Fifty years ago this week Ingmar Berman’s Persona opened in the U. S. One of the landmarks in the history of film, it is about the convergence of personalities between an actress (Liv Ullmann), mute and withdrawn after falling silent in the middle of a performance, and the nurse (Bibi Andersson) charged with her care. …
On January 26 1967, Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair opened in America (the UK-based production had its premiere in Britain the previous October). Largely unnoticed at the time and a flop at the box office (though it did earn five BAFTA nominations), the movie is very much worth revisiting, both on the strength of its…
A major stepping stone on the road to the New Hollywood, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up opened in the U.S. on December 18, 1966. Antonioni was already a heroic figure to that younger, big-city, buzzing-with-excitement legion of avid filmgoers (and future film-makers)—the New Hollywood generation that had previously flocked to art-houses for screenings of his earlier masterpieces,…
One of the very best episodes of Star Trek, “Balance of Terror” (season 1, episode 14), first hit the airwaves on December 15, 1966. A great show even with an average episode, “Terror” rolled out the best of everything that The Original Series (the kids call it TOS now) had to offer: a thoughtful and…
Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth feature film, Le Deuxieme Souffle, premiered in Paris on November 1, 1966. The nominal plot – prison break, world-weary gangster, impossible heist, inevitable unraveling – sounds like standard-issue fare. But in Melville’s hands . . . in Melville’s hands . . . these basic and familiar elements are molded into nothing short…
The program of the 1966 San Francisco Film Festival, which ran from October 20-30 of that year, featured two modest efforts that were the product of a partnership between Jack Nicholson and Monte Hellman. The duo, who had previously collaborated on a pair of movies in the Philippines, had this time gone off to the…
Seconds, the third entry in what can be seen as John Frankenheimer’s American Nightmares trilogy – an astonishing triptych that began in 1962 with The Manchurian Candidate (one of the great American films of the second half of the twentieth century), and continued in 1964 with Seven Days in May (written by Rod Serling and…
October 1966 welcomed the publication of Hitchcock: The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by François Truffaut, a long-form interview of the Master by one of his most devoted enthusiasts, who, both as a young critic and subsequently as a great filmmaker in his own right, counted Hitchcock among his idols. (It is easy to point…
Since September 8, 1966, we have lived in a world that has included Star Trek, a television show that made a small difference, in a good way. That it would endure for fifty years, spawning endless descendants, sequels, books, movies, and subcultures, is astonishing. (The show bounced around NBC’s schedule for three years before it…
A milestone on the road to the Seventies Film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, an adaptation of Edward Albee’s Tony Award winning play starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, was released fifty years ago. Successfully bringing the play to the screen – with the explicit approval of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) –…