Part of our The Italians series

Saturday, December 6, 2025, Million Dollar Theater

LOCATION: The Million Dollar Theater, 307 S Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90013

11a LA DOLCE VITA (1960, co-wri & dir by Federico Fellini, w/ Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Paramount, 176mns, Italy,

3p ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969, co-wri & dir by Sergio Leone, w/ Charles Bronson, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards, Henry Fonda, Paramount 145mns, USA, 35mm)

For any screenings with 35mm prints, always be prepared that we may have to use a DCP.digital backup just in case.

You can get two for one (two tickets for the price of one) to any individual movie or get the ITALIANS double feature pass (both movies, best deal) while supplies last.

11a LA DOLCE VITA Fellini was a world cinema master in the 1950's. After La Dolce Vita in 1960, he achieved a velocity that catapulted him out of the stratosphere into the cosmos. Very few movies so shocked, revolutionized, galvanized a moment as La Dolce Vita. The story of the intense struggle between decency and hedonism in celebrity journalist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni in one of his key performances) in Rome, Italy, La Dolce Vita captured the whole world moving from an older set of values to the ones that still have currency: fame, celebrity, disruption. Fellini follows Marcello through parties, orgies, publicity junkets, crazy relationships. All pulsing to Nino Rota's incredible score, La Dolce Vita found a way to make the conflict between the spiritual and the material BOTH entertaining and life-changing. Fellini's success was so meteoric that his next movie, 8 1/2, often considered his masterpiece and one of the greatest movies of all time, dealt with his struggle to make a new movie after the reaction of La Dolce Vita.

3p ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST Sergio Leone was coming off one of the best trilogies of all time-A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly-and he decided he had to go bigger. More epic.

Now that doesn't always work out. But when Once Upon A Time in the West came out in 1969, he managed the rarest of feats-to make a movie as good (some would say even better) than the three classics that preceded it.

Once Upon A Time in America tells the intersecting stories of four characters-a quiet man bent on revenge (Charles Bronson), a mishievous rogue (Jason Robards), a widowed mail-order bride with a secret past (Claudia Cardinale), and a powerful hired killer who works for the railroads (Henry Fonda in a shocking bad guy performance). Leone, as the title announces, wisely understood that as an Italian he was going to be making a fever dream of what the American west might have meant. And his movie feels BOTH American and European in its obsessions and vision. As if an immigrant made a movie that somehow reflected both their new world (the US) and the world in their hearts (Italy, Europe). Leone also pioneered a cross-cutting memory-present day editing structure that would influence generations of moviemakers. And it's no understatement to say that much of Quentin Tarantino's body of work wouldn't be the same without this movie or the trilogy that preceeded it.

Some movies are meant to be seen on the big screen. This is one of them. On a 35mm archive print.

Go to next door's historic Grand Central Market for breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks as we screen these two all-time world classics. On glorious 35mm.