The Furniture: Wallpaper and Wet Wood in 'The Grey Fox'

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Yesterday would have been the 100th birthday of Richard Farnsworth. You might have seen some tributes on Twitter, most of them recalling Farnsworth’s Oscar-nominated performance in David Lynch’s The Straight Story - the actor’s last film. Today I’d like to turn to something earlier, a gorgeous Canadian Western called The Grey Fox. 

It’s the kind of movie that feels undiscovered even as you’re watching it - even now that it’s been beautifully restored and rereleased by Kino Lorber. It’s not that it was ignored upon release, really; Farnsworth got a Best Actor - Drama nomination at the Golden Globes and it swept the Genie Awards. But its quiet, slow, rainy charm lends it an air of the forgotten, as if it had been left on a shelf for a century. 

The subject helps: the last years of the last notorious stagecoach robber in the West, released into the 20th century like a ghost...

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Ennio Morricone (1928-2020)

by Nathaniel R

Confession, dear reader. Two decades of writing about movies later I still feel ill-equipped to write about one of the largest tools in the filmmaking arsenal: scoring. Ennio Morricone once described music as "energy, space, and time" which is a broad and huge and cosmic enough description to explain away how overwhelming a task it is to write about... especially to those of us who are more visually attuned. As you've undoubtedly heard, Morricone, by all accounts of the all time great composers, has passed away at the age of 91 after a fall which hospitalized him. In the course of his spectacular career, which stretches across six decades of cinema, he helped defined an entire genre (the spaghetti western), and composed the scores for over three hundred movies as well as an alarming number of TV shows on the side.

His six Oscar nominations (Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, Malena, The Hateful Eight) and two Oscars (one of them an Honorary) don't even begin to cover what he gave to the cinema. He was beloved by auteurs as is amply evident in his filmography. Some of his most famous films and scores outside of those Oscar-honored works include The Good The Bad and the Ugly, La Cage Aux Folles, Lady of the Camelias, Once Upon a Time in America, Inglorious Basterds, Wolf, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, For a Few Dollars More, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and Cinema Paradiso. Do you have a favourite score from that illustrious body of work?

Morricone is survived by his wife of 63 years, Maria Travia, and their four children. He will be missed but his legacy has long since been immortalized.

Almost There: Paul Newman & Robert Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"

by Cláudio Alves

From 1944 to 2008, we had a five-wide Best Picture race in the Oscars, as well as four acting categories. During those years, it became rare for a movie to score a Picture nomination without also nabbing some sort of acting nod. It was especially unusual for the majority of a given line-up to be devoid of acting nods, happening only three times during those 65 years. One of those times was the 1969 Academy Awards, when Z, Hello, Dolly! and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid didn't get any love from the acting branch. Considering the general bias against "foreign language" performances and the horrible reviews of a certain musical, it's easy to understand why the actors of Z and Hello, Dolly! went unrecognized. But what about the revisionist western in the bunch?…

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Toshiro Mifune @ 100: Yojimbo

Team Experience is celebrating the Centennial of Japan's great movie star Toshiro Mifune for the next couple of nights. Here's Eric Blume...

When the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo was released in 1961, he and Toshiro Mifune already had collaborated on over a dozen films, and this collaboration is widely considered one of their greatest.  It essentially birthed the character of The Man With No Name, was remade three years later by Hollywood as A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood, and has had an enduring influence on films for almost sixty years...

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The New Classics - Meek's Cutoff

The New Classics is a weekly series by Michael Cusumano, looking at great films of the 21st century through the lens of a single selected scene. 

Scene: Emily takes charge
The lost pioneers in Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff travel with a bird in a cage dangling from the back of a covered wagon. It is a token of happier days, when nature was an ornament that decorated your home, not a force that drained the life from you with its punishing distances and barren terrain.

More than a sad joke, the little yellow parakeet also functions as a poignant symbol for the codes of society the pioneers carry with them into the wilderness, codes which become increasingly absurd in the context of their predicament. Lost, dying from thirst, and led by a guide who is either a charlatan or a mad man, the wagon train’s men still make sure to isolate themselves from their wives when discussing strategy.

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