Favorite Articles/Essays On Films??

Before I forget the idea, I wanted to put it out there. I also have to find it - I had something interesting written by Pauline Kael.

Any kind of document that talks about movies... Actually I have another one, Ray Carney on why movies aren't good anymore, and he has a lot of contacts with independent and mainstream filmmakers (John Cassavetes and Sidney Lumet).

I'll just paste it, and I'll put down the URL below.
http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/indievision/other.shtml


Why are Hollywood movies so bad? The best way to answer the question is simply to take you behind the scenes on a quick cook's tour of how movies are really made. I warn you. It's not a pretty picture.
The first thing you never want to forget about the movies in that–first , last and always–they are business deals put together to make a quick buck. To say the obvious, the goal is to take $7.50 out of as many pockets as possible. Everything is directed to that interest.
There was an interview in the last Saturday's Globe with Sydney Lumet that more or less sums up the current state of the art.
Lumet's comments are all the more telling in that they don't come from some wild-eyed radical, but from the ultimate Hollywood insider. Lumet has been making successful, money-making Hollywood movies for more than 40 years.
On the other hand, of course a Stalin movie would never really be made precisely because it would be controversial and would alienate blocks of viewers, and jeopardize profits.
What Hollywood is in favor of is not controversy, but pseudo-controversy. On the one hand, you want people to think that your movie is really new and different and controversial; but on the other, you don't want to actually create a disturbance. You don't want to force viewers really to have to think or to learn something. If you are dealing with politics in particular, the formula involves taking a topical issue–Watergate, Vietnam, the Holocaust–but making sure that it is situated at a certain distance from the average viewer's experience or knowledge.
Hollywood movies take our common-sense understandings and sell them back to us, with a slight change of clothes. It's a little like one of those MacDonald's Happy Meal promotions. You add a new spice or condiment or action figure to deep people's interest, but basically you give them the same fast food over and over again.
In terms of the production of these films, timidity is built into the system at every level. Movies originate as "deals"–business arrangements hashed out between producers, directors, writers, and a group of stars, in which the movie itself becomes an almost incidental after-thought: The real goal of each of the parties is to protect his or her financial interest, and to maximize the final product's "bankability."
In the service of doing that, the overriding goal is to secure a name star at any cost. When I talk to beginning directors, it's usually the first story they tell me: How they took their first script to a studio–sometimes a marvelous script–and were told the project could only get a green light if a particular "name" actor plays the lead–if Johnny Depp or Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise can be persuaded to do it–no matter how ludicrously inappropriate that particular choice might be for the role.
Then once a real "star" signs on to a production, the dynamics of the deal allow the star to demand as many rewrites as he or she wants until they are happy with the script.
I interviewed a director a few years ago who told an all too typical story that summarizes the situation. He had written a serious treatment of Black-White race relations in the fifties in the Deep South, and approached a studio to get it financed. To protect their interest, they said they would only take it on if Whoopi Goldberg played the lead. He thought that was the end of it, and that the film would never be made: Not only was she wildly inappropriate for the part, but he figured she would never agree to it. Well, for whatever reason, she did sign onto it. He thought he had died and gone to heaven. The only problem was that a few weeks before the shooting began she insisted that all of her scenes be rewritten. Seems she thought her character was too hard. It would ruin her image. She wanted her role made sweeter. Since she was a condition of the financing, of course he had to agree. I don't need to tell you the end of the story. One more sentimental Hollywood movie.
Even after a studio film has been scripted, cast, and shot, it's not immune from further mutilation. Virtually every Hollywood movie is audience-tested before it is released. If the preview audiences don't respond loudly and obviously enough, the film is reshot and re-edited until they do. As an example, Fatal Attraction actually had a fairly nuanced ending when it was first shot, but after audience testing, the ending was rewritten and re-filmed so that the Glen Close character was murdered in a horror movie gore fest.
In short, the goal is to make sure that the audience never has to work very hard, or be seriously challenged in any way. A movie you have to think about for a few day; or one you have to go back a see again to understand flunks the preview test by definition. That's why most Hollywood movies end up having morality-play plots, characters who can be divided into good or bad guys, and slam-bang happy endings where justice triumphs and all the problems are solved in the final five minutes.
These movies are the best roller-coaster rides ever made. You strap yourself into them. You undergo a few thrills and chills, a fake scare or two. And then it's all over and everything is OK again. You leave the theater no different from the way you went in.
* * *
Let me go on to the second point. If the movies are as bad as I am saying, and at least the people I talk to seem to agree that they are pretty awful, why is it so hard for non-Hollywood movies, the other movies, to get screened and known?
Going behind the scenes a little can perhaps help to explain why the alternative filmmaker is left out of the picture. You have to start with the fact that 99 percent of the movie houses in America are part of enormous theater chains. Sony, for example, owns and operates more than 700 screens in New England alone, and approximately 2000 screens from coast to coast.
One office rents and programs all of the movies for the entire chain. In the case of the Sony theaters, all of the movies for those 700 New England and 2000 national screens–are picked by three people in Secaucus, New Jersey. Do the results surprise you?
I want you to think about the job of those three programmers for a minute. I know the people who do this particular job. They're not bad folks. Their intentions are good. But what they need more than anything else is a steady, dependable stream of movies every week of the year. The basic fact of their existence is that they have to have something showing on a couple thousand otherwise blank screens every hour from noon to midnight, every day of the week. Those screens are like having a monster chained in your basement. You constantly need to feed it–to fill its maw–or it will destroy you. It takes an enormous number of films and prints to keep the whole thing going. Given this situation, is it any surprise that Sony and every other theater chain has a working relationship with certain major studios in which they play almost everything the studio releases? It's like General Motors establishing a relationship with a dependable parts supplier, or IBM having one with a chip maker.
Both the economics and the logistics of filling 2000 or more screens simultaneously leave the shoestring independent–the artist–out in the cold. In the first place, he or she simply can't afford to supply prints in the quantity required. Secondly, if an independent film doesn't have name stars and a major advertising campaign behind it, the theater chain programmer won't even risk playing it, since people won't come to a movie they haven't seen ads for or that doesn't have a big star in it. The independent filmmaker simply can't afford the advertising against the studios. A major studio release budgets between five and thirty million dollars for advertising alone; that's ten to a hundred times the entire budget of most alternative productions. The disproportion of economic resources is pretty stark. The entire budget of many alternative productions is what the studios spend on a single page ad in the Sunday New York Times.
Now the one way for the alternative filmmaker to break out of this vicious circle of neglect is to garner a rave review from a major critic at a major publication like Time Magazine or The New York Times. A review is the one available form of publicity that is free. And once in a while that happens. Janet Maslin–now–or Vincent Canby five or ten years ago could change film history with a single review. Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee are examples of filmmakers who probably wouldn't be known today if Vincent Canby hadn't championed their first movies. The only problem is that this happens very rarely. In fact the opposite usually happens. Rather than bucking the tide and championing an alternative to Hollywood, most reviewers generally function as extensions of the studio publicity machinery.
There are many reasons why this is so, and I don't have time to go into them, but I simply want to mention two of the more troubling aspects of the relationship between film reviewers and Hollywood studios.
First, it's not a generally known fact that most of the leading film magazines are actually owned by the same people who own the Hollywood studios.
The second, even less known fact, is that most of what you read about films in most newspapers and magazines has, to some extent, been paid for by the studios–in the form of junkets provided to journalists. Each of the studios flies cadres of reviewers to New York or Los Angeles every week. They put them up in fancy hotels, pay for their meals, their bar tabs, and their other expenses–and arrange the interviews with the director and stars that you read in the newspaper or magazine. I would think it would be a clear journalistic conflict of interest to accept ongoing gifts and privileges from people you are supposed to be reporting on, but I have yet to see a single newspaper mention the film junkets in print.
* * *
There is much more to say about the potentially incestuous relationship of critics and Hollywood movies. But this is getting just too depressing. Even if I am in a church I don't want to sound too much like Jeremiah. So I want to conclude on a positive note, and suggest that there are wonderful alternative to Hollywood. Over the course of the past 30 years there have been many absolutely terrific film made. They just don't make it into the theater and the newspapers. But there are ways to see and celebrate the achievement of alternative films. Let me suggest four things you can do/not only see these movies, but to help make more of them possible. I list the steps in order of importance from more important to less:
In the first place, patronize independent movie theaters. There are a few movie theaters that are not part of chains, and they are almost the only places you can see non-mainstream movies. In Boston, the two most important independent commercial theaters are the Coolidge Corner in Brookline and the Brattle in Harvard Square. The Nickelodeon used to be good, but Sony bought it and that was the end of that. Loew's bought it back, but the damage had been done. It's now strictly a "fake indie" theatre. There are also two Boston non-commercial screening facilities that I highly recommend: Remis Auditorium at the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge.
There are some clunkers that play at all four of these locations, of course; but generally speaking, anything screening at The Coolidge Corner, the Brattle the MFA, or the Harvard Film Archive is probably better than anything else playing at any of the hundred chain-run movie theaters at the same time.
Second, if you want to give alternative work a try, go to a well-stocked video store (if you live in Boston, Videosmith is excellent), and do something directly the opposite of what most viewers do: Check out a recent movie you haven't heard anything about.
Be a market contrarian: if it stars Meryl Streep or Jack Nicholson don't rent it. Ever. If there are twenty copies of it on the shelf, walk past it. If there was a saturation ad campaign for it six months before, skip it. If it has a babe, a gun, or an exploding helicopter on the box, avoid it. Don't believe the hype. Every studio picture is packaged and pitched to make you feel you are not really alive unless you have seen it. It's a lie. You're only really alive, if you are not wasting your time on it. If you are doing something else.
On the other hand, if it is by a director you've never heard of, with unknown actors, a no-name releasing company, and has an unfamiliar title–it could be awful, but at least there's a chance it might be great.
(I'll give you another inside tip: one thing I look for is whether the director also wrote the movie–if the Beatles and Rolling Stones can write their own songs, a film artist should not have to hire a writer to make a movie.)
I've included a starter list of my own favorites on the sheet I distributed.
By the way, if you don't have a well-stocked video store down the street, you still have a chance to rent excellent videos. There are two video companies that rent non-Hollywood, alternative films by mail–for a small membership fee and a modest mailing charge. I highly recommend them (and guarantee that they haven't flown me around the country and put me up in a hotel to make me say it). They are called Facets and Home Film Festival, and their numbers are listed on the second page of the sheets you have. I have their catalogues here.
Third, whenever possible, cruise the Bravo networks if your cable system offers them. Bravo runs some real gems–many of which aren't available on video. It's almost axiomatic that nothing of real interest is going to appear on HBO, Showtime, The Movie Channel, of Cinemax, not to mention the networks or PBS.
Finally, if you want a book to guide your viewing, I'd recommend you be a contrarian in that too–stay away from the old standbys–especially Leonard Maltin's TV Movies, the one that everyone seems to buy. Most of the standard film indexes and encyclopedias don't even list the sort of movies I am recommending. But one book does. It is called: The TimeOut Guide to Film. (It's a British publication–doesn't that figure?) I highly recommend it.
Now, in good conscience, I want to end by issuing a consumer warning. As I've already said, the "other movies" are not Happy Meals or roller-coaster rides or feel-good entertainments. They are works of art, which means that they can be strange and off-putting if you are not ready for them. I can't guarantee that you will be pleased by every one of them. But they will make you think and feel in new ways. They will take you places that Hollywood movies don't ever dare to go.
But, for me at least, that's the fun of getting off the beaten path. While Hollywood offers formulas; these films are real adventures.

