The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 4-10
Carnival of Souls (1962)
Directed by Herk Harvey
An orphan of sorts: that storybook orphan who is the product of a great love affair (in this case, with cinema), and after an adolescence spent wandering an inhospitable, cold world, is discovered by those who would become its loving adoptive family. By all of this I mean that it’s the only feature director Harvey ever made, and that it became B-movie royalty for good reason; those scenes shot in the abandoned, cheerfully orientalist Saltair Pavilion, where eyelinered extras stumble and grasp at the shrieking blonde heroine, Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss), spawned a dynasty of zombies, starting with Romero. In all its awkwardness, the film manages also to yank a heartstring or two: poor church-organist Mary may or may not have been a dead girl all along, but no one living seems quite as interested in her as those proto-zombies. Elina Mishuris (November 5, 4pm; November 12, 8pm at “To Save and Project: The 13th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation”)
