Mickey One, produced and directed by Arthur Penn, opened on September 27, 1965. A harbinger of the New Hollywood, it had the misfortune of arriving ahead of its time; had it been released two or three years later, it surely would have met with greater success and acclaim. But in 1965, a moody, expressionistic film…
Get Smart made its television debut on September 18, 1965, with the episode “Mr. Big,” written by the show’s co-creators, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. The series, which can be watched with enormous pleasure today, arrived at a transitional moment in American politics and culture. An odd hybrid of rat-pack sensibilities and New Hollywood anti-establishment…
Worth seeking out is Francois Truffaut’s 1973 masterpiece Day for Night (La Nuit Americaine), just released in yet another characteristically marvelous special edition from the Criterion Collection. Day for Night is a movie that is in love with the movies—Roger Ebert called it “not only the best movie ever made about movies,” but also “a…
On August 3, 1965 Darling hit the big screen. It was a huge commercial success and took home Academy Awards for actress and screenplay—but it is one of those “you had to be there” movies; no need to track it down if you haven’t seen it. (Borderline scandalous at the time, both MGM and Columbia…
A visit to the Harvard Film Archive afforded an opportunity to see Robert Altman’s HealtH. The film, shot in 1979, was screened in 1980 but shelved by a hostile studio-in-transition, and not properly released until 1982. One of Altman’s most obscure films, it remains largely unavailable and so despite its modest reputation the chance to catch…
On July 25th at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, folk hero Bob Dylan, backed by a band that included Paul Butterfield and Al Kooper, plugged in, played three loud rock songs, and was essentially booed off the stage. (Many people booed. He left fifteen minutes into a scheduled one hour set. We can argue about…
Adlai Stevenson, Governor of Illinois and two-time Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party (he lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956), died on July 14, 1965. He succumbed to a heart attack while walking in London with the actress and politically active socialite (and occasional paramour of director John Huston) Marietta Tree. An overview of…
Noir week at MCC reached its conclusion with the pitch-perfect classic Out of the Past – one for the time capsule if you were looking to preserve the essence of noir for future generations – before wrapping up class with a consideration of neo-noir, and a very close read of Chinatown. (In Hollywood’s Last Golden…
Noir week continues at Mid Century Cinema (and at Cornell’s Adult University) with two classics, The Big Sleep and Gilda. The justly beloved Big Sleep comes with a famous backstory—in the can in 1945, the film was shown to American servicemen overseas, but with distribution schedules juggled by the end of the war, Sleep was…
It’s a week of Noir at Mid Century Cinema—I’m teaching a class on the subject at Cornell’s Adult University. Today we visited the bookends of the classic period: John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), before diving into a close reading of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), one of…