Summer’s Here

It’s beginning to look a lot like summer. Goodbye winter coats! Hello Hawaiian shirts, tank tops, bikinis, sunglasses and suntan lotions! I don’t know about you but I kinda like the bright sunny skies. It’s like creation announcing its presence in all its glory. I feel like stepping outside in the heat and welcoming this bright day. So far, no forest fires. So far no earthquake. It’s a true gift from God.

King David said it best in Psalm 118:
1 Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!
For His mercy endures forever.
24 This is the day the Lord has made;
We will rejoice and be glad in it.

I still need to prepare for my talk on AI this Sunday. But in the meantime, here’s a song I just wrote:

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Summer

(Verse 1)
It’s beginning to feel a lot like summer,
Everywhere you go;
From the sunny beaches to
The cloudless skies so blue
And lemonade pitchers that seem to appear on cue.

(Chorus)
It’s beginning to look a lot like summer,
Bikinis and sunglasses in every store;
But the sweetest sight to see,
Is the ice cream truck that beckons me,
Bringing all the flavors I adore.

(Verse 2)
Can you hear the sounds of laughter,
As waves crash on the shore?
Children playing in the sand,
With their buckets hand in hand,
And brilliant paper kites that fly and soar.
(Repeat Chorus)

(Bridge)
A dip in the pool, a dive in the sea,
We’re feeling the summer vibes so free.
The sun is shining, the temperature’s high,
With sun tan in hand, we reach for the sky.

(Outro)
So let’s embrace this summer season,
With its warmth and joy so bright;
From the beach to the pool,
Any way to keep cool,
Let’s make memories of this delightful sight.

TGIF people!

Raoul

BTW, I didn’t really write that song above. It was AI generated. I just edited it a bit. Did you notice?

JOKE OF THE WEEK

Thanks to Wyne of Mandaluyong, Philippines

PARTING SHOTS

Thanks to Art of Sierra Madre, CA

Thanks to Tom of Pasadena, CA

I found these

The Traveling Boy

My good friend (and jokester) Terry and I came up with these.

The post High School Reunion appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Here’s my list, and I encourage you to assault, disagree or perhaps even agree, and send in your own list in our readers’ section at ad***@tr**********.com . What is most important is to keep a dialogue going about cinema as a visual medium for artistic expression where it takes its place among other art forms.

1. Robert Bresson

The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself. When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the other. – Robert Bresson

Bresson Films for Review:

• Diary of a Country Priest (1951)
• A Man Escaped (1956)
• Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

 2. Yasujirō Ozu

I have formulated my own directing style in my head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others. I can make fried tofu, boiled tofu, stuffed tofu. Cutlets and other fancy stuff, that’s for other directors. – Yasujirō Ozu

Ozu Films for Review:

• I was born, but … (1932)
• Tokyo Story (1953)
• An Autumn Afternoon (1962)  

3. Alfred Hitchcock

If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on. – Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock Films for Review:

• Notorious (1946)
• Rear Window (1954)
• Vertigo (1958)

4. Jean-Luc Godard 

If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality. – Jean-Luc Godard

 Godard Films for Review:

• Vivre sa vie (1962)
• Pierrot le Fou (1965)
• Masculin Féminin (1966)

5. Roberto  Rossellini 

I want you to know how deeply I wish to translate those ideas into images, just to quiet down the turmoil of my brain. – Roberto Rossellini

Rossellini Films for Review:

• Paisà (1946)
• Journey to Italy (1954)
• La Prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV (1966)

6. Orson Welles 

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. – Orson Welles

Welles Films for Review:

• Citizen Kane (1941)
• The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
• Touch of Evil (1958)

7. Ernst Lubitsch  

There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one. I let the audience use their imaginations. Can I help it if they misconstrue my suggestions? – Ernst Lubitsch

Lubitsch Films for Review:

• Trouble in Paradise (1932) 
• Ninotchka (1939)
• The Shop Around the Corner (1940) 

8. Howard Hawks  

I’d say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven’t seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don’t worry much about plot anymore. – Howard Hawks 

Hawks Films for Review:

• Bringing Up Baby (1938) 
• Only Angels Have Wings (1939) 
• Rio Bravo (1959) 

9. Kenji Mizoguchi 

You must put the odor of the human body into images [which] describe for me the implacable, the egoistic, the sensual, the cruel… there are nothing but disgusting people in this world.– Kenji Mizoguchi

Mizoguchi Films for Review:

• The Life of Oharu (1952)
• Ugetsu (1953)
• Sansho the Bailiff (1954) 

10. Jean Renoir  

What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object – Jean Renoir 

Renoir Films for Review:

• The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1935)
• The Human Beast (1938)
• The Rules of the Game (1939) 

11. Max Ophüls  

The highest reaches of the actor’s art begin, I believe, at the point where words cease to play a part. – Max Ophüls

Ophüls Films for Review:

• Letter from an Unknown Woman (1949)  
• La Ronde (1950)
• The Earrings of Madame de… (1953)  

12. Luis Buñuel  

God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed. Thank God, I am still an atheist – Luis Buñuel

Buñuel Films for Review:

• Viridiana (1961)
• Belle de Jour (1967)
• Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972)

 13. Fritz Lang 

To begin with I should say that I am a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or only rarely, with my ear – to my constant regret. Each picture has some sort of rhythm which only the director can give it. He has to be like the captain of a ship. – Fritz Lang

Lang Films for Review:

• Metropolis (1927)
• M (1931)
• The Big Heat (1953)

14.  John Ford  

My name’s John Ford. I make westerns – John Ford

Ford Films for Review:

• My Darling Clementine (1946)
• Rio Grande (1950)
• The Searchers (1956)

15. Josef von Sternberg

Shadow is mystery and light is clarity. Shadow conceals – light reveals. To know what to reveal and what to conceal and in what degrees to do this is all there is to art. – Josef von Sternberg

Sternberg Films for Review:

• The Docks of New York (1928)
• The Blue Angel (1930)
• Morocco (1930)

 16. Billy Wilder  

I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut. – Billy Wilder

Wilder Films for Review:

• Double Indemnity (1944)
• Sunset Boulevard (1950)
• Some Like It Hot (1959) 

17. Robert Altman 

Making a movie is like chipping away at a stone. You take a piece off here, you take a piece off there and when you’re finished, you have a sculpture. You know that there’s something in there, but you’re not sure exactly what it is until you find it. – Robert Altman 

Altman Films for Review:

• McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
• Nashville (1975)
• Short Cuts (1993)

18. D.W. Griffith 

Remember how small the world was before I came along? I brought it all to life: I moved the whole world onto a 20-foot screen. I made them see, didn’t I? I changed everything. – D.W. Griffith 

 Griffith Films for Review:

• The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Intolerance  (1916)
• Broken Blossoms (1919) 

19. Abbas Kiarostami 

My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never intended. Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated. – Abbas Kiarostami

Kiarostami Films for Review:

• Close-Up (1990)
• Taste of Cherry (1997)
• The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)  

