Movies

United Artists 90th Anniversary Film Festival

April 3, 2008

A shot across the bow of the Hollywood studio system, United Artists was incorporated in February 1919 as an independent production and distribution company by four of the movie industry’s creative giants: Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith. (Remarked one studio executive: “The inmates are taking over the asylum.”) Under the management of Joe Schenck in the 1920s it released some of the three stars’ greatest pictures (Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad) as well as projects with Buster Keaton (The General) and Rudolph Valentino (Son of the Sheik). As Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks began to wind down their careers, UA was pressed for quality product and cut deals with such independent producers as Howard Hughes (Hell’s Angels), Samuel Goldwyn (Dodsworth), and Alexander Korda (The Prisoner of Zenda). The company was never a huge success, but for three decades it came to represent the independent spirit that periodically revitalizes the American movie industry.

Strangely, none of that is being celebrated in this Music Box program of UA releases, the earliest of which—Robert Aldrich’s crazed Kiss Me Deadly (Mon 4/7, 9:40 PM)—hit theaters in 1955. By then the surviving founders, Chaplin and Pickford, had handed over the company to two lawyers, Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, who closed down its production facilities and operated it primarily as a financing company. Yet even in this period UA backed some adventurous projects, from Charles Laughton’s eerie The Night of the Hunter (showing Wed 4/9, 5:00, 9:40) to John Frankenheimer’s paranoid The Manchurian Candidate (Tue 4/8, 4:30) to John Schlesinger’s sexually frank Midnight Cowboy (Thu 4/10, 9:40) to Sidney Lumet’s caustic Network (Thu 4/10, 4:30). UA bankrolled Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (Mon 4/7, 5:00) and Robert Wise’s West Side Story (Sun 4/6, 4:00) and supported such emerging talents as Stanley Kubrick (The Killing, Tue 4/8, 9:40), Sergio Leone (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Sat 4/5, 4:00), Woody Allen (Bananas, Fri 4/4, 5:30, Sa 4/4, midnight), and Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull, Fri 4/4, 9:20).

For more information call the Music Box at 773-871-6604 —J.R. Jones

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