The Irregular Film Club

Presents

 

Otto Preminger's

Skidoo

Thursday 18 October

7.30 pm - Room 056

 

plus bonus feature:

Orson Welles' The Hearts of Age (1934 - 8 mins)

 

More information on both films:

Skidoo sounds like a myth. Otto Preminger makes a psychedelic acid-trip comedy starring Mickey Rooney, Jackie Gleason, George Raft, and Groucho Marx as 'God'. There's a musical number with dancing tin cans. Rudimentary video effects shrink prison inmates and attach Grouncho's head to a screw. Harry 'Lime in the Coconut' Nilsson sings the entirety of the end credits down to the MCMLXVIII.

Yet, to gently crowbar in a link to Welles, 'it's all true'. Preminger and (and Groucho too, reputedly) was experimenting with LSD at the time, and the resulting film is a pro-acid counterculture epic, which sunk like a stone on release and has since been neglected and forgotten, or possibly suppressed by the Man. Either way it exists only in unofficial and bootleg versions, so allowances will have to be made for the quality of the screening.

Vincent Canby's review of the film for the New York Times

An essay by Paul Krassner regarding his pharmaceutical adventures with various personalities including Preminger and Groucho.

Senses of Cinema article on The Hearts of Age by Brian L. Frye

 

Trailer for Skidoo

"Anybody that don't like that daddy, don't like chicken on Sunday."