20. Carl Theodor Dreyer 

Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry. – Carl Theodor Dreyer 

Dreyer Films for Review:

• The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
• Day of Wrath (1943)
• Ordet (The Word) (1955) 

21. Michelangelo Antonioni  

After you’ve learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like – including breaking those rules. A film you can explain in words is not a real film. – Michelangelo Antonioni

Antonioni Films for Review:   

• L’Avventura (1960)
• L’Eclisse (1962)
• Blow-up (1966)  

22. Buster Keaton 

Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot. Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles. – Buster Keaton 

Buster Keaton Films for Review:

• Sherlock Jr. (1924)
• The General, co-director Clyde Adolf Bruckman (1927)
• Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) 

23. Chantal Akerman   

When people ask me if I am a feminist film maker, I reply I am a woman and I also make films. – Chantal Akerman

Akerman Films for Review: 

• Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
• News from Home (1977)
• D’Est, From the East (1993)

24. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends. It’s a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other. – Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Fassbinder Films for Review:

• The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972)
• Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
• Berlin Alexanderplatz, a 14-part West German crime television miniseries (1980)  

25. Ousmane Sembène  

I think cinema is needed throughout Africa, because we are lagging behind in the knowledge of our own history. I think we need to create a culture that is our own. I think that images are very fascinating and very important to that end. Our forefathers’ image of women must be buried once for all.  – Ousmane Sembène

Sembene Films for Review:

• La Noire de… Black Girl (1966)
• Mandabi  (1968)
• Xala (1975) 

26. Charles Chaplin 

Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease from pain. You’ll never find rainbows if you’re looking down. We think too much and feel too little. – Charles Chaplin

Chaplin Films for Review: 

• City Lights (1931)
• The Great Dictator (1940)
• Monsieur Verdoux  (1947)

27. Andrei Tarkovsky  

The director’s task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable. – Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky Films for Review:

• Andrei Rublev (1966)
•  Solaris (1972)
• Stalker (1979)  

28. Federico Fellini  

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me. – Federico Fellini

Fellini Films for Review:

• Nights of Cabiria (1957)
•  La Dolce Vita (1960)
• 8½ (1963), 

29. Ermanno Olmi

I really don’t feel exclusive. My ambition instead, perhaps because of my peasant–worker background, is to look at the world with others, not as an aristocratic. – Ermanno Olmi

Olmi Films for Review:  

• Il Posto (1962)
• The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)
• Tickets, an anthology film directed by Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami  and Ken Loach (2005)

30. Akira Kurosawa 

Kurosawa Films for Review:  

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That’s the reason I’ve made cinema my life’s work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film. – Akira Kurosawa

• Ikiru (1952)
• Seven Samurai (1954)
• Yojimbo (1961)

31. Sergei Eisenstein  

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects? – Sergei Eisenstein

Eisenstein Films for Review:    

• Strike (1925)
• Battleship Potemkin (1925)
• Alexander Nevsky (1938) 

32. Éric Rohmer  

Rohmer Films for Review: 

I don’t think that my films are ‘literary’; they are based on the most ordinary things of life. – Éric Rohmer 

• My Night at Maud’s (1969)
• Perceval le Gallois (1978)
• Le Beau Mariage  (1981)

33. Jerzy Skolimowski  

As a poet my mind is trained along the path of poetic associations – I’m not afraid to wander away from direct narrative – I feel safe with a story that tempts you to believe or disbelieve. – Jerzy Skolimowski

Skolimowski Films for Review:  

• Deep End (1970)
• Moonlighting (1982)
• EO (2022) 

34. F.W. Murnau 

Don’t act – think! Films of the future will use more and more of these “camera angles” or, as I prefer to call them, these “dramatic angles.”  – F.W. Murnau 

Murnau Films for Review: 

• Nosferatu (1922)
• The Last Laugh (1924)
• Sunrise (1927).

35. François Truffaut

The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure. – François Truffaut

Truffaut Films for Review: 

• The 400 Blows (1959)
• Jules and Jim (1962)
• Day for Night (1973)

36. Miklós Jancsó 

It’s very simple. Cinema has limits that it can’t exceed. It can never go beyond catching the spectator’s interest to make a spectacle. – Miklós Jancsó.

Jancsó Films for Review: 

• The Round-Up (1966)
• The Red and the White (1967)
• Red Psalm  (1971) 

37. Hou Hsiao-hsien  

The  “wu” in  “wuxia” means both “to cut” and “to stop.” It also refers to the weapon – usually a sword – carried by the assassin.  So wuxia stories are concerned with the premise of ending violence with violence. The hero’s journey is epic and transformative – physically, emotionally, and spiritually. – Hou Hsiao-hsien

Hou Hsiao-hsien Films for Review: 

• A City of Sadness (1989)
• The Puppetmaster (1993)
• Flowers of Shanghai (1998) 

38. Werner Herzog 

There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization. – Werner Herzog

Herzog Films for Review: 

• Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
• The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
• Stroszek (1977) 

39. Satyajit Ray 

The director is the only person who knows what the film is about. Cinema’s characteristic forte is its ability to capture and communicate the intimacies of the human mind. – Satyajit Ray 

Ray Films for Review: 

• Pather Panchali (1955) 
• Apur Sansar (The World of Apu) (1959)
• Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest)  (1970) 

40. Stanley Kubrick  

A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. – Stanley Kubrick

 Kubrick Films for Review:

• Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
• The Shining (1980) 

41. Alain Resnais  

I use formal techniques to make the film more perceptive emotionally. – Alain Resnais

Resnais Films for Review:

• Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
• Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
• Mon oncle d’Amérique (1980) 

42. John Cassavetes  

During the actual filming, I’m not really listening to dialogue. I’m watching to see if the actors are communicating something and expressing something. You’re not aware of exactly what people are saying. You are aware of what they are INTENDING and what kind of feeling is going on in that scene. – John Cassavetes  

Cassavetes Films for Review:  

• Faces (1968)
• A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
• Opening Night (1977) 

43. Claire Denis  

I am not at all interested in theories about cinema. I am only interested in images and people and sound. – Claire Denis

Denis Films for Review:

• Chocolat (1988)
• Beau Travail (1999)
• Stars at Noon (2022)  

44. Sam Peckinpah 

The whole underside of our society has always been violence and still is. Churches, laws – everybody seems to think that man is a noble savage. But he’s only an animal. A meat-eating, talking animal. Recognize it. He also has grace and love and beauty. But don’t say to me we’re not violent. – Sam Peckinpah 

Peckinpah Films for Review:

• Ride the High Country (1962)
• The Wild Bunch (1969)
• Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) 

45. Andrzej Wajda  

When a film is created, it is created in a language, which is not only about words, but also the way that very language encodes our perception of the world, our understanding of it. – Andrzej Wajda 

• Kanał (1957)
• Ashes and Diamonds (1958)
• Man of Iron (1981)  

46. Martin Scorsese 

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out. – Martin Scorsese

Scorsese Films for Review:

• Mean Streets (1973) 
• Taxi Driver (1977)  
• Raging Bull (1980)   

