Saint Jack
UW Cinematheque 821 University Ave., UW Vilas Hall, Room 4070, Madison, Wisconsin
press release: USA | 1979 | DCP | 112 min.
Director: Peter Bogdanovich ; Cast: Ben Gazzara, Denholm Elliott, Peter Bogdanovich
In what might be his most charismatic and memorable role, Gazzara is Jack Flowers, an amiable American pimp living by an increasingly outmoded code of honor in Singapore during the Vietnam-era. In the episodic story adapted from Paul Theroux’s novel, Jack has his run-ins with U.S. soldiers, British businessmen, and CIA spooks, all while attempting to build the brothel of his dreams. After his fall from grace with Hollywood in the mid 1970s, Bogdanovich reunited with producer Roger Corman for this medium budget, character-driven gem that delivered the director some of the best reviews of his career.
All summer screenings take place at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue. Admission free for all screenings, seating limited. No admission 15 minutes after scheduled start times. Please visit our website for a complete listing of programs and descriptions.
On Wednesday evenings this summer we will remember one of contemporary cinema’s most talented and most mercurial auteurs, Peter Bogdanovich (1939-2022). Before he became a writer, producer, and director, Bogdanovich was a curator of repertory film programs and a journalist who specialized in interviews with pioneering Hollywood actors and filmmakers, and his movies are suffused with cinephilia, especially for 30s and 40s Hollywood melodramas and comedies. Although he was widely celebrated for a trio of early 70s box office successes (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, and Paper Moon), this series will focus on six Bogdanovich features made after he fell out of favor with American audiences and the Hollywood establishment. We start with his final narrative feature, Squirrels to the Nuts, a radically different director’s cut of the movie that became She’s Funny That Way, and shown here for the first time since its well-received premiere earlier in 2022 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The series also includes three other definitive director’s cuts of neglected Bogdanovich movies, as well as the theatrical release versions of two very fine movies, Saint Jack and The Thing Called Love.