The Jane Pickens Film & Event Center has spent nearly a century building a reputation for turning a movie ticket into something closer to a night out. On Tuesday, September 29, that instinct takes a particularly unusual form: a screening of the Coen brothers' 1990 gangster saga "Miller's Crossing," preceded by live traditional Irish music from the Rhode Island trio Fáilte and accompanied by a Pinot Noir tasting in the lobby.
The music starts at 6:30 p.m., with the film to follow. Tickets are sold at the door and through the theater's website.
The pairing is not as random as it might sound. "Miller's Crossing" is set during Prohibition and built around a war between an Irish crime outfit and an Italian one, and its score — by Carter Burwell — leans heavily on traditional Irish melody. The theater's own description calls the film "infused with sweeping traditional Irish music," which is why a live set beforehand makes a certain sense. Fáilte, whose name is Irish for "welcome," is a trio of Rhode Island musicians who perform traditional Irish material. The band has played around Newport before, including harbor cruises aboard the Coastal Queen.
The screening is part of the theater's Noir Avec Noir series, which rotates a small selection of Pinot Noirs alongside classic film noir — the pun being that both the wine and the genre are dark. For this installment, three rotating Pinots will be poured in the lobby, and patrons are welcome to carry their glasses into the auditorium.
"Miller's Crossing" premiered in 1990 and then opened to a shrug. Critics at the time were divided; audiences, apparently, stayed home. It has since been thoroughly reassessed. In 2005, Time magazine named it one of the 100 greatest films ever made, and critic Richard Corliss described it as a "noir with a touch so light, the film seems to float on the breeze like the frisbee of a fedora sailing through the forest."
The film's origins are as tangled as its plot. The story draws heavily on Dashiell Hammett, particularly the 1931 novel "The Glass Key," with elements pulled from "Red Harvest" as well. The result is less an adaptation than a distillation: the Coens took Hammett's hard-boiled grammar — the loyal lieutenant, the rigged friendship, the woman in the middle — and set it loose in a nameless Eastern city where the accents are Irish and the hats are wide.
Gabriel Byrne plays Tom Reagan, the right-hand man to Albert Finney's Irish boss, Leo O'Bannon. Reagan's composure is the engine of the movie; he offers his services to the rival Italian organization and sets off a chain of betrayals that the film tracks with almost clinical detachment. Marcia Gay Harden plays Verna, the woman both men want, and John Turturro plays Bernie Bernbaum, her brother, a bookmaker whose survival is the film's moral fulcrum. Barry Sonnenfeld, later a director himself, shot the film, and its imagery — a forest at the edge of town, a hat on the ground, a burning house — has become some of the most quoted visual language in the Coens' filmography.
What makes the night distinctive is the venue as much as the program. The building at 49 Touro Street, on Washington Square, was constructed in 1834 as a Zion Episcopal Church, then served as a Catholic church beginning in 1885. It became a movie house — originally called The Strand — in 1923, and has been showing films ever since, moving from silents to talkies and from film to digital. Its wooden stage survives from a stretch between 1918 and 1922 when the space was used for live performance, and it still hosts music and theater today. In 1974, Joe Jarvis bought The Strand and renamed it for Jane Pickens, a Newport resident of Bellevue Avenue fame who had performed with the Ziegfeld Follies and led the singing group the Pickens Sisters. At the dedication, she and her sister Patti, then 55 and 60, reprised their old act.
Today the JPT is the only movie house in downtown Newport, with 300 seats downstairs and 172 in the balcony, art deco chandeliers overhead, an original ticket booth, and a lobby that functions more like a lounge than a concession stand. It sells craft cocktails, wine, and beer, and its popcorn is popped fresh for every show with real butter. The theater also has a new projector, which it has been showing off with 4K restorations of cult favorites throughout September.
For one night, all of that — the church-turned-cinema, the fiddles, the Pinot, the fedoras — converges on a film that flopped in 1990 and has been quietly accumulating reverence ever since. It is the kind of programming that a multiplex cannot replicate and a streaming queue cannot approximate: a movie that rewards a big screen, preceded by the music that runs through its bones, in a room that has been darkening for films since before sound.