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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Movie lists! Will this be our last list? No! Movie lists – following, always, the Andre and Wally rules – are irresistible. So we will continue to generate lists, appealing to (an apparently irrefutable) law gleefully articulated by my children when called upon to explain why the house had been reduced to smoldering ruins: “We…
As the calendar year comes to a close, movie list season has again arrived—even if this year the very sound of the word “list” sends shivers, inviting attention to the predictable disaster of the recently dropped Sight and Sound decennial poll of the “greatest films of all time.” (As we wrote, all too presciently, eight…
It was a pleasure to sit down (virtually) with Extract Editions, who reached out to us to have a short conversation about the movies, and in particular, about criticism and cinephilia. The interview inspired a welcome walk down memory lane, and a fond look back at my informal film school, that is, the time I…
The first episode of The Bob Newhart Show aired on September 16, 1972. It would run for six seasons, and garner a well-deserved reputation as one of the great television shows of the seventies—often paired in historical memory with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That coupling makes sense, as for much of its run the…