The home of space age pop and incredibly strange music.


​​Friday, December 16
7:00pm
Liberty Hall
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The holiday season's upon us and our next Cinema a Go Go offers up a splendid treat for the season - Bell, Book and Candle (1958) starring James Stewart, Kim Novak and Jack Lemmon!  Based on a popular Broadway play by John van Druten, Bell, Book and Candle tells the tale of Gillian Holroyd, a beatnik witch living in Greenwich Village, who falls in love with publisher Shep Henderson and casts a spell on him to force him to love her.  Complicating matters is Gillian's warlock brother Nicky, who spends his nights playing bongos in an after-hours club for witches and warlocks, and drunken author Sidney Redlitch, who fancies himself an expert on witchcraft.

A movie about witches for Christmas?  Well, for starters, the movie takes place at Christmastime, and it was released on December 25, 1958.  The combination of Christmas in New York in mid-century, a beguiling story and the glorious Technicolor make Bell, Book and Candle a criminally underrated holiday movie.

Much of the inspiration for TV's Bewitched comes from Bell, Book and Candle.  The film also marked James Stewart's last role as a romantic lead.  The story is that Stewart felt he was too old for the role and felt uncomfortable in the love scenes with Kim Novak.
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Also on our big double bill is Santa Claus (1959), the strangest and possibly most disturbing Christmas movie ever made!  This South of the Border epic almost defies description and is so utterly bizarre in every respect that it almost transcends Christmas.

In the late 1950's, Santa Claus was still an unfamiliar figure in Mexico, where holiday gift-giving customs still focused on the Magi and their feast day, Epiphany.  Maybe because of the lack of an established Santa figure, many elements of this ridiculous film differ dramatically from established portrayals of St. Nick.

For one thing, Santa doesn't live at the North Pole.  Instead, he hangs out in an orbiting space station, where he manages a horde of captive child workers and uses an array of high tech surveillance devices to spy on kids all over the world.

You have to see this one to believe it.  It's not known if a viewing of Santa Claus will cause permanent brain damage, so we've edited this opus down to a safe, manageable length!
Friday, December 16 - 7:00pm - Liberty Hall
Tickets on sale at the door.