47. Masahiro Shinoda

One thing I can say is either to look at films very carefully, watch a lot of films, or don’t see any films at all. Just imagine! – Masahiro Shinoda

Shinoda Films for Review:

• Pale Flower (1964)
• Double Suicide) (1969)
• Ballad of Orin (1977) 

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. – Ingmar Bergman

Bergman Films for Review:

• The Seventh Seal (1958)
• Winter Light (1962)
• Persona (1966) 

49. Sergio Leone 

When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite. – Sergio Leone 

Leone Films for Review:

• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
• Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
• Once Upon a Time in America (1984) 

 50. Agnès Varda  

I’m not interested in seeing a film just made by a woman – not unless she is looking for new images. – Agnes Varda

Varda Films for Review:

• Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
• Le Bonheur (1965)
• Vagabond (1985) 

51. Jacques Rivette  

I guess I like a lot of directors. Or at least I try to. – Jacques Rivette 

Rivette Films for Review:

• L’amour fou (1969)
• Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
• La Belle Noiseuse (1991)

52. Clint Eastwood 

I keep working because I learn something new all the time. – Clint Eastwood 

Eastwood Films for Review:

• Unforgiven (1992)
• Mystic River (2003)
• Million Dollar Baby (2004) 

53. Erich von Stroheim

In Hollywood, you’re only as good as your last picture. – Erich von Stroheim

Stroheim Films for Review:

• Blind Husbands (1919)
• Foolish Wives (1922)
• Greed (1924)

54. Chris Marker 

An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared. – Chris Marker

Marker Films for Review:

• La Jetée (1962)
• Sans Soleil (1983)
• Loin du Vietnam, short in compilation film (1967)

55. Robert Flaherty

Sometimes you have to lie. One often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit. – Robert Flaherty

Flaherty Films for Review::

• Nanook of the North (1922)
• Man of Aran (1934)
• Louisiana Story (1948)

56. Claude Chabrol

Films with a message just make me laugh. – Claude Chabrol

Chabrol Films for Review:

• La Femme infidèle (1969)
• Le Boucher (1970)
• Juste avant la nuit (1971)

57. Michael Powel & Emeric Pressburger 

Of course, all films are surrealist. They are because they are making something that looks like a real world but isn’t. – Michael Powell

Powell & Pressburger Films for Review:

• A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
• Black Narcissus (1947)
•  The Red Shoes (1948

58. Joseph Losey

Films can illustrate our existence… they can distress, disturb and provoke people into thinking about themselves and certain problems. But NOT give the answers. America has abandoned the strong woman of spirituality and is shacking up with the harlot of materialism. – Joseph Losey

Losey Films for Review:

• The Servant (1963)
• Accident (1967)
• The Go-Between (1971)

59. Preston Sturges

I did not think that a good movie was the equivalent of a good stage play, any more than I thought an automobile ride was as exhilarating as a drive behind a spirited horse, nor a trip by steam as soul-satisfying as a voyage by sail. – Preston Sturges

Sturges Films for Review:

• Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)
• The Lady Eve (1941)
• Sullivan’s Travels (1941)

60. David Cronenberg

Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos. – David Cronenberg

Cronenberg Films for Review:

• Spider (2002)
• Dead Ringers (1988)
• A History of Violence (2005)

61. Carlos Saura

I can’t separate cinema from my life. The two things are interrelated and enrich or impoverish each other. – Carlos Saura

Saura Films for Review:

• Ana and the Wolves (1972)
• Cría cuervos (1975)
• Flamenco Trilogy (1981 – 1986), Bodas de Sangre, Carmen, El Amor Brujo 

62. Wim Wenders 

Film is a very, very powerful medium. It can either confirm the idea that things are wonderful the way they are, or it can reinforce the conception that things can be changed. – Wim Wenders

Wenders Films for Review:

• Alice in the Cities (1974)
• Kings of the Road (1976)
• The American Friend (1977)

63. John Huston

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. – John Huston

Huston Films for Review:

• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
• The Man Who Would Be King (1975) 

64. Shōhei Imamura  

I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure on which the reality of daily Japanese life obstinately supports itself. – Shōhei Imamura 

Imamura Films for Review:

• Vengeance Is Mine (1979)
• The Ballad of Narayama (1983)
• Black Rain (1989)

65. Nicholas Ray 

An actor can be as talented as another, but if he doesn’t stick to what the director’s intentions are, it all falls down. – Nicholas Ray 

Ray Films for Review:

• In a Lonely Place, (1950 )
• Johnny Guitar (1954)
• Bitter Victory (1957)

66. Jean Vigo 

However paradoxical it may seem, the film studio’s ideal would be to produce only one film which would go on making money forever. – Jean Vigo

Vigo Films for Review:

• Zéro de conduite featurette (1933)
• L’Atalante (1934) 

67. Vittorio De Sica

Art has to be severe. It cannot be commercial. It cannot be for the producer or even for the public. It has to be for oneself. – Vittorio De Sica

De Sica Films for Review:

• Sciuscià (1946)
• Ladri di biciclette (1948)
• Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1970)

68. Jacques Tati

The images are designed, so that after you see the picture two or three times, its no longer my film, it starts to be your film. You recognize the people, you know them, and you don’t even know who directed the picture. – Jacques Tati

Tait Films for Review:

• Les Vacances de M. Hulot (1953)
• Playtime (1967)
• Trafic (1971)

69. Richard Lester

Cinema must reflect the temper of the times. We must choose material not only on the basis of whether we feel deeply, but on whether or not anyone’s bloody well going to see it. – Richard Lester

Lester Films for Review:

• A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
• Petulia (1968)
•  Juggernaut (1974)

70. Kon Ichikawa 

I’ve made various types of films: period dramas, modern dramas, films set in the Meiji period. But I don’t make any distinctions between them – they’re all films. True, with a period drama, there are certain conventions. With a modern drama, there is a different style of shooting. So you have to make changes according to the genre, but I never think, “This is a period drama, so I have to shoot it in such and such a way.” Films are films. If you don’t understand that, then you start filming lies. – Kon Ichikawa

Ichikawa Films for Review:

• The Burmese Harp (1956)
• Odd Obsession (1959)
• Fires on the Plain (1959)

71. Laurent Cantet 

I think we’re going through a really precarious period in film production, and I very much fear that it’s going to be a lot more difficult to make my kind of cinema. If you make films that don’t exactly announce themselves as surefire hits, you feel like you’re walking a tightrope.  I don’t want to take larger scale films in order to show my evolution as a director. – Laurent Cantet

Cantet Films for Review:

• Human Resources  (1999)
• Time Out (2001)
• The Class (2008)

72. Jean-Pierre Melville

I believe that you must be madly in love with cinema to create films. You also need a huge cinematic baggage. – Jean-Pierre Melville

Melville Films for Review:

• Le Doulos (1962)
• Le Samouraï (1967)
• Army of Shadows (1969)

73. Krzysztof Zanussi

I think cinema has a unique capacity to show the passage of time. When the camera can cover a distance of forty years, and you see what really happened to the faces of the actors – how they really aged, with no need for make-up – you see what happens to us. In literature, it is only reference, it’s not sensual; in cinema it’s sensual. – Krzysztof Zanussi

Zanussi Films for Review:

• Contract – FR TV (1980)
• The Constant Factor (1980)
• A Year of the Quiet Sun (1984)

74. Luchino Visconti

I could make a film in front of a wall if I knew how to find the data of man’s true humanity and how to express it. – Luchino Visconti

Visconti Films for Review:

• Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960)
• Il gattopardo (1960)
• Morte a Venezia (1971)

75. David Lynch

Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too. – David Lynch

Lynch Films for Review:

• Blue Velvet (1986)
• Lost Highway (1997)
• Mulholland Drive (2001)

Readers, feel free to comment or send your own lists to ad***@tr**********.com .

