The Melbourne Cinémathèque & ACMI present
An Old Gangster’s Molls
When
Wed 27 Sep 2023
This helter-skelter silent screwball comedy classic is a breathless mélange of assumed and mistaken identities, chase sequences, doppelgängers and fantasised murders. Anny Ondra (the original “Hitchcock blonde” in 1929’s Blackmail) puts in a hilarious turn as Fifi, one of the great screen flappers, opposite gangly Czech comic genius Vlasta Burian, who appears in two roles. With cinematography by the great Otto Heller (The Crimson Pirate), this 2014 restoration features a score perfectly attuned to the mayhem by contemporary Czech silent film music specialists, Neuvěřitelno.
Digital print courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.
Also screening on Wed 27 September
Program
“All The World’s Bedlam”: Screwball, Czechoslovak style
Happy End (1967) – Wed 27 Sep, 7pm
An Old Gangster's Molls (1927) – Wed 27 Sep, 8.45pm
Eva Fools Around (1939) – Wed 4 Oct, 7pm
You Are a Widow, Sir (1971) – Wed 4 Oct, 8.45pm
Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977) – Wed 11 Oct, 7pm
Heave Ho! (1934) – Wed 11 Oct, 8.45pm
About the program
This season charts 50 years of a peculiarly antic, extraordinarily inventive strain of popular comedy from Czechoslovakia, spanning the late silent era through to the end of the 1970s. It highlights the extraordinary comedic talents of performers still famed domestically but too little known in the anglophone world...
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About Melbourne Cinémathèque
Australia's longest-running film society, Melbourne Cinémathèque screens significant works of international cinema in the medium they were created, the way they would have originally screened.
Melbourne Cinémathèque is self-administered, volunteer-run, not-for-profit and membership-driven.
