The Jerusalem Film Festival will be held at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and other places around the city from August 24-September 4.
The Cannon Group was an extraordinarily successful Hollywood film company specializing in genre movies, founded by Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, that had its heyday in the ‘80s.
After producing some of the most popular Israeli films of the ‘60s and ‘70s, such as Sallah Shabati, the Eskimo Limon series and Operation Thunderbolt, they started Cannon in America and made blockbuster action movies with such stars as Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone. They jumped at every trend and ran with it, making movies about the Breakdance craze, the occult, martial arts and much more, sometimes selling movies based on a story idea and a poster. While some dismissed them as schlockmeisters presiding over an empire of cheap exploitation movies, others — such as Tarantino — feel their movies are classic crowd-pleasers.
They also nurtured arthouse directors, producing films by Jean-Luc Godard, Andrey Konchalovskiy, Roman Polanski and others.
Business problems brought an end to the company and the two had a personal falling out but they reunited for an emotional screening of a documentary about them, The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films, directed by Hilla Medalia, at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2014.
Most of the films in this series have not been shown on screen since their release in the ‘80s. Tarantino will provide introductory remarks before many of the screenings. This will be his second appearance at the Jerusalem Festival, where he was a guest of honor in 2016.
The tribute will open with a double feature of Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly, a look at the life of hard-drinking poet Charles Bukowski, starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, and Andrey Konchalovskiy’s Runaway Train with Jon Voight and Eric Roberts.
Other films to be shown include The Delta Force with Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin; Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects, 10 to Midnight and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown starring Charles Bronson; The Naked Cage, a women’s prison story; The Ambassador, the story of an American ambassador to Israeli starring Robert Mitchum and Rock Hudson in his final feature-film appearance.
For the full program and to order tickets, go to the festival website at https://jff.org.il/en/lobby/tribute-cannon-films-collaboration-quentin-tarantino