The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 23-29
Directed by Tay Garnett
Longtime Hollywood contract filmmaker Garnett excelled at depicting friction between the opposite sexes in the tension-driven genres of melodrama, screwball comedy, and film noir. His pre-Code film Her Man contains elements from all three. The film (a new 4K restoration of which will receive a weeklong theatrical run at MoMA in conversation with other Garnett works) retells the popular “Frankie and Johnnie” story in a Havana dive called the Thalia inhabited by wayfaring businessmen, drunken sailors, and women paid to keep male customers company and encourage them to buy drinks. Frankie (played by Helen Twelvetrees) is one such lady with torn stockings, who has so frequently rehearsed and delivered a speech about her dreams of getting out that it startles her when a good-looking sailor (Phillips Holmes) catches wise to her act. Dan shares with Frankie his knowledge that she is both acting and sincere, and the two fall in love for long enough for her to show how naïve she actually is. She believes she can protect her new man from Johnnie (Ricardo Cortez), the piano-playing, white-suited, knife-wielding pimp jealous of any outside connection that Frankie might form. For the female captive of circumstances, Dan represents a wave reaching out and washing the sand of her life with Johnnie away—a dangerous dream that she has long buried, but which over film’s course she realizes that she always kept alive. Aaron Cutler (March 29-April 4, showtimes daily, at MoMA’s “Her Man: A Forgotten Masterwork in Context”)