This is the time of year we play the “best of” game, here with a top ten of our favorite home video releases of 2020. What’s that you say? All video in 2020 is home video? Well, yes, but we’re limiting ourselves to what was released on DVD and/or Blu Ray. And, as always, recall…
Puzzle of a Downfall Child, the first film by Jerry Schatzberg (he would go on to direct notable New Hollywood entries The Panic in Needle Park and Scarecrow), has taken a long and circuitous path towards its current status as “significant second tier seventies film worth a look.” Released on December 16 1970, it was greeted…
We’ve all been there—late at night in a crowded bar, people have had a few to many, a boast is bandied about, and before you know it, a brawl erupts over which was Hitchcock’s greatest decade, the thirties or the forties? (A minority faction fights for the fifties, and that guy dressed in black smoking…
David Thomson is one of the most accomplished and influential writers on cinema over the last half-century. Wedding an impossibly encyclopedic knowledge of film history with a singularly recognizable, assuredly graceful and daringly personal prose style, Thomson was prominent among the grand cohort of critical voices that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s—a golden age,…
Greetings all. We’re writing today about some upcoming logistical changes here at Mid Century Cinema. We have to transition from both our web-host and our software template. (Our name, address, and content will remain the same.) During that process, we hope to be able to transfer our list of subscribers (those who receive e-mail notifications…
John Cassavetes’ eagerly anticipated Husbands premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival on October 24, 1970. Expectations for the movie were especially high as this was the filmmaker’s follow-up to his widely celebrated Faces, a breakthrough for independent American cinema, which a young Roger Ebert described as “the sort of film that makes you want…
The Television Show The Odd Couple premiered on September 24, 1970. (The Broadway production, written by Neil Simon and directed by Mike Nichols, opened in 1965 and ran for almost a thousand performances; there was also a movie version in 1968, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.) Nothing against the play, which took home an…
September 19 1970 welcomed the first episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, with would run for seven seasons and 168 episodes, accumulating a large bundle of awards and honors along the way. In retrospect that is not surprising, given the amount of talent on hand in front of and behind the camera. The reputation…
Recently I was interviewed by Super-ficcion on a wide range of movie related issues, under the headline of “Is Hollywood in Crisis?” I thought they did a great job in putting together a very spiffy piece, which can be accessed here. Some Mid Century Cinema followers have read the interview on other platforms, but we’re…
The 1970 New York Film Festival – then only in its eighth year – looked to be a very promising affair. As the New York Times reported with enthusiasm on September 4, the event would feature “new films directed by Satyajit Ray, Luis Buñuel . . . Bernardo Bertolucci, Alain Resnais, Kenji Mizoguchi . ….