Peter Bogdanovich’s lost film!
Wednesday, December 7th at 7:30 PM
SQUIRRELS TO THE NUTS
In Person: CUNY English Lecturer, Film Scholar, and Film
Rescuer James Kenney
Suggested Donation: $15
Heavily cut, substantially reshot, and burdened with a
painfully explicit voice-over narration, Peter Bogdanovich’s final
theatrical feature was released in 2014 under the title She’s Funny
That Way and quickly disappeared from view. Miraculously,
Bogdanovich’s full original cut, running 123 minutes and titled Squirrels
to the Nuts in homage to Ernst Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown,
was saved from oblivion by James Kenney, a CUNY English instructor,
who discovered a high-definition video master of the Bogdanovich edit on eBay.
In its full, free-floating form, Squirrels recovers
Bogdanovich’s elegance, airiness, and ability to smoothly manage a large cast
of characters. This ensemble romantic farce centers around a Brooklyn sex
worker and aspiring actress, Isabella (Imogen Poots), and how she
unwittingly affects the interconnected relationships between a Broadway
director (Owen Wilson), his leading lady wife (Kathryn Hahn), her suave
co-star (Rhys Ifans), an obsessive judge (Austin Pendleton), and
a thoroughly unprofessional therapist (Jennifer Aniston), among many
others. At heart the film is a McCareyesque comedy of remarriage, with the
stage director (Wilson) fighting through serial infidelities to make it back to
his patient wife (Hahn), who herself is being pursued by the scruffy Brit film
star (Ifans). However, the peripheral characters—particularly Pendleton’s
lovesick judge and Aniston as the world’s most indiscreet therapist—add some
wonderful, darker notes to Bogdanovich’s rich comic tapestry. (USA,
2013/2022, 123 min., DCP)
