The first item comes from Cuba. Charlie Chaplin fans that have Criterion’s old disc of  Modern Times may have seen it. It’s a little bit of wonderment from Cuba’s ICAIC state film company. Along with making moves to eliminate illiteracy, the Castro government invested in cultural opportunities for large sections of the country that were all but cut off from civilization.

Por Primera Vez translates as ‘For the First Time.’ It’s a simple movie, filmed in a day, showing a mobile movie theater arriving in the Baracoa area of Guant´namo. The show is only a little over ten minutes long, but the last three or four minutes record the faces of villagers, many of them children, watching a motion picture for the very first time. It’s 1967, not 1930.

The film has long been a favorite — I wish moviegoing could get back to being as basic and wonderful as this, once in a while.

Make sure to turn the closed captions on, for English subtitles. The ‘showtime’ sequence doesn’t need subs.

On July 26, UCLA will be presenting a rare 1960 TV show taken from an original story by Arch Oboler, first heard as a radio show in 1945. The two-hour show features Shepperd Studwick and James MacArthur, and stars William Shatner as ‘an extremely wealthy, egotistical industrialist who finances a pioneering space flight for the U.S. government,’ and whose ‘malignant narcissism emerges under the allure of the media spotlight, triggering horrific events.’

Oboler wrote about the nuclear threat many times. His best feature film is an apocalypic tale of the  last five people on Earth.

The photo above is from a stage production …

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson