A Room With A View (1985)

Phantasm (1979)

A Touch of Class (1973)

Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

The Bad Seed (1956)

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

Private Benjamin (1980)

Born Romantic (2000)

Hobson’s Choice (1954)

Dillinger (1973)

Peabody Award

Never on Sunday (1960)

Stuart's Nite

Jules Dassin obit via NYT:

Mr. Dassin left the United States for France in 1953 because, he said, he was “unemployable” in Hollywood. In Paris, unable to speak much more than restaurant French when he arrived, he encountered hard times and remained largely unemployed for five years. In need of money, he agreed to direct “Rififi,” a low-budget production about a jewelry heist. A memorable sequence is of the robbery itself, lasting about a half-hour and filmed without music or dialogue.

Mr. Dassin also acted in the movie, under the name Perlo Vita, playing an Italian safe expert. He won a best-director award for the film at the 1955 Cannes Film Festival. By the time he wrote and directed “Never on Sunday,” a comedy about a good-hearted prostitute (Ms. Mercouri), the anti-Communist witch hunt in the United States had been discredited, and he had been accepted again.

Mr. Dassin also had a role in the movie, as a bookish American from — like Mr. Dassin himself — Middletown, Conn., who tries to reform the prostitute. His directing and screenwriting were nominated for Academy Awards.

The movie was a moneymaker and its title song was a hit, though some critics found the script predictable. Ms. Mercouri became Mr. Dassin’s second wife in 1966, two years after he directed her in “Topkapi,” another film about jewel thieves, the prize in this case being gems from the Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul.

Jules Dassin was born in Middletown on Dec. 18, 1911, one of eight children of Samuel Dassin, an immigrant barber from Russia, and the former Berthe Vogel. Shortly after Jules was born, his father moved the family to Harlem. Jules attended Morris High School in the Bronx.

He joined the Communist Party in 1930s, a decision he recalled in 2002 in an interview with The Guardian in London. “You grow up in Harlem where there’s trouble getting fed and keeping families warm, and live very close to Fifth Avenue, which is elegant,” he told the newspaper. “You fret, you get ideas, seeing a lot of poverty around you, and it’s a very natural process.”

He left the party in 1939, he said, disillusioned after the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler.
....
He had always been demanding of himself and often critical of his own work. In 1962, with his best films largely behind him, Mr. Dassin told Cue magazine: “Of my own films, there’s only one I’ve really liked — ‘He Who Must Die.’ That is, I like what it had to say. But that doesn’t mean I’m completely satisfied with it. I’d do it all over again, if I could.”

Encyclopedia Britannica on Melina Mercouri:

Mercouri came from a politically prominent family. She graduated from the Drama School of the National Theatre of Greece. Her first major role, at the age of 20, was Lavinia in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, but perhaps her most memorable parts were Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and the good-hearted prostitute in the film Never on Sunday (1960). This film gained her an international reputation that would serve her well in politics. Her involvement in politics was triggered by her indignation over the military coup that brought a handful of army colonels to power in Greece in 1967.

Married to the French-born American film director Jules Dassin (who directed most of her films), she was abroad when the coup occurred. She dedicated herself to stimulating opposition against the junta in Europe and the United States, to the extent that she was deprived of her Greek citizenship by the colonels’ regime. After the collapse of the dictatorship in 1974, she returned to Greece and promptly joined Andreas Papandreou’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). She ran unsuccessfully that year for deputy from the same Piraeus district that had made her famous in Never on Sunday, but she was elected when she ran a second time, in 1977.

Reelected in 1981 when Pasok won a general election, she was appointed by Papandreou to be his minister of culture. One of her major efforts was an attempt to persuade the British government to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece; she also increased government subsidies for the arts. She served in the post until 1989, when PASOK lost power; she was reappointed after their electoral victory in 1993. In 1971 Mercouri published an autobiography, I Was Born Greek. In 1997 UNESCO created the Melina Mercouri International Prize for the Safeguarding and Management of Cultural Landscapes; the prize is awarded every two years.

Duck Soup (1933)

Nora's Nite

Michael Koller via Senses of Cinema:

Duck Soup is indisputably the Marx Brothers' greatest film. It is the last of the five films the Brothers made for Paramount Pictures during their most creative and anarchic period. The first two films, Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) were adaptations of their hit stage comedies and suffer from a theatrical inertia, while the next three, Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup, were based on original screenplays. Duck Soup was the only one of these films that fully integrated and balanced all of the Marx Brothers' comic elements.

