“A film must always be finished, even if it is in the dark.”
This line may come froma brand new film, Pedro Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces,” but it’s an apt pointer to a vintage film retrospective in New York that surely forms the oddest news item of the day. In “Broken Embraces,” the line is spoken by a blind film director determine to salvage the work of his once-sighted career; in this retrospective, directors with half that disability are being duly celebrated.
The New York Post reports that the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village is screening a series of classics from five Hollywood masters, all of whom share the unusual fate of having gone blind in one eye: John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang, Raoul Walsh and Andre de Toth.