THE BEST INDEPENDENT FILMS YOU NEVER HEARD OF
(a beginner's guide to English-language films, any one of which is more important than Spike Lee's, Oliver Stone's, Steven Spielberg's, Joel and Ethan Coen's, and Quentin Tarantino's complete work)

Basic training:
Vince Gallo, Buffalo 66
Tom Noonan, What Happened Was, The Wife (Noonan is the greatest living American director)
Ken Loach, Raining Stones
Su Friedrich, Sink or Swim, Rules of the Road
Gillian Armstrong, My Brilliant Career, The Last Days of Chez Nous
Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep, To Sleep with Anger
Caveh Zahedi, A Little Stiff
Mike Leigh, Abigail's Party, High Hopes, Life is Sweet, The Short and Curlies
Sean Penn, Indian Runner
John Korty, The Crazy Quilt, Funnyman, Riverrun
Shirley Clarke, Portrait of Jason
Les Blair, Bad Behavior
Alison Anders, Gas, Food, Lodging
Elaine May, The Heartbreak Kid, Mikey and Nicky
John Cassavetes, Shadows, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence
Jane Spencer, Little Noises
Claudia Weill, Girlfriends
Harry Hook, The Kitchen Toto
Michael Almareyda, Another Girl, Another Planet, The Rocking Horse Winner, Sundance
Milton Moses Ginsberg, Coming Apart
Jim Jarmusch, Stranger than Paradise, Mystery Train

Strictly for the more daring:
Bruce Conner, Marilyn Times Five, Report, A Movie, The Rose
Todd Haynes, Safe, Superstar
Edmund Elias Merhige, Begotten
David Blair, Wax, The Discovery of Television Among the Bees
Mark Rappaport, The Scenic Route, Local Color
Alan Clarke, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, or anything else you can get by him
John Cassavetes, Faces, Husbands, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night, Love Streams
Michael Almereyda, Twister, Another Girl, Another Planet
Jon Jost, Bell Diamond, Last Chants for a Slow Dance
Mike Leigh, Bleak Moments, Meantime, Grown Ups, Kiss of Death, Hard Labor
Robert Kramer, Ice, Milestones, Route One, Starting Point
Barbara Loden, Wanda
Paul Morrissey, Trash, Flesh
Rick Schmidt, Morgan's Cake
Michael Radford, Another Time, Another Place
Richard Lowenstein, Dogs in Space
Thomas Vinterberg, The Celebration
Lars von Trier, Breaking the Waves

It would be nice if the article would also champion indie action movies.

Do you know of any?

Sinners & Saints, Undisputed movies, Blue Ruin, The Prodigy, Ninja movies with Scott Adkins... etc.

Do you know of any articles or essays?

I don't know if you looked at the bottom, but Carney had a lot of independent movies.

These are my two favorite books on Film Theory/Analysis:

The Gangster Film Reader

Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film

Actually, just got finished reading an article from the AV club on how Chicago became the cultural crime capitol of the country.

The crew at Birth.Movies.Death. come out with some good essays as well.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/s...rick-cinephile

Early days

Young Kubrick, in addition to his other great love at the time – chess, which he played daily – “assiduously attended screenings at the Museum of Modern Art”, in the words of Michel Ciment. Here he saw the great films of the silent era, amongst others. His high-school friend and early collaborator Alex Singer particularly remembers them both going to see Alexander Nevsky (1938) – because immediately afterwards Kubrick bought an LP of the Prokofiev score and played it continuously, until he drove his younger sister so crazy she smashed the LP on his head.
In 1987, Kubrick touched on this period of his life in a newspaper interview:

“My sort of fantasy image of movies was created in the Museum of Modern Art, when I looked at Stroheim and D.W. Griffith and Eisenstein. I was starstruck by these fantastic movies. I was never starstruck in the sense of saying, ‘Gee, I’m going to go to Hollywood and make $5,000 a week and live in a great place and have a sports car’. I really was in love with movies. I used to see everything at the RKO in Loew’s circuit, but I remember thinking at the time that I didn’t know anything about movies, but I’d seen so many movies that were bad, I thought, ‘Even though I don’t know anything, I can’t believe I can’t make a movie at least as good as this’. And that’s why I started, why I tried.”
— Interviewed by Lloyd Grove, Washington Post, June 28th 1987

The first and only (as far as we know) Top 10 list Kubrick submitted to anyone was in 1963 to a fledgling American magazine named Cinema (which had been founded the previous year and ceased publication in 1976). Here’s that list:



1. I Vitelloni (Fellini, 1953)
2. Wild Strawberries (Bergman, 1957)
3. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
4. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Huston, 1948)
5. City Lights (Chaplin, 1931)
6. Henry V (Olivier, 1944)
7. La notte (Antonioni, 1961)
8. The Bank Dick (Fields, 1940)
9. Roxie Hart (Wellman, 1942)
10. Hell’s Angels (Hughes, 1930)
As Harlan told me: “Stanley would have seriously revised this 1963 list in later years, though Wild Strawberries, Citizen Kane and City Lights would remain, but he liked Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V much better than the old and old-fashioned Olivier version.” (It’s interesting to note just how many formidable filmmakers have included City Lights in their lists of favourite films: Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Bresson, Milos Forman, Kubrick, David Lean, Carol Reed, Andrei Tarkovsky, King Vidor, and Orson Welles all have.)

Michel Ciment has pointed out that Max Ophuls and Elia Kazan are notably absent from Kubrick’s 1963 Top 10. In an early interview with Cahiers du cinéma in 1957, Kubrick said:

“Highest of all I would rate Max Ophuls, who for me possessed every possible quality. He has an exceptional flair for sniffing out good subjects, and he got the most out of them. He was also a marvellous director of actors.”

Also in 1957, Kubrick considered Kazan:

“…without question the best director we have in America. And he’s capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses.”

In the 1960s, Kubrick said:

“I believe Bergman, De Sica and Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the world who are not just artistic opportunists. By this I mean they don’t just sit and wait for a good story to come along and then make it. They have a point of view which is expressed over and over and over again in their films, and they themselves write or have original material written for them.”

Another rare comment, this time from 1966:

“There are very few directors, about whom you’d say you automatically have to see everything they do. I’d put Fellini, Bergman and David Lean at the head of my first list, and Truffaut at the head of the next level.”

Kubrick rarely discussed in public his thoughts on other filmmakers, so the few times he did are worth repeating. On Chaplin:

“If something is really happening on the screen, it isn’t crucial how it’s shot. Chaplin had such a simple cinematic style that it was almost like I Love Lucy, but you were always hypnotised by what was going on, unaware of the essentially non-cinematic style. He frequently used cheap sets, routine lighting and so forth, but he made great films. His films will probably last longer than anyone else’s.”

On Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927):

“I know that the film is a masterpiece of cinematic invention and it brought cinematic innovations to the screen which are still being called innovations whenever someone is bold enough to try them again. But on the other hand, as a film about Napoleon, I have to say I’ve always been disappointed in it.”

On two actors he admired:
The Blue Angel (1930)

“When you think of the greatest moments of film, I think you are almost always involved with images rather than scenes, and certainly never dialogue. The thing a film does best is to use pictures with music and I think these are the moments you remember. Another thing is the way an actor did something: the way Emil Jannings took out his handkerchief and blew his nose in The Blue Angel, or those marvellous slow turns that Nikolay Cherkasov did in Ivan the Terrible.”
— all from an interview with Philip Strick and Penelope Houston in Sight & Sound, Spring 1972

And on unexpected inspiration:

“Some of the most spectacular examples of film art are in the best TV commercials.”
— Kubrick, Rolling Stone, 1987

The only other authoritative list of films Kubrick admired appeared in September 1999 on the alt.movies.kubrick Usenet newsgroup courtesy of his daughter Katharina Kubrick-Hobbs, introduced with her premonitory words:

“There does seem to be a weird desire from people to ‘list’ things. The best, the worst, greatest, most boring, etc. etc… Don’t go analysing yourself to death over this half-remembered list. He liked movies on their own terms… For the record, I happen to know that he liked:

• Closely Observed Trains (Menzel, 1966)
• An American Werewolf in London (Landis, 1981)
• The Fireman’s Ball (Forman, 1967)
• Metropolis (Lang, 1927)
• The Spirit of the Beehive (Erice, 1973)
• White Men Can’t Jump (Shelton, 1992)
• La Belle et la Bête (Cocteau, 1946)
• The Godfather (Coppola, 1972)
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)
• Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet, 1975)
• One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Forman, 1975)
• Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
• Abigail’s Party (Leigh, 1977)
• The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991)

and I know that he hated The Wizard of Oz. Ha Ha!”

In late 2012, a user-generated list appeared at the website of the esteemed American Blu-ray and DVD label The Criterion Collection and promptly shot around the internet, eventually forming the basis of a number of poorly written articles wrongly believing that Criterion themselves had compiled the list. The list in question, compiled by Criterion fan Joshua Warren, combined the two above lists of Stanley’s favourite films that are known to exist (the 1963 Cinema Top 10 and Katharina’s list), along with a smattering of other interesting titles – but the main list only contained titles that had been released by Criterion on disc.
The purpose of this article is to attempt to compile an exhaustive chronological Master List of every film Kubrick is known to have expressed admiration for in some way. Hopefully this will lead to even more stories coming to light. I aim to keep it up to date.
The Master List, 1921-1998

“Stanley was generally very disappointed with commercial cinema… that it could have been so much more… budgets that were squandered on silly stories.”
— Anthony Frewin, assistant to Kubrick (1965-69 and 1979-99), in 2012

The Phantom Carriage

Victor Sjöström, 1921

Metropolis

Fritz Lang, 1927

Frewin: “We spoke about this whilst working on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley thought it was ‘silly’ and even ‘childish’ and couldn’t quite understand why it was held in such high regard.”[Nevertheless, it appeared on Katharina Kubrick-Hobbs’ list of films her father liked.]

Hell’s Angels

Howard Hughes, 1930

Harlan: “I realise it’s on this 1963 list, but strangely, he never mentioned Hell’s Angels to me when we played the forever changing Desert Island Discs game with films.”

The Blue Angel

Josef von Sternberg, 1930

Harlan: “A must.”

City Lights

Charles Chaplin, 1931

The Bank Dick

W.C. Fields, 1940
Citizen Kane

Orson Welles, 1941
Roxie Hart

William Wellman, 1942
Henry V

Laurence Olivier, 1944
Les Enfants du Paradis

Marcel Carné, 1945
La Belle et la Bête


Jean Cocteau, 1946
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

John Huston, 1947
La Kermesse Héroïque

Jacques Feyder, 1935
Kubrick mentioned enjoying seeing it at MoMA and referred to it as “a very nice film” in an interview with Renaud Walter in Positif, issues 100 and 101, December 1968 and January 1969.
Pacific 231

Jean Mitry, 1949

Frewin: “Stanley said Pacific 231 was one of the most perfectly edited, if not the most perfectly edited films, he had ever seen. Not only that but also the way Mitry melded the cutting with Honegger’s music. He thought it was a knockout.
“I’d seen the film just before going to work for Stanley and was always going on about it. He wanted to see it and I borrowed a 16mm print from the BFI.”

Rashomon

Akira Kurosawa, 1950
See the entry for Seven Samurai (1954).
La Ronde / Le Plaisir / Madame de…

Max Ophuls, 1950 / 51 / 53

Harlan: “La Ronde, yes – he was a real Arthur Schnitzler fan. Madame de… with Danielle Darrieux – Stanley loved it.”

Miss Julie

Alf Sjöberg, 1951

Kubrick: “I have a very vivid memory of Miss Julie, which was directed in an extremely remarkable fashion.”
— interviewed by Raymond Haine, Cahiers du cinéma, July 1957

Édouard et Caroline

Jacques Becker, 1951

Kubrick: “They say Becker makes minor films, but Édouard et Caroline is nevertheless a ravishing thing.”
— interviewed by Raymond Haine, Cahiers du cinéma, July 1957

Casque d’Or

Jacques Becker, 1952

Kubrick: “I very much like Jacques Becker. His reputation for lightness has not stopped him from making an excellent dramatic film in Casque d’Or, which I saw many times.”
— interviewed by Raymond Haine, Cahiers du cinéma, July 1957

I Vitelloni

Federico Fellini, 1953
La Strada

Federico Fellini, 1954
Speaking in 1957, Kubrick said:

“I know only La Strada [of Fellini’s films] but that is amply sufficient to see in him the most interesting poetic personality of the Italian cinema.”
— interviewed by Raymond Haine, Cahiers du cinéma, July 1957

Seven Samurai

Akira Kurosawa, 1954

Frewin: “What struck me immediately while looking through this ‘Master List’ was the conspicuous absence of Akira Kurosawa. Stanley thought Kurosawa was one of the great film directors and followed him closely. In fact I cannot think of any other director he spoke so consistently and admiringly about. So, if Kubrick was cast away on a desert island and could only take a few films, what would they be? My money would be on The Battle of Algiers, Danton, Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood…
“Talking of Kurosawa, a poignant tale: Stanley received a fan letter from Kurosawa in the late 1990s and was so touched by it. It meant more to him than any Oscar would. He agonised over how to reply, wrote innumerable drafts, but somehow couldn’t quite get the tenor and tone right. Weeks went by, and then months, still agonising. Then he decided enough was enough, the reply had to go, and before the letter was sent Kurosawa died. Stanley was deeply upset.”

Smiles of a Summer Night

Ingmar Bergman, 1955

Kubrick: “The filmmaker I admire the most after Max Ophuls is without a doubt Ingmar Bergman, whose every film I’ve seen. I like enormously Smiles of a Summer Night”
— interviewed by Raymond Haine, Cahiers du cinéma, July 1957

Frewin: “Bergman’s star waned with Kubrick from the early 1960s onwards.”

Bob le flambeur

Closely Observed Trains (1966)



Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956

“The perfect crime film”
— Stanley Kubrick

Wild Strawberries

Ingmar Bergman, 1957
Throne of Blood

Akira Kurosawa, 1957
See the entry for Seven Samurai (1954).
La notte

Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961
Very Nice, Very Nice

Arthur Lipsett, 1961
[Kubrick reportedly asked Arthur Lipsett to create a trailer for Dr. Strangelove, but he declined. The designer of the film’s opening titles, Pablo Ferro, eventually cut the finished trailer and it is very much in the style of Lipsett’s work in Very Nice, Very Nice.]
Mary Poppins

Robert Stevenson, 1964

Kubrick: “I saw Mary Poppins three times, because of my children, and I like Julie Andrews so much that I enjoyed seeing it three times. I thought it was a charming film. I wouldn’t want to make it, but…
“Children’s films are an area that should not just be left to the Disney Studios, who I don’t think really make very good children’s films. I’m talking about his cartoon features, which always seemed to me to have shocking and brutal elements in them that really upset children. I could never understand why they were thought to be so suitable. When Bambi’s mother dies this has got to be one of the most traumatic experiences a five-year-old could encounter.
“I think that there should be censorship for children on films of violence. I mean, if I didn’t know what Psycho was, and my children went to see it when they were six or seven, thinking they were going to see a mystery story, I would have been very angry, and I think they’d have been terribly upset. I don’t see how this would interfere with freedom of artistic expression. If films are overly violent or shocking, children under 12 should not be allowed to see them. I think that would be a very useful form of censorship.”
— interviewed by Charlie Kohler in The East Village Eye, 1968, a few days after 2001: A Space Odyssey opened

The Siege of Manchester

Herbert Wise, 1965. Shot on film, made for BBC TV’s Theatre 625 (series 3, episode 8)
Kubrick saw parts of it during its initial (and only?) TV broadcast and the day after asked Herbert Wise whether he could bring the actual film reels to his house. Kubrick watched it all and asked Wise how he achieved the performances. View this interview with Wise where he recounts the story.
The Battle of Algiers

Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966

Kubrick: “All films are, in a sense, false documentaries. One tries to approach reality as much as possible, only it’s not reality. There are people who do very clever things, which have completely fascinated and fooled me. For example, The Battle of Algiers. It’s very impressive.”
— interviewed by Renaud Walter in Positif

Frewin: “Stanley raved (or what passed as raving with him!) about The Battle of Algiers, and Wajda’s Danton, over a lengthy period of time. When I started work for Stanley in September 1965 he told me that I couldn’t really understand what cinema was capable of without seeing The Battle of Algiers. He was still enthusing about it prior to his death.”

