What’s Screening: January 2-8

Happy New Year!

Let the Right One In, Parkway, opens Friday. Better than Horror of Dracula, Interview with a Vampire, and The Lost Boys, and maybe better than Nosferatu, this is one of the great vampire movies. What better place for a vampire than a Swedish winter? The nights are very long, snow covers everything, and people drink heavily and seem depressed to begin with. It’s like Bergman, only with undead bloodsuckers. Let the Right One In is also a coming-of-age story, about first love between a boy about to turn 13 and a girl who has been 12 “for a very long time.” Read my full review.

Double Bill: Touch of Evil & Wait Until Dark, Castro, Wednesday. Orson Welles’ film noir classic Touch of Evil was one of his few Hollywood studio features. He lacked the freedom he found in Europe, but the bigger budget–and perhaps even the studio oversight–resulted in one of his best. As a corrupt border-town sheriff, Welles makes a bloated, scary, yet strangely sympathetic villain. Janet Leigh is a lovely and effective damsel in distress (although Psycho apparently didn’t teach her to stay away from seedy motels). As the hero, a brilliant Mexican detective, Charlton Heston is…well, he’s miscast, but not as badly as some people say. Wait Until Dark isn’t in that league, but it’s a well-made thriller that gives you a rare chance to enjoy a scary Alan Arkin. It also has one very original, very effective shock moment (I can’t give it away) that has since been ruined by overuse.

A Shot in the Dark, Castro, Saturday. The first movie based around the character of Inspector Clouseau (a supporting character in the original Pink Panther) supplies more laughs than any three normal comedies. Peter Sellers created one of cinema’s great comic characters in this dignified yet idiotic detective who believes himself a crime-solving mastermind, and A Shot In the Dark gives Clouseau his best vehicle. The cast includes George Sanders as a possibly guilty nobleman and a beautiful (if talent-impaired) Elke Sommer as the obvious suspect whom Clouseau refuses to suspect. On a double bill with Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a movie I saw long ago and didn’t care for. Part of the Castro’s Henry Mancini series.

Monsieur Verdoux, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Thursday, 7:30. I feel like a cad attacking Charlie Chaplin’s second talkie and penultimate American film. It took courage in the Hollywood of 1947 to make a movie with a serial killer as the protagonist, and to use that murderer to attack greed, industrialization, and war. But let’s face it: The movie is slow, preachy beyond human tolerance (even if you agree with Chaplin’s sentiments), and almost totally devoid of humor. Only Martha Raye keeps me from giving it an F.