The program of the 1966 San Francisco Film Festival, which ran from October 20-30 of that year, featured two modest efforts that were the product of a partnership between Jack Nicholson and Monte Hellman. The duo, who had previously collaborated on a pair of movies in the Philippines, had this time gone off to the…
The newly released The Great Movies IV, the final collection of essays originally published by Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun Times, arrives as a pleasant surprise—if, necessarily, as a bittersweet one. The preceding three volumes each had one hundred entries; this final installment features only sixty-two, a crooked numerator that calls attention to a…
Seconds, the third entry in what can be seen as John Frankenheimer’s American Nightmares trilogy – an astonishing triptych that began in 1962 with The Manchurian Candidate (one of the great American films of the second half of the twentieth century), and continued in 1964 with Seven Days in May (written by Rod Serling and…
October 1966 welcomed the publication of Hitchcock: The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by François Truffaut, a long-form interview of the Master by one of his most devoted enthusiasts, who, both as a young critic and subsequently as a great filmmaker in his own right, counted Hitchcock among his idols. (It is easy to point…
Two giants of French cinema celebrate their birthdays this time of year, Jacques Becker on September 15—he would have been 110, and Robert Bresson, born five years before Becker on September 25 (though he would outlive him by nearly 40 years). Bertrand Tavernier has been singing Becker’s praises in a series of recent interviews on…
Since September 8, 1966, we have lived in a world that has included Star Trek, a television show that made a small difference, in a good way. That it would endure for fifty years, spawning endless descendants, sequels, books, movies, and subcultures, is astonishing. (The show bounced around NBC’s schedule for three years before it…
It’s time to mark up the calendar with plans to attend screenings at the Fifty-Fourth New York Film Festival, which will be held this year from September 30 to October 16. The big tent, of course, dazzles with the glittering jewels of carefully selected new films, not yet in general release. Always full of promise…
Robert Redford turns eighty on August 18, which at some level is hard to believe. But when you think about, it does come with the territory of having starred in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents—in 1961. It might also seem odd that here at Mid Century Cinema we’re taking the opportunity to celebrate the…
What do we want from the movies? Let us summarily dismiss questions of taste. Movies are like wine—you can’t tell someone what to like. The wine you like is the wine you like. So too it is with cinema. To talk about what we want from the movies, then, is to ask something less personal…
Cinematographer Henri Decaë would have celebrated his 101st birthday on July 31. “It was he who liberated the camera from its fixed tripod,” Michel Marie wrote, and “made the New Wave possible.” The contributions of Decaë (and fellow cinematographer Raul Coutard) to the films and the possibilities of the New Wave (and, by example, to…