If you have spent any time in the dark at 209 West Houston Street — west of Sixth Avenue, where Film Forum has anchored Manhattan’s repertory life since 1990 — you already know the rhythm. A series begins on a Friday. Sidewalk regulars arrive twenty minutes early. The matinee audience leans toward retirees and graduate students; the evening crowd skews younger, sharper-elbowed about good seats. Bruce Goldstein’s programming notes hang from the lobby. By the end of three weeks, the people sitting near you start to look familiar, because you have all been showing up for the same reason.
This month, the reason is the Fleischers.
From Friday, May 8 through Thursday, May 28, 2026, Film Forum is presenting Fleischer père et fils — a side-by-side retrospective of the films of Richard Fleischer and the animation of his father, the cartoon pioneer Max Fleischer. The Fleischer name is one of the most quietly consequential in American moving-image history, and seeing the two careers pinned next to each other on a single calendar is the kind of programming Film Forum was built to do.
This piece is for the kind of cinephile who plans a week around a 35mm print, not the tourist who wants to know which Greenwich Village rooftop a romantic comedy used in 2004. The retrospective deserves the former.
The Series, As Programmed
The series is programmed by Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s Founding Repertory Artistic Director, who has shaped the theater’s repertory program since 1987. It is presented with support from the Robert Jolin Osborne Fund for American Classic Cinema of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The Max Fleischer cartoons are drawn from a pool of more than sixty titles, most restored by Fabulous Fleischer Cartoons — a restoration project that has been working through the Paramount-era Fleischer Studios catalog with the patience the material deserves.
The Richard Fleischer half of the program is a careful walk through one of mid-century Hollywood’s most genre-fluent filmographies: Armored Car Robbery (1950), The Narrow Margin (1952), Bodyguard (1948), Compulsion (1959), The Boston Strangler (1968), 10 Rillington Place (1971), Fantastic Voyage (1966), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Soylent Green (1973), The Vikings (1958), Barabbas (1961), The Happy Time (1952), The New Centurions (1972), The Last Run (1971), Mr. Majestyk (1974), Violent Saturday (1955), See No Evil (1971), So This Is New York (1948), Child of Divorce (1946), Trapped (1949) and Crack in the Mirror (1960). Several of these — including The Narrow Margin — are screening in 35mm prints.
The Max Fleischer programs are organized as themed shorts blocks: Pre-Code Betty Boop, The Evolution of Betty Boop, Fleischer’s Superman Cartoons, Fleischer’s Popeye Cartoons, “Oddball” Fleischer, All Fleischer! All Color!, All Fleischer! All Musicals!, Fleischer “Head” Cartoons, and the feature Hoppity Goes to Town (1941), better known by its alternate title Mr. Bug Goes to Town. Animation historian Jerry Beck introduces several of the cartoon programs in person.
The dates and times above are confirmed on Film Forum’s own calendar at filmforum.org/series/fleischer-pere-et-fils. As always with rep cinema, the recommendation is to buy ahead — Film Forum’s house is nearly five hundred seats across four screens, and the long lobby gets full for the marquee blocks.
Why Pair Them at All
The case for pairing Max and Richard Fleischer on one calendar is partly biographical and entirely artistic. Max Fleischer ran Fleischer Studios in New York from 1921 onward; the studio’s Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman shorts are the most stylistically distinct American animation of the pre-Disney-monoculture period. The rubber-hose limbs, the urban-cabaret soundtracks, the willingness to be sexual or sad in a way that the Production Code eventually shut down — that is Fleischer house style. The Superman cartoons in particular, produced between 1941 and 1943, are still the visual template every animator working in the character returns to.
Richard Fleischer, Max’s son, took the other Hollywood road. He worked as a director-for-hire across genres for four decades, and what unites his best work is craft applied without ostentation — a quality that took critics a long time to recognize because his career never settled into a single shape they could brand. The cheap, perfect noirs Armored Car Robbery and The Narrow Margin. The expansive Technicolor adventures of The Vikings and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The cold ethical procedurals of Compulsion and 10 Rillington Place and The Boston Strangler, all three of which take real cases and refuse to sentimentalize them. The science-fiction dystopias of Fantastic Voyage and Soylent Green. He could do anything, and the consequence — as the French critics who coined the père et fils framing have argued for years — is that his individual films have always been easier to love than his career has been to summarize.
Putting the cartoons and the live-action features in one program lets you see what carries across: a fascination with bodies under pressure, with sealed environments (the submarine, the train, the prison cell, the rooming house), with the mechanics of the trick well done. Watch a 1933 Betty Boop short and then watch The Boston Strangler, with its early use of split-screen to render simultaneous time, and the family resemblance is not subtle. The two Fleischers thought visually.
Tonight at the Theater — Tuesday, May 19
For the Pilgrim arriving on the evening this piece runs, the calendar is unusually generous. Film Forum is screening three Richard Fleischer features back-to-back on Tuesday, May 19: Armored Car Robbery at 2:35 PM, The Narrow Margin at 4:10 PM, and The Happy Time at 5:50 PM. The same day brings Ernst Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow at 12:15 PM and 8:00 PM as part of the parallel “The Lubitsch Touch” series, also programmed by Goldstein. A double feature of The Narrow Margin into Lubitsch’s Merry Widow at 8:00 is, on paper, an indefensibly New York evening — a train-bound RKO noir followed by a Paramount operetta — and that is the point. Film Forum’s house style is to trust you to follow the leap.
The full ticket price is $18 general, $12 for members. The box office line at 212-727-8110 still answers if you would rather hear a human confirm the showtime than reload a ticketing page. Memberships start at a level that pays for itself in about four screenings a year, which is a fact you can verify directly at filmforum.org/support/more/membership.
