AFI Silver Celebrates Julie Andrews and Peter Bogdanovich
AFI's retrospective of the careers of Andrews and Bogdanovich ranges from 'Victor/Victoria' to 'Mask."
The AFI Silver Theatre is currently screening notable classic films as part of retrospectives to screen legend Julie Andrews and director Peter Bogdanovich. First up is the series of films starring Andrews, who received this year’s AFI Life Achievement Award in June.
Next up is Torn Curtain, Alfred Hitchcock’s mediocre 1966 Cold War thriller starring Andrews as a woman hunting for her atomic scientist husband, portrayed by Paul Newman, who has defected behind the Iron Curtain. (8/6, 8/8-11)
The zippy, zany Thoroughly Modern Millie, George Roy Hill’s romantic musical spoof set in Roaring Twenties comes next. Andrews plays a country naif newly arrived in New York where she soon befriends Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Channing. (8/14-16)
In STAR!, an extravagant seven-time Oscar-nominated showbiz biopic from the same creative team behind The Sound of Music, Andrews portrays the life and career of one of Britain’s most beloved entertainers, Gertrude Lawrence. (9/3-4)
The series closes with a 40th-anniversary screening of 1982’s lavish Victor/Victoria, the story of a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman in order to become a star in pre-war Paris, a gender-bender musical farce starring Robert Preston in an Oscar-nominated performance as a gay man, groundbreaking for its time. (9/11-12, 9/14)
Also getting AFI’s big-screen tribute is Peter Bogdanovich, an influential filmmaker, known for his deep knowledge of cinematic history, who died this past January from complications of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 82.
Bogdanovich made his mark, as the AFI puts it, with original films “drawing inspiration from and reimagining genres popular during Hollywood’s glory days through a prism of 1970s cynicism.”
The “Peter Bogdanovich Remembered” lineup starts with 1971’s The Last Picture Show, the filmmaker’s most acclaimed work, a coming-of-age elegy to the American West that also served to jumpstart Cybill Shepherd’s cinematic career — as well as her decade-long romance with Bogdanovich — as one of three “futureless teens” living in a dusty, dead-end Texas town in the early 1950s. Jeff Bridges and Cloris Leachman co-star. (7/30-31)
The director’s spin on classic screwball comedies, 1972’s What’s Up, Doc? stars Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, and Madeline Kahn, in her screen debut (8/5, 8/9, 8/11) is followed by Paper Moon, a Depression-era comedy that stars O’Neal as a dust bowl con man traveling with a precocious orphan played by the actor’s real-life 10-year-old daughter Tatum, who became the youngest-ever recipient of an Academy Award for her work in the 1973 film. (8/12, 8/14)
The series also includes Nickelodeon, an underappreciated silent-era-set showbiz comedy starring O’Neal and Burt Reynold (8/22-25) and 1985’s Mask, a powerful drama starring Cher as a tenacious mother fighting against the rampant discrimination and prejudice her son (Eric Stoltz) faces due to a pronounced genetic deformity known as “lionitis.”(9/18-19)
The AFI Silver Theatre is at 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring. Tickets are $10 to $13 per screening. Visit www.afi.com/Silver or call 301-495-6720.
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