Program Notes
Program Notes: The Great Escape (1963)
It is possible to pinpoint precisely the moment that Steve McQueen became a movie star. It comes in the last 20 minutes of The Great Escape. It's so exciting you can taste it. And you know that the cocky, handsome, volatile actor was a bona fide movie star.
Program Notes: Nights of Cabiria (1957)
In Nights of Cabiria actress Giulietta Masina and director Federico Fellini give us a funny, beguiling, and heartbreaking examination of innocence that has yet to be surpassed.
Program Notes: The Birds (1963)
Alfred Hitchcock liked to take chances. He took a huge one with The Birds, a story about our feathered friends turning homicidal and waging war on humanity with one of his most puzzling endings.
Program Notes: Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
Sleepless in Seattle is a romantic comedy that slyly ridicules Hollywood's unrealistic depictions of love and at the same time wants to be the same sort of preposterous-but-beloved screen romance it spoofs.
Program Notes: Bye Bye Birdie (1963)
It says something that Bye Bye Birdie, a musical inspired by a very specific news story of the late 1950s and devised as a humorous commentary on the cultural ethos of that era, has over the last 50 years become timeless.
