Even in the glory days of the New Hollywood, Francis Ford Coppola’s intensely personal, almost willfully non-commercial masterpiece The Conversation (1974) was not an easy film to get produced. But after scoring a massive hit with The Godfather, Coppola was able to extract studio backing for the picture he cared about in exchange for his…
This week in 1966 Jean-Luc Godard released Masculin Féminin, the eleventh of fifteen films (not to mention half-a-dozen or so shorts) that he directed from 1960 (Breathless) to 1967 (Weekend)—an impossibly glorious run that included A Woman is a Woman, Vivre Sa Vie, Band of Outsiders, and Contempt. Masculin Féminin was also the last of…
Klute (1971) is another iconic film of the New Hollywood. Its gritty New York City locations and murky interiors were shot by seventies virtuoso Gordon Willis (“the prince of darkness”—if you can’t make out the screen captures below, take it up with him); Michael Chapman (subsequently the cinematographer on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) operated…
How fresh is Nashville (1975), more than forty years after its release? Tom Wicker, political columnist for the New York Times, described the film as a “cascade of minutely detailed vulgarity, greed, deceit, cruelty, barely contained hysteria, and the frantic lack of root and grace into which American life has been driven.” Robert Altman’s mid-career…
The magnificent Five Easy Pieces (1970) is an exemplar of everything the Seventies Film aspired to be. Directed by Bob Rafelson (who also co-wrote the story), the movie was a product of the legendary six-picture deal that BBS Productions (Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson, and Steve Blauner) reached with Columbia Pictures—one that traded small budgets in…
Week Three of the “Politics of the 70s Film” featured Medium Cool (1969), a labor of love from quadruple-threat Haskell Wexler (writer-director-cinematographer-camera operator). I have written at length about this outstanding film previously, and more recently a short piece about Wexler as well, and so I will not repeat those efforts here. But Medium Cool is…
The Paul Newman vehicle Harper opened on February 23, 1966. Despite the considerable talent attached – including cinematographer Conrad Hall (whose 70s credits include Fat City and Smile), screenwriter William Goldman (All the Presidents Men, Marathon Man), and a marvelous cast that also features Lauren Bacall, Shelly Winters, Robert Wagner and Janet Leigh (wasted in…
Here at Mid Century Cinema we continue to shadow my “Politics of the 70s Film” class this semester; film number two is Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969). The X-rated film (years later reclassified as an “R”) about the doomed friendship between a dim-witted would-be hustler from Texas and a homeless, tubercular, New York City street-survivor (that…
I’m teaching “The Politics of the 70s Film” this semester, and Mid Century Cinema will follow along, with a few words about each movie screened for the class. First up is The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), a film that, in style, substance, and attitude, crystallized many of the elements of the emerging New Hollywood. Nichols,…
Jacques Rivette, one of the great and singular directors of his time, died January 29 at the age of eighty-seven. He was one of five young movie-obsessed friends (along with Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut) who met in the late 1940s, each drawn like apes to the monolith in 2001 to…