John Cassavetes’ masterpiece The Killing of a Chinese Bookie opened in February 1976. It screened for just a handful of days, and then it was gone, having failed, to put it mildly, to catch on with either audiences or critics (“resolutely refuses to come to a point” sniffed one major review). Decades later, most serious…
Who’s calling? We are! In our indefatigable service to our loyal subscribers, we’re reaching out one more time, as our “automatic e-mail alert for a new post system” crashed and did not send out a notification for this sparkling new Dog Day Afternoon post. But our brilliant webmistress went to town and fixed the problem ….
Dog Day Afternoon premiered in late September 1975, and, although regular followers of Mid Century Cinema may grow weary of the phrase, I nevertheless have no choice but to report that it is one landmark films of the New Hollywood. In my defense, it was an era that produced many landmarks, right up there with…
Once again, it’s time for the Best from Fifty Years Ago. This is our ninth such list (having previously “bested” 1967 – 1974), and we approach 1975 with mixed emotions. Why is that, you ask? Good question—glad to see that you are reading with care and not just skipping ahead to the list. Well it’s…
February 1975 welcomed the release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider. An international production (it was filmed on location in Germany, Spain, England and Algeria), The Passenger is nevertheless a New Hollywood landmark. (Beyond the essential imprint of the French New Wave on the New Hollywood, other European auteurs were…
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,…