Jules Dassin: Last News

Bookended by a near-identical juxtaposition of sound and fury, directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s “Meet Me in the Bathroom” starts and ends like a messy, wannabe Jules Dassin cityscape film seen through a grunge filter. “Manhattan crowds with their turbulent musical chorus, Manhattan faces, and eyes, forever for me,” our narrator reads as we see riotous anger take to the streets.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city,” went the voiceover in Jules Dassin’s classic Big Apple-set film noir. Two such stories make up the crux of the documentary Five Years North, which follows a pair of New Yorkers who couldn’t be more incompatible, even if their lives are connected in larger, more meaningful ways.

Bruce Haring pmc-editorial-managerAnthony Chisholm, whose long career spanned Broadway, film and television, died today at age 77. No cause was given by The Katz Company, his talent management.Chisholm earned a 2007 Tony nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his role in another August Wilson’s play Radio Golf.He was born on April 9, 1943 in Cleveland, Ohio, and was drafted by the US Army in the 1960s, serving as a platoon leader for the 4th Armored Calvary, 1st Infantry Division in the Vietnam War.Upon returning to the US, Chisholm performed in The Boys from Syracuse and The Threepenny Opera at Karamu House in Cleveland, Ohio.

Kaleem Aftab The Lumiere Film Festival paid homage to Greek actress, singer and politician Melina Mercouri this week with a mini-retrospective on what would have been the centenary of her birth.The centerpiece event was a screening Thursday of “Never on Sunday,” the 1960 musical drama directed by and co-starring her regular collaborator, husband Jules Dassin, who was put on the Hollywood Blacklist for being a member of the Communist Party, and moved to Europe.Mercouri and Dassin met at the Cannes Film Festival in 1955 when Dassin was starring in “Rififi,” and Mercouri in “Stella,” a retelling of “Carmen.” They would work together many times, most famously on “Pheadra” (1962), “Topkapi” (1964), and “10:30 P.M. Summer” (1966).