May 11
Convinced strongly about the bland nature of 60s movies in general as I am, I went into The Apartment with a little trepidation. Sure, the director is Billy Wilder and, sure, Jack Lemmon stars. But still. I’ve been burned by the flower power era too many times before. You can’t blame me for being a little emotionally unavailable.
Sidney Lumet attempts to work with Tennessee Williams’ 1957 play Orpheus Descending in 1960′s The Fugitive Kind. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but Lumet almost overwhelms in his approach to the material and the smaller emotional moments get lost in the shuffle. Still, the casting is tremendous and no fan of cinema should ever pass up an opportunity to see Marlon Brando in his prime.
Williams had written the role for Brando all along, hoping that he’d star in a Broadway version of Orpheus Descending alongside the marvellous Anna Magnani. Brando was too intimidated to star with Magnani on such a small stage, however, thinking that her performance would overshadow his own (he might have been right). With Williams’ blessing, Brando took to starring in the screen version of the piece as directed by Lumet.
Oct 17
Based on a 13th Century Swedish ballad (“Töres dotter i Wänge”), Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring tells a tale of revenge, faith, morality, and justice. It won the 1961 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and has become one of Bergman’s most famous pictures. Interestingly, the movie was banned in Fort Worth, Texas, over controversy dealing with the pivotal rape sequence.
Bergman’s picture is couched in religious belief and the clinging that people do to their traditions and concepts of reality. As with many of his movies, The Virgin Spring questions the conception of deities and highlights the confusion that many feel in practicing religious beliefs. The tale is thoughtful and intimate despite feel rather large and expansive at times, owing a lot to Bergman’s skill as a filmmaker in taking the medieval genre and creating something as small as a standard modern setting. At no time does he attempt to make an “epic;” this is a small, spiritual story about revenge and justice.
Nov 1
There is no question that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho changed the face of the horror and thriller genre forever. Its structure, style, and attention to detail altered what audiences saw as conventional thrillers and added new dimensions to a genre that often struggled under the weight of its own importance. Hitchcock, one of the genre’s true auteurs, is still widely revered as the undisputed leader of the genre and Psycho is largely considered his finest piece of work.
There are so many pivotal and influential scenes wrapped up in this 1960 thriller that it is almost impossible to describe the movie completely. Any attempt to sum the film up or describe its many nuances is almost always destined to failure, as Hitchcock has filled his masterpiece with an incredible amount of style, substance, and shade. Nevertheless, I shall humbly attempt to look at Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
The Time Machine is a 1960 science fiction film based on the 1865 H.G. Wells novel of the same name. The film was directed by George Pal, who also directed the famed 1953 version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The Time Machine was renowned in its time for its usage of special effects and picked up an Academy Award for Special Effects in 1961. Among its more notable effects is the usage of time lapse photography to illustrate the world changing at a breakneck speed according to the point of view of the time traveller. The Time Machine was remade in 2002 by H.G. Wells’ great-grandson in a film that starred Guy Pearce and Jeremy Irons.
The Time Machine stars Rod Taylor, also known from the Hitchcock classic The Birds, as George, a Victorian era Englishman with an interest in time travel. He spends time working on a time machine in his home and discusses the possibilities of time travel with his sceptical friends, who appear to humour him up until he shows them a miniature model of the time machine and has it disappear in front of them. George’s friends dismiss this disappearance as a parlour trick and depart, only to have George, frustrated, get into his full-scale time machine and blast off through time. George departs through time, stopping at each major World War on the way, until he eventually reaches the year 802701.