Closely Observed Trains

Jirí Menzel, 1966
The Fireman’s Ball


Milos Forman, 1967
The Anderson Platoon (La section Anderson)

Pierre Schoendoerffer, 1967

Kubrick: “I like to see documentaries. I very much liked La section Anderson, that film made by a Frenchman about an American platoon. I thought it was a terrific film. But personally I wouldn’t be interested in making something like that.”
— interviewed by Renaud Walter in Positif

Frewin: “Stanley had a high regard for Pierre Schoendoerffer. He watched La Section Anderson prior to Full Metal Jacket, and La 317ème Section (1964), and not only that but also Diên Biên Phú (1992) which Pierre sent over at Stanley’s request after I had tracked him down. They had a couple of conversations.”

Peppermint Frappé

Carlos Saura, 1967
Kubrick, discussing Spanish cinema in 1980:

“I first encountered Saura’s work by chance and in a rather strange way one day when I got home quite late and turned on the television; a film in Spanish with subtitles, that I knew absolutely nothing about, and besides, I’d missed the first half hour. It was hard for me to follow and understand but, at the same time, I was convinced it was the film of a great director.
“I watched the rest of the film glued to the TV set and when it was over I picked up a newspaper and saw that it was Peppermint Frappé by Carlos Saura. Later I found a copy of the film, which of course I watched from the beginning and with great enthusiasm, and since then all of Saura’s films that I’ve seen have confirmed the high quality of his work. He is an extremely brilliant director, and what strikes me in particular is the marvellous use he makes of his actors.
“I’d also like to mention the great impression the young girl Ana Torrent made on me in the two roles I saw her play: in Erice’s film The Spirit of the Beehive, and in Saura’s Cría Cuervos. I dare say that in a few years she will be a woman of rare beauty – you can see it already – and a great actress. Besides these two directors I must of course mention Luis Buñuel, whom I have profoundly admired for many, many years.”
— interviewed by Vicente Molina Foix in El Pais – Artes, 20 December 20 1980, translated in 2013 by Georges Privet

[Kubrick asked Saura to supervise the Spanish versions of A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and The Shining.]
If….

Lindsay Anderson, 1968
Rosemary’s Baby

Roman Polanski, 1968
Once Upon a Time in the West

Sergio Leone, 1968
Sir Christopher Frayling’s Leone biography (Something to do with Death) states on page 299:

“Kubrick admired the film as well. So much so, according to Leone, that he selected the music for Barry Lyndon before shooting the film in order to attempt a similar fusion of music and image. While he was preparing the film, he phoned Leone, who later recalled: ‘Stanley Kubrick said to me, “I’ve got all Ennio Morricone’s albums. Can you explain to me why I only seem to like the music he composed for your films?” To which I replied, “Don’t worry, I didn’t think much of Richard Strauss until I saw 2001!”’”

Ådalen 31

Bo Widerberg, 1969
Tora! Tora! Tora!

Richard Fleischer, 1970

Harlan: “I remember Stanley remarked: “How clever that the Japanese speak Japanese – what a difference it makes.’”

The Emigrants


Jan Troell, 1970

Harlan: “He adored The Emigrants. He was so enthused by the look of it that he hired the costume lady Ulla-Britt Söderlund for Barry Lyndon, who then worked with Milena Canonero. I remember Stanley wanting to talk to Jan Troell to congratulate him and ask him a few questions, and what happened so often to him when making these calls, after finally getting the person he wanted: ‘Is this Jan Troell?’, ‘Yes, who is this?’, ‘This is Stanley Kubrick’, ‘I bet you are’, and click, hung up. Then Stanley had to try again with: ‘Don’t hang up!’ etc.”

Get Carter

Mike Hodges, 1971
[According to Mike Kaplan, Kubrick said: “Any actor who sees Get Carter will want to work with [Hodges].”]
McCabe & Mrs. Miller

Robert Altman, 1971
Kubrick rang Altman to ask how he got the shot with McCabe lighting his cigar during the opening credits. See Breaking Point by Tony Hall, in Film & History, vol. 38.2, Fall 2008.
Harold and Maude

Hal Ashby, 1971

Harlan: “He loved Harold and Maude but I don’t know whether he ever spoke to Hal Ashby or not.”

Cabaret

Bob Fosse, 1972

Harlan: “Cabaret led to Marisa Berenson getting the part in Barry Lyndon.”

Cries and Whispers

Ingmar Bergman, 1972

Harlan: “He was very impressed and depressed by Cries and Whispers – he could barely finish it. I was with him.”

Deliverance

John Boorman, 1972
The Godfather

Francis Ford Coppola, 1972
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

“He watched The Godfather again… and was reluctantly suggesting for the 10th time that it was possibly the greatest movie ever made and certainly the best cast.”
— Michael Herr, Vanity Fair, 1999

Solaris

Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972
La bonne année

Claude Lelouch, 1973
The Exorcist

William Friedkin, 1973
The Spirit of the Beehive

Víctor Erice, 1973
American Graffiti

George Lucas, 1973
There are a few differences between the French and English editions of the Kubrick interviews that appear in Michel Ciment’s Kubrick book. (Kubrick subsequently revised the text for the first printing of the English edition.) In the French version, Kubrick says at one point:

“If I made as much money as George Lucas, I would not decide to become a studio mogul. I cannot understand why he doesn’t want to direct films anymore, because American Graffiti and even Star Wars were very good.”
— translated by Georges Privet, 2013

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Tobe Hooper, 1974
The Terminal Man

Mike Hodges, 1974

Kubrick: “It’s terrific.”
— quoted by Mike Kaplan in a Guardian piece. Also much-loved by Terrence Malick.

The Cars That Ate Paris

Peter Weir, 1974

Weir: “[Stanley] was a man who had a kind of internet before the internet: he knew things, he had contacts…
“Sometime in 1976 Warners approached me about directing a vampire movie. Stanley had very kindly recommended me to John Calley for the project, which he’d looked at himself. He’d seen my first two films, The Cars That Ate Paris and Picnic at Hanging Rock. Sometime earlier I’d written him a fan letter, though I didn’t say I was a filmmaker. I was enormously flattered and excited that he recommended me.
“I was in Hollywood trying to raise money for The Last Wave. Nothing I’d done had been released in America, and there I was having this wonderful meeting about this vampire picture. But I let it go. It wasn’t a humorous piece, and I thought, I can’t live in the world of this vampire movie for a year. So I went back to Australia and carried on as I had before.”
— from The Sound of Pictures by Andrew Ford. [The “Warner Bros. vampire film” turned out to be the TV movie Salem’s Lot (Tobe Hooper, 1979).]

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Peter Weir, 1975
See entry for The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)
In 2011, Weir said about Kubrick:

“[There] was one great thing that [Kubrick] instilled in me – that you can make a large, commercial film and not compromise your artistic values.”
— from Peter Weir Talks Trying To Crack ‘Pattern Recognition,’ Stanley Kubrick & ‘The Way Back’, Indiewire, 25 January 2011

Cría Cuervos

Carlos Saura, 1975

Harlan: “I saw Cría Cuervos in Zurich when it came out and loved it. I told Stanley what a great film it was and I remember his answer: ‘I am hungry for a great film – try to borrow a print.’ I called Primitivo Álvaro at Carlos Saura’s office in Madrid and told him how I loved the film and that Stanley Kubrick asked me call, etc etc – could we borrow a 35mm print? The answer was, “of course, we would only be too pleased” etc etc. I reminded him that it must have English subtitles. “Of course” was the answer.
“Two days later Emilio drove to the agent at Heathrow, at that time still temporary import formalities and stuff like this, we had the print ready on the next Saturday and invited a lot of people. Stanley and I ran the film. NO SUBTITLES! For the first ten minutes it doesn’t matter so much, one is enthralled by what we see – the little girl on the staircase, the woman coming out of the man’s bedroom, the girl calling Papa. He is dead. She sees the empty glass, takes it, washes it carefully in the kitchen and mixes the glasses. We are intrigued. Mum comes in, lovely little encounter before the masks of happiness slips from Mum’s face – and the girl is off to feed the pet. What a beginning.
“It became clear that there were no subtitles. Stanley first suggested to stop because it’s unfair. ‘Let’s just finish the reel’, someone said. I knew the film, briefed everybody between the reel changes about what we had seen, and we watched the whole film and loved it.”

