Some very mixed doubles

One thing I like about Bluesky is that there are accounts which look at what was showing on TV or at the cinema in that week during some other year, like what was on at Times Square or the Scala in London, etc. I don’t know anything about the Times cinema except what this tells me, but I did find on BS this ad for its February/March 1969 programming…

…which I find profoundly baffling on multiple levels. Of all of these, the only one where I’ve actually seen both titles is La kermesse heroique and Viridiana, neither of which… go together. And I’ve seen one film in each of the others and read about their respective partners to know that, well, none of them do either. I really can’t imagine what the logic of these couplings is, and maybe that was the point; having learned that Antony Balch was operating the place at that time certainly explains the discordance of the programming to some extent, if not the precise oddities going on here.

I mean, Hunger is apparently “a masterpiece of social realism“, whereas X is… frankly kind of the opposite of that, I don’t think Roger Corman ever had that in mind. Masque is one of his too, of course, although it’s him in his higher-minded Poe series, but again the other film is, per IMDB, “An avant-garde political satire” so not exactly an obvious pairing again. That film starred Zbigniew Cybulski who was also in The Saragossa Manuscript… I have no idea what Thoughts of Chairman Mao even is (maybe this?), but I’m sure it was also a wildly inappropriate companion to its big shaggy Polish brother, though admittedly I can’t think of many films that would pair well with. But the last one… OY. Mouchette is actually one of the few Bressons I haven’t seen at any point, I think Four Nights of a Dreamer and The Devil Probably are the only other ones I’ve never seen, but that means I have seen all his others, so I know EXACTLY how deranged it is to pair him off with a 1940s Val Lewton horror for RKO. Particularly that one. And did each of these bills actually play each day for a week as the ad suggests? OY again.

But Balch was also running the Jacey cinema at the time which apparently ran more in an exploitation/sex vein (including his own Secrets of Sex in 1970, where it was apparently a big hit and made back its entire cost just from that one cinema) so presumably that offset some of the losses I’m sure the Times must’ve been accruing with this sort of programming. I found the advert via this fellow who offers a lot of old cinema ads like this, but Bluesky is so damnably hard to plow through so I don’t know if he’s got any more of this particular place. I’d love to see more of what Balch was running there cos this batch is so perplexing. Maybe 1969 was just like that, of course…