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) –…
Fifty years ago this week, Mid Century Cinema favorite Claude Chabrol released The Line of Demarcation, an occupation/resistance drama that unfolds in a provincial French town straddling the river marking the frontiers of formal German administration of French territory. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. Chabrol made somewhere between fifty and sixty…
The fourth feature film of Alain Resnais, La Guerre Est Finie (The War is Over) opened in Paris on May 11, 1966. That it is his definitive masterpiece is a minority position. Resnais, revered for his intelligent, haunting, elliptical stories and brilliant, daring experimentation with the possibilities of cinematic time, is best known for his widely…
This week in 1966 Jean-Luc Godard released Masculin Féminin, the eleventh of fifteen films (not to mention half-a-dozen or so shorts) that he directed from 1960 (Breathless) to 1967 (Weekend)—an impossibly glorious run that included A Woman is a Woman, Vivre Sa Vie, Band of Outsiders, and Contempt. Masculin Féminin was also the last of…