Dog Day Afternoon


Sidney Lumet, 1975
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

Milos Forman, 1975
Annie Hall

Woody Allen, 1977
Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Steven Spielberg, 1977
Abigail’s Party

Mike Leigh, 1977
Eraserhead

David Lynch, 1976
[]
Girl Friends

Claudia Weill, 1978

Kubrick: “I think one of the most interesting Hollywood films, well not Hollywood – American films – that I’ve seen in a long time is Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends. That film, I thought, was one of the very rare American films that I would compare with the serious, intelligent, sensitive writing and filmmaking that you find in the best directors in Europe. It wasn’t a success, I don’t know why; it should have been. Certainly I thought it was a wonderful film. It seemed to make no compromise to the inner truth of the story, you know, the theme and everything else.
“The great problem is that the films cost so much now; in America it’s almost impossible to make a good film – which means you have to spend a certain amount of time on it, and have good technicians and good actors – that aren’t very, very expensive. This film that Claudia Weill did, I think she did on an amateur basis; she shot it for about a year, two or three days a week. Of course she had a great advantage, because she had all the time she needed to think about it, to see what she had done. I thought she made the film extremely well.”
— interviewed by Vicente Molina Foix in 1980

The Jerk

Carl Reiner, 1979

Harlan: “He didn’t think The Jerk was such a good film, but it is true that he considered (for a very short time) Steve Martin as an actor. Early days!”

Manhattan

Woody Allen, 1979

Harlan: “‘Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat’ – we laughed out loud.”

All That Jazz

Bob Fosse, 1979
Alien

Ridley Scott, 1979
Scott mentions in the 2007 documentary Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner that Kubrick admired Alien. Kubrick admired Scott’s work in commercials too.
Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola, 1979

Kubrick: “I think that Coppola was stuck by the fact that he didn’t have anything that resembled a story. So he had to make each scene more spectacular than the one before, to the point of absurdity.
“The ending is so unreal, and purely spectacular, that it’s like a version, much improved, of King Kong [laughs]. And Brando is supposed to give an intellectual weight to the whole thing…
“I think it just didn’t work. But it’s terrifically done. And there are some very strong scenes.”
— from Kubrick, enfin! by Michèle Halberstadt, Première (France), October 1987. Translated by Georges Privet, 2013

An American Werewolf in London

Jon Landis, 1981

Blood Wedding

Carlos Saura, 1981
Modern Romance

Albert Brooks, 1981
[Brooks tells how Kubrick saved his life in Esquire, 1999.]
E.T. The Extra-terrestrial

Steven Spielberg, 1982
Danton

Andrzej Wajda, 1984

Frewin: “Stanley thought Danton was very nearly beyond criticism and ‘perhaps the finest historical film ever made’. He loved everything about it and said he would never tire of watching the scenes with Gérard Depardieu and Wojciech Pszoniak (‘I’d love to use that Polish actor in something’).”

[See also the entry for Seven Samurai (1954)]
Heimat

Edgar Reitz, 1984

Harlan: “Stanley was completely taken by Heimat. The idea of telling such an ‘impossible to tell story’ through the eyes of a bunch of simple villagers he considered completely new and brilliant. To show ‘heaven’ convincingly and without special effects on the top floor of a country inn and have the dead people observe ‘us’ – he was deeply moved. There are a number of other scenes like that. He was so taken by it that he hired the art director and costume designer for preparation of Wartime Lies (Aryan Papers). There are some specific scenes we saw together again and again (having videotaped the BBC2 broadcast) and I remember it all very well.”

Platoon

Oliver Stone, 1986

Kubrick: “I liked it. I thought it was very good. We weren’t too happy about our M16 rifle sound effects [on Full Metal Jacket], and when I heard M16s in Platoon, I thought they sounded about the same as ours.
“The strength of Platoon, is that it’s the first of what I call a ‘military procedural’ that is really well done, where you really believe what’s going on. I thought the acting was very good and that it was dramatically very well written. That’s the key to its success: it’s a good film. It certainly wasn’t a success because it was about Vietnam. Only the ending of Platoon seemed a bit soft to me in the optimism of its narration.”
— interviewed by Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune, 21 June 1987

In an interview around the same time with Jay Scott from Toronto’s Globe & Mail, Kubrick said:

“I liked both Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter – but I liked Platoon more.”

The Sacrifice

The Sacrifice (1986)



Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986

Harlan: “Very important.”

Babette’s Feast

Gabriel Axel, 1987
House of Games

David Mamet, 1987
Pelle the Conqueror

Bille August, 1987
Radio Days

Woody Allen, 1987

Harlan: “Stanley loved it, not so much because it is a great film, but because this was his childhood too.”

The Vanishing

The Vanishing (1988)



George Sluizer, 1988

Kubrick watched it three times and told Sluizer that it was “the most horrifying film I’ve ever seen”. Sluizer asked: “even moreso than The Shining?”. Kubrick replied that he thought it was.
Harlan: “The Vanishing was real – The Shining was a ghost film – a huge difference.”

Henry V

Kenneth Branagh, 1989

Harlan: “Stanley liked Branagh’s version much better than the old and old-fashioned Olivier version which he had on his 1963 list. He thought it was far superior.”

Roger & Me

Michael Moore, 1989

Harlan: “He greatly admired the guts[iness] of Michael Moore – substantial content and a major US figure.”

Dekalog

Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1990

Harlan: “I believe the only foreword to a book he ever wrote was for the scripts of Kieslowski’s Dekalog – and he did this with pleasure. A great masterpiece.”

The Silence of the Lambs

Jonathan Demme, 1990
Husbands and Wives

Woody Allen, 1992
White Men Can’t Jump

Ron Shelton, 1992
The Red Squirrel

Julio Medem, 1993
Pulp Fiction

Quentin Tarantino, 1994
Frederic Raphael recounts in how Kubrick recommended Pulp Fiction to him:

“He admired it very much, he said ‘it’s pretty good, okay?’

Frewin: “He thought it was slick.”

Boogie Nights

Paul Thomas Anderson, 1998
Anderson visited Kubrick in England during the Eyes Wide Shut shoot. Interviewed by Anderson’s own fansite Cigarettes & Red Vines in March 2000, he said:

“[Kubrick] had seen Boogie Nights and he liked it very much. He liked the fact that I was a writer director and commented that more filmmakers should write and direct. He said he liked Woody Allen and David Mamet and mentioned House of Games and Husbands and Wives – interesting how similar they are to Eyes Wide Shut.”

Harlan: “1993–1999 was such a hectic period – over a year intensive prep for Aryan Papers then the same again for A.I. – both ‘postponed’. These were tough times and watching films was mainly research. He saw fewer films during that time – still, he didn’t shut himself away and certainly saw The Silence of the Lambs and every Woody Allen film. But I can’t tell you specific titles as I could for the earlier periods.”

The Off List

Over the years, many uncorroborated claims have been made about Stanley Kubrick liking certain films. For the sake of comprehensiveness, where no other evidence exists or there are contradictory reports, I’ve gathered these titles outside the main Master List. Here is the ‘off-list”:
Lupino Lane

Comic two-reelers from the 1920s
It has been claimed (by the late Philip Jenkinson, in a 1981 edition of ITV’s Clapperboard) that Kubrick owned a couple of very rare prints of Lupino Lane films, and went out of his way to find them. Jenkinson suggested Ken Russell was a fan of Lupino Lane, too.

Anthony Frewin: “Take it from me, Stanley never had any Lupino Lane prints, certainly not in the years I worked for him.”

Things to Come

William Cameron Menzies, 1936

Frewin: “Despite the best efforts of both Arthur C. Clarke and myself Stanley could not see the merits of the film. He thought the narrative, such as it was, was subordinated to H.G. Wells’ ‘preachy’ belief that scientists were the only ones to be trusted to rule the world, that the film was essentially Wellsian propaganda.
“Two of the special effects supervisors on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tom Howard and Wally Veevers, both began their careers under Ned Mann on the special effects of Things to Come. Also the film’s sound chief, A.W. Watkins, was the resident sound chief at MGM Studios when we were making 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Universe

Roman Kroitor / Colin Low, 1960
This National Film Board of Canada half-hour film is reported to have influenced the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, apparently “using the same panning camera effect for creating the planets”, and hiring narrator Douglas Rain to voice HAL.

Frewin: “Stanley didn’t think much of the film but thought the SFX showed promise and after talking to Wally Gentleman, who designed the SFX, hired him for 2001. But, alas, Wally, didn’t stay with us very long as he didn’t like Stanley interfering (!) with what he was doing!”

Ikarie XB-1

Jindrich Polák, 1963

Frewin: “Stanley had seen Ikarie XB-1 when he was researching and writing 2001: A Space Odyssey in New York prior to the move to London (along with anything else of remote interest that he could lay his hands on). It certainly wasn’t an inspiration to him though he did think it was a half step up from your average science-fiction film in terms of its theme and presentation, but then, as he admitted, that wasn’t too difficult in those days.
“I don’t think there were any futuristic or science-fiction films that inspired him. And the fact that cinema hadn’t delivered in these areas was a contributing factor in his making 2001.
“Stanley was an indiscriminate moviegoer (‘You can learn something from a bad film as equally as from a good film’), and I’m not sure how some of those films got on the list of his ‘fave’ films. He had a puckish sense of humour and may have been jesting at times. Often there may have been one shot or one sequence in an otherwise risibly undistinguished film that he thought was pretty good, but it’s a step too far including that film on a list of his favourites.”

