John Cassavetes’ eagerly anticipated Husbands premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival on October 24, 1970. Expectations for the movie were especially high as this was the filmmaker’s follow-up to his widely celebrated Faces, a breakthrough for independent American cinema, which a young Roger Ebert described as “the sort of film that makes you want…
The Television Show The Odd Couple premiered on September 24, 1970. (The Broadway production, written by Neil Simon and directed by Mike Nichols, opened in 1965 and ran for almost a thousand performances; there was also a movie version in 1968, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.) Nothing against the play, which took home an…
September 19 1970 welcomed the first episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, with would run for seven seasons and 168 episodes, accumulating a large bundle of awards and honors along the way. In retrospect that is not surprising, given the amount of talent on hand in front of and behind the camera. The reputation…
Recently I was interviewed by Super-ficcion on a wide range of movie related issues, under the headline of “Is Hollywood in Crisis?” I thought they did a great job in putting together a very spiffy piece, which can be accessed here. Some Mid Century Cinema followers have read the interview on other platforms, but we’re…
The 1970 New York Film Festival – then only in its eighth year – looked to be a very promising affair. As the New York Times reported with enthusiasm on September 4, the event would feature “new films directed by Satyajit Ray, Luis Buñuel . . . Bernardo Bertolucci, Alain Resnais, Kenji Mizoguchi . ….
On August 3, 1970, about a year and a half after the fact, Performance, which promised the big screen debut of Mick Jagger, had its official premiere. Completed in 1968, the movie was shelved by a nervous studio spooked by its general decadence and envelope-pushing sex, drugs, and sadistic, fetishized violence—not to mention a disastrous…
One of the many pleasures of having an obsession with the movies is that one thing leads to another. A few months ago the programming team here at Mid Century Cinema stumbled across a film by Asghar Farhadi, and were so impressed that we quickly screened everything of his that we could get our hands…
Any pantheon of the New Hollywood must include Robert Altman, whose run of twelve films from 1967 to 1977 stands up robustly in comparison not only with his distinguished contemporaries, but alongside almost any figure we can think of in the history of cinema. So it is high past time that we gave him the official…
It’s that time of year: every summer here at Mid Century Cinema we roll out a new Top 10 list . . . from fifty years ago. As always, our obligatory qualifiers apply: such exercises are silly, arbitrary, impossible, and irresistible. [Our legal department has also advised us to note that all lists appearing on…
On May 18 it was announced that earlier in the previous week, legendary actor and larger than life presence Michel Piccoli had left us, midway through his ninety-fifth year. Such a death is not a tragedy, of course, but like the falling of a mighty, ancient tree, one takes notice of such things. I don’t…