The allied triumph in the Second World War is remembered – fondly and correctly – as one of the great and inspiring moments of modern history, and the quarter century that followed was a period of economic growth and prosperity almost unimaginable in the context of the miserable decades that preceded it. But all periods…
Faye Dunaway, who can stake a fair claim to the title Lead Actress of the New Hollywood, turns seventy-five on January 14. Dunaway was there from the beginning to the end, with starring roles in Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976); she also was above the title in two additional…
“We were taught that we should question all the established values, all the taboos, and that the one thing we must continually strive for was a sense of self and a sense of expanding our horizons.” That was David Bowie, summarizing his interpretation of the lessons of the sixties, and how those lessons influenced his…
January 12 1966 was a momentous day in television history, as perennial third-place network ABC unleashed Batman, with the first of 120 episodes that would air during its brief but glorious run. Like Get Smart (which also negotiated an ambitious blend of comedy and drama), Batman straddled the cultural shifts of the mid-1960s, with one…
In a tough week for cinematographers, Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the legendary figures of the New Hollywood, died on January 3. At the age of eighty-five he was still going strong, coming off a very busy 2014 and associated with a number of upcoming projects. Zsigmond, along with fellow countryman and fellow cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, escaped…
The closing days of 1965 saw the release of The Slender Thread, the first feature film directed by Sydney Pollack, who had been scuffing around as a TV actor (and director) for the previous decade. Thread marked the start of an impressive career for Pollack as a movie director (and subsequently as a notable producer…
The great cinematographer Haskell Wexler died on December 27, six weeks shy of his ninety-fourth birthday. Over the course of his long and extraordinary career, which straddled documentary and fiction films, Wexler was probably best known for his incisive photography on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Mike Nichols, 1966). Nominated for five academy awards, he…
Producer/Director Martin Ritt’s outstanding The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, based on the John le Carré novel, opened in America on December 16 1965. The liberal-humanist Ritt (who was blacklisted in the 1950s) had a reputation for often wearing his politics on his sleeve, which is not typically a recipe for dramatic intrigue. …
The great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu was born on December 12 1903 and died on the very same day in 1963. One of Mid Century Cinema’s favorites, we celebrate twelve-twelve as Ozu day. A prolific artist of the silent era, Ozu came to the talkies late and reluctantly, and did not live to see old…
A milestone birthday celebration for Fritz Lang, who was born on December 5, 1890. Lang, a child of Vienna, would become one of the great directors of the thriving Weimar cinema that flowered in Germany during those tumultuous years between the end of the First World War and the Nazi seizure of power. Best known…