IN ORINDA, CA; AND ARMOND WHITE LINKS 'BROKEN BLOSSOMS' WITH 'CARRIE'
Piper Laurie will be on hand at the Orinda Theatre in Orinda, California this Saturday, January 14th, for a double feature of two of her greatest films, Brian De Palma's Carrie (5pm), and Robert Rossen's The Hustler (8pm). According to Diablo Magazine's Pete Crooks, Laurie will appear for a Q&A with the audience following each film.Meanwhile, the other day, Armond White mused on D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms for Out, and mentioned De Palma's Carrie:
Film buffs esteem Broken Blossoms for its artiness — dreamlike, fuzzy images project us into the exoticism of other states of being. It heightens our response to effeminacy while critiquing Battling Burrows’s masculine threat. Crisp’s macho sneer is on a behavioral continuum with Gish’s fragility (her fright hiding in a closet was repeated in Brian DePalma’s modern sexual gothic Carrie) and Barthelmess’s ethereal, idealized compassion. The man and girl’s idyll is crushed (“The spirit of beauty breaks her blossoms all about his chamber”), and no contemporary gay-bashing would be more heartrending.