Some Like It Hot (at the Movies)!
Summer is nigh! Distract yourself from the rising temperatures with a movie set somewhere even hotter: Florida, the Australian Outback, or a cramped submarine. All these films and more can be found on the display stand on the third floor of the Chester Fritz Library.
Henry Fonda stars as the sole dissenting member on a jury of White men weighing the guilt of a Puerto Rican teenager charged with the murder of his father. Stuck together in a sweltering room, the jurors are pressed to reconsider the case and their own biases. (1957, dir. Sidney Lumet, 96 minutes)
Body Heat stars Kathleen Turner in a breakthrough role as the smoldering Matty Walker and William Hurt as Ned Racine, the sleazy lawyer whom she convinces to help murder her wealthy husband. Lawrence Kasdan made his directorial debut with this update of the film noir classic Double Indemnity, now relocated to sweaty South Florida. (1981, dir. Lawrence Kasdan, 113 minutes)
It is 1942, and the German submarine fleet is engaged in the Battle of the Atlantic to harass and destroy British shipping. However, the Allies have deployed better escorts, the Destroyer Class, and German U-Boats have begun to take heavy losses. Famed for its sweaty claustrophobia, Das Boot follows one such U-Boat crew and examines how submariners maintained their professionalism, attempted to accomplish impossible missions, while all the time attempting to understand the politics and ideology of Nazi high command. (1981, dir. Wolfgang Petersen, 149 minutes)
Luke (Paul Newman) is sent to a Deep South chain gang after vandalizing parking meters while drunk. Prison gang leader Dragline (George Kennedy) tries to crack the new inmate’s spirit, but Luke refuses to be broken. The warden (Strother Martin), however, is more determined to bring Luke into line. Adapted from the novel by former inmate Donn Pearce, the film is best known for Paul Newman’s career-defining performance as a handsome rebel with an adamant independent spirit. (1967, dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 126 minutes)
Mookie (Spike Lee) is a delivery man who works for a pizzeria owned by Sal (Danny Aiello). Over the course of one day on one block of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood at the height of summer, racial tensions over the exclusively Italian-American “Wall of Fame” in the restaurant escalate into a violent conflagration. A vivid and colorfully-named supporting cast– friendly drunk Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), watchful Mother Sister (Ruby Dee), Mookie’s friend Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), boombox-toting Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn)– rounds out what remains writer-director Lee’s most critically acclaimed film. (1989, dir. Spike Lee, 120 minutes)
Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune), a wealthy industrialist, is just on the verge of buying out a major shoe company when he receives a menacing phone call from a man who claims to have kidnapped his son. But it’s not his son who has been taken: the kidnappers abducted an employee’s child by mistake. Adapting Ed McBain’s detective novel King’s Ransom, High and Low combines domestic drama with police procedural while commentating on Japanese class distinctions. (1963, dir. Akira Kurosawa, 143 minutes)
Passing through the backwoods town of Sparta, Mississippi, Philadelphia detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier) is called upon to help the local police investigate the murder of an out-of-town businessman. He forms an uneasy alliance with the bigoted police chief (Rod Steiger), who faces mounting pressure from Sparta’s hostile citizens to catch the killer then run the Black interloper out of town. The winner of the 1967 Academy Award for Best Picture, In the Heat of the Night is remembered as one of the most consequential film of the civil rights era. (1967, dir. Norman Jewison, 110 minutes)
Matt Dillon stars as Rusty James, a lunkheaded teen clad in sweaty tank tops who idolizes his older brother (Mickey Rourke), known only as the Motorcycle Boy. Effortlessly cool, the Motorcycle Boy once dominated the youth gangs of Tulsa before going missing. Rusty James wants to take over, but lacks the necessary smarts. When his older brother finally returns, Rusty James is disappointed that the Motorcycle Boy is now skeptical of his former power and afflicted by fugues like their mother. As he runs afoul of his girlfriend (Diane Lane) and a vindictive cop (William Smith), Rusty James seems headed for nowhere good. Adapted from the S.E. Hinton novel. (1983, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 94 minutes)
Prohibition-era Chicago musicians Joe and Jerry (Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon) wind up at the wrong place at the wrong time and witness mobsters assassinating a rival gang. Afraid of being rubbed out themselves, they disguise themselves as women and join an all-female band headed to Miami. Joe can’t resist the charms of the group’s singer, Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), and poses as a millionaire to woo her. Meanwhile, Jerry is pursued by an actual millionaire who has fallen in love with his female persona. (1959, dir. Billy Wilder, 121 minutes)
Lonely Southern belle Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) is broke and ashamedly moves in with her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) in a tenement in New Orleans’s French Quarter. Stella’s brutish husband, Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), loathes Blanche’s ostentatious refinement and artifice, and he ceaselessly badgers her, worsening her already fragile mental health. Adapted from the play by Tennessee Williams, with most of the original Broadway cast reprising their roles for the screen. (1951, dir. Elia Kazan, 125 minutes).
On honeymoon with his new bride, Susan (Janet Leigh), Mexican-born policeman Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) agrees to investigate a recent bombing. In so doing, he incurs the wrath of local police chief Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), a corrupt bully with a perfect arrest record. Vargas suspects that Quinlan has planted evidence in the past, and he isn’t about to let the suspect in the current case be railroaded. Quinlan, whose obsession with justice is motivated by the long-ago murder of his wife, is equally determined to get Vargas out of his hair, and he makes a deal with local crime boss Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) to frame Susan on a drug rap, plummeting the case off-course. (1958, dir. Orson Welles, 111 minutes)
A schoolteacher (Gary Bond), stuck at a job in an arid settlement in the Australian Outback, stops off in a mining town on his way home for Christmas. Discovering a local gambling craze that may net him enough money to move back to Sydney for good, he embarks on a five-day nightmarish odyssey of drinking, gambling, and hunting. (1971, dir. Ted Kotcheff, 109 minutes)
