![]() ![]() Surreal, macabre, and filled with memorable scenes and images, it’s possibly the Coens’ darkest film to date, and an exhilarating watch. While the Coens are no strangers to writing neurotic male characters, Barton Fink may be the film of their oeuvre which delves deepest into the paranoid mind of its protagonist, presenting us with a nightmarish, Kafka-esque vision of 40s Hollywood. Barton Fink also marked the first time the Coens would collaborate with acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins, who would go on to shoot films like The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men with the brothers. The Coens wrote the roles specifically for each of the two leads and it shows Turturro is a tense ball of neuroses, while the film makes the most of Goodman’s easy-going charm. Here, Fink meets Charlie Meadows, a friendly travelling salesman who is also a tenant in the hotel, played to perfection by John Goodman. Arriving in LA, he sets up shop in a huge, strange hotel and spends most of his time staring in vain at his typewriter. Set in 1941, Turturro is the Barton Fink of the title, a celebrated New York playwright who has been enticed to Hollywood to write scripts for a film studio. ".possibly the Coens’ darkest film to date, and an exhilarating watch." Or from the Cannes Film Festival that year, but also, in an unusual three-prize sweep, awards for Joel Coen as director and John Turturro as best actor. The resulting film swept that year’s Cannes festival, winning not just the Palme d’Or, but also Best Director and Best Actor for lead John Turturro, and remains one of the Coens’ finest. Thursday, Humanities Quadrangle, Room L01 (320 York) Introduction by Archer Neilson. ![]() Barton Fink is set in the 1930’s, the beginning of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Their neat solution to dealing with writer’s block was to write a protagonist suffering from the same affliction. Writer/Director Joel Coen was an assistant film editor on Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead (1981) and you can clearly see that Barton is in the same vein as the ill-fated weekend at a remote cabin movie. The story goes that the Coen Brothers wrote Barton Fink in three weeks when they felt like they needed to get some distance from working on their previous film, the autumnal gangster film Miller’s Crossing. See any two films in our Hollywood on Hollywood selection for £10 – simply log in, book your seats and the discount will be applied at checkout! ![]()
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