The Moviegoer: Squeeks the means of projection

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.

The artwork accompanying my column this week was drawn by my friend Nathan Gelgud, who, two Fridays ago, was in town to present Robert Downey Sr.’s Putney Swope (1969) at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema. The event coincided with the release of his book Reel Politik, a compilation of his inspired online comic strip that interrogates and celebrates cinephilia with a political slant that would make Jean-Luc Godard proud. I recommend it for anyone reading this column—and also as a potential gift for the holiday season.

a black-and-white comic of a person hating on Chicago until they find out Michael Mann is from there Credit: Nathan Gelgud

Nathan and I have known each other online for almost a decade now (he’s designed posters for several screenings I’ve programmed around town), so this would have been our first time meeting in person. I say “would have been” because, at the very last moment, I was unable to attend the screening. On that Friday, one of our cats, Squeeks, started declining in health rapidly. We scheduled an emergency appointment with our vet, where we ended up having to put her down just an hour before the screening.

We were heartbroken, and still are—Squeeks loved cinema and would often join us for at-home movie nights. She especially loved horror movies, and we joked that she had an ongoing friendship with Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The first movie we watched together at home without her was Edward A. Blatt’s Between Two Worlds (1944), which ended up being oddly apropos. My husband had picked it up from the library because it was a film starring John Garfield he hadn’t seen. It centers a group of people in London during World War II who’ve all ostensibly booked passage on a ship sailing to the U.S. It turns out, however, that they’re all dead (though only a few realize it initially), and that the ship they’re sailing upon is destined for the afterlife, where an uncertain fate awaits. Were that to be an accurate depiction of death, Squeeks would have been on that boat, on her way to meet the angel Sydney Greenstreet, who would have undoubtedly sent her to heaven.

Our community of film-loving friends has been supportive these past few weeks, and I dwelled in the feeling during a Sunday night screening of Blake Edwards’s S.O.B. (1981) at the Davis Theater. Cine-File (where I’m comanaging editor) copresented the show with John Dickson of the Oscarbate Film Collective as part of his ongoing Trust Fall blind screening series. Edwards based the film loosely on his own experience with a movie of his that flopped and had him contemplating death by suicide. Such is the fate of Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan), the Edwards avatar whose latest film (starring his wife, played by Edwards’s real-life wife, Julie Andrews) has made him a studio pariah. It’s an absolutely hysterical movie, and everyone had a great time.

It ends with text onscreen saying that the updated version of Felix’s film (the production of which comprises most of the plot of the film) made a ton of money and everyone lived happily ever after . . . until the next movie. So on that note . . .

Until the next movie(s), moviegoers!

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