It’s probably possible to overstate the importance of Bonnie and Clyde to the subsequent development of American cinema, but you’d have to indulge in some pretty outrageous hyperbole to do it. It almost single-handedly dragged Hollywood into the aggressive stylistic modernism that Europe had been enjoying for most of the 1960s; there had been scattered […]
My first thought is not a very professional one: holy shit, Diane Ladd used to look exactly like her daughter. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I can turn to the matter at hand. And the matter at hand is The Wild Angels, a film without which the subsequent history of cinema […]
The dominant aesthetic of commercial American filmmaking in the 1960s was that of unbridled size. Enormous action films with star-studded casts, like The Great Escape; sprawling ensemble comedies like The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming; grandiose historical epics like Doctor Zhivago. And, of course, the musicals. There’s never been anything quite like a […]
There’s no such thing as a universal opinion, of course, and we wouldn’t want there to be. Even so, I don’t think anyone would seriously call my tastes or judgment into question if I propose that Cary Grant was absolutely the suavest motherfucker in the history of cinema. So it is with no little bit […]
Having arrived in 1963, our Hollywood Century project now completes its first half. And it pleases me greatly that such a milestone should be commemorated with one of the quintessential Hollywood films of all time – maybe the single best example of the grand, epic, stupid indulgence that only Hollywood filmmakers could ever fully enjoy. […]
There has never been a time anywhere in the history of commercial cinema that was terribly easy on aging women, but for a stretch of the 1960s it was perhaps slightly easier. For that decade bore witness to the brief flowering of the dubious genre of “hagsploitation” in which famous actresses in their 50s and […]
The one thing that can never be claimed of the 1961 Western One-Eyed Jacks is that it’s like other movies. Lumbering and bloated, often compelling, always gorgeous, and at times astonishingly bizarre in its attempt to force the psychological impulses of mid-century naturalist theater acting into the framework of a bog-standard Western revenge thriller, I […]
The signal characteristic of Otto Preminger’s Exodus from 1960, a story of the founding of the modern state of Israel, has nothing to do with the film’s sensitive political content; nothing to do with the iconic, stirring Romantic main theme of Eric Gold’s deservedly Oscar-winning score; nothing to with the fact that this is the […]
Melodramas, neo-Westerns, proto-indies, social commentary and all are fun, but I couldn’t leave the 1950s behind without touching on that decade’s single most lasting contribution, not just to movies but to Western civilisation generally. The ’50s, you see, were the decade when Teen Culture truly came into existence, not just in the sense of teenagers […]
That are certain expectations that immediately present themselves in connection with a film made at MGM in 1958, starring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and directed by Vincente Minnelli, and not the least merit of Some Came Running is that it completely defies them. It’s not a musical, for one thing, though that’s a superficial […]
The Hollywood Century project has been primarily concerned with charting the history of the major Hollywood studios, but it has also been an attempt to track the evolution of American filmmaking over a one-hundred year period, and as we make our way through the ’50s, we have come across one of the truly seismic events […]
Motion pictures had been taking their cues from stage plays since the earliest days of narrative filmmaking, but something specific shifted in the 1950s. Part of that shift happened in theater itself: the evolution of the musical play in the years following Oklahoma! in 1943 introduced new psychological acuity and narrative complexity to what had […]
