“City on the Edge of Forever,” the twenty-eighth episode of the first season of Star Trek, aired on April 6 1967. Widely acclaimed, it is a fan favorite, and has been singled out for high praise by both Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner. A time-travel affair where the bulk of the action takes place in…
This week’s movie was Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, a relatively little-known obscurity that should be included in any serious discussion of the great films of the 1970s. That this is generally not the case can be attributed to a number of factors. It was an enormously troubled production—May shot a lot of film (legend…
This week’s movie was Francis Ford Coppola’s New Hollywood landmark The Conversation, one of the three films produced under the auspices of The Director’s Company, a partnership formed by hot-off-celebrated-hits Coppola (The Godfather), William Friedkin (The French Connection), and Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show). The arrangement with Paramount Pictures – modest budgets in exchange…
This week’s movie was actually Klute, but once again, having posted on that great film already, we decided to take the opportunity to talk about the next entry in Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoid trilogy”—The Parallax View. (All the President’s Men would round out the set.) One of the great paranoid thrillers of the seventies (possibly…
Mid Century Cinema favorite and enigmatic Art House Rock Star Robert Bresson’s eighth feature film, Mouchette, had its Paris premiere fifty years ago this week. We have always had a special fondness for Mouchette. Generally averse to rankings, we nevertheless have no trouble identifying this as our third favorite Bresson, behind, in no particular order,…
This week featured our first introduction to Robert Altman, one of the prominent figures in the New Hollywood pantheon. Over the final three decades of his career, Altman would release more than his share of great films—but there is nothing to compare with his remarkable stretch of nine films from 1969 to 1975, arguably the…
Fifty years ago this week Ingmar Berman’s Persona opened in the U. S. One of the landmarks in the history of film, it is about the convergence of personalities between an actress (Liv Ullmann), mute and withdrawn after falling silent in the middle of a performance, and the nurse (Bibi Andersson) charged with her care. …
This week’s screening for The Politics of the Seventies Film was The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), an achievement that represents everything the New Hollywood aspired to be: small scale, minor key, intensely personal, expressly cinematic, and ultimately indelible. “The King of Marvin Gardens is Monopoly minus the reassurance of toy money,” wrote David Thomson,…
Finally catching up with Alan J. Pakula’s 1981 paranoid thriller Rollover has us thinking, once again, about the magic of the movies. Another way of phrasing this question would be: “Why is Rollover so bad?” But here at Mid Century Cinema, we’re extremely wary of the good/bad thing. As we emphasized in our review of…
This week’s focus in class was actually Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, but as this is well covered ground here at Mid Century Cinema, today we will consider instead a film that has some interesting parallels with that picture. Both Norman Mailer’s notorious Maidstone and Wexler’s Medium Cool attempt to blur the distinction between fiction and…