As a theater owner, film programmer, and arthouse distributor for more than 50 years, Dan Talbot, in collaboration with his wife, Toby Talbot, had a profound impact on film culture, introducing American audiences to thousands of films from around the world at the New Yorker Theater, which ran from 1960 to 1973, Cinema Studio (1977–90), the Metro (1982–87), the Lincoln Plaza (1981–2018), and the distribution company New Yorker Films. While the Talbots’ focus shifted from repertory programming that often highlighted neglected American films to arthouse programming of new international features, the New Yorker Theater made its mark with its creative pairings, such as the double feature of Alfred Leslie and Robert Franks’s Pull My Daisy and Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons that opened on April 7, 1960.
The Magnificent Ambersons. 1942. USA. Written and directed by Orson Welles. With Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collings, Erskine Sanford, Richard Bennett. 35mm. 88 min.
Peter Bogdanovich was a film critic and programmer before he was a director. In 1965 he organized an Orson Welles retrospective for the New Yorker Theater, and wrote that Welles “is as much a magician as a consummate artist, a spellbinding entertainer as well as a master poet. His films have a rare vitality and spirit, and the gown of Culture, the respectability of the Museum becomes them not. They are alive.” Of The Magnificent Ambersons, Bogdanovich wrote that “Welles eloquently narrates his version of George Amberson Minifer’s comeuppance and the tragic price others paid for it. Directed with great economy of gesture, an unerring sense of period and style, and a pervasive melancholy of nostalgia.”
Pull My Daisy. 1959. USA. Directed by Alfred Leslie, Robert Frank. Narrated by Jack Kerouac. With Richard Bellamy, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Delphine Seyrig, David Amram, Alice Neel, Sally Gross, Denise Parker, Pablo Frank. 35mm print courtesy of Anthology Film Archives. 28 min.
Pairing Pull My Daisy with The Magnificent Ambersons is the kind of quirky programming that Dan Talbot loved. The films are connected by their poetic and vital use of voice-over narration, and by the way they each create portraits of an enclosed society that is on the verge of fading away.