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…
Thee Days of the Condor has been much on our minds lately, what with its eyebrow-raising inclusion on our “Sight and Sound Ten Greatest Films of All Time” ballot, and the related decision to include the movie in our Seventies Film class this summer at Cornell’s Adult University. (A pleasant surprise, which derived from Keith…
As the calendar turns to mark the official start of the dog days of summer, it is once again time for that annual Mid Century Cinema ritual: unveiling our Top 10 films—from fifty years ago. 1972 was another outstanding year for the movies, and in crafting this inescapably idiosyncratic and infinitely contestable list, regarding omissions,…
The educational outreach branch of Mid Century Cinema is developing a new class, which will be taught in the coming fall semester: “A Cinema of Resistance.” This of course raises the musical question, “What the heck is a cinema of resistance”? Well, most narrowly, the phrase refers to films made in dissent of a prevailing…
Fat City, the film that marked the beginning of John Huston’s remarkable late career resurgence, premiered at the Cannes film festival on May 12, 1972. The legendary filmmaker, then sixty-six and coming off several uninspired efforts and an even longer stretch since he’d really had something to say, might have easily shuffled quietly into his…
Once a decade, the British film Journal Sight and Sound produces its “Greatest Films of All Time” list, based on a survey of nearly 1,000 critics, programmers, distributors and film scholars. Last time around, in 2012, there was some excitement as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo unseated the perennial “this is officially the greatest movie of all…