The second screening in this  year’s Summer Cinema on Center Street, a free outdoor movie series, takes place on Saturday August 11, at 7:30pm.

The theme of this year’s series is “cerebral cinema” and Saturday’s classic is B-movie film Donovan’s Brain (1953) which features a young Nancy Davis (aka Mrs Ronald Reagan). In the film a crazed surgeon has been extracting the brains of monkeys, keeping them alive outside their bodies. When a plane crashes nearby, the police rush the survivor to the surgeon’s lab for emergency care. Despite their best efforts, terrible tycoon Walter Donovan dies, so the scientist liberates his lobes, keeping them alive in a jar. Soon the megalomaniacal brain asserts its influence over the doctor, who must do its evil bidding. Watch the Donovan’s Brain trailer.

The movie will be projected onto the wall of the future Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.

The Summer Movie series takes place over three weekends in August and is organized jointly by Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and the Downtown Berkeley Association.  … Continue reading »