HEIGHTS THEATER

Judy (Jane Fonda) is newly divorced and needs a job, and she lands one as a secretary at Consolidated. Violet (Lily Tomlin) has worked there for a dozen years, trained her stupid boss, Franklin M. Hart (the wonderfully odious Dabney Coleman), and is stuck without promotion. Doralee (Dolly Parton) is Frank’s secretary, whom he belittles. Well, put those three women together, and in no time, they’ll have their sweet revenge… and start running the company! Produced and conceived by Jane Fonda, 9 to 5 launched Parton’s cinematic career and was a massive hit, even though President Ronald Reagan hated that the characters smoked pot in once scene. Don’t miss it!

One of the most beloved of Hollywood's dark comedies returns to the Heights Theater. When Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) visits his Brooklyn home to show off his new wife to his spinster aunts and oddball uncle, he figures nothing can go wrong. But when Mortimer's psychopathic brother shows up with a doctor (who just happens to be Peter Lorre) the body count rises and the laughs never cease.

Beverly (Marion Davies) is a young American student, eager to see Europe with her cousin Oscar. Good news! Oscar’s just been named heir to the throne of a European country. Bad news! He got injured in a skiing accident and can’t make it in time to receive his birthright. Here’s an idea—dress cousin Beverly as Oscar! Complications: man, Beverly sure thinks Oscar’s bodyguard is one hot number. One of the great “trouser roles” in silent film, Marion Davies’ Beverly is drag personified in this gender-bending silent masterpiece, with another brilliant score by the talented Katie Condon.

Here come the VILLAGE PEOPLE! Songwriter Jack Morell (Steve Gutenberg, in his debut) writes great disco songs. His pal, former supermodel turned consumer of junk food, Sam Simpson (Oscar-nominated Valerie Perrine), helps our man by asking her ex, who happens to be an executive of a record label, to sign him to a contract. Enter sexy lawyer Ron White (Caitlyn Jenner), who helps assemble a band. What band? THE VILLAGE PEOPLE, who else? CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC was a critical and commercial failure but has since become embraced as one of the craziest, most heartfelt paeans to disco ever put on film, not to mention a joyous celebration of a late 70s LGBTQ+ culture, even as it’s trying to pretend every man is straight (not in the least). The “YMCA” and “Milkshake” scenes are worth the price alone, but don’t believe us, don’t miss CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC.

Set in Paris’ theatrical society in the early 19th Century, Children of Paradise is the story of a mysterious courtesan who is beloved by four men: an actor, a thief, a count, and a mime. Director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert create a lush world in stunning contrast to the Nazi-controlled France in which they were filmmaking. One of the most beloved French films of all-time, director François Truffaut famously said that he would give up all of his films to have made Children of Paradise, and in a 1995 survey, French film critics called it the best film ever made.

When stick-up artist “Heliotrope” Harry comes home after escaping the cops, he finds his devious wife, Lilly, in the arms of another. Enraged, Harry shoots his rival, and before he’s caught, leaves his baby girl on the doorstep of a rich, childless couple. While in the big house, he’s kept abreast of daughter Alice’s progress by his former associate, Froggy. But when Lilly finds the girl and seeks revenge, Harry is able to get free and tries to set a trap to keep his daughter safe. One of the earliest productions from David O. Selznick, Forgotten Faces is a newly restored masterpiece of silent melodrama, not available for streaming anywhere!

We’ve been asked to screen Hocus Pocus for years, and it’s finally here! When Salem, Massachusetts teenager Max accidentally resurrects three witches from the seventeenth century, and those witches happen to be comedians Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy, the results is one of the most hilarious (and beloved) pictures from the 1990s!

Lieutenant Aldo Raine is a battle-tested solider in the U.S. Army during World War II. His goal: recruit a commando group of Jewish-American soldiers to do “one thing, and one thing only: kill Nazis!” This is Quentin Tarantino’s World War II, full of blood, brilliant dialogue, great actors, all the while referencing spaghetti Westerns and Italian action films. Inglourious Basterds was a tremendous hit and introduced the world to the amazing Christoph Waltz, who won an Oscar for his slimy performance.

