To see the intro to this project, as well as links to other decades, click here. 20) “S’Wonderful,” from An American in Paris (1951) The first Best Picture winner in color since Gone with the Wind, An American in Paris likewise hearkens back to what weary viewers might have seen as a simpler time. After… Read More Listen to America: The 1950s
Dir. David Lean. Starring Sarah Miles, Robert Mitchum, Trevor Howard There’s a scene in Madeleine, made two decades earlier and under a radically different set of censorship instructions, where a sex scene is replaced, essentially, with a torrid reel. Rather than depicting a coital sequence between Ann Todd and Ivan Desny which wouldn’t have passed… Read More Ryan’s Daughter (1970)
To see my running list of the hundred greatest movie stars in American film history, click here All stars are listed with a single film which is particularly important, though not exclusively so, to understanding what makes them vital to American movies. 45) Gene Hackman / Key film – Hoosiers Leading men can be many… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Years…100 Stars: 41-45
Dir. Sydney Pollack. Starring Robert Mitchum, Ken Takakura, Keiko Kishi Remember when you were in college and you had that one friend who studied abroad in London for a semester, and when he came back he called it “football” and not “soccer” because he had been enlightened by three months there? The Yakuza is the movie equivalent… Read More The Yakuza (1974)
Dir. Jacques Tourneur. Starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas Picture links back here Out of the Past is a film which doesn’t work well unless you believe with a full heart in the inevitable stupidity of men, a stupidity which is born out of arrogance and self-importance, and which is compounded by an inability… Read More Out of the Past (1947)
Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Juliette Lewis Among its top ten grossing films in the colorfully named genre “Thriller – Psycho/Stalker/Blank from Hell,” Box Office Mojo places seven of them between 1987 and 1994. Cape Fear is not even the highest grossing film of its ilk from 1991; Sleeping with the… Read More Cape Fear (1991)
Seeing Things Secondhand 