I’m teaching “The Politics of the 70s Film” this semester, and, as we have done previously, Mid Century Cinema will follow along with commentaries related to the movies screened for class—or to movies related to those movies (since we can’t bear to repeat ourselves). This week we watched The Graduate. Regarding the general themes of…
On January 26 1967, Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair opened in America (the UK-based production had its premiere in Britain the previous October). Largely unnoticed at the time and a flop at the box office (though it did earn five BAFTA nominations), the movie is very much worth revisiting, both on the strength of its…
Thanks to the efforts of Arrow Academy, Kino Video, and The Criterion Collection, all of the fiction films of the great Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski are now easily accessible. Actually, that’s not quite true. His second foray into fiction (Kieslowski made his early reputation as a documentary filmmaker, and those talents are put to extraordinary…
Regular followers of Mid Century Cinema know that Bertrand Tavernier is one of our favorite directors, so it is no surprise that we read with great interest a new collection of interviews with the filmmaker. Not every artist need be a great raconteur, but vicariously spending time with Tavernier – intelligent, articulate, politically alert and…
The recent release of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle in a new special edition from The Criterion Collection was more than enough reason to revisit this old classic—and it did not disappoint. If anything, Jungle is even better than we remembered. What is great about this movie? What isn’t great about this movie? Beautifully shot,…
A major stepping stone on the road to the New Hollywood, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up opened in the U.S. on December 18, 1966. Antonioni was already a heroic figure to that younger, big-city, buzzing-with-excitement legion of avid filmgoers (and future film-makers)—the New Hollywood generation that had previously flocked to art-houses for screenings of his earlier masterpieces,…
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…
I’ve been thinking about the 1930s these days, and not in a good way (though if it’s any consolation, I think we’re in France, not Germany). But in these dispiriting times, let’s reach for some movies-as-therapy, and remember that not everything about the 1930s was dismal—in fact it was a great decade for the films…
Why is the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever made called “A Christmas Tale”? (Which, we hasten to add, is not to be confused with “A Christmas Carol.”) Because it is French. And, as director Arnaud Desplechin explained, they don’t have Thanksgiving in the Old World. But he wanted to tell a version of that particular type…
And so this has actually happened—America has elected as its President an ignorant, nativist authoritarian. One would not have thought this possible. It is still very difficult to process. At such a moment, talking about the movies seems, perhaps . . . frivolous? I am sympathetic to this perspective. But I want to…