Funeral Parade of Roses

Matsumoto Toshio, 1969
A number of people have pointed out striking (coincidental?) similarities between Matsumoto’s film and A Clockwork Orange, but no confirmation can be found. Neither Frewin or Harlan have any recollection.
Basic Training

Frederick Wiseman, 1971
Michel Ciment reported that Wiseman told him: “Kubrick watched Basic Training endlessly while preparing Full Metal Jacket.” Wiseman himself has repeated this claim in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. However those closest to Kubrick at the time cannot remember him viewing the film.

Frewin: “I’m not aware that SK ever saw this. I was getting all the films in at that time and I was never asked to get this. Anyway, we had Gus Hasford and Lee Ermey, both ex-USMC, on board to advise, and Michael Herr too.”

Freebie and the Bean

Richard Rush, 1974

[In a Rolling Stone article about Rush’s The Stunt Man it was claimed Stanley thought Freebie and the Bean was the best film of 1974.]
Who Dares Wins

Ian Sharp, 1982
Euan Lloyd, the producer of this anti-CND, right-wing action film, mentions on the commentary track of its newish Blu-ray disc that Kubrick was fond of the film. This claim is strongly contested:

Frewin: “Lloyd, as the gunnery sgt in Full Metal Jacket would say, is blowing smoke up our asses. That film is the antithesis of everything Stanley stood for and believed in.”

Barcelona

Whit Stillman, 1994
Stillman discusses Kubrick’s admiration for Barcelona on the Criterion commentary track for The Last Days of Disco.

Terrible advice Mr. Carney

Interesting article though, even if it does come off as a bit high-handed. Also I see it was from 2003, if Carney knew what Hollywood was to become a decade or so later he would have been grateful for what they offered at the time.

I like that he champions indie films, but they are not the only alternative to the latest mainstream blockbusters.

He's exaggerating, but I know what he means (sensationalism).. I highly agree with what's been going on with the state of movies. It's so difficult to find GREAT new movies that I always seem to revert to older movies.

What would you consider the other alternatives?

By the way, last night, Bill Maher made a mention of the latest movies..

Funny video, I may not see eye to eye with Maher but I can't deny he makes me laugh.Classics, Foreign films, B-movies/direct-to-video, as well as lower-budget Hollywood movies that tend to be pet projects rather than moneymaking schemes.

I admit to getting a little riled when someone craps on Hollywood, because classic Hollywood movies are my favorite, period. In its hey-day it truly was a Dream Factory, unfortunately it has become a tired, bloated industry of people too scared to bet on anything remotely risky.

You said it... I think after "Jaws" a new mindset emerged. Blockbusters. Each studio drastically reduced the amount of movies, didn't take chances and became formulaic.

An interview entitled "Orson Welles hated Woody Allen"

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/o...ed_woody_allen

http://collider.com/best-70s-movies-...errated-movies

http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2015/th...hollywood-era/

I'm at #2, checking the ratings on IMDB to see not only the score, but how many people rated it.