Today there are TV shows and movies by the dozen that explore and even celebrate the serial killer. But Fritz Lang's astonishing M, almost a century old, was the first serial killer film, the first police procedural, and still the one by which all are measured. Peter Lorre murders children, and his horrific crimes make him the target of both the police and the underworld. But Lang isn't merely focused on the killer—as usual his most scathing attacks are on the German society. Police, thugs, and the average citizen are as culpable as the killer himself. Filmed as the Nazis were beginning to consolidate power, M strikes at the very heart of what it means to be evil. Disturbing, thought-provoking, and by all measures, a classic. "What a haunting film it is." —Roger Ebert

Yvonne (Frances Drake) is a gorgeous actress. Steven (Colin Clive) is a famous pianist. Dr. Gogol (Lorre) is an insane scientist who is in love with Yvonne. When a train accident wrecks Steven’s hands, Dr. Gogol does the happy couple a “favor”… by transplanting the hands of an executed psychopath onto Steven’s arms. Fully healed, the pianist finds a trail of bodies in his wake, and he begins to suspect that these hands have a will all their own. From this wonderfully ludicrous plot comes a horror film with tremendous emotional impact, grounded in Lorre’s disturbing, and heartfelt, performance as Gogol.

Hans Wieland is a brilliant actor, a leading figure in German cinema. When the Nazis pressure him to divorce his Jewish wife, Elisabeth, he refuses. Finally, political pressure becomes too much, and, realizing that he will be arrested, his wife to be sent to a concentration camp, he faces the ultimate test of his love. Based on the real-life story of actor Joachim Gottschalk, Kurt Maetzig’s Marriage in the Shadows was the first movie (produced under Soviet auspices) to confront Germans about their treatment of Jews. A brilliant and heartbreaking film, shot like a noir but filled with the rarefied emotions of a melodrama, this rare screening should not be missed.

Pete, Delmar and Ulysses (Tim Blake Nelson, John Turturro and George Clooney) escape a chain gang in 1930s Mississippi in the Coen Brothers’ riotous take on Homer’s Ulysses. Featuring some of the best folk musicians of the turn of the century, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a modest hit in its day, has since gone on to be one of the Coen’s most revered classics.

There is no way we’re having a drag series without DIVINE! Pity poor Frances Fishpaw (Divine): her porno-theater-owning husband is having an affair, her son's huffing household chemicals, her daughter's a hussy, and the other housewives spit on her! Enter the handsome Todd Tomorrow (Tab Hunter), who sweeps her off her feet—but is he for real, or just another cad? Exploding off the screen in Waters' patented grainy grindhouse style, POLYESTER is alarming, offensive, hilarious, and even dare-we-say affectionate. Also: Divine is the Queen of all Queens!

In the sixteenth century, bandits have been invading a small mountain village, depleting it of its rice harvest and leaving its inhabitants in a state of perpetual near-hunger. A group of three brave villagers goes to the nearest town, hoping to entice down-on-their-heels samurai to help defend the village with the promise of rice. What ensues is one of the most thrilling, and emotionally moving, action epics ever made. The Seven Samurai has always been high on list of the greatest films ever made, and is an absolutely entertaining film that leaves its viewers enthralled and devastated. The Heights presents the gorgeous new digital 4K restoration from Janus.

Do we really need to explain this one? Perhaps no movie musical is as beloved as Singin' in the Rain, which has sold out the Heights Theater three times in the last four years! What a wonderful feeling!

Armand (Robin Williams) and Albert (Nathan Lane) run The Birdcage, a drag nightclub in Miami where Albert performs as Starina. Armand has a 20-year-old son from a one-night stand, and whoops! Armand’s son wants to marry a young woman… whose father happens to be ultra right-wing Senator Keely (Gene Hackman). Well, their idiot son hid the fact that his folks are gay and Jewish, so voila! Enter Mr. and Mrs. Coleman—Armand as Mr. and Albert as Mrs. This sparkling comedy was a surprise hit, and Robin Williams and Nathan Lane are pure comedy gold. Also, we miss Gene Hackman and Robin Williams.

Boris Karloff met his match with Elsa Lanchester, who plays the Bride of Frankenstein and sports perhaps the greatest hairdo in Hollywood's long history of great hairdos. Her performance was years ahead of its time, the kind of thing that wins Oscars today and was the perfect foil to Karloff. James Whale attempted to camp up his entry, but the result is a film that many consider superior to the first, more emotional and less stagy than the first, and perhaps the greatest entry of Universal's celebrated horror films.

