I want to first recommend two Val Lewton Movies: I Walked with a Zombie (1943) on Sept. 5 and Mademoiselle Fifi (1944) on Sept 10, the first directed by Jacques Tourneur and the second by Robert Wise. Val Lewton had his own B unit at RKO in the forties and produced a number of low-budget but poetic films (the best thing written about him so far is Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror by Joel Siegel, Viking 1973). The Tourneur is a free adaptation of Jane Eyre, the Wise based on two stories by Maupassant.
September has a number of films directed by George Cukor, a stylish and intelligent director (though I am not as high on him as I once was), my favorite being It Should Happen to You, about advertising and relationships in New York (1954, showing on Sept. 2 and 11).
There are several films by John Ford, including Sergeant Rutledge from 1960, starring Woody Strode as a persecuted member of an African-American cavalry unit, showing on Sept.7. Other good Westerns in Sept. include Delmer Daves's 3:10 to Yuma (1957), Anthony Mann's The Man from Laramie (1955) and Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959). These three are being shown Sept. 9.
Raoul Walsh's Strawberry Blonde (1941) is being shown on Sept. 14. It's one of three film versions of a James Hagan play and is elegantly funny and deeply moving.
On Sept. 16 there are a films by Jean-Luc Godard, including Pierrot Le Fou (1965), with its marvelous use of wide-screen and color and an impressive cameo by Samuel Fuller, whose first film, I Shot Jesse James (1949), is being shown on Sept. 20.
On Sept. 25 a films by Robert Bresson are being shown; my favorite of these austere masterpieces is Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966), influenced by Dostoevsky's The Idiot, with the title character played by a donkey.
There are a number of John Huston films being shown in Sept., my favorite being The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and there is also Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause, as wonderful a use of color as the Huston is with black-and-white.
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