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From child actors to screen icons, Kurt Russell and Jodie Foster celebrated in summer retrospective
Walt Disney’s last words were “Kurt Russell.” When the film, television and theme park mogul died in 1966, his final, unfinished memo began and ended with the name of the studio’s then 15-year-old star. Russell has been such a rugged, reliable presence in movies for so many decades — he’s one of those guys who seems like he’s always been around and you’re always glad to see him — it’s easy to forget he started out as a child actor, making his screen debut kicking Elvis Presley in the shin in 1963’s “It Happened at the World’s Fair.”
Jodie Foster has spent even more of her life in front of a camera, beginning her career as the Coppertone baby in TV commercials when she was just 3 years old. Before her double Oscar wins, Foster was also part of the Disney stable, playing the wisecracking tomboy in kid-friendly comedies when she wasn’t moonlighting in more adult fare with Martin Scorsese.
Things tend not to end well for child actors. Even the ones who manage to navigate the psychological perils of early fame often have trouble transitioning to adult roles. For every Natalie Portman, there are countless Coreys. Yet Russell and Foster have persevered. That’s the subject of the Somerville Theatre’s massive summer retrospective “Kurt and Jodie: From Disney Kids to Movie Legends.” Running from Sunday, May 17, through Saturday, July 11, the 24-film series stacks a dozen double features following the two screen icons through surprisingly similar career choices.
They’ve never worked together, and you don’t think of them having much in common. Russell’s an easygoing guy’s guy known for action films and knockabout comedies, while Yale grad Foster has always led with her precocious refinement and formidable intellect. (One can’t imagine Kurt acting in French.) Yet what’s so delightful about the Somerville’s lineup is how perfectly their movies tend to complement each other.
The series begins with early Disney efforts “Freaky Friday” and “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes” (May 17), but the synchronicities really start to kick in after Foster and Russell bust out of kiddie flicks and into the Big Apple hellscapes of “Taxi Driver” and “Escape from New York” (May 18). They’re the faces of two of their era’s most enduring horror films, “The Thing” and “The Silence of the Lambs” (June 13), but both headed back into the Old West with “Tombstone” and “Maverick” (June 15) before venturing into the great beyond with the trippy sci-fi films “Contact” and “Stargate” (June 29). Foster and Russell have starred in muckraking social issue dramas like “The Accused” and “Silkwood” (June 1) and even briefly returned to their children’s film roots with “The Fox and the Hound” and “Bugsy Malone” (May 24).
“They each had careers that follow a trajectory unlike anyone else’s in Hollywood, except each other’s,” said Somerville Theatre co-owner Ian Brownell, who first had the idea for “Kurt and Jodie” in 2022, when the cinema did a similar series saluting John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. One of the Boston movie scene’s great patrons, Brownell co-hosts The Brattle Film Podcast as well as Crystal Ballroom Movie Trivia, a free monthly event where he and the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s Billy Thegenus try to stump more than 30 teams with their arcane cinema knowledge. Before coming on board at the Somerville, Brownell used to run rep series for friends in his basement movie theater, complete with program notes and themed snacks.
“When doing legit programming at a real theater, you can only run what the studios license, and what you think people will come out to see,” Brownell noted. His original vision for the “Kurt and Jodie” series stretched out to 16 double features. “I initially wanted to do more of the live-action Disney films, but most of them have never been transferred to DCP or reissued on 35mm.” There’s also the practical business consideration of how many folks would actually buy tickets to “The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit.” (I’ve watched some strange stuff in his basement, like a pristine 35mm release print of a terrible 1980s sex comedy.)
The first “Kurt and Jodie” pairing that came to Brownell’s mind was the nifty, underrated thrillers “Breakdown” and “Flightplan” (June 22). In the former, Russell’s wife is kidnapped after their car breaks down on the side of the highway, and in the latter, Foster’s daughter goes missing during an international flight. Both films rely on stellar, unshowy performances from the leads in selling their sometimes implausible plots, engendering our sympathies in big, screen-filling close-ups as the characters are constantly being gaslit by sinister supporting characters who insist that nothing’s wrong. They’re the kind of movies that remind you what movie stars can do.
Speaking of gaslighting, the most diabolically clever double feature in the lot puts Russell’s wacky romantic comedy “Overboard” alongside Foster’s period love story “Sommersby” (July 6). Both are stories of a man pretending to be a woman’s husband, and in both, she doesn’t particularly mind the deception. The two stars can be seen as hustlers in “Used Cars” and “Carny” (May 25). Director Robert Zemeckis’ 1980 farce stars Russell as a gleefully unscrupulous salesman, while the same year’s sordid carnival story — co-starring and co-written by The Band’s Robbie Robertson — features Foster as the street-smart, underage girlfriend of a sleazy clown played by Gary Busey. (The last time the Somerville showed “Carny” was a tribute to Robertson after his death in 2023. When I got home, I saw that someone on Letterboxd had written: “All nine people who attended this midnight screening are going to prison.”)
The series closes out with a hilariously claustrophobic double whammy of “The Hateful Eight” and “Carnage” (July 11). Quentin Tarantino’s vicious, locked-room Western about how the Civil War never really ended is matched in its bleakly funny vitriol by Roman Polanski’s underseen adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award-winning play, in which the four wealthy parents of two grade school kids caught fighting in the playground wind up battling it out with each other at a school-mandated meeting, destroying their own marriages in the process. Foster’s entitled mama bear is as fearlessly unlikable as Russell’s blowhard bounty hunter, in what Brownell calls a “stuck in a room with terrible people” double feature.
“I’m always looking for excuses to bring ‘The Hateful Eight’ back to the Somerville,” he said of Tarantino’s 70mm opus, which had a record-breaking run at the theater in 2015. “I don’t think there’s a better place to see it in the entire world. We have the correct Ultra Panavision lenses, the right size screen with proper 2.76:1 masking curtains, and we have one of the greatest old-school projectionists still working today, David Kornfeld.”
Tarantino and Polanski are a long way from Walt Disney. So are Kurt and Jodie.
“Kurt and Jodie: From Disney Kids to Screen Legends” runs at the Somerville Theatre from Sunday, May 17, through Saturday, July 11.
