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�Overlooked and Underrated� reminds us why we love the American Cinematheque

Comments (0) By Scott Foundas Wednesday, Jan 10 2007

Elsewhere in the program comes another chance to see The Detective, the delightful 1954 comic mystery starring Alec Guinness as G.K. Chesterton’s detective priest Father Brown and directed by British filmmaker Robert Hamer, whose entire overlooked and underrated career was the subject of a 2006 UCLA retrospective. Priests and detectives — albeit not one and the same — also figure prominently in Ulu Grosbard’s criminally neglected True Confessions (1981), an unusually subtle and character-driven crime drama in which an LAPD homicide investigator (Robert Duvall) and his monsignor brother (Robert De Niro) are drawn into the web of a Black Dahlia–esque murder case.

In short, there’s something here for everyone, and if I’ve saved the best for last, it’s to remind you of those three Boetticher Westerns — models of wit, suspense and narrative economy all. They may not be the most overlooked (or the most underrated) items on display in this particular exhibition. But when I said the Cinematheque is living up to its name, it’s not just by showing these movies, but by showing them on the Egyptian’s great, big CinemaScope screen. I’ve yet to see an HDTV that even comes close.