The Best Old Movies On a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, July 29-August 4
The Old Mill (1937)
Directed by Wilfred Jackson
Before Disney released its first feature-length film, the studio used shorts to test and develop the tricks and techniques its animators would need to make hand-drawings move for more than an hour—while also making audiences laugh, cry and worry. The last of the pre-Snow White one-reelers is this nine-minute, dialogue-free “Silly Symphony”—now regarded as one of the finest cartoons ever produced—about the title’s abandoned windpower generator and the forest critters who survive a storm there. Despite a century’s advances in animation, you’ll still marvel, whether it’s at the softly painted glow of fireflies or the harmonizing of some croaking frogs, whistling crickets and a Hollywood studio orchestra. It screens at MoMA as part of a program of great Disney preshows, from “The Band Concert,” in which a fife-puffing Donald Duck won’t let an irascible Mickey Mouse finish conducting a performance of the William Tell Overture, to “The Country Cousin,” in which a hick mouse comes to stay with top-hatted family on Parkritz Row in the big city, where the blocks of cheese are as tall as buildings and the champagne puddles as deep as swimming pools. You ain’t seen funny till you’ve seen a drunk Podunk rodent try to box a radiator or do the Grouch Marx mirror routine with his reflection in a Jell-O mold. Henry Stewart (July 31, August 1, 4:30pm at MoMA’s “Glorious Technicolor”)