It’s that season again—time to revisit the best movies from half a century ago. And 1974 was a great year for the movies. The New Hollywood, which only had two big years left ahead of it, wasn’t just hot, it was incandescent. And it was a also a very strong year for film globally. Confronted…
Summer’s here, and the time is ripe . . . for our annual “Fifty Years Ago” best of list. As always we play by the Wally and Andre rules—and rarely have those admonitions been so vital. At with 1971 and 1972, 1973 was another banner year for the New Hollywood, and for the movies more…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is now Fifty Years Old—which is two years older than Marlon Brando was when he portrayed Don Corleone in the movie. It is, inarguably, a great film, even something of a landmark, now adorned with all the requisite ribbons of coveted official approval. (It checks in at twenty-one on the…
As is now long-standing tradition, every summer Mid Century Cinema surfaces with a “Fifty Years Ago” Top 10 list. (As always, please refer to the Wally and Andre rules about the ridiculousness of such exercises.) This season brings us to 1971, an outstanding year for the movies and one of the high water marks of…
Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut, Drive, He Said, had its premiere in New York City on June 13, 1971. It is not a great film—as Roger Ebert put it in his spot-on if slightly generous review, it is a “disorganized but occasionally brilliant movie.” But it remains worth watching, both for its own noteworthy merits, and…
Claude Chabrol, one of Mid Century Cinema’s favorite directors, is said to have made close to seventy feature films. We’ve only seen fifty-four of them, but very likely our favorite is Just Before Nightfall. One of the great films of the seventies, it premiered in Paris on March 31, 1971. Arriving midway in a period…