Perilous Movies

Instructor:  Dr. Benito Rakower

Course Description:  This six-week course will explore a theme in which movies excel.   How does a person suddenly find himself or herself in an impossible situation?  In real life, there is usually no way out, but in the movies there is.

Six Films

1. The Big Clock - American – Ray Milland is at the wrong place at the wrong time.  He brings on the wrath of corporate America.  But, is he truly innocent?  Stunning performance by Charles Laughton.

2. Rogue Male – English -  Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize winner, wrote the screenplay.  How does an English aristocrat suddenly find himself a hunted man eating out of tin cans in a hole in the ground?

3. Spellbound - American -  An amnesiac decides to take over the administration of a posh psychiatric hospital and seduce Ingrid Bergman.  Pretty easy as it turns out.  They go skiing together in a way no one had ever skied before.

4. The Lady Vanishes -  English – A comedy and endearing movie about what happens when a lovely woman gets hit on the head inadvertently.  World War is possible.  A wonderful exposé of Central European values in collision with English fair play.

5. The Duel -  American and British – This utterly stunning movie captures the totality of Napoleon’s rise and fall.  A young officer inadvertently offends another officer.  A duel consumes one and exasperates the other to the limit of human endurance.

6. Frantic – French and American – Harrison Ford is a physician in Paris with his wife.  She has picked up the wrong suitcase at the airport.  This brings on collision with Israeli agents, the U.S. government and the Paris police.  A very funny and very nasty movie.

Biographical Information:  Dr. Benito Rakower was educated at Queens College and graduated from Harvard University with a doctorate in English, dissertation on Hamlet.  He trained to be a pianist and French music became his specialty.  He has taught film and literature courses at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education concerning Camus, Sartre, Debussy and Ravel, and lectured at the French Library in Boston.