Mid Century Cinema favorite Mike Nichols would have turned eighty-five on November 6. We have previously celebrated each of his first two films, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and The Graduate (1967), so on this occasion we thought we would take a look at another one of his best—one of the milestones of the…
The newly released The Great Movies IV, the final collection of essays originally published by Roger Ebert in The Chicago Sun Times, arrives as a pleasant surprise—if, necessarily, as a bittersweet one. The preceding three volumes each had one hundred entries; this final installment features only sixty-two, a crooked numerator that calls attention to a…
Two giants of French cinema celebrate their birthdays this time of year, Jacques Becker on September 15—he would have been 110, and Robert Bresson, born five years before Becker on September 25 (though he would outlive him by nearly 40 years). Bertrand Tavernier has been singing Becker’s praises in a series of recent interviews on…
It’s time to mark up the calendar with plans to attend screenings at the Fifty-Fourth New York Film Festival, which will be held this year from September 30 to October 16. The big tent, of course, dazzles with the glittering jewels of carefully selected new films, not yet in general release. Always full of promise…
Robert Redford turns eighty on August 18, which at some level is hard to believe. But when you think about, it does come with the territory of having starred in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents—in 1961. It might also seem odd that here at Mid Century Cinema we’re taking the opportunity to celebrate the…
What do we want from the movies? Let us summarily dismiss questions of taste. Movies are like wine—you can’t tell someone what to like. The wine you like is the wine you like. So too it is with cinema. To talk about what we want from the movies, then, is to ask something less personal…
Cinematographer Henri Decaë would have celebrated his 101st birthday on July 31. “It was he who liberated the camera from its fixed tripod,” Michel Marie wrote, and “made the New Wave possible.” The contributions of Decaë (and fellow cinematographer Raul Coutard) to the films and the possibilities of the New Wave (and, by example, to…
How fascinating was the filmmaker known as Eric Rohmer? When his mother died in 1970, she had no idea her son was a famous director. As Rohmer’s own son explained, she “did not know about my father’s filmmaking activities, which she never for a minute suspected. She thought he was a schoolteacher.” Forget about the…
At Mid Century Cinema we are slaves to the academic calendar, which means that the last month has been an especially hectic one, something we note by way of apology for letting Bertrand Tavernier’s seventy-fifth birthday slip by on April 25th without proper notice. But better late than never, especially for one of our favorite…
A semester of seventies films draws to a close with Chinatown, a monumental achievement in which every element of the movie contributes to its overall vision perfectly and could scarcely be improved upon, starting with Robert Towne’s screenplay—one of the greatest ever written. The final version of the script was sculpted from Towne’s much longer,…