For the five Paramount films there were four brothers, a fifth, Gummo, left the line-up before they moved into the cinema. These brothers were so different to each other they seemed unrelated. Groucho was the leader, the slick greaser whose chief weapon was his mastery of the English language, yet he was as phoney as his moustache. Chico, with his fake Italian accent, represented the poor European immigrant who had arrived in America in search of a better future. Chico's strength, or weakness if you like, was his catalogue of bad puns.

During his trial as a spy in Duck Soup he is asked, "Isn't it true you tried to sell Freedonia's secret coded plans?" He replies, unembarrassed, "Sure I sold a code and 2 pair of plans." Curly, blonde-haired Harpo was mute, yet his lack of speech was never a hindrance, frequently being placed in a position were speech was mandatory and always coping. For example, in Monkey Business he attempts to get through the American customs by carrying a gramophone and pretending to be Maurice Chevalier. At one point in Duck Soup he answers the phone for Groucho. I wonder if his character really was mute!

Finally there was the much-maligned Zeppo. The ersatz WASP of the team, almost the comic straight-man and yet he was always in on the joke. He is generally regarded as the least talented of the four and yet he was in their best movies. Is this purely a coincidence or did he contribute significantly to their artistic success? Zeppo left the team to become a theatrical agent just after their Paramount contract was terminated.

The Marx Brothers are justifiably seen as the cinematic auteurs of their films partly because, apart from Duck Soup, the direction of their films is competent at best and frequently rudimentary. Nevertheless, Duck Soup is the product of a fortunate collaboration with the masterful comedy director Leo McCarey who understood his performers' comic genius. Duck Soup is definitely one of McCarey's better films even if it is not his best.

Duck Soup's trite B-grade drama operates in parallel and contrast to the Marx Brothers' absurdist comedy. This is beautifully illustrated in Margaret Dumont's first scene with Groucho. Dumont is serious, with a pompous dignity, her reactions to Groucho's misplaced humour are various, including outrage and moral indignation, yet she never acknowledges Groucho's 'wink'. She describes Firefly as "a progressive, fearless fighter" but Groucho never displays any responsibility and to the contrary undermines the notion in his opening song. "If you think this country's bad off now, just wait until I get through with it," he sings. Dumont perfectly demonstrates why she is one of the great 'straight men' of all time. Her performance alone is a joy to watch. And this demonstrates one of McCarey's strengths as a director.

He builds his film around actors, yet there is also an intuitive understanding of the technical power of filmmaking. McCarey allows his comedians to milk their humour without remaining subservient to narrative logic or character consistency. Chicolino (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo) are two spies who, along with Firefly, display no real allegiance to either of the opposing factions. This helps to maintain the comic pace of the film and says much about nationalistic jingoism and patriotic hysteria.

French Connection II (1975)

Peter's Nite

Stephen B. Armstrong on French Connection II via CinemaRetro:

The original script for French Connection II was prepared by Robert Dillon, whose previous credits included, most notably, Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Once production commenced in the summer of 1974, however, Frankenheimer decided that he needed to have his script re-worked. For the job, he recruited the novelist Pete Hamill, who’d actually known Eddie Egan, the New York City police detective upon whom Hackman’s character Popeye Doyle was based. In 2006, Hamill recalled his involvement in the project:

[When Frankenheimer] called me from Marseilles, asking me to help, I said I would try to get there within two days. "Why not one?" he said, and laughed nervously. I never asked why he called me. Someone hand-delivered a script to my place in New York and I read it on the plane.

John, at that time, had a major problem. He had already shot nine days of the existing script. He had developed a reputation for going over budget, so had no flexibility. He couldn't re-shoot what was already in the can.

That gave me a problem too, since I had to write around the existing pieces, which, as always, had been shot out of order. It was like working on a jigsaw puzzle. The basic problem was that Hackman, a great movie actor, had nothing to act. And the reason for that was that Roy Scheider was not in the sequel, and Hackman had nobody to bounce his lines off. He would never talk to a French cop the way he talked to Scheider in the Billy Friedkin original.

….My first work was on the following day's pages, trying to make the character sound like Popeye Doyle….Within a day-and-a-half (with naps in between) I had written enough for them to keep shooting for six or seven days….Hackman was ecstatic. He had something to act!

