The Classic Film Series—which ran for nearly 40 years at the LaSalle Bank Cinema (later Bank of America Cinema) until BofA shuttered the venue last December—returns this week in its new home at the Portage Theater.
Becca Hall, Julian Antos, and Kyle Westphal, three organizers and projectionists from the bank series, are programming the weekly Portage offerings under the aegis of their new Northwest Chicago Film Society. (Former BofA programmer Michael W. Phillips has his own new venture, South Side Projections, which is slated to begin screenings in this spring.)
Classic Film Series’s first offering at the Portage is Douglas Sirk’s 1956 oil family love quadrangle Written on the Wind, starring Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. Dave Kehr called it “one of the most remarkable and unaccountable films ever made in Hollywood.”