Events & Calendars Mead Summer Film Series

On three Fridays in July, the Mead will present classic American films in conjunction with the exhibition An Unblemished Mirror of Truth: Kyohei Inukai, Robert Brackman, and Portraits of American Tragedy. The screenings will take place on July 11, July 18 and July 25 at 4:30 p.m. Before each screening, Bradley Bailey, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Postdoctoral Curatorial Teaching Fellow in Japanese Prints, will give brief remarks about the film's history and its relationship to the works featured in the exhibition.

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Friday, July 11, 4:30 p.m.: Portrait of Jennie (1948) tells the tale of struggling New York City portraitist Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) and Jennie (Jennifer Jones), the mysterious beauty who becomes his muse. This film is notable for its innovative use of Technicolor, employed only in the final shot of Eben’s oil painting of Jennie, which was painted for the film by Robert Brackman, the artist who painted the Mead’s portraits of Charles and Anne Lindbergh.

Friday, July 18, 4:30 p.m.: The Heiress (1949) is the story of Catherine Sloper (Olivia de Havilland) and her tragic love affair with the dashing but penniless Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), a suitor her father vehemently disapproves of. The film is based on Henry James’s Washington Square (1880), a fictionalized version of the tragic story of Gertrude Tredwell, the heiress and spinster whose mansion is now the Merchant's House Museum in New York. It also has eerie parallels to the life of Lorna Mallinson Bowen, who was Kyohei Inukai’s friend and neighbor, as well as the sitter for one of his most cherished paintings, featured in the Mead’s exhibition.

Friday, July 25, 4:30 p.m.: Murder on the Orient Express (1974) is director Sidney Lumet’s mystery masterpiece, which features a star-studded cast including Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Vanessa Redgrave, Jacqueline Bisset and Albert Finney as the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. A significant element of the plot is the kidnapping, ransom and murder of Daisy Armstrong, whose disappearance is based on the famed Lindbergh baby, who vanished only a few years before the publication of Agatha Christie’s book (1934) on which the film is based.