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…
Author: MidCenturyCinema
News and Commentary – Birthday Boys! Becker 110, Bresson 115
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…
50 Years Ago This Week – Star Trek!
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…
News and Commentary – Coming: The New York Film Festival
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…
News and Commentary – Robert Redford is 80!
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…
News and Commentary – What We Want from the Movies
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…
News and Commentary – Henri Decaë 101
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…
50 Years Ago This Week – Who’s Afraid of the Production Code?
A milestone on the road to the Seventies Film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, an adaptation of Edward Albee’s Tony Award winning play starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was released fifty years ago. Successfully bringing the play to the screen – with the explicit approval of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) –…
News and Commentary – Bookshelf: The New Eric Rohmer Biography
How fascinating was the filmmaker known as Eric Rohmer? When his mother died in 1970, she had no idea her son was a famous director. As Rohmer’s own son explained, she “did not know about my father’s filmmaking activities, which she never for a minute suspected. She thought he was a schoolteacher.” Forget about the…
News and Commentary – Bertrand Tavernier at Seventy-Five
At Mid Century Cinema we are slaves to the academic calendar, which means that the last month has been an especially hectic one, something we note by way of apology for letting Bertrand Tavernier’s seventy-fifth birthday slip by on April 25th without proper notice. But better late than never, especially for one of our favorite…