Join RiverRun for a Retro Screening of the 1959 movie THE BEST OF EVERYTHING, Discussion, and book signing – 11/18
Mid-century modernism comes to the big screen when RiverRun Retro welcomes special guests Diane Baker and Foster Hirsch for a screening of THE BEST OF EVERYTHING from 1959. Based on Rona Jaffe’s best-selling novel, the film follows three young women working for a New York publishing firm.
- Date: November 18th
- Time: 7:00 PM
- Location: UNCSA Main Theatre
From the lilting title song sung by Johnny Mathis over a sweeping view of the New York skyline to the mid-century décor on steroids to the boundary pushing-themes, this is a film that ranks with the best of the 1950s melodramas. At the time of its release, Variety called it “slick and glossy like a color still on coated stock” and when the novel was reissued in 2020, the reviewer in The New Yorker wrote, “The Best of Everything is what you would get if you took Sex and the City and set it inside Mad Men’s universe.”
The evening includes an on-stage conversation with Diane Baker and Foster Hirsch, presentation of RiverRun’s Master of Cinema Award to Diane Baker, and a book signing for Foster’s new book, Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties, published in October by Random House Knopf with books available for purchase from Bookmarks that evening.
Diane Baker began her career when George Stevens cast her in The Diary of Anne Frank. She was given a contract at Twentieth-Century Fox where she appeared in a number of high-profile pictures then worked across the studios starring with Paul Newman in The Prize at MGM and with Sean Connery in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie and with Gregory Peck in Mirage, both for Universal. She has had a prolific career in both film and television with more recent roles in Silence of the Lambs, The Net, Murder at 1600, The Cable Guy, and many others. In addition to acting, she is an accomplished producer and educator.
Foster Hirsch is a professor of film at Brooklyn College and author of seventeen books on film and theater. A noted film historian, he presents program at a number of prestigious film organizations across the globe and is a member of the RiverRun Advisory Board.
sponsors:
