Tony-winning actor, director, activist, and bon vivant Alan Cumming is known for both his chameleonic performances (this is a man, after all, who has played every role in “Macbeth”) and charmingly irreverent wit. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, the stage and screen star sits down with Criterion president Peter Becker to discuss everything from Scottish-cinema rarities to the reasons why he’s decidedly antiauteurist to the films he loves dearly. The selections he’s chosen—including Orson Welles’s trickster metadocumentary F FOR FAKE, Charlie Chaplin’s audacious political satire THE GREAT DICTATOR, and Volker Schlöndorff’s surreal antiwar statement THE TIN DRUM—display the same slyly subversive spirit he brings to his own work.
Scottish Renaissance man Alan Cumming discusses the differences between actors and movie stars, the Scottish films he loves, and more.
Directed by Charles Chaplin • 1940 • United States
Starring Charles Chaplin, Jack Oakie, Paulette Goddard
In his controversial masterpiece THE GREAT DICTATOR, Charlie Chaplin offers both a cutting caricature of Adolf Hitler and a sly tweaking of his own comic persona. Chaplin, in his first pure ...
Directed by David Lean • 1945 • United Kingdom
Starring Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard
After a chance meeting on a train platform, a married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) begin a muted but passionate, and ultimately doomed, love affair. With its evocatively fog-en...
Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1945 • United Kingdom
Starring Wendy Hiller, Roger Livesey
In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s stunningly photographed comedy, romance flourishes in an unlikely place—the bleak and moody Scottish Hebrides. Wendy Hiller stars as a headstr...
Directed by Hal Ashby • 1971 • United States
Starring Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort
With the idiosyncratic American fable HAROLD AND MAUDE, countercultural director Hal Ashby fashioned what would become the cult classic of its era. Working from a script by Colin Higgins, Ashby tells the story of the emo...
Directed by Orson Welles • 1975 • France, Iran, Germany
Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In F FOR FAKE, a free-form sort-of documentary by Orson Welles, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully reengages with the central preoccupation of his career: the tenuous lines between illu...
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff • 1979 • Germany
Starring David Bennent, Mario Adorf, Angela Winkler
Oskar is born in Germany in 1924 with an advanced intellect. Repulsed by the hypocrisy of adults and the irresponsibility of society, he refuses to grow older after his third birthday. While the c...
Directed by Jack Clayton • 1987 • United Kingdom
Maggie Smith plays an older woman who begins to lose her faith in the church as the loneliness of her existence comes to bear.