Frankheimer interviewed by Gerald Pratley:

Another example of course are the races of Grand Prix seen in Ronin as high-speed chases through the streets of Paris. They are so brilliantly done and so exciting throughout that the director finds himself questioned by almost everyone asking "how did you do this?" Frankenheimer replies, "Well, I spent hours recently recording commentaries about this for the DVD disc giving viewers an almost complete account of how we worked out the car sequences. First we sent out the art director -- or production designer as they call them now -- with a group of experts to determine where we would stage all this. Everything was pre-planned. We sketched them, with Ted Boonthanakit, as story boards; we put cameras in crash boxes, on cars and in cars, took shots of actors in and out of cars, towed cut-up cars, we used right-hand versions of the cars from England for close-ups of the actors who appeared to be driving but the actual driver was out of the shot driving on the right-hand side of the cars. We drove at the speeds you see in the picture and there were no special effects. Every car coming and going, passing or swerving, was driven by an expert racing driver. We had 300 French drivers at the wheels of all other cars on the road and for help in all this I have to thank Jean Claude Lagniez. There were all manner of ways and techniques we used, cameras with different lenses, and every move for every car was worked out in advance. It was very exciting, it was terribly dangerous, lives were often in jeopardy and it took a great many weeks -- and then I did 28 days on second unit filming; all the roads were blocked off to traffic, we controlled everything we shot and the French police were extremely helpful. And it all came together in the editing process with Tony Gibbs, one of the best editors still working today."

The bars, cafes, houses, and other interiors have the look, and create the atmosphere, of classic French films from past eras. This, said Frankenheimer, was what he set out to achieve, adding with a laugh, "I think I now have 'my trilogy' (a reference to the works of other directors, among them Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Kobayashi, Donski) with The Train, French Connection II and Ronin, which have several traits in common: a graphic French realism and characterization, pervaded with tragedy and humour." (The director has made two other films in France: Grand Prix (in part) and the little-known but memorable, Impossible Object.)

And what did all of this cost? For Frankenheimer, never known to be an "over-budget" filmmaker and who has achieved remarkable results on low budgets, Ronin was his most expensive film at $US54m. "Well," he said with a touch of humour, "I didn't waste money. We live in inflationary times, it's expensive shooting in France and the money is all there up on the screen. The studio got its moneysworth, car chases do not come cheap, and De Niro doesn't work for scale!

"I'm not lightning fast, but I'm not slow either. I tend to shoot a lot of set-ups. I was an editor and director in live television, that's what I did, and I watched every shot on the screen -- in rehearsal and in performance. I knew what was needed in editing and I still do. I shoot a lot of coverage, and making Ronin was an experience I enjoyed immensely."

Escape from Alcatraz (1979)

Pamela's Nite

Point Blank (1967)

Stuart's Nite

The Great Santini (1979)

Nora's Nite

If.... (1968)

Peter's Nite
Nora's pasta salad, gluten-free brownies

Lindsay Anderson bio at Screenonline:

Born in Bangalore, India, on 17 April 1923, younger son of a Scottish army officer stationed there, Anderson was named for Australian poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, much admired by his mother. Educated at Cheltenham College, he announced there his intention to 'rebel' and spent the rest of his life carrying out this aim. At Cheltenham, he began a life-long friendship with writer-to-be, Gavin Lambert, drawn together by their love of American films; sixty years later, Lambert would write an elegant account of Anderson's (and his own) life and work.

Following World War 2 service as a cryptographer with the Army's Intelligence Corps, he read Classics at Wadham College, Oxford. Here, very significantly, he co-founded (with Lambert) the short-lived but influential critical journal, Sequence, in which he set down his passionately held views on such filmmakers as his heroes John Ford and Humphrey Jennings, on Hollywood musicals - and, with almost uniform severity - on the British cinema of the day, which he saw as irredeemably middle-brow and middle-class. In Sequence he indulged the luxury of 'saying exactly what [he] liked', and maintained the habit, sometimes to his own cost, for the rest of his life. He was not a man who changed his mind, and the passions of those early years informed the rest of his life.

John Harris on Lindsay Anderson via The Guardian:

Exactly 40 years ago, the film director Lindsay Anderson was preparing for the release of If..., the surreal story of a revolt in a public school in which the masters and prefects stood as signifiers for Britain and its atrophying establishment. This was 1968,and the cabal of libertines who drive the film's plot crystallised the political excitement that had been evident that year in London, Paris, Prague and Berlin. Their leader - all lips, hair and animal magnetism - was a character called Mick Travis, played by the young Malcolm McDowell. With good reason, his image has since been used on scores of record sleeves and club flyers, and tacked to successive generations of undergraduate walls.

