NEW YORK: It's a great week for wild men in the Big Apple repertory scene. The Italian-born Marco Ferreri was the kind of artist who is unimaginable without the 1960s but who wasn't quite of the '60s: he was the kind of older, shaggy figure who was attracted to exploring ideas of liberation, revolution, self-transformation, and chaos but who was never easily convinced that they led to utopia. An eight-film DVD box set of Ferreri's work was released here last year; with any luck, it might create a new audience for such works as La Grande Bouffe and Tales of Ordinary Madness (starring Ben Gazzara as a stand-in for Charles Bukowski). One film not included in the set is the 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, which, starting today, plays for a week in a new 35 mm. print at BAM. The film stars the pre-eminent French Mr. Smooth of his generation, Michel Piccoli, who comes home one night for a long evening of cooking, gun-polishing, and soul-searching while his missus, played by Keith Richards muse Anita Pallenberg, is zonked out in the bedroom. Dillinger does not come our way often, so this screening is highly recommended.
Actors like Rip Torn don't come dancing down the main drag every day, either, and it's hard to think of another irascible, once-borderline-unemployable thespian crazy who's mellowed into such a surefire entertainer without losing much of his edge, piss, and vinegar. Anthology Film Archives has concocted a mini-Rip Torn festival that begins next Thursday with Maidstone, the legendary Norman Mailer improv party that ends with our hero, dissatisfied with the ending Mailer had settled for, trying to juice things up by attacking his director with a hammer after Mailer thought the shoot had wrapped, and 1973's Payday, arguably the finest full-length showcase of Torn's career, in which he stars as a third-rate country music star barnstorming across the back roads while his fuse gets shorter and shorter and his heart rate gets perilously faster.
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