Metrograph Paying Tribute to Dede Allen in March Film Series

Metrograph presents Remember Every Frame: Edited by Dede Allen, a six-film showcase celebrating the trailblazing editor, beginning March 1 at Metrograph In Theater. Titles include The Addams Family, Bonnie and Clyde, Odds Against Tomorrow, Reds, Slap Shot, and Slaughterhouse-Five.

Dede Allen: Editing & Paving a Path in Film

Beginning her career in the film industry as a college sophomore on the Columbia Studios lot back in 1943, Dede Allen eventually learned the editor’s craft under the tutelage of Citizen Kane cutter-cum-director Robert Wise—whose 1959 Odds Against Tomorrow was her first major work—and in the decade to come she would emerge as one of the preeminent editors in Hollywood, a crucial force in introducing techniques like the jump cut and the audio overlap to American moviemaking, as well as moving past the strictures of studio era continuity cutting to a more limber, modern cutting style. An homage to an innovator in an often invisible art, featuring highlights from seven decades of Allen’s extraordinary career.

Dede Allen’s first major work as an editor, directed by mentor (and Citizen Kane cutter) Robert Wise, was this late film noir starring Robert Ryan as a racist ex-con and Harry Belafonte as his partner-in-crime, a garrulous gambler and nightclub singer who, to the great discomfort of Ryan’s character, happens to be Black. A smart, supple, suspenseful genre piece/allegory that trips along to the beat of a hip score by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, with a primo supporting cast featuring quintessential noir dames Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame.

Dede Allen owes no small part of her reputation as an unsurpassed poet of screen violence to her work on Penn’s New Hollywood watershed, the rough-and-ready, sepia-tinted retelling of the Depression Era crime spree undertaken by Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, hillbilly antiheroes embodied here by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. While widely mythologized for its Production Code-shattering scenes of bloodletting, including its unforgettable concluding bullet ballet, Bonnie and Clyde is also a film of real rustic poetry—two flipsides of the same coin that Allen handles with equal panache.

Get unstuck in time with this daring adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s seemingly unadaptable, epoch-hopping classic of counterculture literature, starring Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim, existing at one and the same time as a POW surviving the firebombing of Dresden; a prosperous suburbanite in Ilium, New York; and as an attraction in an extraterrestrial zoo on the planet of Tralfamadore, doted over by Valerie Perrine’s hot-to-trot starlet, Montana Wildhack. Dede Allen seemingly effortlessly negotiates the complex chronological leaps of Vonnegut’s novel, rendering what its narrator describes as a mere “collection of moments, strung together in random harmony” into a coherent—and disarmingly moving—whole.

Saturday, March 16 screening followed by a panel discussing the lasting influence of Dede Allen, in conversation with those who worked with and were mentored by her, including her son, Tom Fleischman, and George Roy Hill’s son, John Hill. Presented by American Cinema Editors.

This beer-guzzling bad-sportsmanship movie to which all imitators aspire features Paul Newman, at the pinnacle of his stardom, as Reggie “Reg” Dunlop, the graying player-coach of the Chiefs, a minor league hockey team in a Nowheresville, Pennsylvania mill town who start to draw sellout crowds when their leader lets the psychotic, bespectacled Hanson Brothers onto the ice, inspiring “Reg” to retool the team as a rampaging goon squad. The outrageous script, courtesy Nancy Dowd (Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains), is nasty, brutish, and hilarious, while Allen’s shrewd cutting—including unmatched employment of reaction shots—speaks volumes about the cathartic appeal of violent spectacle.

Co-Presented with ACE.

Beatty’s brawny historical drama about the life of John Reed, an American journalist who witnessed the Russian Revolution first-hand and chronicled it in his book Ten Days That Shook the World, clocks in at an imposing 195 minutes, but Allen’s dab-handed cutting keeps this epic of political ardor and fractious in-fighting scudding along at an extraordinary clip, giving scenes from the distant past the urgency and immediacy of right now. Featuring Beatty as Reed, a stacked cast including Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, and cinematography by Vittorio Storaro at his most audacious, Reds is Hollywood at, in at least two senses of the word, its most radical.

Among the most perfectly cast Hollywood studio films of the last half-century, cinematographer-cum-director Sonnenfeld’s adaptation of Charles Addams’s macabre recurring New Yorker feature stars Raul Julia as the suave patriarch of the Addams clan (“You lady-killer…” “Acquitted!”), Anjelica Huston as his waxen, witchy bride, and an outstanding preadolescent Christina Ricci as doomy daughter Wednesday. A drolly dark comedy that moves with the fearsome speed of a 1930s screwball, thanks to the surgical precision of Dede Allen’s editing.

Remember Every Frame: Edited by Dede Allen runs from March 1 to March 23, with select encore screenings to follow.