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…
News And Commentary – Noir Week (2): Gilda and The Big Sleep
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…
News And Commentary – Noir Week at MCC: Double Indemnity
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…
50 Years Ago This Week – Godard’s Alphaville in Berlin
The favorite filmmaker of many a young, hip cinephile, John-Luc Godard was at the apogee of his movie-god status in 1965 when Alphaville, his dystopian sci-fi noir took home the Golden Bear at the fifteenth Berlin film festival. The New Wave legend made an astonishing fifteen feature films from 1960 through 1967 (and eight shorts…
News And Commentary – Wally Gives a Shout-Out to Claude Chabrol
In this short video, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory rummage around in the DVD closet of the Criterion Collection, to note the release of a new box set of their collaborations on film. The set includes special editions of My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street. And if you haven’t seen those two yet,…
50 Years Ago This Week – Woody Allen’s First Screenplay
What’s New Pussycat? premiered on June 22, 1965, and despite its very promising cast – including Peter Sellers, Peter O’Toole, and Romy Schneider – we at Mid Century Cinema are Not recommending it. It was never very good and has not aged well. (Even the venerable Andrew Sarris, then purportedly rallying to Pussycat’s defense against…
50 Years Ago This Week – Claude Sautet’s Second Try
In 1960, Director Claude Sautet released Classe Tous Risques, an outstanding escaped-killer-on-the-run drama featuring Lino Ventura and an unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo. For his efforts he won the enormous respect of his peers (Jean Pierre Melville grabbed a hold of Ventura and made a similarly themed if very different picture, Le Deuxieme Souffle) but not much…
News And Commentary – More from Ethan Hawke on the New Hollywood
Two months ago we discussed Ethan Hawke’s absorbing interview in the spring issue of Cineaste in which the actor elaborated on the influence of the New Hollywood on his career choices; part two of that conversation appears in the magazine’s summer issue, and is again of great interest to fans of the seventies film. “If the point…
News And Commentary – The Costa-Gavras/Montand Trilogy
Between 1969 and 1972 filmmaker Costa-Gavras and actor Yves Montand teamed up for three compelling political thrillers, two of which, The Confession (1970) and State of Siege (1972) have just been released in excellent new special editions from the Criterion Collection. Criterion had previously issued Z (1969). Costa-Gavras, born in Greece in 1933 (as Konstantinos…
News And Commentary – Still Celebrating the Orson Welles Centennial
Celebrating Orson Welles’ 100th birthday isn’t something you do in just one day, or even a month, and here at Mid Century Cinema we’ve been in a very Wellesy state of mind. If you have not much familiarity with Welles (or even if you do), take a look at this entertaining and informative six minute…