The South Alabama Film Festival launched a free monthly screening series in June 2011, turning Bernheim Hall at the Ben May Main Library into a summer movie house built entirely on literary adaptations. The “One for the Books” series runs the second Tuesday of each month, with shows at 6 p.m. — and every attendee leaves with coupons for sushi at the Liquid Lounge around the corner at Washington and Dauphin, to keep the post-film conversation going.
Programming director Gideon C. Kennedy, a local filmmaker, curated the lineup around adaptations that have faded from circulation but hold up for modern audiences.
The Lineup
June 14 — The Americanization of Emily (1964). The inaugural screening doubled as a William Bradford Huie centennial tribute: the novel’s author was an Alabama native, and his widow Martha Huie wrote a special introduction for the festival about watching her husband’s book become a film. James Garner stars as a Navy officer whose comfortable wartime life is upended by an English war widow (Julie Andrews) and the approaching D-Day invasion, in a controversial script adapted by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Arthur Hiller.
July 12 — The Swimmer (1968). Burt Lancaster swims home through his neighbors’ backyard pools in John Cheever’s suburban fever dream.
September 13 — Our Man in Havana (1959). Alec Guinness leads Graham Greene and director Carol Reed’s comic spy story about a vacuum-cleaner salesman recruited into British intelligence.
October 10 — The Night of the Hunter (1955). Robert Mitchum’s terrifying preacher hunts two children who know where a stolen fortune is hidden, in Charles Laughton’s sole directing effort, adapted from Davis Grubb’s novel by Pulitzer winner James Agee.