Black Tuesday
Hugo Fregonese, 1954, 80 min

Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht

“This ferocious film noir, independently produced by Leonard and Robert Goldstein, proved to be Hugo Fregonese’s last Hollywood film, as well as the last time Edward G. Robinson played a toweringly malevolent figure. As Vincent ‘King’ Canelli, Robinson draws on the audience memories of Little Caesar and countless other gangster films, yet the evil he embodies is something new, born of the industrial-scale violence of WW2 (…) Cinematographer Stanley Cortez, shooting the first feature film on Kodak’s revolutionary high-speed black-and-white Tri-X stock, contributes images that rival the spatial complexity and prickly detail of his work on The Magnificent Ambersons, while looking forward to the strong, nearly abstract use of negative space that characterizes his contributions to The Night of the Hunter.” – Dave Kehr

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Late Season
Zoltán Fábri, 1966, 125 min
UK premiere of the new restoration

Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht

“Three decades before Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful stirred controversy for approaching the Holocaust in a comic idiom, this disturbing and darkly funny film did likewise, to more profound and penetrating effect. Antal Páger gives a haunting performance as the ageing hotel manager driven by an ostensibly casual prank into confronting his own guilt for the fate of his Jewish employers during World War II. Director Zoltán Fábri, the most respected among the generation of Hungarian filmmakers who had emerged before the 1956 Uprising, crafts a film whose playful modernism underlines rather than undermining the darkness at its core; he summed up its spirit by declaring that “You can argue with the prosecutors, but there is no defence against conscience.”” – Alexander Jacoby

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Los Golfos
Carlos Saura, 1959, 84 min
UK premiere of the new restoration of the uncensored version of the film

Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht

"By all rights, Saura's first film, The Hooligans [AKA The Delinquents], should have been the manifesto and spearhead of a "Spanish New Wave"; the scandal of Viridiana, however, and the film's "preordained" (through government meddling) box office failure quickly put an end to the aspirations of an emerging generation of film school-trained directors. Following the exploits of a teenage gang who plan a burglary of a large factory in order to finance the bullfighting career of a friend, Saura creates a hard-edged look at a rapidly modernizing Spain as seen from the bottom up. Much of the camerawork is hand-held, giving the film a striking, almost visceral kind of immediacy." – Richard Peña

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The Stranger and the Fog
Bahram Beyzaie, 1974, 140 min

Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht

“Impossible to see for decades and presented in a new digital restoration from the original camera negative, Bahram Beyzaie’s dazzling The Stranger and the Fog, about a mysterious stranger who arrives in a coastal village on a drifting boat and falls for a local woman, is an endlessly symbolic tale in which uncontrollable forces of nature, superstition, ritual, and violence disorient the viewer in exhilarating ways. In the film’s meticulously structured circular narrative, characters, times, and spaces rhyme and mirror one another, turning filmmaking into an act of dreaming. Characters are the product of one another’s imagination, and eventually all become myth. The film cedes the centre of both desire and control to a woman of will, breaking through the strictures of victimized women presented in many Iranian films of the 1970s.” – EK

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Ida Lupino: The Best of Her Television Work
Ida Lupino, 1956–64, 100 min

Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht

The London-born Hollywood movie star Ida Lupino, known as one of the screen’s 'tough girls', found acting insufficient for her intellectual and social ambitions. In 1949, she ventured into directing, “investigating the social condition of women in contemporary society.” With Dorothy Arzner retired, Lupino became the only active female director in Hollywood at the time. Her remarkable directorial output has been restored and widely screened in recent years. However, her rich, and fascinating body of work for television – usually individual episodes within ongoing series – remains largely unexplored. These works encompass proto-feminist stories, genre pieces, and tightly knit dramas. This programme features some of Lupino’s most outstanding television work from the 1950s and 1960s.

Fear and Desire
Stanley Kubrick, 1952, 72 min

“In this existential drama – which has the feeling of a waking dream rather than a conventional war film – four soldiers return to their senses after crash-landing in a forest behind enemy lines. Blindly navigating their way back to their unit, they attack an isolated cabin occupied by enemy soldiers, then apprehend a peasant woman (Virginia Leith) who is tormented by the deranged young soldier assigned to guard her (Paul Mazursky). On the verge of freedom, they discover an outpost of enemy officers and must decide whether to slip silently past or stage a violent confrontation with their doppelgängers. For decades, the 62 minute version was all that existed of Fear and Desire, which a still dissatisfied Kubrick withheld from release throughout his lifetime. (...) Now, seven decades later, audiences can finally see Fear and Desire as it was first released and witness the first awkward blossoming of a 23-year old Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic genius.” – Bret Wood

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The Movie Orgy
Joe Dante, 1968, 275 min

Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht

The Movie Orgy is a legendary five-hour triumph from Joe Dante. In 1968, Dante took an apartment’s worth of 16mm prints and, with the help of producer Jon Davison, meticulously fashioned them into what is quite possibly the world's first found footage megamix. Comprised of commercials, news reels, clips from feature films, TV bloopers, and much more, The Movie Orgy is both a fascinating cultural artifact and a wild vortex of mashed-up magnificence. Unavailable to screen for decades and never available on home video, the film has been preserved from the original 16mm reels by AGFA in partnership with Joe Dante and Jon Davison.

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Lillian Gish
Jeanne Moreau, 1984, 90 min
UK premiere of the new restoration

Introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht

“A rarely seen directorial work by legendary French actor Jeanne Moreau, this film is a cinematic dialogue with another iconic performer from a different era and country: Lillian Gish, famously known as the “First Lady of the Silent Screen.” The American silent film star reflects on her career, which began in 1913, recalling her early experiences as a child actress, the groundbreaking production of The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith, and much more.” – E.K.

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Never on Sunday is a series of screenings of rare classics, archive masterpieces, obscure delights and forgotten gems carefully curated and introduced by Ehsan Khoshbakht and taking place the last Sunday of each month at Close-Up.