Anything But Silent Live Theatre Organ Accompaniment by Ben Model
FORBIDDEN PARADISE
Tuesday, June 25th at 7:30 PM
$11 Members | $ 16 Public
Early Hollywood superstar, Pola Negri, and one of Hollywood’s most elegant and sophisticated directors, Ernst Lubitsch, reunite for this delightfully ahistorical costume melodrama about the erotic seductions and lonely deprivations of Empress Catherine the Great.
New digital restoration! Catherine (Pola Negri), the czarina of a European nation, is about to be captured by rebels when suave military officer Capt. Alexei Czerny (Rod La Rocque) swoops in to save her. Catherine returns the favor with a bedroom rendezvous, and Alexei subsequently becomes bewitched by her beauty. He ditches his lover, Anna (Pauline Starke), to be with the czarina, only to find out that she entertains countless other beaus. Enraged, Alexei becomes a leader in the ongoing revolution against the royals. Although they had collaborated on seven movies in Germany, this was Lubitsch’s only American film with Pola Negri. Forbidden Paradise reveals itself to be what Museum of Modern Art curator Dave Kehr calls “the first fully achieved film of Lubitsch’s mature period,” graced as it is with the comic touches and sophisticated rhythmic compositions for which Lubitsch would become legendary. (USA, 1924, 76 Mins., NR, Silent with English Intertitles | Dir. Ernst Lubitsch)
Ben Model is one of America’s leading silent film accompanists, and has been playing piano and organ for silent
films at the New York MoMA since 1984, and the CAC since 2006.
