An Evening with Don Murray @ UCLA | Mar. 7

[uclaftva]

Please join UCLA Film & Television Archive for a special evening celebrating actor Don Murray’s distinguished career in American film and television!

The program screens Friday, March 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village and will be followed by a lively discussion with Mr. Murray and cinema scholar Foster Hirsch.

See details below.

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AN EVENING WITH DON MURRAY
Friday, March 7 @ 7:30 p.m.

With leading man good looks and screen presence to spare, actor and director Don Murray could have easily pursued a highly successful turn as a matinee idol or teen heartthrob. To the contrary, throughout a distinguished career that includes an auspicious feature film debut opposite Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop (1956), Murray has consistently selected ambitious dramatic projects reflective of his own socially conscious views and concerns. In a long run of memorable and challenging roles, including co-starring as a tormented closeted senator in Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1962), Murray has specialized in flawed, complex characters that are often unsure, afraid, and profoundly human.

Join cinema scholar Foster Hirsch in conversation with Don Murray, along with a screening of a classic television drama and a feature film from the Archive’s vaults, both starring Mr. Murray.

IN PERSON: Don Murray, Foster Hirsch.

THE PHILCO TELEVISION PLAYHOUSE: “A Man is Ten Feet Tall”
(NBC, 10/2/55)
PROD: Gordon Duff. DIR: Robert Mulligan. SCR: Robert Alan Aurthur. CAST: Don Murray, Sidney Poitier, Martin Balsam, Michael Strong, Hilda Simms.
In this powerful early television anthology directed by Robert Mulligan (To Kill A Mockingbird, 1962), Don Murray stars alongside future cinema legend Sidney Poitier as an AWOL soldier that forms an unexpected deep friendship with an African American dockworker. As racial tensions on the waterfront escalate to unbridled brutality, the fates of the two men become intractably intertwined.
Digital betacam, b/w, 60 min.

A HATFUL OF RAIN
1957
Twentieth Century-Fox. PROD: Buddy Adler. DIR: Fred Zinnemann. SCR: Michael V. Gazzo, Alfred Hayes. CINE: Joseph MacDonald. EDIT: Dorothy Spencer. CAST: Don Murray, Eva Marie Saint, Anthony Franciosa, Lloyd Nolan, Henry Silva.
Directed by Fred Zinnemann (High Noon, 1952) and featuring a harrowing score by Bernard Herrmann, this pioneering, realistic examination of drug addiction stars Don Murray as a returning Korean War veteran dependent on morphine due to a battle injury. In perhaps the defining role of his career, Murray’s riveting, unsettling performance twitches with the palpable anxiety and desperation of a soul in free fall.
35mm, b/w, 109 min.

*Use of The Philco Television Playhouse: “A Man is Ten Feet Tall” courtesy of Films Around The World.

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VENUE: Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood Village, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90024 (corner of Wilshire & Westwood Blvds., courtyard level of the Hammer Museum).


TICKETS: Advance tickets are available for $10 online.

Tickets are also available at the Billy Wilder Theater box office starting one hour before showtime: $9, general admission; FREE to all UCLA students with valid ID; $8, other students, seniors and UCLA Alumni Association members with ID.


PARKING: At the Billy Wilder Theater for a $3 flat rate after 6 p.m. Enter from Westwood Blvd., just north of Wilshire.


INFO: UCLA Film & Television Archive website / 310-206-8013