When Hitchcock’s REBECCA won Best Picture in ’41, he also had another film in contention: FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT. Expertly paced, it finds Hitchcock honing the formula of a breathless chase across multiple locations, even sketching out ideas later to appear in NORTH BY NORTHWEST. The impulsive slugging of a cop by reporter John Jones (Joel McCrea) gets the attention of his editor, who seeks a scribe to cover Europe’s unstable situation without the biased tone of a foreign correspondent. Things get sinister when Jones’ first interview subject, a Dutch diplomat, is assassinated in a spectacularly Hitchcockian sequence involving a gazillion umbrellas. From there, Jones is embroiled in a deadly plot to undermine the stability of the Western world. A flawless example of a classic Hollywood thriller with perfect balance between comedy, tension, and visual ingenuity. The film is also a harbinger of things to come from the director, who also dabbled in war-themed shorts and chronicled WWII’s evolution in SABOTEUR and LIFEBOAT, followed by a perverse look at its aftermath in NOTORIOUS.
Blueshift Ensemble performs a program of chamber music curated by composer and conductor Evan Williams featuring works by Williams and his musical mentors, friends, and colleagues in Crosstown Theater. The program includes works by Jennifer Jolley, Caroline Shaw, and Michael Fiday.
Clare Johnson is a queer writer and visual artist from Seattle, Washington, making hybrid poetry, intricate dip pen drawings, acrylic paintings of memories, participatory public art, and multidisciplinary projects expanding into theater and book art. Across disciplines, Johnson’s art-making philosophy is inspired by ordinary objects with dual meanings —post-its, ephemeral/disposable yet meant to hold onto something you’ll forget, and band-aids, signaling healing attention or a wound equally. For her ongoing Post-it Note ….
Join us in the Green Room at Crosstown Arts for a performance by Katharine Hedlund.
Join jazz vocalist/pianist Katharine Hedlund for a special live album recording performance at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts with Paul Taylor, Jim Spake, and Carl Caspersen. Katherine Hedlund was becoming quite the fixture and turning heads in Memphis before she departed for San Francisco in 2018, and we are thrilled to be hosting her in a rare return appearance.
