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…
Claude Sautet is not a household name. The French auteur, who left us in 2000, was not a prolific filmmaker. (The writer-director of fourteen features, he had a hand in the screenplay of a number of others, including the cult favorite Eyes Without a Face.) Nor did he leave behind a particular film that is…
Puzzle of a Downfall Child, the first film by Jerry Schatzberg (he would go on to direct notable New Hollywood entries The Panic in Needle Park and Scarecrow), has taken a long and circuitous path towards its current status as “significant second tier seventies film worth a look.” Released on December 16 1970, it was greeted…
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…