The post Traveling Boy Selects the 75 Greatest Film Directors of All-Time appeared first on Traveling Archive.

The genesis of our poll was highly influenced by Christina Newland’s thoughtful piece in BBC Culture, entitled, Why 1971 was an extraordinary year in film – BBC Culture

Number 10: Duck, You Sucker!

(aka Fistful of Dynamite)

Director: Sergio Leone; Writing: Luciano Vincenzoni, Sergio Donati, Sergio Leone; Cinematography: Giuseppe Ruzzolini; Music: Ennio Morricone. 

Players: Rod Steiger, James Coburn, Romolo Valli, Maria Monti.    

Synopsis: A Mexican bandit and an I.R.A. explosives expert rebel against the government and become heroes of the Mexican Revolution.

Memorable Lines:

• James Coburn as John H. Mallory: Where there’s revolution there’s confusion, and when there’s confusion, a man who knows what he wants stands a good chance of getting it.
• Mallory: When I started using dynamite… I believed in… many things, all of it! Now, I believe only in dynamite. I don’t judge you, Villega. I did that only… once in my life. Get shovellin’.
• Rod Steiger as Juan Miranda: Please, don’t try to tell me about revolution! I know all about the revolutions and how they start! The people that read the books, they go to the people that don’t read the books, and say “Ho-ho!” The time has come to have a change, eh?”

Behind the Scenes:

• When James Coburn was offered the role of John Mallory by Leone, he was initially reluctant. He had dinner with Henry Fonda (star of Once Upon a Time in the West) and asked him what he thought of Leone. Fonda told him that he considered Leone the greatest director he ever worked with. Coburn then took the part. Similarly, Fonda himself had been reluctant to take the part Leone offered him, but was persuaded by his friend, Eli Wallach, the co star of The Good, The Bad and Ugly (1966). Earlier, Wallach had asked Clint Eastwood what to expect when working with Leone on The Good, The Bad and Ugly. Eastwood replied, Never believe an Italian special effects man when he says the explosion won’t hurt you.
• The chanting of Shon shon shon in composer Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack was the suggestion of Leone’s wife, Carla Leone, who thought it would sound better than the original Wah wah chants. Morricone himself said the chants do not represent the names of characters but are just part of the soundscape like the chants in all the other Sergio Leone westerns. Morricone also said that Leone asked him to compose a film’s music before the start of principal photography – contrary to normal practice. He would then play the music to the actors during takes to enhance their performance.
• Rod Steiger demanded that his scenes be filmed with natural sound. This was virtually unheard of in Italian cinema and led to much tension between Steiger and Leone. Steiger had prepared for the role by taking accent and language lessons with a Mexican woman with the goal to use inflections that would imply Juan’s difficulty with speaking English instead of his native Spanish. To create Mallory accent, James Coburn vacationed in Ireland for five weeks. After the film’s completion, Steiger was content with the final result, and praised Leone for his skills as a director.

CRITICS:

• Underrated large canvas Leone; Steiger and Coburn as a revolutionary odd couple. – Dan King, T-Boy Film & Music
• Though not the towering masterpiece of “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968), but still with Leone’s difficult to imitate directorial style of extreme closeups, generally followed by silence and violence (in this case explosions), and then cutting directly to sweeping panoramic shots of a scorched Spanish desert. And, Morricone, always on board, having contributed to all original musical compositions in Leone’s films since “The Colossus of Rhodes” (1961), including the Leone executive produced, “My Name is Nobody.” (1973). – Ed Boitano, T-Boy Film & Music
• Leone’s means are occasionally too complicated, his themes are rendered with a unique lyrical force as the leitmotifs of Morricone’s memory music. Thus, whereas the theme of “Once Upon a Time in the West” was revenge in all its ultimately futile ramifications, the theme of “Duck, You Sucker” is betrayal in all its hopelessly unresolved ambiguity. Leone is nothing if not ambitious and audacious, and I say more power to him in this era of emotionally paralyzed filmmaking. – Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice

Number 9: Macbeth

(Original title: The Tragedy of Macbeth)

Director: Roman Polanski; Writing: Roman Polanski, Kenneth Tynan, based on play by William Shakespeare; Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor; Film Editing: Alastair McIntyre; Production Design: Wilfrid Shingleton; Art Direction: Fred Carter; Set Decoration: Bryan Graves; Music: The Third Ear Band.

Players: Jon Finch, Francesca Annis, Martin Shaw, Terence Bayle, John Stride, Nicholas Selby, Stephan Chase, Paul Shelley.

Synopsis: A ruthlessly ambitious Scottish lord seizes the throne with the help of his scheming wife and a trio of witches in this chilling adaption of William Shakespeare’s play.

Memorable Lines: 

• Jon Finch as Macbeth: False face must hide what false heart doth know.
• Francesca Annis as Lady Macbeth: Things without all remedy should be without regard. What’s done is done.
• Macbeth: Come, seeling night, scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day. And with thy bloody and invisible hand cancel and tear to pieces that great bond which keeps me pale. Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse while night’s black agents to their prey do rouse

Behind the Scenes:

• Director Roman Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by members of Charles Manson’s Family two years before the making of the film. It is believed that due to this traumatic event, Polanski developed the story to be a more violent representation of Shakespeare’s play. For instance, the scene in which Macbeth murders King Duncan was not in the original play and was instead implied.
• The scene in which Macbeth’s thugs massacre Macduff’s household was based on Roman Polanski’s memory of Nazi SS officers ransacking his house as a child.
• Filming began with four grueling weeks in Snowdonia National Park. Richard Vetter’s TODD-AO 35 lenses won an Academy Award for reducing anamorphic distortion in close-ups.

Critics: 

• Polanski’s “Macbeth” is more interesting than if he had done your ordinary, respectable, awe-stricken tiptoe around Shakespeare. This is an original film by an original film artist, and not an “interpretation.” It should have been titled “Polanski’s Macbeth,” just as we got “Fellini Satyricon.” – Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com
• We’ve had remarkable film adaptions of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” in the past with Orson Welle’s “Macbeth”  (1948) and Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood” (1957) which both remained true to their own directorial sensibilities. This is also the case of Polanski’s adaptation where, in many respects, the images are jolted up to an almost hypnotic and hysterical level. Yes, the period detail and violence are profound; as it often was in the Middle Ages – Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• People ask why I do things, this or that film. Why? Why do I eat fish and not steak for lunch? I don’t know why. There are layers of experience, and not only artistic experience. Making a film is separate from life, but it is made by a human being and whatever happens to me has got to have an influence in what I do. A film sums up the experiences of my life. You absorb the experience, you assimilate it and you make a decision. A film sums up everything—whom I see, what I drink, the amount of ice cream I eat. It is everything. Do you understand? Everything. – Roman Polanski, taken from interview with  Bernard Weinraub of the NY Times after the release of Macbeth.

