Thursday, October 18th, 2018, at 7:00 p.m.
Every month, films from the Library’s collection are shown at the Mary Pickford Theater in the James Madison building, ranging from titles newly preserved by the National Audio Visual Conservation Center film lab, classics from the National Film Registry, and lesser known titles worthy of discovery.
This month we present Only Yesterday:
ONLY YESTERDAY (Universal, 1933). Directed by John M. Stahl. Screenplay by William Hurlbut, Arthur Richman and George O’Neill, based on the book of the same name by Frederick Lewis Allen. With Margaret Sullavan, John Boles, Edna May Oliver, Billie Burke, Benita Hume, Reginald Denny. (104 min, black & white, 35mm).
A powerful pre-code melodrama chronicling the love of a single mother for the man who had fathered her child and then forgot her. Spanning the period from 1917 and America’s entry into World War I to the stock market crash of 1929, the film was nominally based on a bestselling social history of 1920’s America by the editor of Harper’s Magazine. Unofficially, however, the story was adapted from Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s novella “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” which fifteen years later would serve as the source for Max Ophüls’s celebrated film of the same name. “Only Yesterday” marked the film debut of Broadway actress Margaret Sullavan and is undoubtedly one of the finest achievements of director John M. Stahl, “the master of melodrama” best known for a series of sophisticated women’s pictures produced at Universal in the 1930’s. Preserved in 2016 by the Library of Congress Packard Campus Film Preservation Lab from original nitrate negatives in the AFI/Universal Pictures Collection.
Seating is on a first-come first-serve basis. Doors open at 6:30 pm.
For more information on our programs, please visit the Mary Pickford Theater website.
The Mary Pickford Theater is located on the 3rd floor of the Library of Congress James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. SE, Washington, DC, 20540.