Zelienople's Strand Theater and The Maltese Falcon

Saturday evening we ventured into the Great North (Zelienople) to watch "The Maltese Falcon" at the Strand Theater, which is something I've wanted to do since they (re)opened in July 2009. (Yes, there was a Maltese Falcon before there was a Millenium Falcon.)

I've always been a fan of arthouse / college-town indy movie theaters - places that show an eclectic mix of great movies and foreign films, usually for one or two days each in a quick rotation. I've been missing that for a long time, since the Pittsburgh Playhouse got out of showing movies. I knew that the renovation of the old Strand Theater promised to bring that back.

The Strand Theater (wiki) was built in 1914 by Gioachino and Rosalia Sapienza, and featured silent films with live piano accompaniment as well as Vaudeville-style shows on its small stage. Unable to compete with multiplexes and VCR's, the Strand closed in the 1980's.

One of the side-effects of the Pittsburgh economy is that a lot of buildings in small towns can sit empty for a long period of time. In this case, the Strand sat unused for twenty-five years, and crossed over into a new period of utility.

The (new) Strand reopened in July 2009, and I had low expectations of the state of the theater - I assumed it would be the old theater with perhaps new seats. I was very pleasantly surprised to see that the interior had been redesigned and the space re-engineered. It reminded me of the O'Reilly Public Theater downtown.



This was a first: my children had never watched a movie from a balcony before. This was the classic movie experience which is rarely available anymore. Some movies are better on the big screen, and the fast-paced Maltese Falcon is one of them. After the show we had pizza at GoodFellas across the street, which was excellent.

The Strand is a first-class movie house. It's better that the new theaters that you'll see in places like the Waterfront.

I hope to go back in May for Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Holding true to the original presentation, the Strand will present this restored silent movie accompanied by live piano performance.

Bicycle Thief

Saw an article in the paper of record, The Bicycle Thieves Among Us. It was a story about how New Yorkers seem to be becoming lax about bicycle security.

I had hoped that it would be a story built upon one of my Ten-Best Movies of All Time: The Bicycle Thief (available in both English and Italian w/subtitles). I imagined that it might talk about how the deteriorating economy was driving people to commit crimes which they wouldn't ordinarily do.

The story I imagined was more thought-provoking than the article I found. The story I conjured up was about the 1948 movie, which routinely places in the top-ten lists of movie students. In 1952 it was declared the "greatest film of all time". In a 2002 poll of directors, it placed sixth as the greatest movie ever made. It made the Vatican's list of the best movies ever made.

So let me encourage you to watch The Bicycle Thief, which is available on Netflix, and in the Foreign Films section of Blockbuster. You might be tempted to give up on it in the first fifteen minutes, but it really gets going after that. To me, this was a remarkable movie about universal concepts such as family roles, honor, poverty, and decision making. There's a few plot twists; it's a compelling entertainment.

Anyway, what I'd hoped for when I saw the NYT headline was an article talking about NYC bicycle theft and changing economic times, informed by the theme of this movie. Maybe I'm reaching the age where the interesting news is the fiction I compose, rather than the fiction the media composes.

There is some disagreement about the most correct title; the original was Ladri di biciclette, and Anglo versions call it The Bicycle Thief or Bicycle Thieves.

This is the most successful film in the Italian neo-realist genre, and in keeping with that concept it was filmed on location, with regular people instead of actors.

This is a movie trailer intending to get American audiences to see the film:


The entire movie (Italian with sub-titles) seems to be on YouTube in 10-minute segments, starting with this one below:


And I suppose I should decide what the other nine of my Top Ten Movies are.