NUMBER 8: Murmur of the Heart (Le souffle au Coeur) 

Director/Writer: Louis Malle; Cinematography: Ricardo Aronovich;  Music: Sidney Bechet, Gaston Frèche, Charlie Parker, Henri Renaud.

Players: Léa Massari, Benoît Ferreux, Daniel Gélin, Michael Lonsdale, Ave Ninchi.

Synopsis: As France is nearing the end of the first Indochina War, an open-minded teenage boy finds himself torn between a rebellious urge to discover love, and the ever-present, almost dominating affection of his beloved mother.

Memorable Lines:

• Léa Massari as Clara Chevalier: I don’t know. Begin at the beginning. Wait to experience things yourself. And there’s plenty of time. I’m not rushing you. Everyone has to discover love for himself. Lots of things can happen between a man and a woman. Better to find out for yourself, not from a book.
• Benoît Ferreux as Laurent Chevalier: I’m tired of the old jazz. Always the same thing.
• Laurent Chevalier: The music store has the new Charlie Parker. Let’s go.

• Louis Malle based many aspects of the protagonist Laurent’s life on his own experiences growing up. This included his love of jazz, curiosity about literature, the “tyranny” of his two older brothers who tried to introduce him to sex, and having a heart murmur.
• While the incest aspects of the story were not autobiographical, Louis Malle did in fact end up sharing a hotel room with his mother as a child while on a trip to treat his heart murmur due to “bizarre” circumstances.
• Malle asserted in interviews that the incest, in particular, is fictional. He claimed that in writing the script, he had no intention to include incest, but ended up doing so as he explored an intense mother-son relationship

Critics: 

• Breaking a taboo, ever so gently, is just part of the magic of this very French take on coming of age. – Stephen Brewer, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• “Murmur of the Heart”  is mellow and smooth… but with the kick of a mule—a funny kick, which sends you out doubled over grinning.- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker.
• The boy is played by a nonactor, Benoit Ferreux, whose puzzlement about growing up, and whose admiration at the possibilities of life, remind us of young Jean-Pierre Leaud in Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows.” The two movies deserve comparison in more ways than one. And yet “Murmur of the Heart” isn’t really about the boy, but the mother. Lea Massari (you may remember her as the girl in “L’Avventura”) is so irrepressible, so irresponsible, so much a girl and not quite an adult, that her performance takes scenes that might have been embarrassing, and makes them simply magical. – Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com

Number 7: Straw Dogs

Director: Sam Peckinpah; Writers: Sam Peckinpah, David Zelag Goodman, based on novel by Gordon M. Williams; Cinematography: John Coquillon; Music: Jerry Fielding; Film Editing: Paul Davies, Tony Lawson, Roger Spottiswood.

Players: Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T.P. McKenna, David Warner.

Synopsis: A young American man and his English wife come to rural England and face increasingly vicious local harassment.

Memorable Lines: 

• Susan George as Amy Sumner: Those straw dogs were practically licking my body outside, so… Dustin Hoffman as David Sumner: I applaud their good taste. Amy Sumner: It’s not funny. David Sumner: We’ll, maybe you should wear a bra.
• David Sumner to brutes: Ok, you’ve had your fun. I’ll give you one more chance, and if you don’t clear out now, there’ll be real trouble. I mean it.
• David Warner as Henry Niles: I don’t know my way home. David Sumner  (last line in film): That’s okay. I don’t either.

Behind the Scenes:

• Sam Peckinpah’s adaptation of the novel drew inspiration from Robert Ardrey’s books, African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, which argued that man was essentially a carnivore who instinctively battled over control of territory.
• Before shooting, Sam Peckinpah instructed Dustin Hoffman and Susan George to live together for two weeks, with co-writer David Zelag Goodman in tow. Some of their interactions during this period were worked into the film’s script.
• In the scene where David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) first enters the local pub, director Sam Peckinpah was unhappy with the other actors’ reaction to this stranger entering their world. Eventually, he decided to do one take where Hoffman entered the scene without his trousers on. He got his reaction, and these are the shots shown in the final film.

Critics: 

• I can think of no other film which screws violence up into so tight a knot of terror that one begins to feel that civilization is crumbling before one’s eyes. – Tom Milne, Sight & Sound 
• Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” is the first American film that is a fascist work of art. The movie follows an American mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) and his wife (Susan George), who become the subject of an escalating series of attacks by a gang of locals; its graphic depiction of rape and murder crystallized the filmmaker’s worldview that humans are instinctively attuned to violence. – Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
• You have to understand, first of all, that the movie ends with maybe 20 minutes of unrestrained bloodletting, during which people are scalded with boiling whisky, have their feet blown off by shotguns, are clubbed to death and (in one case) nearly decapitated by a bear trap. The violence is the movie’s reason for existing; it is the element that is being sold, and in today’s movie market, it should sell well. But does Peckinpah pay his dues before the last 20 minutes? Does he keep us feeling we can trust him? I don’t think so. – Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com

Number 6: The French Connection

Director: William Friedkin; Writing: Ernest Tidyman, based on the book Robin Moore; Cinematography: Owen Roizman; Music: Don Ellis; Editing: Gerald B. Greenberg; Art Direction: Ben Kasazkow. 

Players: Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider, Fernando Rey, Tony Lo Bianco, Marcel Bozzuffi.

Synopsis: A pair of NYC cops in the Narcotics Bureau stumble onto a drug smuggling job with a French connection.

Memorable Lines: 

• Gene Hackman as Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle: All right, Popeye’s here! Get your hands on your heads, get off the bar, and get on the wall!
• ‘Popeye’ Doyle: Did you ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?
• Roy Scheider as Buddy ‘Cloudy’ Russo: Mulderig! You shot Mulderig! (a police detective). ‘Popeye’ Doyle (Ignoring him, last line in film): That son of a bitch is here. I saw him. I’m gonna get him.

Behind the Scenes:

• Cameras and equipment would often freeze during shooting due to near-freezing temperatures during the winter shooting in New York City and Brooklyn.
• According to William Friedkin, the film’s documentary-style realism through hand-held photography, use of real locations and editing style were inspired by the movies, Z (1969) by Costa Gavras, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. (1960).
• The famous shot of the chase is made from a front bumper mount and shows a low-angle point of view shot of the streets racing by. Director of photography Owen Roizman, said that the camera was undercranked to 18 frames per second to enhance the sense of speed. Roizman’s contention is borne out when you see a car at a red light whose muffler is pumping smoke at an accelerated rate. Other shots involved stunt drivers who were supposed to barely miss hitting the speeding car, but due to errors in timing accidental collisions occurred and were left in the final film.

