About this Event
YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS Wednesdays with Karina Longworth — in person!
The Philosophical Research Society is proud to welcome Karina Longworth, film critic, author, journalist and the creator and host of the beloved YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS podcast, for two evenings – Henry Hathaway’s PETER IBBETSON on Wednesday, March 26th and Stanley Donen’s MOVIE, MOVIE on Wednesday, April 9th – in celebration of YMRT’s new season, which takes a close look at the latter day films of 14 directors from Hollywood’s Golden Age. Both screenings will be preceded by in-depth introductions by Longworth, illuminating the films’ fascinating histories and their places within their directors’ iconic oeuvres.
Since 2014, the podcast You Must Remember This has explored the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century, comparing and contrasting our perceptions and distorted memories of the past with the actual truth — or, at least, as close to the truth as we can get when discussing an industry that has always mythologized itself. That’s the “forgotten” history part; the “secret history” comes from reframing these stories using a contemporary female gaze, always with empathy for what it was like to be a human being—and often an outsider—at these various points in time.
YMRT’s current season, The Old Man is Still Alive, looks at the late filmographies of a number of directors whose careers began in the early decades of Hollywood, who were still making movies in the 60s and 70s (and even 80s). In many cases, these directors, many of them Oscar winners or the men behind undeniable classics like Metropolis, It's a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted (or were forced) to engage with massive changes in technology; sudden-seeming shifts in attitudes towards race and gender; and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be skeptical that an old man had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new “degenerate” cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, “the kids with beards” and tried to keep doing what they had been doing for 30 years; others were quick to try to get with the times by making films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society (even dropping acid as “research”); others fell somewhere in between.
PETER IBBETSON (1935) - dir. Henry Hathaway
Of the 14 directors covered in The Old Man is Still Alive, the man who has fallen furthest into obscurity today is Henry Hathaway (episode premiering March 25th). While many of the subjects of this season saw their careers tail off in the 1960s, Hathaway hit a new creative peak in the second half of that decade with the two hit Westerns, The Sons of Katie Elder (his masterpiece) and True Grit (for which John Wayne, a top box office draw for 30 years, won his only Oscar). While his peers were getting weird, Hathaway continued to crank out dependable hits in the genres with which he had become expert, Westerns and adventure films.
With Hathaway, you have to look to earlier in his career to find the weirdness. In the 1930s, Hathaway transitioned out of working as an assistant director for greats like Josef von Sternberg, and began directing features of his own. As a low-level contract director at Paramount, Hathaway took the assignments he was offered, but those assignments happened to include a number of dramas dealing with various aspects of spirituality, the most accomplished of which was PETER IBBETSON, which star Gary Cooper specifically requested that Hathaway direct.
Based on a novel by George Du Maurier (grandfather of Rebecca author Daphne Du Maurier), Ibbetson tells the story of Peter (Cooper) and Mary (Ann Harding), who bonded as neighbors in their youth, rediscover one another as adults and realize that they are romantic soulmates. There is one major problem: she is married to an aristocrat who has hired him to redesign the stables at their grand chateau. After accidentally killing the husband, Cooper’s Ibbetson is thrown in Pr*son. This turns out to not be an impediment to romance, when he and Mary realize that they are able to visit one another in their dreams. Bursting with allusions to Jungian psychology, PETER IBBETSON offers an oddly romantic salve for our current times: we see that even extreme trauma can be transcended, through powerful interpersonal connection.
Program notes by Karina Longworth.
You Must Remember This creator, writer and host Karina Longworth will introduce this rare screening of a forgotten classic!
Dir. Henry Hathaway, 1935, 88 mins, Unrated (Suitable For All Audiences), United States, English, Black & White, Digital.
Ticket price: $15 (in-person event only).
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USD 17.85
