Turn the Key Softly
Chazen Museum of Art 750 University Ave., Madison, Wisconsin 53706
press release: UK | 1953 | 35mm | 81 min.
Director: Jack Lee
Cast: Joan Collins, Yvonne Mitchell, Kathleen Harrison
This simple, melancholy picture is about three women who get out of Holloway Prison on the same day in rainy, somber London: Monica (Mitchell) landed in jail because of her low-life thief of a boyfriend, Stella (Collins) is a prostitute hoping for a better life, and Granny (Harrison) is an elderly woman with a weakness for shoplifting. Were it made a few years later, Turn the Key Softly might have been impossibly grim. Instead it’s a film as delicate and honest as any Powell and Pressburger production, made right before England’s cycle of Angry Young Man films turned the industry into something much more dark and hopeless. The gorgeous inner city location photography—from cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, better known for his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey—is reason enough to come, but it also balances lives of poverty, loneliness, old age, and occasional optimism and hope in a way that feels very tangible without being excessive or clichéd.
Chicago Film Society Presents!
Founded in January 2011 by Becca Hall, Julian Antos, and Kyle Westphal, three Chicago based projectionists and programmers, the Chicago Film Society was created to “to promote the preservation of film in context.” The CFS’s successful regular screening series at Northeastern Illinois University, the Music Box Theatre, and other locations in Chicago, was, according to their mission statement, launched out of a conviction that “films capture the past uniquely. They hold the stories told by feature films, but also the stories of the industries that produced them, the places where they were exhibited, and the people who watched them. We believe that all of this history–not just of film, but of 20th century industry, labor, recreation, and culture–is more intelligible when it’s grounded in unsimulated experience: seeing a film in a theater, with an audience, and projected from film stock.” The CFS has also established a significant and eclectic archive of 35mm and 16mm film prints that we have drawn upon for the purposes of this series tribute to the Society’s cinephilic accomplishments. Our Sunday Cinematheque at the Chazen series from September through December will present an international selection of 15 feature films and several shorts from throughout film history, all on 35mm, from the collection of the Chicago Film Society! Additionally, Julian Antos and Becca Hall will appear in person on September 28 at our regular Vilas Hall venue to present a CFS restoration of Hal Hartley’s American indie classic Trust.