If the blessed, long-delayed drop in Valley temperatures isn’t enough to get you in an October kind of mood, maybe a spooky movie can. Playing Saturday, October 18 only at 6 p.m. at the Coyote Branch of Buckeye Public Library is the latest edition of the Carol Pugh Film Series, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, one of the seminal cinematic creepshows, with live musical accompaniment.
Robert Weine’s 1920 saga is sometimes called the first horror movie. It’s a very early one, anyway, and it would be hard to find a much more influential work for the genre. This German nightmare offers iconic horror tropes – the mad scientist, the plodding enslaved monster carrying the beautiful heroine in his arms, the angry mob of villagers – probably for the first time.
The not-so-good Doctor, played by Werner Krauss, is a shabby, troll-like mountebank who works a sideshow, exhibiting a pathetic somnambulist, Cesare, played by Conrad Veidt, later memorable as the Nazi major in Casablanca. Cesare normally resides in the titular coffin-like cabinet in a perpetual snooze, interrupted only when Caligari wakes him up to feed him, or send him on some nasty errand. For instance, near the beginning the Doc is treated rudely by a town official when he applies for an exhibitor’s license; the next morning the man is found murdered in his home. Courtesy pays.
Although these and other melodramatic devices undoubtedly seemed less corny and cliched when the movie was released, more than a century ago, than they do now, they aren’t really what gives this dreamlike flick its charge. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari‘s power derives from the weird visual atmosphere Weine and his designers, Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Rohrig, bring to almost every shot through boldly stylized, expressionistic sets and camera angles, externalizing a skewed, neurotic mental state and imposing it on the movie’s settings. It can mess with your head.
If you’ve never seen the film, the Buckeye Public Library show is a terrific opportunity, especially since it features an original musical score by Stephen Prutsman performed live by Tetra String Quartet. For details go to buckeyeaz.gov/library or call 623-349-6300.
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The incomparable, irreplaceable, perennially irresistible Diane Keaton departed from us this past week. AMC is showing two of her signature films this week at several of the chain’s locations around the Valley: Annie Hall, her 1977 classic written and directed by Woody Allen, a romanticized account of their real-life relationship, and 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, which delightfully paired her with both rascally old Jack Nicholson and reverent young Keanu Reeves. These movies don’t necessarily represent the kind of powerhouse acting chops she showed in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, The Little Drummer Girl or Shoot the Moon, but they are both showcases for her one of a kind, once in a generation charm.
Go to amctheatres.com for details.
