User Reviews

The Projectionist is not a great film, but it IS a film that every self-respecting movie fan will love, in whole or in part. Chuck McCann plays a union projectionist who escapes from his day job via black and white fantasy sequences where he 'plays' an overweight super hero or a bit part in Casablanca. The film also features footage from Buck Rogers and lots of other old movies, parodies of Universal horrors, the trailer for The Day the Earth Stood Still (original version of course!), and copious newsreel footage featuring Hitler, Mussolini, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John and Bobby Kennedy, and others. We also get Rodney Dangerfield, who gives the best film performance of his career as the manager of the decaying bijou where McCann works, beautiful Ina Balin (sans dialogue) as The Projectionist's (fantasy?) girlfriend, and a bittersweet semi-autobiographical turn by Czech émigré Jara Kohout as the theater's concessions salesman. An obvious labor of love for writer-director-costar Harry Hurwitz, this prophetic post-modern salute to the magic of the motion picture will appeal to admirers of Mohsen Makhmalbhaf's Once Upon a Time...Cinema and Bill Morrison's Decasia, as well as those who just want to soak up some circa 1970 Times Square atmosphere.

. . . THE PROJECTIONIST is the sort of hit-and-miss, brilliant-one-minute\mediocre-the-next, "all over the map" mash-up that every Tom, Dick, and Harry is doing on the internet nowadays. Chunky Chuck McCann as the title character has an (on-screen) imagination filled with Nazis, war, Ku Kluxers, riots, science fiction horror, lynchings, assassinations, machine-gun fire, Busby Berkeley female kaleidoscopic formations, gang fights, dinosaurs, explosions, cavalry charges, burning dirigibles, concentration camp carnage, super heroes, arch villains, crackpot evangelists, and nude chicks on bearskin rugs. Adolph Hitler features most prominently. References to actual movies are everywhere--on projectionist Fred C. Dobbs' big screen at the Palace Theater, on his film poster-papered apartment walls, and on the marquees of the sidewalks he haunts while off-duty. His brain is filled with snippets from dozens of movies sampled here (director Harry Hurwitz sometimes needs to split the screen five ways to cram everything in). McCann as Dobbs "does" Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, and James Stewart, among others. Did this obscure flick "inspire" Monty Python, Benny Hill, Laugh-In, That was the Week That Was, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and BE KIND, REWIND? Who is to know?

When I played this movie on VHS and the first thing that appeared was the cartoon Gerald McBoing Boing's Symphony (which I reviewed here last year), I actually thought this short was going to be played in full before the feature. Instead, it turns out the title character whose name is the same as the person playing him, Chuck McCann, is playing it at the New York theatre he works at and has to fix it when it tears on the projector it's on. And so begins this fascinating film as we follow Chuck as he talks to one of the ushers, Harry (writer/director Harry Hurwitz), who gets shooed away by manager Renaldi (Rodney Dangerfield in his film debut) who warns Chuck not to communicate with his other employees on company time of which another one of those Chuck's friendly with is the candy man played by Jara Kohout. During some downtime, Chuck imagines-in silent black and white-he's superhero Captain Flash who has to defeat Dangerfield's The Bat from Kohout's Scientist and his daughter who's played by 60's leading lady Ina Balin. These sequences are quite hilarious what with the sound effects and physical movements. Ms. Balin is also in another dream sequence-also in silent black and white-with Chuck whenever he tells Harry about his dates with her. Since we never see her in the real-life color sequences, we don't know if she really exists here. Oh, and the Captain Flash music sounds like stock melodies from the '30s-'40s serials while the ones with just Chuck and Ina have the more Easy Listening '60s vibe. There's also some creatively amusing mix of various newsreel/classic feature/new footage meant to convey just how immersed in movie lore Chuck really is that provide some bizarre juxtapositions like when JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" seems to come out of Adolf Hitler's mouth! There's also a touching moment between Kohout and McCann when the latter asks about the former's experience in silent movies in his home country of Czechoslovakia as well as his escape from the Communist country during the intermission of a theatrical revue he performed in. McCann himself has one good scene by himself when he impersonates some of the famous movie stars like his idols Laurel & Hardy not to mention Rodney himself on another occasion! Oh, and while Dangerfield provides some lines that could have been funny if he delivered them in his stand-up voice, here they're just said in a solemn tone that only brought a slight smile on my face. When he's in the bw footage, however, his bug eyes can still highly amuse. And one more thing: if you're familiar with movie names from a certain era, then you could tell what year this movie was filmed in when titles like Barbarella and Star! appear on marquees though one more that's displayed is the one you're reading about right now...

Awesome flick, starring Chuck McCann. In some ways, a very haphazard and unfocused mess, but also, obviously, an intense labor of love for the director, and maybe also for Chuck McCann, the kiddie-show star of our youth. Chuck is a projectionist at an old movie house (run by Rodney Dangerfield), who fantasizes that he is a superhero. The superhero segments, filmed in Fort Tryon park, it seems, are very amateurish and cheap, remind me of a super-8 superhero film my friends and I made when we were in 10th grade, in which I starred as some sort of superhero. But the director, a guy named Hurwitz, also interspersed hundreds of clips from old Hollywood movies--at one point, the screen was divided into five parts, with different segments of Hollywood films showing in each of the parts. (I guess no one was enforcing film copyrights in 1971.) The Projectionist opens with a segment from a Gerald McBoing Boing cartoon, which then goes off the reel, and contains a lot of news footage showing the awful events in the world, police beating demonstrators, KKK hanging blacks, etc. It also contains fake coming attractions: one for a film about our awful future in which men become the slaves of robots, and another for a film about our glorious future, in which we ascend to heaven on earth. And then there are the scenes of Chuck McCann walking through the streets of New York of 1971, including a stunning walk down seedy old 42nd Street (one of the marquees says "Save Free TV"--remember the campaign against pay TV becoming the norm?) and a visit to a magazine shop with racks full of girlie mags (racks full of racks?) and a photo from one of those mags, a naked girl on a rug, turns into a fantasy segment for Chuck McCann. The movie is nuts, total anarchy, gloriously unfocused and idiosyncratic, and wonderful, and ends with the film we're watching pulling out of the aperture, and the screen going white, then black. Then the lights in the theater go on.