We’ve been doing some end of semester spring cleaning here at Mid Century Cinema, and it seemed like a good time to bring everyone up to date by highlighting some new content that is now available on the site, as much of it is often added unannounced. (And to our surprise it’s also been almost three years since our last “recent additions” post—time flies when you’re watching movies.)
In particular, there is quite a bit of new content to peruse over in Books, Essays and More. Most notably, as it has been almost a year since the publication of When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited, we have now added links to (excerpts of) the introduction – which provides an overview of the volume – and our chapter “BBS and the New Hollywood Dream.” The passages from the BBS chapter include discussions of Jack Nicholson, and two films we have not discussed at length in MCC posts: Drive He, Said, and The Last Picture Show. Also up and accessible is a contribution from us from an unrelated project, on Clint Eastwood’s “Cop films from Nixon through Reagan,” which casts a generally critical eye on a filmmaker who would only emerge as a serious artist after he had put such efforts behind him.
This section also features links to recent essays we are particularly pleased to have had the opportunity to write, on Claude Chabrol’s “Second Wave” (his films from 1968 to 1975), and “Who Knew it could get Worse? When Nixon Haunted the New Hollywood.” Additionally, here we’ve added a slew of essays published in Cineaste Magazine, including reviews of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood and Olivier Assayas’ Non-Fiction, as well as discussions of The Man Between, seventies film landmarks Klute, Shampoo, and Midnight Cowboy, Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, Louis Malle’s debut feature Elevator to the Gallows, and Orson Welles’ The Stranger.
In News and Commentary, personal favorites added since our last recap include some serious business, such as the (relatively) widely read “Art and Artists: Where we Stand,” as well as “Scorsese and Cinephilia,” “The Three Screenings Rule,” and “Directors and Voice”; new treatments of Varda, Bergman, Melville, and Kubrick, and appreciations of Kristen Stewart, Gene Hackman, the late Buck Henry, and Elliot Gould. Finally, Fifty Years Ago this Week added a number of anniversary entries, including Paul Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and Bergman’s incomparable Shame; under that header we also initiated a new series of annual “best of” lists, starting with 1967, 1968, and 1969.
But wait, there’s more. Forthcoming we anticipate (major teaser here) a first from us—a long-form interview with one of our favorite writers on film; we’ve been commissioned for a joint review of new books on Chinatown, Sidney Lumet and Mike Nichols; a chapter on Peter Yates in the forthcoming volume The Other Hollywood Renaissance, and, coming this summer, the best of 1970. When you consider the price of an annual subscription, gotta say, not too shabby . . .
