The closing days of 1965 saw the release of The Slender Thread, the first feature film directed by Sydney Pollack, who had been scuffing around as a TV actor (and director) for the previous decade. Thread marked the start of an impressive career for Pollack as a movie director (and subsequently as a notable producer…
News And Commentary – Haskell Wexler Est Mort
The great cinematographer Haskell Wexler died on December 27, six weeks shy of his ninety-fourth birthday. Over the course of his long and extraordinary career, which straddled documentary and fiction films, Wexler was probably best known for his incisive photography on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Mike Nichols, 1966). Nominated for five academy awards, he…
50 Years Ago This Week – The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
Producer/Director Martin Ritt’s outstanding The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, based on the John le Carré novel, opened in America on December 16 1965. The liberal-humanist Ritt (who was blacklisted in the 1950s) had a reputation for often wearing his politics on his sleeve, which is not typically a recipe for dramatic intrigue. …
News And Commentary – Happy Ozu Day!
The great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu was born on December 12 1903 and died on the very same day in 1963. One of Mid Century Cinema’s favorites, we celebrate twelve-twelve as Ozu day. A prolific artist of the silent era, Ozu came to the talkies late and reluctantly, and did not live to see old…
News And Commentary – Fritz Lang 125!
A milestone birthday celebration for Fritz Lang, who was born on December 5, 1890. Lang, a child of Vienna, would become one of the great directors of the thriving Weimar cinema that flowered in Germany during those tumultuous years between the end of the First World War and the Nazi seizure of power. Best known…
News And Commentary – Last List: The Greatest Films of the 1980s and 1990s
Finally, the fifth and last list of favorites—twenty-five films from the 1980s and 1990s. Again, and as always, it’s important to follow the Rules of the Game, but one reminder I will mention explicitly: only one director per list (and so any other films from that director which would have otherwise found a place on…
News And Commentary – The Films of Woody Allen
A programming alert for followers of Mid Century Cinema: on the occasion of his eightieth birthday (!), I have written an appreciation of the films of Woody Allen for Bright Lights Film Journal, which can be read here. In the spirit of the occasion, below is a list of Allen’s feature films as writer-director, along…
News And Commentary – More Greatest Films – The Eagerly Awaited List Four: The Seventies!
So here they are, my top twenty-five from the seventies, (once again in order of domestic release date by country of origin). Obviously, this was the hardest list of all—looking back, it turns out this decade contributed TEN to my twenty-five greatest of all-time list; as always, those films noted by an asterisk. So the…
News And Commentary – More Greatest Films – The Lists of Others: Auteur Edition
Wow. There must be something in the air. Here at Mid Century Cinema we’re been compiling our “best of” lists, and just by coincidence – we assume – those invaluable folks at the Criterion Collection have put up a link to this French website which has posted a slew of “top 50s” from notable directors….
News And Commentary – The Greatest Films, Part Three – 25 from the 1960s
Forging ahead with the “best of” lists . . . and this is getting harder. Last week we went with twenty-five favorites from the 1940s and 1950s. The 1960s featured what Phillip Lopate dubbed “the heroic age of movie going” (especially for foreign films), the ambitious American films that pressed hard against the weakening resistance…