Better

1.Theatre,at Loeb Drama Center
Aurelia's Otario
July 30 Thu, 2009 7:30 pm Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street, Cambridge
Tickets available through the A.R.T. Box Office and website

2.Music,at Sanders Theatre
Program of Handel and Haydn. The chorus will sing with professional orchestra and soloists.
July 31 Fri, 2009 8:00 pm.Sanders Theatre at 45 Quincy Street, Cambridge.Free admission
Program of Bartok, Mozart, and Haydn.
August 1 Sat, 2009.8:00 pm.Sanders Theatre.Free admission

3.Films Carpenter centre
Harvard Film Archive: Viva la muerte July 24, 2009 7:00 pm
Harvad Film Archive: The Devils July 24, 2009 9:00 pm
Harvard Film Archive: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) July 25, 2009 7:00 pm
Harvard Film Archive: The Seven Percent Solution July 26, 2009 7:00 pm
Harvard Film Archive: They Might Be Giants July 26, 2009 7:00 pm
Description:They Might Be Giants grafts the Don Quixote story onto Holmes-in late-twentieth century Manhattan, where a mentally unbalanced judge has come to believe he is the singular detective. On the verge of being institutionalized, he becomes the patient of a sympathetic (female) psychiatrist named Dr. Watson! Besides Don Quixote, They Might Be Giants also draws from The Madwoman of Chaillot in its tale of insanity as a form of protest against alienating modernity. While the film occasionally skirts uncomfortably close to outright whimsy, the lead performances by George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward ground the proceedings in an emotional reality that ultimately proves quite moving.
Harvard Film Archive: The Scarlet Claw and The House of Fear July 27, 2009 7:00 pm
Description:Surely the most famous incarnation of Sherlock Holmes by a screen actor is that of Basil Rathbone, who played the detective in fourteen Hollywood films from 1939 to 1946. While Rathbone's Holmes has been universally praised, the accompanying Dr. Watson has proved more controversial. Nigel Bruce's Watson has been dismissed as a bumbler, light years from the stalwart army veteran imagined by Conan Doyle. Yet, as a comic foil, Bruce does quite well. In fact, Bruce's success in the role may have rehabilitated Watson for the screen; the character is absent from a number of previous cinematic Holmes adaptations. After two films for Fox in 1939, Rathbone and Bruce revived their characterizations for a series of films at Universal released between 1942 and 1946, almost all directed by Roy William Neill. Tonight's program offers two of the most highly regarded films from this series. The Scarlet Claw finds Holmes and Watson in Canada investigating a grisly murder in a film that resembles Universal's classic horror films from the 1930s. The House of Fear is considered the most convincing mystery of the series, with its plot that echoes echoing Agatha Christie's seminal And Then There Were None (1939). Both films preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
Harvard Film Archive: East of Eden July 31, 2009 7:00 pm
Description:
Kazan worked closely with John Steinbeck to adapt his sweeping six-hundred page epic about two rival families in early 20th century Salinas, California, eventually distilling the story to the tortured relationship between a well-meaning patriarch and his two sons as they come of age and fall in love with the same winsome young woman. Featuring an unknown James Dean as the younger, awkward brother, East of Eden offers one of the 1950s' most memorable and harrowing portraits of familial discontent. Kazan's passion for the American landscape and history is made clear by the film's use of gorgeous, painterly landscapes and vivid period detail.
Harvard Film Archive: Panic in the Streets July 31, 2009 9:15 pm
Description:
For his final Fox picture, Kazan contributed one of the strongest entries in the studio's popular semi-documentary cycle, a grippingly realistic account of police and government efforts to contain a near outbreak of bubonic plague in New Orleans. Often taken as an allegorical panegyric for big government, Panic in the Streets nevertheless avoids the cold abstraction typical of the semi-documentaries by rendering vivid its non-studio locations in working-class and immigrant New Orleans and by giving ample screen time to the private, domestic life of Richard Widmark's harried public health official. Noteworthy as well is the casting of Brando's former Streetcar understudy Jack Palance, in his first screen appearance, as a snarling, predatory smuggler, eccentrically paired with comic Zero Mostel as his blustery sidekick.
Harvard Film Archive: The Lost World August 1, 2009 3:00 pm
Harvard Film Archive: Pinky August 1, 2009 9:15 pm
Description:
Kazan recovered the helm of Zanuck's cherished and pointedly controversial 'message picture' about racist bigotry in the Deep South after various misunderstandings caused the abrupt departure of John Ford, the film's original director and, briefly, Kazan's mentor. In order to avoid a feared Southern boycott of Pinky's interracial story, Zanuck cast a Caucasian actress, Jeanne Crain, in the main role of a pale-skinned African American 'passing' as white in the North, a seemingly retrograde decision that nevertheless may have contributed to the film's phenomenal commercial and critical success. Kazan characteristically explores the inner life of the characters, using the legendary Ethel Waters to great effect and divining an unexpectedly raw and vulnerable performance from Crain.
Harvard Film Archive: Pie in the Sky August 1, 2009 9:15 pm
Description:
Kazan costars in his second collaboration with Ralph Steiner, a scrappy, improvised parody about Depression-era resourcefulness and theatrical bombast, largely shot in a garbage dump.
Harvard Film Archive: America, America August 2, 2009 7:00 pm
Description:
After concentrating for many years exclusively and with great success on American subjects and settings, Kazan turned abruptly away, towards his native land and family history, by adapting his own novelization of his Turkish uncle's arduous journey from his small Anatolian village to Constantinople and ultimately to New York City. Using a cast of little known Greek and American actors and shooting exclusively on location in Greece and Turkey, Kazan set out to accurately recreate the bitter poverty and struggle faced by aspiring immigrants at the turn of the century. With a young Haskell Wexler bringing his signature hand-held cinematography and auteur editor Dede Allen quickening the pace, America, America offers a rare example of a spontaneous and richly energetic period film.
Harvard Film Archive: Splendor in the Grass August 3, 2009 7:00 pm
Description:
Among the most emotionally powerful of all Kazan's films, Splendor in the Grass effectively uses its period story and setting-the 1929 Wall Street Crash-to speak implicitly to the emergent youth movement and generational tensions of the early 1960s. Working closely with playwright William Inge, Kazan fought off multiple attempts to censor the film's frank critique of American Puritanism and capitalist excess as two sides of the same counterfeit coin. Inge and Kazan's shared interest in psychoanalysis pushed their characterization of sexual awakening to a devastating extreme, a limit point of superimposed desire and madness embodied by a radiant and fragile Natalie Wood and a dashingly awkward Warren Beatty, in his first screen role.
Harvard Film Archive: Wild River August 7, 2009 7:00 pm