Critics: 

• “The French Connection” answered the question, can Gene Hackman do anything bad? No, some films may not be great, but Hackman, always committed and solid. – Jim Gordon, T-Boy Society of Film & Music.
• The movie is all surface, movement, violence and suspense. Only one of the characters really emerges into three dimensions: Popeye Doyle’s Gene Hackman, a New York narc who is vicious, obsessed and a little mad. The other characters don’t emerge because there’s no time for them to emerge. Things are happening too fast. – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com 
• A hugely successful slam-bang thriller that zaps the audience with noise, speed, and brutality. The movie, about police detectives tracking down a shipment of heroin in New York City, is certainly exciting, but that excitement isn’t necessarily a pleasure. The ominous music keeps tightening the screws and heating things up; the movie is like an aggravated case of New York. It proceeds through chases, pistol-whippings, slashings, murders, snipings, and more chases for close to two hours. This is what’s meant to give you a charge. – Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

Number 5: Death in Venice

Director: Luchino Visconti; Writing: Luchino Visconti, Nicola Badalucco, based on novella by Thomas Mann; Cinematography: Pasqualino De Santis; Film Editing: Ruggero Mastroianni; Art Direction: Ferdinando Scarfiotti; Costume Design: Piero Tosi; Music: Gustav Mahler.

Players: Dirk  Bogarde, Romolo Valli, Björn Andrésen, Silvana Mangano, Marisa Berenson, Mark Burns, Nora Ricci, Carole André, Franco Fabrizi.

Synopsis: In Visconti’s adaptation of the Thomas Mann novella, avant-garde Composer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to a Venetian seaside resort in search of repose after a period of artistic and personal stress. But he finds no peace there, for he soon develops a troubling attraction to an adolescent boy, Tadzio on vacation with his family. The boy embodies an ideal of beauty that Aschenbach has long sought and he becomes infatuated. However, the onset of a deadly pestilence threatens them both physically and represents the corruption that compromises and threatens all ideals.

Memorable Lines: 

• Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach: You cannot reach the spirit with the senses. You cannot. It’s only by complete domination of the senses that you can ever achieve wisdom, truth, and human dignity.
• Gustav von Aschenbach: Madame, will you permit an entire stranger, to serve you with a word of advice and warning, which self-interests prevents others from saying. Go away! Go away, immediately. Don’t delay. Please, I beg you.
• Gustav von Aschenbach: You know sometimes I think that artists are rather like hunters aiming in the dark. They don’t know what their target is, and they don’t know if they’ve hit it. But you can’t expect life to illuminate the target and steady your aim. The creation of beauty and purity is a spiritual act.

Behind the Scenes:

• Second part of Visconti’s German Trilogy, which also included The Damned (1969) and Ludwig. (1973).
• In the Thomas Mann novella, Gustav von Aschenbach is an author, not a composer.
• While Gustav Mahler may have inspired the character of Gustav von Aschenbach, many of the plot points in the novella were inspired by Thomas Mann’s own experience. According to Mann’s widow Katia, the two were vacationing in Venice in 1911, when Mann noticed a beautiful young boy staying at their hotel.

Critics: 

• Lots of self-obsessed pondering on beauty and intellect is set against a soundtrack by Mahler, with moody canals and crumbling palazzi as backdrops. – Stephen Brewer, T-Boy Society of Film & Music.
• While “Death in Venice” is indifferent to the plague (“Asiatic cholera”) as a condition in itself, the film’s intensive focus on its protagonist vividly raises the question of self-isolation. As the sole three-dimensional character, Aschenbach is necessarily solitary; his standoffish personality follows on this structural sequestration: he has to be a loner. Even in flashbacks to more gregarious times with wife and daughter, he is “a man of avoidance,” the “keeper of distances.” The friend who makes these charges gets even blunter: “You are afraid to have direct, honest contact with anything!” D. A. Miller, from My Lockdown with Death in Venice.
• The physical beauty of the film itself is overwhelming. The world of the Lido of sixty years ago has been re-created in painstaking detail. The fashions, the entertainments, the table settings reveal Visconti’s compulsion for accuracy. The photography is almost the first I have seen that is fully worthy of the beauty of Venice; the pink-and-gray city rises from waters of a glasslike smoothness, so that the water and the quality of light itself seem to suggest the presence of the plague-bearing sirocco wind. The wind brings both plague and beauty, which is its function in the Mann novel, and Visconti’s mastery of visual style almost succeeds in creating the very ideas and feelings that his heavy-handed narrative entirely misses. – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com

Number 4: Dirty Harry

Director: Don Siegel; Writing: Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink and Dean Riesner, based on story by Harry Julian Fink & Rita M. Fink; Cinematography: Bruce Surtees; Music: Lalo Schifrin; Film Editing: Carl Pingitore; Art Direction: Dale Hennesy; Makeup Department: Gordon Bau.

Players: Clint Eastwood, Andrew Robinson, Harry Guardino, Reni Santoni, John Vernon.

Synopsis:When a madman calling himself the Scorpio Killer menaces the city, tough-as-nails San Francisco Police  Inspector Dirty Harry Callahan is assigned to track down and find the crazed psychopath.

Memorable Lines: 

• Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan: Now you know why they call me “Dirty Harry”…
  every dirty job that comes along.
• Harry Callahan: Uh uh. I know what you’re thinking. “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk??
• Harry Callahan: You know, you’re crazy if you think you’ve heard the last of this guy. He’s gonna kill again. Josef Sommer as District Attorney Rothko: How do you know? Harry Callahan: ‘Cause he likes it.

Behind the Scenes:

• Serial killer Scorpio was loosely based on the Zodiac Killer, who used to taunt Police and media with notes about his crimes, in one of which he threatened to hijack a school bus full of children. The role of Harry Callahan was loosely based on real-life detective David Toschi, who was the chief investigator on the Zodiac case.
• Before each of Harry’s three combative encounters with the Scorpio Killer, there is a cross and or a reference to Christ. The Scorpio Killer (Andrew Robinson ) wears a belt with a peace symbol buckle throughout the movie. According to producer and director Don Siegel, It reminds us that no matter how vicious a person is, when he looks in the mirror, he is still blind to what he truly is.
• Don Siegel ultimately directed Clint Eastwood in five films, and also appeared as an actor in Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty for Me (also released in 1971).

Critics: 

• Eastwood as the definite Siegel outsider struggling against the system. – Dan King, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• Dirty Harry” is very effective at the level of a thriller. At another level, it uses the most potent star presence in American movies — Clint Eastwood — to lay things on the line. If there aren’t mentalities like Dirty Harry’s at loose in the land, then the movie is irrelevant. If there are, we should not blame the bearer of the bad news. – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com
• Don Siegel’s cop movie was received as a right-wing fantasy on its release in 1971, and it probably made a lot of money on that basis. But now that the political context has faded, it’s easier to see the ambiguities in Clint Eastwood’s renegade detective-who, in the usual Siegel fashion, is equated visually and morally with the psychotic killer he’s trampling the Constitution to catch. A crisp, beautifully paced film, full of Siegel’s wonderful coups of cutting and framing.- David Kehr, Chicago Reader

Number 3: Just Before Nightfall (Juste avant la nuit)

Director: Claude Chabrol; Writing: Claude Chabrol; based on Edouard Atiya’s crime novel, The Thin Line, later issued as Murder, My Love. Cinematography: Jean Rabier; Music: Pierre Jansen; Film Editing: Jacques Gaillard.

