How fresh is Nashville (1975), more than forty years after its release? Tom Wicker, political columnist for the New York Times, described the film as a “cascade of minutely detailed vulgarity, greed, deceit, cruelty, barely contained hysteria, and the frantic lack of root and grace into which American life has been driven.” Robert Altman’s mid-career…
The magnificent Five Easy Pieces (1970) is an exemplar of everything the Seventies Film aspired to be. Directed by Bob Rafelson (who also co-wrote the story), the movie was a product of the legendary six-picture deal that BBS Productions (Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson, and Steve Blauner) reached with Columbia Pictures—one that traded small budgets in…
Week Three of the “Politics of the 70s Film” featured Medium Cool (1969), a labor of love from quadruple-threat Haskell Wexler (writer-director-cinematographer-camera operator). I have written at length about this outstanding film previously, and more recently a short piece about Wexler as well, and so I will not repeat those efforts here. But Medium Cool is…
Here at Mid Century Cinema we continue to shadow my “Politics of the 70s Film” class this semester; film number two is Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969). The X-rated film (years later reclassified as an “R”) about the doomed friendship between a dim-witted would-be hustler from Texas and a homeless, tubercular, New York City street-survivor (that…
I’m teaching “The Politics of the 70s Film” this semester, and Mid Century Cinema will follow along, with a few words about each movie screened for the class. First up is The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), a film that, in style, substance, and attitude, crystallized many of the elements of the emerging New Hollywood. Nichols,…
Jacques Rivette, one of the great and singular directors of his time, died January 29 at the age of eighty-seven. He was one of five young movie-obsessed friends (along with Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut) who met in the late 1940s, each drawn like apes to the monolith in 2001 to…
The allied triumph in the Second World War is remembered – fondly and correctly – as one of the great and inspiring moments of modern history, and the quarter century that followed was a period of economic growth and prosperity almost unimaginable in the context of the miserable decades that preceded it. But all periods…
Faye Dunaway, who can stake a fair claim to the title Lead Actress of the New Hollywood, turns seventy-five on January 14. Dunaway was there from the beginning to the end, with starring roles in Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976); she also was above the title in two additional…
“We were taught that we should question all the established values, all the taboos, and that the one thing we must continually strive for was a sense of self and a sense of expanding our horizons.” That was David Bowie, summarizing his interpretation of the lessons of the sixties, and how those lessons influenced his…
In a tough week for cinematographers, Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the legendary figures of the New Hollywood, died on January 3. At the age of eighty-five he was still going strong, coming off a very busy 2014 and associated with a number of upcoming projects. Zsigmond, along with fellow countryman and fellow cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, escaped…