Notes on the Room
Film Forum’s current Houston Street cinema was built in 1990 at a cost of $3.2 million. In 2018, the institution raised $5 million for a renovation that upgraded the seating, improved the legroom and sightlines in all theaters, and added a fourth screen — the screen most repertory series now play on after their first weekend. In 2023, after fifty-one years as director, Karen Cooper stepped down; she was succeeded by Sonya Chung (2023–2025) and, as of 2026, by Tabitha Jackson. Film Forum is, on the institution’s own accounting, the only autonomous nonprofit cinema in New York City, runs roughly a $7 million operating budget with about 80% of that going directly into programming, and counts more than 6,000 members. It is open 365 days a year.
These are not trivia. They are the reason a series like Fleischer père et fils exists at all: a long institutional memory, programmers who have been at the same desk long enough to see a Richard Fleischer reappraisal coming, and an audience trained over fifty-five years to show up for it.
How to Approach a Three-Week Repertory Series
There are two reasonable strategies for a series of this scale.
The first is the survey approach: pick one Max Fleischer cartoon program and one Richard Fleischer feature you have never seen, and let those be the anchor. “Oddball” Fleischer introduced by Jerry Beck on May 17 was one good entry point; Pre-Code Betty Boop on May 24 and Fleischer’s Popeye Cartoons on the May 24 Film Forum Jr. slot at 11:00 AM are the remaining strong introductions on the cartoon side. On the live-action side, The Narrow Margin is the consensus masterpiece — about seventy-one minutes of train-bound suspense built almost entirely from blocking and dialogue, and the prints Film Forum is running for several of the showtimes are 35mm. Compulsion is the under-seen one most likely to surprise you, a 1959 courtroom drama based on the Leopold and Loeb case with Orson Welles in one of his great Hollywood-paycheck performances.
The second strategy is the completist approach: trust Goldstein’s curation and try to hit one screening every couple of days. The series rewards this. The Richard Fleischer features pile up arguments that no single film can make on its own — about craft, about working within studio constraints, about what genre versatility costs and what it earns. By the time you have sat through Armored Car Robbery, The Boston Strangler, and Soylent Green in the same week, you have effectively taken a short graduate seminar in mid-century American genre direction, and you did not have to pay tuition.
The cartoons reward bunching for a different reason: the Fleischer Studios visual style is so consistent and so unlike the Disney-derived mainstream that a couple of hours of it in a single sitting recalibrates what you think animation can look like. The musical numbers in All Fleischer! All Musicals! in particular — Cab Calloway rotoscoped in Minnie the Moocher, Louis Armstrong appearing in I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You — are among the few moments in pre-1940 American animation that meaningfully register Black performance, and they are unforgettable in a theater.
Getting There
Film Forum sits on the south side of West Houston Street, just west of Sixth Avenue, in a stretch of Hudson Square that has changed around it for thirty-five years without quite changing it. The 1 train at Houston Street is the closest stop; the C and E at Spring Street are a short walk. If you are coming from the East Side, the B/D/F/M at Broadway-Lafayette and the 6 at Bleecker put you about ten minutes east. The neighborhood is dense with places to sit before a film — but the most reliable pre-screening practice remains the simplest: arrive twenty minutes early, sit in the lobby with the program notes, and let the audience assemble.
What Comes After
The Fleischer series closes on Thursday, May 28. The Lubitsch series — “The Lubitsch Touch” — continues into early June, with Trouble in Paradise introduced by author Howard Gutner on Tuesday, May 26 at 12:15 and 7:10. Coming up across the rest of the spring at Film Forum: the ongoing Now Playing slate of new releases including Manas, Agatha’s Almanac, Bellissima, and No Picnic, which keep the second and third screens busy while Goldstein’s repertory work occupies the first.
The Pilgrim Desk’s standing recommendation for any visiting cinephile is the same it has always been: check filmforum.org and metrograph.com on a Tuesday morning, pick the one screening you would most regret missing, and build the rest of the day around it. This week, that screening is at Film Forum. Most weeks, it is.
Frequently Asked Questions
When does Film Forum’s Fleischer père et fils retrospective run?
The series runs Friday, May 8 through Thursday, May 28, 2026 at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street in Manhattan.
Who programmed the Fleischer series?
Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s Founding Repertory Artistic Director, who has programmed Film Forum’s repertory calendar since 1987.
How many films are in the series?
Roughly two dozen Richard Fleischer features and more than 60 Max Fleischer cartoons, organized into themed shorts programs.
What does a ticket cost?
General admission is $18, members pay $12, as of May 2026 per the Film Forum site.
Are any of the films screening in 35mm?
Yes — several of the Richard Fleischer features, including The Narrow Margin, are screening in 35mm prints. Film Forum notes “all films are projected on DCP unless otherwise noted,” so check the individual film page for the format.
Is there an introduction or Q&A scheduled?
Yes. Animation historian Jerry Beck introduces several of the cartoon programs; Bruce Goldstein joined Beck for a post-film conversation around “Oddball” Fleischer on May 18. Compulsion had a post-film conversation with Jason Ney, author of Richard Fleischer: Journeyman, and author Foster Hirsch on May 13. Check Film Forum’s events page for the remaining dates.
What is Film Forum’s address and how do I get there?
209 West Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue. Nearest subway is the 1 at Houston Street. Box office: 212-727-8110.
Sources verified by direct fetch on May 19, 2026:
– Film Forum General Information — filmforum.org/about/general-information
– Fleischer père et fils series page — filmforum.org/series/fleischer-pere-et-fils
– Film Forum Now Playing — filmforum.org/now_playing
– Metrograph Series page (cross-reference for May 2026 NYC repertory landscape) — metrograph.com/series/
