Cinema's summer season ends with two classics, film on old Hollywood

Cornell Cinema's Burt Lancaster mini-retro concludes with a screening of "The Swimmer," based on John Cheever's short story of the same name, which was considered a classic almost from the moment it appeared in the pages of The New Yorker back in the 1960s. In it, a man decides to swim home through the backyard pools of suburban Fairfield County, Conn., hopping from one manicured yard to the next as he contemplates his marriage, his affairs, his job and, ultimately, the collapse of his middle-class existence.

The writing-directing team of Frank and Eleanor Perry brought the story to the screen. The film will be shown Thursday, July 25, and Tuesday, July 30, at 7:45 p.m.

Another middle-aged man faces life-changing events in Peter Weir's "The Last Wave." Out of a brilliantly blue, cloudless sky a hailstorm erupts, shattering windows and battering schoolchildren, initiating a black rain that will not stop. With this bizarrely altered atmosphere, Peter Weir begins his film, in which a successful corporate lawyer (played by Richard Chamberlain) is drawn into defending five Aborigines accused of committing a ritualistic murder in a Sydney alleyway. As he investigates the case amid a seemingly malevolent nature, his reality becomes entwined in the mysterious "dreamtime" of the primitive Aborigine culture. A new 35 mm print of "The Last Wave" will be screened Friday, July 26, at 7:45 p.m., Sunday, July 28, at 9 p.m. and Thursday, Aug. 1, at 7:45 p.m.

Today's Hollywood, despite the tabloid headlines, seems positively wholesome compared to the scandalous silent era. Director and Hollywood historian Peter Bogdanovich recreates one of the darkest mysteries of the 1920s with the help of a stunning ensemble cast in "The Cat's Meow."

When William Randolph Hearst (the newspaper mogul excoriated by Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane") and his mistress, actress Marion Davies, take a handful of guests -- including Charlie Chaplin, director Thomas Ince and then-novice gossip columnist Louella Parsons -- for a pleasure cruise on their yacht, one of the guests doesn't make it back alive. Lust, ambition and jealousy make for a dangerous cocktail in this beautifully crafted period piece, and Kirsten Dunst is a standout as the beautiful starlet at the center of it all.

"The Cat's Meow" will screen Tuesday, July 30, at 9:30 p.m., Friday, Aug. 2, and Saturday, Aug. 3, at 7:45 p.m. All summer screenings are in Willard Straight Theatre. For information call 255-3522.