STORY? It figures, Paramount having just laid off every employee not in the public domain. That LONE RANGER bomb is bringing everyone down. I think it's gotten more people laid off than Obamacare.

No, UN FLIC (AKA DIRTY MONEY) is, rather, a terse 1972 cops-and-robbers picture by ace French director Jean-Pierre Melville, a specialist in no-nonsense crime dramas. He also took the last name `Melville,' in tribute to the great American novelist Herman Melville, which is worth mentioning as perhaps the last nice thing any French person had to say about an American who wasn't Jerry Lewis or Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Wait Until Dark (February 26 at 5:15 p.m. and February 27 at 1 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[WAIT UNTIL DARK screens Saturday February 26th at 5:15 p.m. and Sunday February 27th at 1 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Wow, watching 1967's high-profile suspense thriller WAIT UNTIL DARK today ought to make our 21st-century jazz musicians, models, actors and artists appreciate just how tough and complicated it was for their predecessors of an earlier generation to obtain heroin. Maybe they'll stop being all snooty and looking down on rural folk or Cleveland west-siders for turning to easily available methamphetamine instead. 

The premise of WAIT UNTIL DARK is that a fortune in smack has been sewn into a rag doll in Canada to get it past customs and into NYC. For reasons I still can't really understand, the doll is passed on to an unwitting (?) accomplice who leaves it in a supposed safe place; the walk-down apartment-darkroom shared by a commercial photographer and his pretty wife Susan (Audrey Hepburn), who was blinded in an accident and is still learing to adapt. Now, all that remains is for the bad guys - a troika, consisting of two longtime scammers (Richard Crenna and Cleveland-born Jack Weston) and a beatnik-punk interloper Stanley Roat (Alan Arkin) - to infiltrate the place and locate the elusive doll.