Fifty years ago this week, Mid Century Cinema favorite Claude Chabrol released The Line of Demarcation, an occupation/resistance drama that unfolds in a provincial French town straddling the river marking the frontiers of formal German administration of French territory. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. Chabrol made somewhere between fifty and sixty…
The fourth feature film of Alain Resnais, La Guerre Est Finie (The War is Over) opened in Paris on May 11, 1966. That it is his definitive masterpiece is a minority position. Resnais, revered for his intelligent, haunting, elliptical stories and brilliant, daring experimentation with the possibilities of cinematic time, is best known for his widely…
A semester of seventies films draws to a close with Chinatown, a monumental achievement in which every element of the movie contributes to its overall vision perfectly and could scarcely be improved upon, starting with Robert Towne’s screenplay—one of the greatest ever written. The final version of the script was sculpted from Towne’s much longer,…
The sensation that was Taxi Driver settled in as the eleventh screening at our semester of the seventies film. Directed with brilliant, baroque virtuosity by Martin Scorsese (on the heels of his breakthrough Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), Taxi Driver was the result of an extraordinary convergence of the talents of three…
A semester of seventies films offered with its tenth entry a (modest) respite from the usual darkness and despair, with the sex-comedy Shampoo (1975). Of course, everything is relative—it’s still the seventies out there, and we surely don’t get the ending we were rooting for, leaving George (Warren Beatty) as diminished, desolate and despairing as…
Another week, another landmark movie – business as usual for a semester of seventies films. Network (1976), comes in the final year of the New Hollywood (in 1977 the writing was on the wall as Network and Taxi Driver lost best picture to the feel-good entertainment that was Rocky, as the morally unambiguous Star Wars…
A semester of seventies films continues with its eighth entry—perhaps the most under-appreciated of all of the great films of the New Hollywood. Arthur Penn’s astonishingly brilliant Night Moves (1975) was the neo-noir that most successfully carried a nuanced and thoughtful appreciation of the landmark films noir of the 1940s into the revised milieu of…
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…