It was with considerable enthusiasm that I procured my copy of William Mann’s Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair the day it became available. Although Bogie has been written about more than extensively – efforts that include the magisterial, definitive, must-read Bogart, by A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax…
The crack staff here at Mid Century Cinema has managed to procure some very exciting rarities (exciting, that is, if you travel in certain uber-nerd circles)—an impossible-to-find feature that we’ve been extremely eager to get our hands on for some time, The Stranger Within a Woman, directed by Mikio Naruse, along with some tantalizing obscurities…
As attentive followers have noticed, the rate of Mid Century Cinema’s posts has slowed down a bit in 2023. I can’t tell you how many letters the staff here has received inquiring about this. Really I can’t. Nevertheless, we felt it appropriate to check in with those imagined faithful, and offer this quick explanation (and…
Movie lists! Will this be our last list? No! Movie lists – following, always, the Andre and Wally rules – are irresistible. So we will continue to generate lists, appealing to (an apparently irrefutable) law gleefully articulated by my children when called upon to explain why the house had been reduced to smoldering ruins: “We…
As the calendar year comes to a close, movie list season has again arrived—even if this year the very sound of the word “list” sends shivers, inviting attention to the predictable disaster of the recently dropped Sight and Sound decennial poll of the “greatest films of all time.” (As we wrote, all too presciently, eight…
It was a pleasure to sit down (virtually) with Extract Editions, who reached out to us to have a short conversation about the movies, and in particular, about criticism and cinephilia. The interview inspired a welcome walk down memory lane, and a fond look back at my informal film school, that is, the time I…
Thee Days of the Condor has been much on our minds lately, what with its eyebrow-raising inclusion on our “Sight and Sound Ten Greatest Films of All Time” ballot, and the related decision to include the movie in our Seventies Film class this summer at Cornell’s Adult University. (A pleasant surprise, which derived from Keith…
The educational outreach branch of Mid Century Cinema is developing a new class, which will be taught in the coming fall semester: “A Cinema of Resistance.” This of course raises the musical question, “What the heck is a cinema of resistance”? Well, most narrowly, the phrase refers to films made in dissent of a prevailing…
Once a decade, the British film Journal Sight and Sound produces its “Greatest Films of All Time” list, based on a survey of nearly 1,000 critics, programmers, distributors and film scholars. Last time around, in 2012, there was some excitement as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo unseated the perennial “this is officially the greatest movie of all…
When last we discussed Alfred Hitchcock, it was to celebrate the movies he made in the 1940s, in support of the contention that it was his finest decade. The stakes of course could not have been higher, and this also outed us as choosing sides in that most sensitive of topics – one that somehow…