Improbably, If... had been shot at Cheltenham college, Anderson's alma mater, whose cooperation had been secured via the crafty use of a 40-page fake script. "I kept saying, 'Why are they letting us shoot here? I can't believe it,'" says McDowell. "And Lindsay said, 'For God's sake, Malcolm - shut up! They think it's very nice, like a Tom Brown's Schooldays kind of film.'"

Eventually, the penny dropped. "Before the film opened," says McDowell, "they had to show it to the headmaster. It was the only screening Lindsay was not present at, which tells you something - and a week later, a letter arrived from Cheltenham college which sat unopened on his mantelpiece for at least seven years. I kept saying, 'Let's open it!', and he'd say, 'No! Put it back.' He didn't want to read the words, 'You betrayed us.'"

As a portrait of the rebel who retained a sentimental attachment to much of what he attacked, the anecdote has Anderson off to a tee - as I have been discovering over the past six months, working on a Radio 4 documentary that involved tracking down some of the people who were closest to him, as well as going back to the so-called Mick Travis trilogy: the three films that made Anderson's name - and, by the end, came close to destroying it.

If..., which won the Palme D'Or at the 1969 Cannes film festival, was the most brilliantly realised. O Lucky Man!, released in 1973, was more flawed, but an ambitious journey into our national character. To finish, there was 1982's Britannia Hospital, an unsatisfactory but fascinatingly swingeing attack on the NHS, trade unions, the monarchy, academia, science, television - and thereby Britain itself. It was released during the patriotic frenzy of the Falklands war, and according to one of Anderson's close associates, its outraged reception left him "a broken man". He remains one of British film's truly underrated talents, responsible for films full of an imagination and brio that most cinema long ago mislaid, but never quite accorded the reputation he deserves.

Anderson's last years were not as productive as they should have been, though in 1985, there came one high-profile and hilariously unlikely offer of work, when he was invited to film Wham! on their visit to China.
The result was a documentary Anderson titled If You Were There, which David Sherwin showed me on a portable TV at his home near the Forest of Dean: a rich, poetic, panoramic portrait of China's strangeness to the eyes of outsiders that George Michael thought wasn't "modern" enough, and Anderson claimed was guilty of one cardinal sin: there wasn't enough Wham! in it. To his annoyance, it was taken off him, recut and released as Wham! in China. "I do think that between them the Whammies have destroyed, or suppressed, an enjoyable, informative, entertaining and at times even beautiful film," he wrote in his diary.

Anderson died in August 1994, after suffering a heart attack while staying with friends in the south of France. A memorial celebration was held at the Royal Court, where David Storey dispensed an opening introduction to the evening. "He was a man with a set of values seemingly in place since birth," Storey said. "They were values by which he observed, scrutinised and judged everything around him, [and he had] an appetite for a world nobler, more charitable and above all more gracious than the one in which he found himself." If that description jars against Anderson's legendarily acerbic side, you do not have to look far for a more salty kind of remembrance; Malcolm McDowell, for example, later recalled that Anderson had expressed the hope that his gravestone might feature the inscription: "Surrounded by fucking idiots."

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Black Beauty (1971)

Pamela's Nite
Special guests: Tess and Fiona.

Mark Lester on starring in Black Beauty via Daily Mail:

We had two ponies playing the young Black Beauty, with the famous white blaze on their foreheads, and I loved spending time with them. Patrick Mower [now Rodney Blackstock in Emmerdale] played the cruel squire. He was a nice bloke and a good laugh but I couldn't work out why my mother, who had accompanied me to Ireland, was so excited to meet him. I didn't realise Patrick already had something of a reputation as a heart-throb.

Although in my memory that summer seems to stretch on for ever, as they do when you are a child, I was there for only about three weeks. After that the cast and crew left for Spain to shoot the rest of the film.

I can't recall what I was paid for Black Beauty but I do remember in 1967, when I was making Oliver!, proudly telling the Daily Mail's Lynda Lee-Potter that I was earning £200 a week and banking the lot with a view to buying an E-type Jag! I made my last feature film, The Prince And The Pauper, in 1976 when I was 18. I'd never really seen acting as a long-term career.

I became an osteopath and today I have a successful practice in Cheltenham. I haven't acted in three decades but there is a possibility I may return to the screen. I have been asked to play King Harold in a film called 1066.