Just found some archives of "highbrow" articles

http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.../issue/archive

Leslie Helliwell

It is only fair that the author of a book which categorises fifty years of films should give some account of his own prejudices. I have spent more than fifty years seeing, talking about and writing about films, so my affection for the medium in its ‘golden age’ can hardly be doubted. Even then, however, the worthwhile movies were the tip of the iceberg: probably eighty percent of what was produced was ghastly rubbish, which is why this book deals with ten thousand movies, not all of them good, out of a total output of four times that number. The best kind of film buff loves the movie business for what it can be at its best, not for its journeyman ‘B’ features, its crackpot experiments, its cheapjack exploitation screamies or those relentlessly boring bottom-of-the-bill fillers.
Jonathan Swift said in 1725: ‘I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth.’ This book encapsulates my Johns, my Peters and my Thomases; this essay complains bitterly that they lately have been so few in number, and attempts, admittedly by some slight use of exaggeration, to throw light on a confused and unhappy segment of cinema history.
When Sam Peckinpah made Straw Dogs from a novel called The Siege of Trencher’s Farm he thought it unnecessary to explain to his audience the significance of his new title which, his publicists informed us on request, was taken from an old Chinese proverb*. And when Stanley Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange he did not bother to retain the section of the Anthony Burgess novel which explained why it was so called. These almost identical incidents exemplify the kind of arrogance which besets film-makers in the seventies. Steeped in the history of Hollywood’s golden age, they have no idea what made it work so well, and as soon as they become successful they begin to despise their audiences and are concerned only to over-spend enormous budgets while putting across some garbled self-satisfying message which is usually anti-establishment, anti-law-and-order and anti-entertainment.
In this they are assisted by such long-haired publications as Sight and Sound and a variety of earnest critics who bend over backwards to see ‘significance’ where none exists and to ascribe all the film’s virtues and faults to the director, or in the current jargon the auteur. (Would any theatrical critic dream of judging a play solely on the director’s contribution, or a literary critic of reviewing a book solely on the basis of its layout on the printed page?) If cinema, which is the creation of so many people, can be an art at all, it must be a folk art which appeals to innocent and sophisticate alike, and can be easily appreciated by both. This happy state of affairs was reached thirty-five years ago by unpretentious and slick productions of the studio system such as The Maltese Falcon and Stagecoach, which used every camera trick in the book without blinding the audience to the characters and the plot. Nowadays one has to fight one’s way through the thick showy surface in order to get to a story which all too often is not worth following.
One problem is that modern films are largely made by people with no sense of humour, people who do not realize that they must please the mass audience if the industry in which they work is to survive. Old-time screenwriters such as Ben Hecht, Dudley Nichols and Lamar Trotti would no doubt be viewed by these young men as cynical hacks, but at least they took pains to please their audience with all the expertise at their command, and they still expressed their own view in a vein of sardonic humour which ran through most of the scripts of the thirties and forties and was there to please and satisfy the minority of film-goers who sought it out.
The absurd pretensions of some modern film-makers certainly cause amusement wherever sensible people congregate, but the advocates of sanity are in no position to have the last word. The present set-up of the film industry encourages wilder and wickeder sensations, from homicidal sharks to diabolical babies, as these are the only subjects which lure large audiences. The successes, however, are all one-offs: no one is much interested in sequels**, preferring to wait for horrors of some other variety. The result is that only one film in twenty or thirty makes a profit, but the custodians of the cash have no option but to go on investing in the hope that the occasional fluke will make a fortune, which will then be quickly dissipated by a string of failures. Universal’s phenomenally successful Jaws, for instance, was immediately followed by such commercial duds as Gable and Lombard, W. C. Fields and Me, The Great Waldo Pepper and The Hindenburg, and the studio is still looking for another hit. The sad fact is that no policy can be devised because the people in charge of the money have no idea what is likely to appeal, and they are forced to put their faith in reputedly brilliant directors who have no idea either but are quite prepared to spend large sums of other people’s money in flying their own flimsy kites. The flimsiness is sometimes astonishing. The director of an abysmal 1976 comedy called Harry and Walter go to New York announced to the press, as a selling point, that it was ‘Laurel and Hardy with real people.’ Had he inquired of his mass audience, he would surely have been told that Stan and Ollie had more reality in their little fingers than was to be found in the entire crew of Harry and Walter go to New York, whether before or behind the camera.
One should of course add that many films these days are not supposed to make money. The adage which used to run ‘you’re only as good as your last picture’ has been changed to ‘you’re only as big as your last budget’, and it is no trick to get a big budget when many films are conceived by industrialists as tax losses: all you have to do is get in the news by holding outlandish views or even making pornography, and Hollywood these days opens its doors to you because at least you must have learnt how to point a camera or arrest public attention. The ones to suffer are the audiences, who have foisted upon them material which they have every right to expect to be professional, and which all too often is not, just the result of untalented exhibitionists spending someone else’s money in whatever way happens to divert them most. Even if there is a profit, their habit is to take the money and run, not to invest it in better production facilities as used to happen in the good old days.
Work is thus produced for a small group of jet-setters; meanwhile that patient paying audience discovers that not only the films but the standards of physical cinema comfort are far worse than they were thirty years ago; since then the cost of admission has risen at a phenomenal rate, the average cost in Britain now being twenty times more than in 1956. What other commodity has risen in price to this extent? Television is infinitely cheaper and can be viewed in the comfort of one’s home: no wonder so many people prefer it.
So the movie industry hastens on its way to perdition and catastrophe, a fate which surely cannot be delayed more than another few years, and for which simple-minded greed, lack of foresight and a large measure of incompetence are chiefly responsible. Those of us who are old enough and who still care about the movies sigh frequently for the halcyon days when Harry Cohn and Louis B. Mayer sat in their front offices, for their intellectual limitations were far less harmful and sometimes far more stimulating to the medium than the excesses of the present incumbents, who seldom stay long enough to make their presences felt and certainly not long enough for any sense of continuity to develop. There is for instance no continuity of employment, which makes the unions tougher and tougher to deal with in an industry which was always volatile in its labour relations: every film is a fresh project for which there is no bank of trained talent to fall back on. As Billy Wilder said, you spend eighty percent of your time making deals and twenty percent making pictures. The old moguls had enough common sense and business acumen to keep the system working so that costs were comparatively low and one could afford the occasional interesting failure to please the intellectuals.
How did the movie world go so wrong? You can trace it to the restlessness after World War II, when the regular audience declined and television was a coming threat and the bosses knew that new trends had to be found but no one knew what they might be in a glum and depressed world. When actors began to want a say in production and seemed willing to risk their own money, the bosses were delighted to share the possible losses; instead they found themselves being eased out and their profits halved, their studios no longer vast employment centres with a constant production line but simply enclosed space and facilities which could be rented out to the highest bidder.
The old moguls were getting older and couldn’t fight the developing situation; the new young ones were businessmen who often backed the wrong horse because they didn’t understand the industry. Meanwhile the old showmen had one last irrelevant fling. If television was the enemy, they reasoned, then give the paying public what television cannot provide. Technology now allowed films to be shot on real locations, which was splendid but had two handicaps. First, the units were away from central control for a long time, and the costs were phenomenal; second, the magic was lost, for the real Paris was by no means so romantic or mysterious as Paramount’s backlot which had served Paris for so many years, nor could the lighting of it be so carefully controlled. The new realistic films were slower, because the travel costs had to be justified and the travelogue largely took the place of drama. (Did anyone complain about the lack of shots of San Francisco in The Maltese Falcon?)
The other way to combat television was to change the shape and effect of the entertainment screen. 3-D was tried, but audiences hated wearing Polaroid glasses in order to get a three-dimensional image which producers largely utilised by hurling knives, tennis balls, spiders and even grubby redskins into the audience’s lap: this was fairground stuff. Cinemascope was then seized upon by Hollywood: twice as wide as the ordinary image and capable of the most spectacular effects. There is no record that the paying audience ever especially liked Cinemascope, or could even remember whether or not a film was in the process, but once the expensive equipment was installed in theatres there was no turning back. Unfortunately the technique involved a reversion in many cinematic effects to the days of D. W. Griffith. The compression of the wide image on to film and its subsequent expansion in the projector made the photography grainy, especially in black and white, which was henceforth virtually abandoned. (At about the same time a transference to safety stock lost us the glamorous luminescent ‘Feel’ which had been possible with nitrate and which can still be seen in old prints.) The new shape was impossible to compose for; as Fritz Lang said, it was fine for funerals, but what painter through the ages had ever selected it unless to cut up into a triptych? Editing was cut to a minimum because on an image so large each cut made the audience jump. Instead, and cheaper, the camera stayed still while the cast roved around the empty spaces in front of it, and there was an absurd number of shots in which the leading actors reclined so as better to fit the frame. Close-ups and subtle nuances were forgotten: no longer did the camera direct you to the drama, you had to look around and find it yourself. It is rather astonishing that directors with an eye to their reputations still persists in using the scope format, for after initial release the future of any film these days is on television, and no scope film will satisfactorily adapt to the TV screen.
In many cinemas Cinemascope was even a fraud, for it had to be on a screen smaller in area than the old image, which was now being referred to sneeringly as ‘postage stamp’. This happened when the old screen had already occupied all the width allowed by the cinema’s structure: to get the Cinemascope shape, if you could not go any wider, height had to be sacrificed, and audiences wondered why suddenly they were looking at a ribbon of picture across the middle of the space which the fine old screen had occupied.
Cinemascope was patented by Fox, so the other companies all hastened to produce their own variations: Warnerscope, Metroscope, Techniscope, Superscope, Megascope, Camerascope, Panavision, each with its own cheap colour process. Projectionists all over the world were confused by these new names, and seldom knew whether they were projecting a film as they were supposed to. The results were often truly appalling, with lack of focus, too much brightness and wrong screen masking among the most common faults. Paramount’s Vistavision, a non-anamorphic process, used the full frame ration but was intended for projection at anything between 1.33:1 and 2:1, so that the essential action had to take place in a strip along the centre of the picture; consequently, to see a Vistavision print on a 1.33:1 screen was painful indeed, as all the action seemed to take place in the middle distance with great areas of unused space at the top and bottom of the image, and composition, which any painter knows to be all-important, was no longer possible. By the mid-fifties, however, 1.33:1 was no longer generally available, as ‘wide screen’ had become de rigueur even for non-anamorphic films: these cut off the top and bottom of the frame and magnified the rest. This meant that revivals were impossible unless one was prepared to suffer dancers without feet and actors without heads!
The result of all this technical uncertainty was that by the mid-fifties movies were in danger of becoming mere expensive sideshows, uninteresting to anyone of sensitivity. At the same time, an element of sophistication crept away from the popular arts: whereas in the thirties and forties smooth and educated idols had been set up for general approbation, the fifties and sixties showed an alarming tendency not merely to make heroes of ‘people like us’ but to rub our noses firmly in the gutter by devising stories whose leading characters had few redeeming features. Censorship had been absurdly tight and must obviously relax, but it was unwise and unexpected that the floodgates should open as they did, to admit movies which would previously have been considered anti-social rubbish. It was right, for instance, for Otto Preminger to fight the idiocies of the Production Code with his The Moon Is Blue and The Man with the Golden Arm, but it was a pity he won his battle with a leaden piece of schoolboy smut and an absurdly melodramatic updating of The Road to Ruin***. Such films simply made one yearn to go back to the days of Trouble in Paradise and The Palm Beach Story, or for the true social concern expressed in the considered, powerful and moving masterpieces of Frank Capra, John Ford, or the early Chaplin.
The talents which had made Hollywood great were certainly nearing retirement by now, but it was perhaps unwise as well as churlish for the new wave to pension them off quite as hurriedly as they did, because there was no comparable talent to take their place. Great art directors like Anton Grot and Hans Dreier, great cameramen like Arthur Miller and James Wong Howe, great directors like Michael Curtiz and William Dieterle were either tossed aside or forced to work on material totally unsuited to their talents and not at all comparable to the films which had made their names. The results were big-budget disasters such as The Egyptian and Omar Khayyam; meanwhile the young directors were copying low-budget television techniques which for every Marty produced a dozen flatly realistic bores.
By the early sixties Hollywood had decided on a new image, but it had lost its old loyalties – the golden age audiences as well as the talents were getting older – and had to appeal deliberately to the ‘emancipated’ young generation. This meant a virtual abolition of censorship, and from the release of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In 1966 to that of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Devil in Miss Jones ten years later is but a short step. The film is no longer an art, or even a craft: after a brief ‘swinging’ period it became an exploitation industry designed to take quick money from suckers, led by maverick Ken Russells rather than conscientious Irving Thalbergs, to plaudits from irresponsible critics whenever some totally untalented new director ‘does his thing’. There is no justification except box office for films like The Exorcist or Mandingo, none except self-indulgence for a $12 million coffee-table film like Barry Lyndon, while the popularity even in sophisticated circles of shoddy pornography like Deep Throat and Death Weekend should stand as an awful warning to the leasers of our society that a vivid young art form has overreached itself and is well and truly on the verge of disaster. It is all very well to say in defence of such films that large numbers of people flock to see them: so they did once bear-bating and public executions and witch hunts, but the human race long ago prided itself on having passed that stage.
The movies will be lucky if, in their search for sensationalism, they do not check themselves out altogether. Audiences have dwindled rapidly and are still dwindling; so is the number of cinemas. The lush old two-thousand seaters have turned into supermarkets, and instead each city has its ineptly-run boxes of mini-cinemas, the effect of which is rather like sitting in cheaply decorated funeral parlours and paying through the nose for the privilege. The family outing to the cinema is a thing of the past: few families can afford it or can find a suitable film, except once or twice a year when the Disney organization stirs itself; and their standards are by no means as high as they were, as a comparison of Robin Hood with Bambi or Pinocchio will immediately show. (The fact that such an uninventive computerised cartoon as Robin Hood can do well at the box office is an instance of how starved the public is for the older, gentler forms of entertainment.)
Another problem besetting the cinema in the sixties was its adoption by verbose and pompous critics who were determined to turn it into serious art. True art is the work of one man, or at least his personal vision; each film is the work of several hundred people. Of these, admittedly the director has the most control, but to assign to him the role of auteur and to ignore the contribution of producer, writer, photographer, composer and editor is arrant nonsense, except possibly in the cases of such as Hitchcock and Kubrick who do control almost every aspect of their output. The new cinema journalism simply encouraged the worst motives of the new breed of film-maker, who came to know that whatever idiocy he perpetrated would be staunchly defended, researched and psychoanalysed by one of these mercenaries in search of a cause. If a character spat on the pavement this would be taken as his final shedding of his working-class upbringing; if he went to bed with a girl it would symbolise his treachery to his own beliefs and his giving in to the snares of Mammon. Listen to a modern critic in the British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin, once a terse and reliable guide to film trends, on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: ‘What Scorsese has done, however is to rescue an American cliché from the bland, flat but much more portentous naturalism of such as Harry and Tonto and restore it to an emotional and intellectual complexity through his particular brand of baroque realism.’ Or on Rafelson’s Stay Hungry: ‘What distinguishes him from other film-makers of the “head” generation is both the poetic sureness of his fragmentary, allusive style, and the elliptical observation which prevents his social themes from being spiked too easily on the cultural antithesis of that bygone era.’ Spare us.
Some of the elements missing from modern cinema are to be found in television, certainly in the UK with its brilliant documentaries, sharp comedies, serious art programmes and single plays; Americans are less lucky except on their public broadcasting system. But television is a private enjoyment, and one inevitably misses the sense of comradeship, of sharing a pleasure, that the cinema used to fulfill. Who having experienced them can forget the feeling of a full house being pleasurably chilled by The Cat and the Canary, or rolling in the aisles at Laurel and Hardy, or hoping against hope that Colman will find his Lost Horizon? What modern films can produce the sheer entertainment value and unforgettable, vivid scenes of such as The Philadelphia Story, Stagecoach, Rebecca, Camille, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Singin’ in the Rain, A Night at the Opera, The Lady Vanishes, and The Third Man? These were all intelligent films, all made for the despised mass audience, and they all made money because they were produced with impeccably professionalism and star talent, and because to these qualities they added heart and good humour. Where is the good humour in Jaws? Where is the heart in The Exorcist? These are rides on fairground ghost trains: one pays for the thrill, but one comes out more depressed than uplifted.
Of course there are some genuine talents at work in films today. One respects the likes of Jack Nicholson and Ellen Burstyn and Al Pacino and Glenda Jackson, but they are all depressingly committed to their own self-expression and to the depiction of mankind with warts and all, not to pleasing, stimulating or improving the public. The need control; but where are the likes of Lubitsch to control them? Of Sturges? Of Ben Hecht? Of James Whale? Of Donald Ogden Stewart? Of S. J. Perelman? Of Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker? The films produced by Altman and Scorsese and Ashby are doubtless stimulating in their violent, abrasive way but they are not the whole of life. David Lean and John Schlesinger and Arthur Penn are meticulous craftsmen, but they are driven by commerce into the excesses of Ryan’s Daughter and Marathon Man and The Missouri Breaks. In the acting league, where are our up-and-coming replacements for David Niven, Cary Grant, Melvyn Douglas, Katharine Hepburn, Ronald Colman? When again will it be the turn of grace and elegance? When indeed will actors want to work? Steve McQueen and Elizabeth Taylor and their like prefer to demand an impossibly high fee, and if they do not get it to sit comfortably at home on the proceeds of their previous hits.
Hollywood at its best – and for Hollywood also read Ealing and Tobis Klangfilm and Svenske Filmindustri – was the purveyor of an expensive and elegant craft which at times touched art, though seldom throughout a whole film. Reality was seldom sought, but why should it be? Real life is not dramatic anyway: even Taxi Driver is heightening, a selection, an emphasis. So are all the great realist films from The Battleship Potemkin to The Grapes of Wrath. And so are the great works of Beethoven, of Rembrandt, of Michelangelo. Film stands to live as poetry to prose, and its comments were at their most apt and stylish when movies were confined to the sound stage and the backlot. Freedom from that confinement has not made them any better: it has only made them diffuse and patchy and overlong, and colour has made things worse because it apes reality whereas black and white conjured up its own mood and its own comment. Today’s screens are too large for the eye to take in. Sound tracks are so ‘realistic’ as to be incoherent. Big budgets are wasted on movies which would have been ten times as effective if a little imagination had been used or required. Kaleidoscopic effects dazzle the eye and befuddle the brain; immensely long pre-credits sequences make one think the film is nearly over before it actually starts; characterisation flies out the window because sex and violence must be fitted in somehow. Plot doesn’t matter: since swinging London was invented every film has become a ‘happening’: which is another way of saying that anything goes and lack of professionalism cannot be criticised.
All right, this essay is a deliberate hatchet job by a disappointed fan who has turned devil’s advocate. Some of the new films clearly have virtues which the old ones didn’t possess: one is grateful for The Graduate and Charlie Bubbles and Cabaret and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which for various reasons could never have been made in the old Hollywood. But if my thesis were not largely true, how would one explain the enormous popularity of old movies on television, or the recent deluge of books about them? Why, out of more than sixty films on British television over the Christmas of 1976, were White Heat (1948), A Night at the Opera (1935), and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) the most discussed and appreciated? Nostalgia is only a trendy word to describe something which people have at last learned to appreciate because it has been taken away from them. No one in his right mind would be nostalgic for PRC second features or for much of the pure assembly line product which inevitably poured out of the studios when they were working at full pitch. And one must progress. But surely not to the wasteful ineptitude which confronts us at the cinema these days. Not to Lucky Lady, Mother Jugs and Speed, At Long Last Love or Harry and Walter go to New York. Must modern audiences really put up with inane or violent rubbish and appear to enjoy it simply because the are supposed not to know any better? We may not be able to get the golden age back, but we can cry for it. If ‘they’ fail to respond we can at least appreciate the best of it, and learn from that best. This book, I hope, may help a few people to do that.