This brave and biting comedy by Charlie Chaplin was his first sound film, and most successful picture. Released at a time when the U.S. was still in a tenuous truce with Germany, The Great Dictator not only satirized the Fuhrer, but accurately portrayed Hitler's hunger for world domination, and his dangerous policies against the Jews, perhaps the first major American film to do so. The Great Dictator is not only one of the greatest movies of all-time, but perhaps the most important comedy ever made.

From the hearts and minds of Stephen King and Mike Flanagan comes THE LIFE OF CHUCK, the extraordinary story of an ordinary man. This unforgettable, genre-bending tale celebrates the life of Charles 'Chuck' Krantz as he experiences the wonder of love, the heartbreak of loss, and the multitudes contained in all of us.

Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) is a tough-as-nails, cool-as-a-cucumber detective in San Francisco. When he’s hired by the gorgeous Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) to find her lost sister, everything seems to be great. Until his partner is killed, and Spade finds himself hot on the trail of the Maltese Falcon, a legendary statue made of gold and jewels, “the stuff that dreams are made of.” Enter Kaspar Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), two of the slimiest (and most entertaining) crooks you’ll ever meet, and the result is one of the great classics of film noir. So popular was their rapport that Greenstreet and Lorre went on to make numerous pictures together.

Alfred Hitchcock’s original THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH explored the director’s themes of innocent people caught in the midst of a dastardly crime, this time in the Swiss Alps and London, but this time in brooding black and white. A fascinatingly odious Peter Lorre is on hand as a criminal with a strange pocket watch, and whose presence makes this one so much darker and nastier than the more famous later version.

THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME. The story of a family and a family business. Starring: Benicio del Toro as Zsa-zsa Korda, one of the richest men in Europe; Mia Threapleton as Sister Liesl, his daughter/a nun; Michael Cera as Bjorn Lund, their tutor. With: Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Mathieu Amalric, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Richard Ayoade, Rupert Friend, Hope Davis, and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Jack Torrence, a recovering alcoholic, retreats to the Overlook Hotel with his wife, Wendy, and son, Danny, in tow, in the hopes of breaking his writer's block. But the hotel is host to a variety of dark secrets, none more disturbing than those in Room 237. The Shining is one of Kubrick's more startling masterpieces, and Jack Nicholson's performance is the stuff of legend.

One of the most popular films of all-time arrives at the Heights Theater! Poor Maria (Julie Andrews) is a nun who is just too free-spirited to do anything right in the convent. So, she’s placed as a governess to the stern Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) and his seven children, who are models of discipline. Thank goodness Maria is there to help them become happy kids again! Director Robert Wise pulled out all the stops making this blockbuster, whose music people have adored for generations. Winner of five Academy Awards.

Blaine, Missouri is small town whose local amateur theater, led by the indomitable Corky St. Clair (Guest), plans to put on a show to commemorate the town’s 150th anniversary. Pulling together all the citizens, who battle for choice roles, Corky’s Red, White and Blaine might just be their undoing! Guest’s star-studded mockumentary is hilarious, and features brilliant comic performances from Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Fred Willard and Guest himself.

A Heights Theater tradition, one of our most popular events - an event that sells out year after year! You will not want to miss the perennial TECHNICOLOR favorite, WHITE CHRISTMAS, on the big screen! Plus.....ON OUR STAGE! The big show starts with a special 20 minute concert by the wonderful MAUD HIXSON, singing a stocking full of your favorite holiday classics! Accompanied by Rick Carlson on the piano as well as A BOUNCING BALL SING ALONG at the end!! Also... A fantastic preshow concert by LOU HURVITZ and ED COPELAND on the Heights Mighty Wurlitzer!

To Glensheen devotees and local cinema buffs, this Gothic old dark house suspense film is an absolute must-see! Shot completely on location in Duluth in the winter of 1971, You'll Like My Mother stars Patty Duke, a very sinister Richard Thomas (John Boy from The Waltons), and an utterly chilling Rosemary Murphy as the mother you'll love to cringe from. However, the real star of this film is the glorious Glensheen Mansion, which you'll explore (with a terrified Patty) from the cellar to the attic!