Flickers Honors Anthony Quinn, Adopted Rhode Islander, on 100th Birthday

Nominated for acting Oscars four times and winning twice, Anthony Quinn was one of the most prolific and recognizable actors of the 20^th century. He appeared in over 160 films released between 1936 and 2002, many of them considered among the best of all-time or at least definitive in their genre.

Born Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca in Mexico in 1915, the actor lived the final years of his life in Bristol. After his death in 2001 at the age of 86, the town granted a request by his widow that he be buried in a private grave on the family estate off Poppasquash Rd.

To commemorate this adopted son of its home state, Flickers: The Rhode Island International Film Festival, is holding a major curated retrospective running through Nov 2015 that will showcase 32 of his films. “We’re screening a large, large collection of his work,” said Shawn Quirk, RIFF programming director. He said that the retrospective was undertaken with the co-operation of Quinn’s widow, Kathy Benvin Quinn.

Quinn’s mixed-heritage Hispanic ancestry – his mother was Irish and Mexican, and his father was of indigenous Nahuatl (Aztec) descent – allowed him to play a wide variety of ethnic roles, ranging from Bedouin Arab (Auda ibu Tayi, Lawrence of Arabia, 1962) to continental Greek (Alexis Zorba, Zorba the Greek, 1964). Some roles depended upon this flexibility, such the lead Johann Moritz in The 25^th Hour (1967), a Romanian peasant during World War II who is mistaken for a Jew and sent to a concentration camp, reclassified as Aryan and conscripted into the Waffen SS, and then prosecuted as a war criminal. “The beauty of Anthony Quinn is that he’s played a number of different characters from different cultures, [showing that] we’re all the same. It’s amazing how many different roles he’s played,” Quirk said.

Among upcoming events, Vincente Minnelli’s Lust For Life (1956), will be screened on June 15 at the East Providence Public Library, about the tortured and violent relationship between best friends and legendary painters Vincent van Gogh (Kirk Douglas) and Paul Gaugin (Quinn), for which Douglas was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar and Quinn won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. George Cukor’s Heller in Pink Tights (1960) will be screened at 6pm on Jun 18 at the Rochambeau Library in PVD, about a vaudeville troupe led by Quinn and Sophia Loren in the American West of the 1880s. The Guns of Navarone (1960), one of Quinn’s best-known films, will be screened at the main annual RIFF event Aug 4 – 9.

Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata (1952), about the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata (Marlon Brando) in the 1910-1920 Mexican Civil War and for which Quinn won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar as his brother Eufemio Zapata, will be screened in collaboration with the Providence Latin-American Film Festival at the URI Providence campus in September. In real life, Quinn’s father fought with Pancho Villa, another leading figure in the conflict and an important character in the film. Brando was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar and acclaimed novelist John Steinbeck was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

The selection process tried to draw from as broad a representation of Quinn’s body of work as possible, Quirk said, while including every Oscar-nominated film. “These are really his best films,” Quirk said.

One of the most infamous of Quinn’s roles, however, will not be part of the retrospective: Mohammed, Messenger of God. Intended as a biography of the Prophet Mohammed, in keeping with Islamic tradition neither the images nor voices of the Prophet and his immediate family were depicted, resulting in the principal role being that of his Uncle Hamza, played by Quinn. During the film’s original run in 1977, a group of 12 Hanafi Muslims (who obviously had not seen the film) staged coordinated terrorist attacks against a number of sites in Washington, DC, taking 150 hostages and demanding the film be withdrawn. At the headquarters of Jewish organization B’nai B’rith, captives were beaten and stabbed. Two people were killed and others severely wounded. Director Moustapha Al Akkad and his daughter were killed in a 2005 terrorist attack in Jordan generally blamed on al-Qaeda. “I thought about that for a while and decided not to show it. It’s a long film and there were other films that showcased that aspect of his career somewhat better, including one by the same director [Lion of the Desert, also not being shown],” Quirk said. “In the end we decided not to.”

RIFF has conducted retrospectives of cinematic artists including Ernest Borgnine and Julie Andrews. One of the more unusual, according to Quirk, was for the work of Joseph Procopio, who is now only 21 years old but whose first premiere was at RIFF when he was age 9. “We have a long history of focusing on well-respected artists,” Quirk said.

Flickers: Rhode Island International Film Festival web site: event overview http://film-festival.org/AnthonyQuinnCentenary.php and schedule http://film-festival.org/AnthonyQuinnCentenary_FILMS.php