Couldn't understand then why the mystery bit frittered away. I still remember that (edited-for-television, obviously) viewing, especially the way the movie snapped into gear as soon as David Hemmings' photographer takes the shots that might contain evidence of a murder. I first saw Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up on prime-time network TV in the Seventies, aware that it was an acknowledged great movie/head trip with some possible hotsy content, which was of great interest to me as an adolescent male. Like, I don't know, 1966 looks pretty darned spectacular - and with only one American film on Bob's Top Ten:Ĭrowded at the top in 1966: this is a year of flat-out masterpieces, a lot of which appear to be coming apart at the seams (or at least dismantling the pieces of what people generally call a movie). But you may want to consider some other possibilities (Robert casts an eye toward 1959, but hasn't given it the full treatment yet). We all know of 1939's reputation, as Peter Bogdanovich memorably put it, as "Hollywood's Golden Year" - and an undeniably swell one it was. "'Strangers' provides an array of teaching opportunities (one textbook scene after another) 'Diary' is one of those movies that expand in your mind for years after seeing them." "'The Thing' is an endlessly repeatable pleasure," he writes. "The Thing" ( Christian Nyby/ Howard Hawks) " Diary of a Country Priest" ( Robert Bresson)ġ0. " Strangers on a Train" ( Alfred Hitchcock)ģ. Robert's 1951 list (composed many years later, and including foreign language titles Farber may not have seen in 1951) includes some of the same movies and directors:Ģ. I used to laugh off quasi-moralists who insisted that self-imposed censorship used to force American film artists to find more creative solutions to getting certain things across having looked at a series of such well-curated films in a concentrated space of time, my certitude on this point has gotten a major shakeup. Confidential (a film I largely admire, incidentally) for all the Production-Code-mandated restraint of the former picture, it oozes a particular kind of sleaziness that Confidential simply can't touch. Look at something like Losey's The Prowler in comparison with, say, L.A. For all of the putative advances that have been made in contemporary cinema in the depiction of sex and violence, and in use of language, there's also something that feels coddled, by comparison, in the supposedly franker contemporary material. Most of them share a hard-bitten attitude that a lot of contemporary pictures would like to emulate, but just don't know how to. Pending these hours in the Farber film world of '51, I found out it really is true what they say: they really don't make 'em like that anymore. Glenn writes of Farber's fondness for "hangout pictures," and his (not necessarily paradoxical) taste for the lean over the flabby: Honorable mention: Chuck Jones' " A Hound for Trouble" starring Charlie Dog. The titles in the series (each links to the corresponding entry): Glenn has not only written essays about each of Farber's 1951 favorites, and Farber's own reviews of them, he's illustrated his posts with some nice big frame grabs.
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