Yorkfest on York?

When I was growing up, Susannah York was in all the movies I wanted to see but my mother would not let me go to see. With roles in the likes of the Superman movies and The Loveboat in her later career it's easy to forget the steamroller of wonderfully lusty flicks she made in the 1960s and 1970s. Unfortunately, I came to see her as sort of a British Carol Lynley or Carroll Baker, not that that would be a bad thing.

But I'd never had a chance to catch her in The Killing of Sister George until picking it up on a whim today. I'd expected it to be arch and camp but am surprised at how straight forward it is, albeit with plenty of scenes of Susannah as the stay-at-home lipstick lesbian who manages to ruin her cigar chomping punishment by smiling with delight with each bite.

Watching it made me realize my need for a Susannah York marathon here on York Street. Maybe we could shut down the street and project her movies on a huge sheet on a balmy October night this autumn. Cumulatively her films add up to quite a bounty starting with Tom Jones, Freud (which I own in a rare WNET broadcast to DVD version), Happy Birthday, Wanda June, The Maids. The clincher, of course, would be to come across a copy of X, Y & Zee, the one that even when I pleaded, kicking and screaming on the floor, my mother refused to take me to see at the 14 Flags Drive In. That one definitely needs to be projected on an enormous sheet on a balmy October evening.