A major stepping stone on the road to the New Hollywood, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up opened in the U.S. on December 18, 1966. Antonioni was already a heroic figure to that younger, big-city, buzzing-with-excitement legion of avid filmgoers (and future film-makers)—the New Hollywood generation that had previously flocked to art-houses for screenings of his earlier masterpieces,…
One of the very best episodes of Star Trek, “Balance of Terror” (season 1, episode 14), first hit the airwaves on December 15, 1966. A great show even with an average episode, “Terror” rolled out the best of everything that The Original Series (the kids call it TOS now) had to offer: a thoughtful and…
I’ve been thinking about the 1930s these days, and not in a good way (though if it’s any consolation, I think we’re in France, not Germany). But in these dispiriting times, let’s reach for some movies-as-therapy, and remember that not everything about the 1930s was dismal—in fact it was a great decade for the films…
Why is the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever made called “A Christmas Tale”? (Which, we hasten to add, is not to be confused with “A Christmas Carol.”) Because it is French. And, as director Arnaud Desplechin explained, they don’t have Thanksgiving in the Old World. But he wanted to tell a version of that particular type…
And so this has actually happened—America has elected as its President an ignorant, nativist authoritarian. One would not have thought this possible. It is still very difficult to process. At such a moment, talking about the movies seems, perhaps . . . frivolous? I am sympathetic to this perspective. But I want to…
Mid Century Cinema favorite Mike Nichols would have turned eighty-five on November 6. We have previously celebrated each of his first two films, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and The Graduate (1967), so on this occasion we thought we would take a look at another one of his best—one of the milestones of the…
Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth feature film, Le Deuxieme Souffle, premiered in Paris on November 1, 1966. The nominal plot – prison break, world-weary gangster, impossible heist, inevitable unraveling – sounds like standard-issue fare. But in Melville’s hands . . . in Melville’s hands . . . these basic and familiar elements are molded into nothing short…
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…