Finally catching up with Alan J. Pakula’s 1981 paranoid thriller Rollover has us thinking, once again, about the magic of the movies. Another way of phrasing this question would be: “Why is Rollover so bad?” But here at Mid Century Cinema, we’re extremely wary of the good/bad thing. As we emphasized in our review of…
This week’s focus in class was actually Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, but as this is well covered ground here at Mid Century Cinema, today we will consider instead a film that has some interesting parallels with that picture. Both Norman Mailer’s notorious Maidstone and Wexler’s Medium Cool attempt to blur the distinction between fiction and…
This week’s movie was actually John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, but we’ve already written about that one here, and we’re sticking to our stories: (1) if forced to choose, we’ll take the dirty old Times Square over the modern tourist-trap eyesore; (2) except for, you know, the movie ending with Dustin Hoffman dead on a bus,…
Last night we eagerly unwrapped the new Criterion Collection special edition of Jack Garfein’s Something Wild, from 1961. New to us, this was a movie aimed directly at Mid Century Cinema’s sweet-spot: gorgeous time-capsule-perfect street shots of New York City; raw, daring performances by the hip cohort of the Actors Studio that contrasted with and…
I’m teaching “The Politics of the 70s Film” this semester, and, as we have done previously, Mid Century Cinema will follow along with commentaries related to the movies screened for class—or to movies related to those movies (since we can’t bear to repeat ourselves). This week we watched The Graduate. Regarding the general themes of…