In 1960, Director Claude Sautet released Classe Tous Risques, an outstanding escaped-killer-on-the-run drama featuring Lino Ventura and an unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo. For his efforts he won the enormous respect of his peers (Jean Pierre Melville grabbed a hold of Ventura and made a similarly themed if very different picture, Le Deuxieme Souffle) but not much…
Category: 50 Years Ago This Week
50 Years Ago This Week – Cannes 1965
The 2015 Cannes film festival is currently in full swing (as I write this, Woody Allen’s upcoming Irrational Man is screening out of competition—it will open in the U.S. in July). On May 16, 1965, the eighteenth Cannes festival drew to a close, with the top prize going to Richard Lester’s The Knack . ….
50 Years Ago This Week – Alfred Hitchcock’s Last “Hour”
On May 10, 1965, “Off Season” the last episode of season three of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour was broadcast on NBC. Not what you would call “must-see-TV,” nevertheless, for a number of reasons the fairly routine, thinly-motivated, and at times only tenuously credible drama effectively holds one’s attention throughout. The first few minutes offer a…
50 Years Ago This Week – Landmarks and Locations
New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Law went into effect on April 19, 1965. The collective, astonished reaction heard after the razing of old Penn Station in 1964: “you mean they can do that?” contributed to a movement that ultimately led to the measure. It was not enough to save the majestic Singer Building from the…
50 Years Ago This Week – Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee
Major Dundee, Sam Peckinpah’s ill-fated Western starring Charlton Heston and Richard Harris, opened in New York City on April 7, 1965—or at least some version of it did. Taken out of the director’s hands and cut by almost a third (an “extended version” DVD release restores some of the lost material), the movie was a…
50 Years Ago This Week – The 37th Academy Awards
The Old Hollywood was running out of ideas but was still firmly in control at the thirty-seventh Academy Awards, hosted by establishment stalwart Bob Hope on April 5, 1965. The ambitious, subversive and spectacular Dr. Strangelove actually managed to nab a few high profile nominations, but the film, along with director Stanley Kubrick and star…