The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, June 1-7
Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972)
Directed by Brian De Palma
If your moviegoing time is limited and you haven’t seen Carrie, Dressed to Kill or Blow Out, see those at the first week of Metrograph’s De Palma series, but otherwise try this, which puts a hat on De Palma’s early, funny period before his graduation to a career-long attempt to perfect the thriller, beginning with Sisters. It’s worth seeing alone for a world-weary, never-funnier Orson Welles as a mentor to white collar drone Tom Smothers, who longs to be a tap-dancing magician. The film loses a little juice when Welles vanishes, but it carries over the smart, shit-kicking spirit of Greetings and Hi, Mom!, adding Allen Garfield as a proto-Dennis Franz De Palma stand-in, obsessing over the minutiae of brassiere architecture. Justin Stewart (June 7, 6pm, 8pm at Metrograph’s De Palma retrospective)