Mickey @ 100: From "National Velvet" to "The Black Stallion"

Here's Baby Clyde to conclude our brief Mickey Rooney Centennial celebration

Many years ago, as a Golden Age Hollywood obsessed tween, I dragged my poor brother up to London with me so we could stand outside the stage door of the Savoy Theatre. The West End debut of the smash hit Broadway revue Sugar Babies was playing and it starred the legendary Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller ...from actual HOLLYWOOD!!!

As a little kid from a decidedly un-glamourous council estate, who spent all his spare time poring over books about old movies stars, this was too good an opportunity to miss. It didn’t turn out quite as I’d planned. We arrived at the stage door with plenty of time before the show began to find a handful of like minded saddos also waiting. They informed us that Miss Miller was already inside which was of course unfortunate, but Mickey was still to arrive. A little while later he did...

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Almost There: John Cazale in "Dog Day Afternoon"

by Cláudio Alves

On March 13th, 1978, John Cazale died of lung cancer at the age of 42. Before his untimely end, the Massachusetts-born actor had amassed an impressive list of credits, both on stage and onscreen. His filmography, as far as features are concerned, is of particular interest and amazement. He appeared in five films, six if you count The Godfather Part III, all of which were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar (a record!). Not only that, but his quintet from the 70s (The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter) represents a list of era-defining classics.

Of them, 1975's Dog Day Afternoon was surely the closest the actor ever came to a much-deserved Oscar nomination…

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Shelley Winters @ 100: Bloody Mama (1970)

We're celebrating the centennial of Shelley Winters. Here's Cláudio Alves…

In October 1966, less than six months after her second Best Supporting Actress Oscar win, Shelley Winters appeared in two episodes of the Batman TV show. Winters once again played a villainous mother. Unlike most Batman villains though, Winters' Ma Parker wasn't based on a comic book character but a historical figure. Kate Barker, commonly known as Ma Barker, was the matriarch of a criminal family who terrorized Arizona during the first decades of the 20th century. Boisterous, vicious, merciless, and bad to the bone, this monster mother was, in many ways, a perfect role for Shelley Winters in this period of her career.

It's no wonder then, that four years after the Batman episodes had aired, Winters returned to the iconic part. This time, however, there were no euphemisms or layers of superhero camp between the actress and the character. Roger Corman's Bloody Mama is a biopic of Ma Barker that, more or less, follows the historical narrative. That being said, if you think this is any sort of stuffy Oscar baity prestige picture, you are terribly mistaken...

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Almost There: Liv Ullmann in "Scenes from a Marriage"

by Cláudio Alves

I confess that, when I first came up with the idea for this week's Almost There write-up, I didn't expect its subject to be so weirdly topical. First up, there's the actual raison d'être for the piece, which is the Criterion Channel's new "Marriage Stories" collection, in which Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage is featured. Then there's the whole Hamilton kerfuffle, which caused controversy over the Academy's definition of what is and isn't cinema or what should and shouldn't be eligible for the Oscars (two importantly different questions). This is relevant because the ineligibility of Bergman's film caused a major ruckus back in 1974 and even prompted a couple of notorious open letters (another topical subject, unfortunately). Finally, we have the recent news that the television cut of Scenes from a Marriage is going to be remade by HBO with Michelle Williams and Oscar Isaac in the leading roles. 

We'll return to some of those matters later on, but, for now, let's concentrate on Liv Ullmann's masterful performance as Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage…

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"The Landlord" at 50

by Mark Brinkerhoff

50 years ago today the one and only Hal Ashby, then an Oscar-winning film editor (In the Heat of the Night, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!) made his directorial debut with the release of The Landlord. Based on a 1966 novel and starring an almost inconceivably baby-faced Beau Bridges, its plot is fairly run-of-the-mill today but must’ve seemed quite daring for the time: A young man named Elgar (?!), who comes from wealth and lives with his parents at their Long Island estate, decides to buy a “rundown” tenement house in the dicey, gentrifying neighborhood of Park Slope. (Imagine!)

The tenants are black, he’s white, and his scheme is to evict them all so he can convert the property into something posh—a vanity project, if there ever was one. 

Things do not go according to (his) plan...

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