[press release from Miranda Brown Publicity]
The 2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival (BAFF) will celebrate the simplest, most elegant and most successful genre formula of all time, the romantic comedy, with a program of films that look at what happens when boy meets girl and complications ensue – and of course, there’s nothing more serious than comedy!
Four classic films of the genre – THE APARTMENT, MANHATTAN, MIDNIGHT and THE PHILADELPHIA STORY – will be included in the program.
THE APARTMENT (1960), written directed and produced by Billy Wilder swept the Academy Awards in 1960 winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Screenplay, and showed that romantic comedy could have a serious and dark edge to it.
Jack Lemmon is the ambitious office worker determined to rise through the ranks by letting his superiors use his apartment for their illicit liaisons. Shirley Maclaine is the boss’s mistress, a woman with a talent for falling in love with the wrong men. Together they will realise that in the modern city, loneliness and vulnerability can be the best basis for romantic attraction.
MANHATTAN (1979) is a celebration of a great city and a rueful contemplation of human folly. In retrospect it stands as the pinnacle of Woody Allen’s career, the moment when he grasped the perfect balance between humour and seriousness. Allen stars as a middle-aged comedy writer with two divorces and a relationship with a 17 year-old schoolgirl that he knows is doomed. Diane Keaton is a woman with whom he disagrees about everything, but whose neuroticism makes her attractive. For Allen, love is a game we are bound to lose but why is it worth playing?
MIDNIGHT (1939) directed by Mitchell Leisen was made during the greatest moment of wit and sophistication in the American cinema. The Cinderella story gets a modern, screwball twist when Claudette Colbert arrives in Paris, fabulously gowned but penniless, as Eve Peabody, one of the legion of working class American girls adrift on the continent in search of fortune, but finally settling for love. Don Ameche as the cab driver who picks her up (or maybe she picks him up), John Barrymore as her fairy godfather, and Mary Astor as her jaded society rival, round out the top line cast.
THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940) directed by George Cukor (Gone With the Wind) is the definitive comedy of re-marriage and also the perfect marriage of stage and screen. Adapted from Philip Barry’s play, the film version instead allows us to appreciate its deeply theatrical virtues of sophisticated dialogue and scintillating performance.
Society couple C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) and Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) have divorced and she is now due to marry George Kittredge, dull moralist and man of the people. The marriage is doomed before it starts. Or at least let’s hope so. Enter Macaulay Connor (Jimmie Stewart), scandal sheet hack and working class poet with a chip on his shoulder. Now stand back and watch the repartee fly. Katharine Hepburn demonstrates in this film as in no other why she is the actor’s actor.
The 2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival is one of the youngest and most innovative Film Festivals in the world and was included in Variety’s ’07 list of the world’s Top 50 Film Festivals.
The 2009 event will present more than a hundred films from 45 different countries, including a number of world premieres. The 2009 BigPond Adelaide Film Festival runs from 19 February to 1 March 2009.