Players: Michel Bouquet, Stéphane Audran, Marina Ninchi , François Périer, Jean Carmet.

Synopsis: Charles Masson, an upper-class French advertising executive, is having an affair with Laura, the wife of his best friend. Charles strangles Laura when one of their S&M games crosses the line and she dies. Though reeking in remorse, Charles realizes that the police do not seem to have any clues about the crime, but has difficulties coping with the situation, trying to live a normal life with his two children and loving wife. Just Before Nightfall is another Chabrol film that focuses on infidelity and again it’s an intriguing drama and an excellent exploration of the human condition.

Memorable Lines: 

• Michel Bouquet as Charles: My darling, I’d like you to understand. With you, love is simple and clear. With her it was a sort of…insane drama. She forced me…she made me participate. It wasn’t love, it was violent and humiliating. She wanted me to rape her. She forced me to be brutal to her. That’s what was so horrifying… it was she who tortured me and took pleasure in seeing me suffer.
• Charles: Justice doesn’t spare a guilty man because his family will suffer.
• Charles: I confessed. I unburdened my conscience. And you absolve me. I could have committed suicide. It would have been better for all. But I would’ve been a coward… a coward.

Behind the Scenes:

• This is the last film of Claude Chabrol’s Hélène cycle, in which actress Stéphane Audran starred, playing characters called Hélène in La femme infidèle (1969), Le Boucher (1970), and La Rupture (1970).
• Stéphane Audran appeared in 24 Chabrol films. In 1964 they were married which lasted for 16 years until divorce.
• Claude Chabrol, initially a film critic for Cahiers du Cinema, became one of the cornerstones of the French Nouvelle Vague.

Critics: 

• Former French film critic Claude Chabrol is the ultimate Hitchcockian director, but with a profound Gallic twist. Along with Éric Rohmer, he wrote the very first book about the Master of Suspense: ‘Hitchcock – The First Forty-four Films.’ Like the Beatles and the British Invasion, who taught North Americans about their own music, the French Nouvelle Vague directors made us appreciate our own Hollywood films. Unlike Brian De Palma, Chabrol used his Hitchcockian influences as a starting point to transcend his own style and meaning. And, of course, there is a Hitchcock thing called, ‘Guilt.’ – Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• His (Chabrol’s) characters are the molds from which the French bourgeoisie is cast. They’re terribly respectable, they live in comfortable homes and work in well-paying professions, they present a facade of total respectability. But underneath there are dark passions and well-kept secrets and, frequently, the ultimate embarrassment of murder. They aren’t killers; that’s the whole point. They’re people who commit murder to their own astonishment. – Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com
• One of the great films of the 1970s, this is Chabrol’s most representative film, and arguably his masterpiece. The first moments of the movie, with the camera intruding upon a blinds-drawn window, again invites comparisons with Hitchcock, and the opening shot of “Psycho.” But that tip of the hat only serves to underscore the extent to which Chabrol has moved on, as “Just Before Nightfall” situates us in a fully realized and now plainly recognizable Chabrolian universe. – Jonathan Kirshner, Bright Lights Film Journal

Number 2: A Clockwork Orange

Director: Stanley Kubrick; Writing: Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess dystopian satire novel; Cinematography: John Alcott (lighting cameraman); Film Editing: Bill Butler; Production Design: John Barry; Costume Design: Milena Canonero; Music: Wendy Carlos, electronic music, realized by Walter Carlos.

Players: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates, Warren Clarke.

Synopsis: In the future, a sadistic gang leader is imprisoned and volunteers for a conduct-aversion experiment, but it doesn’t go as planned.

Memorable Lines: 

• McDowell as Alex: There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.
• Alex: It had been a wonderful evening and what I needed now to give it the perfect ending was a bit of the old Ludwig van.
• Alex: So I waited. And O, my brothers, I got a lot better, munching away at eggi-wegs and lomticks of toast and lovely steaki-wakes. And then one day, they said I was going to have a very special visitor.

Behind the Scenes:

• Because of the limited budget, various techniques had to be used such as dolly shots on wheelchairs, sound recorded live on set, the use of natural light and some scenes in handheld cameras. However, at that time the new camera zoom control was first used in the picture.
• Malcolm McDowell’s eyes were anesthetized for the torture scenes so that he would film for periods of time without too much discomfort. Nevertheless, his corneas got repeatedly scratched by the metal lid locks.
• The film was unavailable for public viewing in the UK from 1973 until 2000, due to Kubrick and Burgess death threats. British video stores were so inundated with requests for the movie that some took to putting up signs that read: No, we do not have “A Clockwork Orange” It was released the year after Stanley Kubrick’s death.

Critics: 

• Whereas Altman’s style was loose and free, Kubrick was the new visionary whose attention to detail in every aspect of his film rivaled that of Hitchcock. Where Altman pulled his audiences in with small, nuanced answers, Kubrick pushed his audiences with big bold questions. Kubrick saw a dystopian future where government gaslighted and conditioned the minds of the youth, ironically set to classic works by Beethoven and Purcell. “Clockwork” is a nightmare, but never a horror.  Mike Rand, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• Stanley Kubrick’s ninth film, “A Clockwork Orange,” which has just won the New York Film Critics Award as the best film of 1971, is a brilliant and dangerous work, but it is dangerous in a way that brilliant things sometimes are. -Vincent Canby, New York Times
• “A Clockwork Orange” manifests itself on the screen as a painless, bloodless, and ultimately pointless futuristic fantasy. The first third splashes out of a wide-angle lens like a madly mod picture-spread for Look magazine where Kubrick toiled briefly long, long ago. The middle third provides a moderately engrossing indictment of B. F. Skinnerism in action. But the last third of the movie is such a complete bore that even audiences of confirmed Kubrickians have drowned out smatterings of applause with prolonged hissing. – Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice

Number 1: McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Director: Robert Altman; Writing: Robert Altman and Brian McKay, based on novel McCabe (1959) by Edmund Naughton; Cinematography: Vilmos Zsigmond; Film Editing: Lou Lombardo; Music: Leonard Cohen; Production Design: Leon Ericksen; Art Direction: Al Locatelli, Philip Thomas; Sound Department: John W. Gusselle.

Players: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Rene Auberjonois, William Devane, John Schuck, Corey Fischer, Bert Remsen, Shelley Duvall, Keith Carradine, Michael Murphy, Hugh Millais.

Synopsis: A gambler and a prostitute become business partners in a remote Pacific Northwest mining town in 1902, and their enterprise thrives until a large corporation arrives on the scene.

