One of the strangest movies ever made by eternally un-ironic über-bombast DeMille! Shot just a few years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, the film opens on a sexually charged college campus war pitting cute co-ed atheists against an angry mob of Christian believers. Some collateral damage lands the two main religious adversaries, played with the electrifying lust we've come to demand of DeMille, in a bizarre reform school where girls and boys toil out their sentences segregated flimsily by a tantalizing, see-through fence!

Producer: Cecil B. DeMille. Titles: Jeanie Macpherson, Beulah Marie Dix. Cinematographer: Peverell Marley. Editor: Anne Bauchens. Cast: Lina Basquette, Marie Prevost, George Duryea, Noah Beery. 35mm, 100 min.

Written by J.M. Barrie, directed by Herbert Brenon and starring the tirelessly puckish pantomimist Betty Bronson – the same trio that brought the masterpiece PETER PAN to the screen the previous year – this follow-up is positively loaded with charm. Barrie here takes the old fairy tale and meta-narrates it, switching its setting to a London household – no wicked stepfolk this time – during the Great War. Bronson is a frail servant beleaguered by a Cinderella complex, an illness that enables all sorts of Neverland melancholy to permeate the proceedings.

Based on the play by J. M. Barrie. Scenario: Willis Goldbeck, Townsend Martin. Adaptation: Esther Ralston. Cinematographer: J. Roy Hunt. Cast: Betty Bronson, Tom Moore. 16mm, silent, 105 min.

This program features a number of Maddin's own exquisite short films, including new and rarely seen work.

THE DEAD FATHER (1985 / 21 min / 16mm)
Inspired by Maddin’s own reoccurring dreams following the death of his father, this debut short follows a man haunted by fleeting, ghoulish visions of his recently deceased dad.

ODILON REDON OR THE EYE, LIKE A STRANGE BALLOON MOUNTS TOWARDS INFINITY (1995 / 5 min / 16mm)
Father and son train conductors rescue a woman from a crash, and soon find themselves competing for her affections.

HOSPITAL FRAGMENT (1999 / 3 min / 16mm)
This impressionistic revisit to the director’s first feature, TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL, may be a remake, a sequel, or something else entirely.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (2001 / 3 min / Beta)
Maddin’s music video made for the acclaimed band Sparklehorse.

SOMBRA DOLOROSA (2004 / 7 min / Beta)
A widow must defeat El Muerto, the eater of spirits, to save her husband’s soul.

SISSY-BOY SLAP-PARTY (2004 6 min / Beta)
An ecstatic orgy of half-naked men slapping one another.

FUSEBOY (2005 / 4 min / Beta)
A homoerotic romp in which three men linger over a fuse box.

ROOSTER (2005 / 5 min / Beta)
A barnyard fantasy featuring a bevy of women and an amorous rooster.

NUDE CABOOSE (2006 / 3 min / color / Beta)
In this intriguingly un-“Maddinesque” made-for-cellphone download, a shirtless man’s efforts to kick-start a conga line take a hilarious turn for the psychosexual.

THE HEART OF THE WORLD (2000 / 5 min / 35mm)
Guy Maddin’s five-minute masterpiece features Anna, Russian state scientist, who must choose between two lovelorn brothers and save the earth from impending doom.

MY DAD IS 100 YEARS OLD (2005 / 17 min / 35mm)
An imaginative love letter to Roberto Rossellini from daughter Isabella, who plays all the parts.

Running time: approximately 80 min.

Various formats.

Lang piles more tropes, visual mischief and his own steel-cold brand of surrealism into this adaptation of Graham Greene's novel than he does in any other film he made in America. By trading some of his meanness—typical, say, of THE BIG HEAT—for a little playfulness, Lang suddenly finds himself sitting plump next to Hitchcock as the era's co-titans of the thriller. I hope the director gave a crate of champagne to eely heavy Dan Duryea for delivering yet another unbelievably oily performance!

Paramount. Based on the novel by Graham Greene. Producer: Buddy G. DeSylva, Seton I. Miller. Cinematographer: Henry Sharp. Editor: Archie F. Marshek. Cast: Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds, Dan Duryea. 35mm, 86 min.

Maddin will delve into the inner workings of his psyche and may even reveal the secret contents of the Mammalopedia, the source of ALL in his childhood home; or show clips of and recreate his pistol-whipping at the hands of a chimp on his fourth birthday.

Guy Maddin's talk is part of the Otis Speaks program, organized through the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design. Admission is free. For more information, call 310.665.6905, or send an e-mail to galleryinfo@otis.edu or a fax to 310.665.6908.

While the seething wrath that makes James Mason unsurpassingly sado-sexy in THE SEVENTH VEIL remains untapped by Max Ophuls in this, the British actor's American debut, terrifying co-star Robert Ryan more than makes up for it with an orgiastic spree of marital jealousy and paranoia in this speculative peek into what it might be like to be married to Howard Hughes, or someone just like him anyway. Young Barbara Bel Geddes is the lucky bride!

Based on on the novel by Libbie Block. Producer: Wolfgang Reinhardt. Screenwriter: Arthur Laurents. Cinematographer: Lee Garmes. Editor: Robert Parrish. Cast: James Mason, Barbara Bel Gaddes, Robert Ryan. 35mm, 88 min.

Has there ever been a face—rugged and manfully handsome yet fragile with inner agonies promising to explode into volcanic rage—like Robert Ryan's? Nick Ray harnesses the violent force of this face in a story about out-of-control cop Ryan, who is sent to cool off in a snowy outpost—the first snow noir?—and there meets up with a pair of out-of-control adversaries: a child-killer and the child's father. Ward Bond, in this latter role, has never been more precipitous or more startling—his grief and stupidity as powerful and natural as a mountain cataract. Into all this steps the serenely blind farm girl Ida Lupino.

RKO. Based on the novel by Gerald Butler. Producer: Sid Rogell, John Houseman. Screenwriter: A. I. Bezzerides. Cinematographer: George E. Diskant. Editor: Roland Gross. Cast: Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan. 35mm, 82 min.

Borzage's films always play themselves out in what Martin Scorsese describes aptly as "lovers' time," with much leisurely poring over the details that engorge a romance's most precious formative moments. Here, though, something different is afoot. When you see forty-year-old Mary Pickford colting around as an apparent teen, and perennially snow-topped C. Aubrey Smith sporting great gobs of hair dye, you smell saga, but Borzage the master of melodrama has many tricks and tones up his sleeve, and I defy anyone to guess exactly where this film is going!

Based on the play by Rudolph Besier, May Edington. Producer: Mary Pickford. Screenwriter: Frances Marion. Cinematographer: Ray June. Editor: Hugh Bennett. Cast: Mary Pickford, Leslie Howard, C. Aubrey Smith. 35mm, 85 min.

Comedic sophisticate McCarey turns his delighted attention to the subject of ageing parents and what becomes of them, metaphorically and literally—a subject that becomes so poignant in his hands one hardly knows what to do with the sadness pouring out from the screen. The film might have been a flop, but it's a masterful mixture of light humor and grim inexorability—a singular cocktail! Beulah Bondi, luckily blessed with a face that enabled her to play elderly roles for close to fifty years, is the mother at the end of the line.

Paramount. Based on the novel by Josephine Lawrence and the play by Helen Leary, Noah Leary. Producer: Adolph Zukor. Screenwriter: Viña Delmar. Cinematographer: William C. Mellor. Editor: LeRoy Stone. Cast: Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi. 35mm, 92 min.