The Clark partners with Images Cinema to present a film series that captures the explosion of creativity, critical acclaim, and box office success that Hollywood directors found after the fall of the studio system.

The series continues with Young Frankenstein (1974). As the serious side of New Hollywood took its inspiration from the French New Wave, the comic side embraced the burlesque of vaudeville filtered through 1950s television. Writer and director Mel Brooks’s pioneering vulgarity looks both tame and edgy from today’s perspective—cheap and risky in a way that reflects America back to itself, then and now. That’s what good comedy does. Young Frankenstein is a disciplined farce, run amok. A parody of the mad scientist, Dr. Frankenstein’s grandson, played by Gene Wilder, stares at the world with nearsighted, pale-blue-eyed wonder. He reaches what was for the 1970s hits a new kind of controlled maniacal peak, beyond where Peter Sellers had been, and sillier. New Hollywood had fun, too. (Run time: 1 hour, 46 minutes)

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524.



Image: Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks, 1974