Memorable Lines: 

• Warren Beatty as John McCabe: I tell you, sometimes, sometimes when I take a look at you, I just keep looking and a-looking. I want to feel your body against me so bad, I think I’m going to bust. I keep trying to tell you in a lot of different ways. If just one time you could be sweet without no money around. I think I could – well, I’ll tell you something. I’ve got poetry in me. I do. I’ve got poetry in me!
• Julie Christie as Constance Miller: Listen, Mr. McCabe. I’m a whore, and I know a awful lot about whorehouses. And I know that if you had a house up here, you’d stand to make a lot of money. Now, this is all you’ve got to do: put out the money for the house. I’ll do all the rest. I’ll look after the girls, the business, the expenses, the running, the furnishing, everything. And I’ll pay you back any money you put in the house, so’s you won’t lose nothin’. And we’ll make it fifty-fifty.
• John McCabe: If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much, follow me?

Behind the Scenes:

• For a distinctive look, Robert Altman and Vilmos Zsigmond chose to “flash” (pre-fog) the film negative before its eventual exposure, as well as use a number of filters on the cameras, rather than manipulate the film in post-production; in this way the studio could not force him to change the film’s look to something less compelling. However, this was not done for the final 20 minutes of the picture, as Altman wanted the danger to McCabe to be as realistic as possible. Note the change when McCabe wakes up, grabs a shotgun, and starts off to the church.
• Though the film takes place in the fictional town of Presbyterian, Washington State, it was actually shot outside of Vancouver, BC.
• During post-production, Altman was having difficulties finding a proper musical score, until he attended a party where the album Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) was playing. He noticed that several songs from the album seemed to match the mood and themes of the movie. Cohen, who had been a fan of Altman’s previous film, Brewster McCloud (1970), allowed him to use three songs from the album: The Stranger Song – which Cohen added a bridge – Sisters of Mercy and Winter Lady. Altman was dismayed when Cohen later admitted that he didn’t like the movie. A year later, Altman received a phone call from Cohen, who told him that he changed his mind after re-watching the movie with an audience and now loved it.

Critics: 

• A rich kaleidoscope of landscape, rain and smoke; a family of regular Altman players speaking in overlapping sound, accompanied by the haunting music of Leonard Cohen makes “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” feel like an opium induced dream.- Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• Altman’s cool, loose style lets his camera lens roam in and out of the lives of his characters while his soundtrack captures every little nuance in the social landscape of the Pacific Northwest during the end of the Old West. Altman’s melting pot of sights and sounds is every bit as American as Ozu’s Tatami- style camera setup is Japanese. Without the flash of Scorsese or the drama of Coppola, Altman carved his footprints into America’s modern cinematic landscape. – Michael Rand, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• Less Altman’s take on the Wild West than life in an isolated Wild West community. – Dan King, T-Boy Society of Film & Music

See The 20 Best Films of 1971, Part One 

If you have a favorite film from 1971 and it’s not listed above, you can access it on IMDB’s  Feature Films released between January 1, 1971 through December 31, 1971. (Sorted by Popularity Ascending)
Send us your own list, at ad*@Tr**********.com and we will publish it in our Readers’ Poll.

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Humble Beginnings

Before anything else, I really want to thank many of you who bought Tom the Mouse last week. I hope you enjoyed it. When I shared the book with my grand kids last Friday, we had so much fun. They laughed at the word “Ewww!” and mimicked animal sounds. The 2 boys were so competitive searching for the hidden images that I had a hard time finishing the story. They really loved it and I had to read it over a few times. It’s a good thing it isn’t a thick book. They still haven’t found all the hidden names and pictures. CLICK HERE and help make the book a success! They can’t wait for the next book. Next book? Is this the humble beginning of something big?

Let’s talk about humble beginnings. You know you live in Los Angeles when you have colorful breakfast friends like A.D.. A.D. is a bald Egyptian marketing executive/violinist. Every time I see him I think of Jennifer Lopez. No, he doesn’t look like J.Lo. He just reminds me of his compelling narrative concerning J.Lo’s humble beginning. He met her when he was having dinner with a movie executive in a Mexican restaurant in New York. Jennifer was a part time waitress, dancer, singer and actress who caught their eye. His friend asked Jennifer to audition for an upcoming movie and handed her a $100 bill to buy an appropriate dress. Jennifer cried with joy because she needed to buy a dress for a family gathering. She was so poor she didn’t own a car and took the subway. That encounter led to J.Lo’s big break starring as the lead role in the movie Selena.

Somewhere in A.D.’s yarn, he told me of his brother-in-law who did charity dental work on certain days of the week. Mr. and Mrs. Lopez were an elderly couple who availed of the charity work. The dentist didn’t realize they were the parents of J.Lo. One day he received an invitation to a Pasadena restaurant for a family event by the Lopezes. A.D.came along. They didn’t know it was a celebrity event. They were picked up by a limo and they sat beside a familiar face. “Excuse me sir,” A.D. said, “but you look like Clint Eastwood.” Of course, it turned out to BE Clint and his family. He also met J.Lo’s (then) fiance — Ben Afleck. Later, A.D.’s bro-in-law became J.Lo’s dentist. She had 4 sessions of teeth whitening that cost her $4k a pop. Sadly, diva rumors abound that fame has gotten to J.Lo’s head. Despite her success there is a sadness that has follwed her. I think she’s with husband No.5 … but who’s counting?

Yesterday I heard a sermon from a local pastor whose sister-in-law was a flight stewardess in TWA. Barbara Streisand and her entourage boarded the first class section one day. The stewardess approached Miss Streisand and asked if she cared for anything to drink. Barbara didn’t acknowledge her presence and glanced outside the window. One of her aids rushed to Barbara’s rescue and reprimanded the stewardess: “No one is supposed to talk to Miss Streisand.”  This incident corroborates a similar story about her and other actors from my bro-in-law who once was a standby fireman in charge of fire safety during movie shootings with pyrotechnics. It’s so sad that when many reach a certain level in society, many somehow transform into total jerks.

Where do YOU stand in society? Up there with the people who “made it?” or are you among the “wanna-bes?” Rich or poor,  you can still be a jerk.

Are you of humble beginnings?
Are you of lofty pasts?
Either way, you have a choice
to show compassion
or to be an #ss.

TGIF people!

“Listen, my dear brothers and sisters: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?”

— James 2:5

Joke of the week

Pet Shop Incident

Shared by Greg of Diamond Bar, CA

Videos of the week

Pasta-Eating Contest
Sent by Tom of Pasadena, CA

This is no ordinary pasta-eating contest. It’s a battle between a man and his dog. It’s not important who won but how the contest was played.

WATCH VIDEO

Coach Lou Holtz’s Inspirational Speech
Sent by Heather of Whittier, CA

Lou said he was born with a silver spoon but it isn’t what you think. Quite an entertainer, this coach. Words of wisdom delivered with conviction and heart.

WATCH VIDEO

Don’s Puns

From Don’s collection of puns

Parting Shot

Thanks to Don of Kelowna, B.C. who shared this photo

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