The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story by Sam Wasson arrives with enormous promise. Coppola’s story has been told before, but those stories are irresistible, and surely there is room for still more—especially from an experienced, eminently well qualified author who enjoyed virtually unprecedented access to all of the major players, and to…
News and Commentary: Never. Enough. Tavernier.
The hardworking staff at Mid Century Cinema has been engaged with a number of off-site projects recently, including an appreciation of Wim Wenders for the New Left Review, a very exiting feature revisiting Three Days of the Condor for the spring issue of Cineaste, and a long-form take on Bertrand Tavernier’s Guerre sans Nom (The…
News and Commentary – 2023 Roundup: The Best New Home Video Releases
As the calendar year comes to a close, it’s time to share our annual Top Ten home video releases. As always, this is not so much a list of our favorite movies newly available in 2023, but rather reflects the “best of home video 2023”—and as such great emphasis is placed on packages that offer valuable…
News and Commentary: John le Carré on the Big Screen
We have been spending, vicariously, a good bit of time with John le Carré in recent months, and also with David Cornwell (1931 – 2020), the man behind that nom de plume. The latter is the subject of The Pigeon Tunnel, a new film by the accomplished documentarian Errol Morris—the title drawn from le Carré’s…
News and Commentary – Robert De Niro: An Appreciation at Eighty
Robert De Niro turns eighty this week—a milestone that apparently we find more aback-taking than he does; this past April, in his eightieth year, the legendary actor celebrated the birth of his seventh child. Nevertheless, as a first ballot Hall-of-Famer, prominent in the pantheon of the New Hollywood, and one of the great actors of…
News and Commentary: Bookshelf: Bogie & Bacall
It was with considerable enthusiasm that I procured my copy of William Mann’s Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair the day it became available. Although Bogie has been written about more than extensively – efforts that include the magisterial, definitive, must-read Bogart, by A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax…
50 Years Ago This Week – The Best of 1973
Summer’s here, and the time is ripe . . . for our annual “Fifty Years Ago” best of list. As always we play by the Wally and Andre rules—and rarely have those admonitions been so vital. At with 1971 and 1972, 1973 was another banner year for the New Hollywood, and for the movies more…
News and Commentary: Bergman, Naruse and Chabrol – The Bootleg Series
The crack staff here at Mid Century Cinema has managed to procure some very exciting rarities (exciting, that is, if you travel in certain uber-nerd circles)—an impossible-to-find feature that we’ve been extremely eager to get our hands on for some time, The Stranger Within a Woman, directed by Mikio Naruse, along with some tantalizing obscurities…
News and Commentary: Somewhat Quiet on the MCC Front
As attentive followers have noticed, the rate of Mid Century Cinema’s posts has slowed down a bit in 2023. I can’t tell you how many letters the staff here has received inquiring about this. Really I can’t. Nevertheless, we felt it appropriate to check in with those imagined faithful, and offer this quick explanation (and…
50 Years Ago This Week – Rip Torn in Payday
Payday, a small film featuring Rip Torn as an irascible country singer of some regional repute (but who nevertheless falls well short of stardom), premiered in New York City on February 22 1973, before screening in Cannes that May. Directed by journeyman Daryl Duke, who worked mostly in television (though his 1978 feature The Silent…