Postscript (January, 1985)
The preceding was written seven years ago, but it seems to have dated in very few respects save that the prophesied decline has been a longer and more complex business than any of us imagined, the advent of such new outlets as cable and video having put back the evil day. Certainly the old pleasures of a family visit to the cinema are experienced now by almost nobody, partly because admission prices continue to skyrocket and partly because the films themselves are totally unsuitable. Thirty years ago, more than half the films on release had ‘U’ certificates, with a mere handful of titles labeled ‘Adults Only’. Now the boot is on the other foot: the vast majority of movies are for people aged fifteen and over, and when very occasionally a ‘U’ film happens along, it does no business because the potential audience thinks it must be bland beyond belief.
During the same period the number of British cinemas has dwindled to a twentieth of what it was, and few indeed of those remaining make a healthy profit. This decline is more marked in Britain than anywhere else in the world, but it is scarcely surprising in a period when the cost of a reasonable seat has risen from 10 or 15p to a suburban average of £2.70 and a West End top of £4.70; this to sit in boxlike tripled or quadrupled cinemas which are uncomfortable and badly run, often with poor sound and picture quality, while the audience endures tedious advertisements and extended intervals in place of the brisk supporting programmes which some of us still remember. In some other parts of the world, probably those with more isolated communities and less varied and attractive television service, it appears that there is still a sufficiently considerable cinema audience, though it stays more or less within the age range of 16 and 24 years old, but it does seem that those who would prefer something less excessive are prepared to patronize the cinema only in its less commercially viable art forms.
Producers with little sense of history have proved more than willing to go on spending other people’s money in increasingly large amounts, and it has become clear that the best this process is likely to throw up is a couple of prestige pictures a year plus half a dozen blockbuster adventures at the level of the old newspaper comic strips. This is perhaps the most astonishing development of all. Adults thirty years ago might possibly have enjoyed E.T., as they enjoyed The Wizard of Oz, but can you imagine them willingly sitting through Star Wars, Ghostbusters or Gremlins? I am not denying that when one is in the mood for something very easy these films can provide a modicum of simple enjoyment, but by and large they are hokum entertainments by and for the untrained mind, and I think one should feel just a little ashamed of submitting to them at a time when a once-great art is providing nothing more stimulating.
One way or another, the end of the cinema has been staved off for another indefinite while. British Film Year is unlikely to have much influence one way or the other. Critics and audience will continue to grit their teeth through expensive flops like Heaven’s Gate, Give My Regards to Broad Street and Dune for the sake of the occasional product of a superior mind: Gandhi or Chariots of Fire or A Passage to India. How long a glamour industry can go on surviving by the skin of its teeth is obviously unsafe to predict, but in the end it is the exhibitors who will call the tune. Now beset by a greater-than-ever emphasis on home entertainment, with even the newest attractions almost simultaneously available on video, they must surely continue to close their empty halls at an even greater rate than has been recently evident; and without cinemas in which films can be seen there will eventually be no way in which producers can get their money back on big-budget enterprises. That may not be entirely a bad thing, for perhaps before too long we may see a return to wit, charm and expertise in place of the mounting excesses of the last quarter-century.

PPS (January, 1987)
Two years later it seems unnecessary to update the above beyond noting an increasing break-even rate for independent films low of budget and high of brow, made specifically for a quick cinema release followed by ‘minority’ TV exposure. One might wish only that a greater proportion of these hybrids showed some optimism for our ailing society instead of wallowing in its lunatic shallows. Commercially, as a mass-entertainment, the cinema still needs a saviour.****

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/ste...full-anatahan/

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/g...tomobiles-1987

This isn't about a movie, but I didn't want to bump a certain thread, or spend a bunch of time searching through them all..

Terry Gilliam
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hollywood...112742135.html

Found this cool site..

https://www.filmcomment.com/archive/?y=1962