MGM Centennial: Post-Golden Age, 1960-1973

As film buffs everywhere, led by TCM, celebrate the 100th anniversary of the merger that formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on April 17, 1924, and recite the litany of great films from the Golden Age of that studio from the 1920s to the early ’50s and the roster declaring “more stars than there are in heaven,” I thought it might be useful to recall some of the films that came later in the studio’s history, particularly in the troubled days of the 1960s and ’70s when turbulence in the executive suites led to the studio’s decline and the destruction of its fabled backlot. I experienced this period in real time, particularly from 1969 on, and remember reading trade paper accounts of the controversial actions of new studio owner Kirk Kerkorian and production head James T. Aubrey, who was there a short time (1969-1973), but managed to burn a lot of bridges during his tenure. Yet I continued to see MGM releases during this period, including a few of my favorite films from the studio, most of which marked quite a contrast with the Golden Age MGM classics which remain beloved by millions today (including me). I’ll start with the earliest MGM films I saw as a young moviegoer. This won’t be a comprehensive account of this era of MGM’s history, just the highlights, including some I saw in theaters and some I discovered years later, usually on TCM.

From 1960-69, I saw 25 MGM films in theaters, including such big-ticket items as BEN-HUR, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, THE TIME MACHINE, MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY, HOW THE WEST WAS WON, DR. ZHIVAGO, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and a highly-touted re-release of GONE WITH THE WIND. (BEN-HUR, HUCKLEBERRY FINN and MUTINY were actually remakes of much earlier MGM films.) Usually it took these films a while to reach neighborhood theaters after their initial Broadway showings, at least two years in the case of BEN-HUR (1959). I was lucky enough to see HOW THE WEST WAS WON (1962) in Cinerama at a Broadway theater on a 4th Grade class trip. I remember looking up and checking out the three projection booths employed for the Cinerama process. Our teacher purchased the program book for the film and placed it in the class library and I devoured it during recess hours, learning the names of all the actors in it.

Double Feature Memories, Part 1: The 1960s

Turner Classic Movies has an eight-minute interstitial called “Two for One: The Tradition of the Double Feature,” and features Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg recalling the great double features they saw in theaters as kids in the 1940s (Scorsese) and 1950s (both of them), with Bruce Goldstein, programmer for New York’s Film Forum, providing historical context. It’s a great piece, superbly edited, with beautiful film clips. I was especially wowed by the color clips from the previously unfamiliar THE LADY WANTS MINK (1953), seen by Scorsese on a double bill with SHANE, and INVADERS FROM MARS, seen by Spielberg on a double bill with THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Bruce Goldstein recalls how Federico Fellini’s LA STRADA was shown in the U.S. on a mind-boggling double bill in 1957 with the cavalry western, TROOPER HOOK, starring Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck. My own double-feature movie attendance began in a later era than theirs, but I experienced many unusual co-feature juxtapositions as well, which I’ll recount here.

Here’s a link to the TCM short:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvg_d1ixLU8

Double features could be two related films, e.g. HERCULES and its sequel HERCULES UNCHAINED, or two James Bond films:

I actually attended this re-release in 1974, having missed the two films when they originally played in 1959 and 1960.

Japan and the Foreign Language Film Oscar

Japan’s choice of Wim Wenders’ PERFECT DAYS (2023) as its submission for Best International Feature at this year’s Academy Awards and its subsequent nomination got me to thinking about Japan and its 72-year-long relationship with the Academy Awards, especially in light of the fact that two major Japanese hits in the U.S. market this past season, Takashi Yamazaki’s GODZILLA MINUS ONE and Hayao Miyazaki’s THE BOY AND THE HERON, were passed over in favor of Wenders’ film. Both films at least got one nomination each in other categories. More on this below, but first some history.

Lee Marvin Centennial

“Lee was my kind of actor, a real tough-looking, tough-talking sonofabitch.” – Sam Fuller

Lee Marvin was born in New York City on Feb. 19, 1924. Today marks his centennial. (He died of a heart attack in 1987 in Arizona at the age of 63.) He was the quintessential movie tough guy of the 1950s and ’60s, emerging alongside Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Palance, and Lee Van Cleef, all of whom, like Lee, would eventually become stars, as well as a rogues’ gallery of equally rough-hewn, battle-scarred visages found among such contemporaries as Neville Brand, Aldo Ray, Ralph Meeker, Jack Elam, Leo Gordon, and Claude Akins, among others, nearly all of whom had served in the military in World War II. (Marvin was in the Marine Corps and was seriously wounded at the Battle of Saipan in the Pacific, for which he got a Purple Heart.)

THE BIG RED ONE (1980) directed by Sam Fuller

For years, these guys plied their trade in crime pictures, war movies and westerns, both on the big screen and small, as well as dramas about working men far removed from the centers of power, and became favorites of grindhouse and neighborhood theater audiences everywhere. (Quentin Tarantino regards these men with great awe in his books, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Cinema Speculation.)

Chow Yun-Fat in New York, 1996

On April 26, 1996, I visited a screening room in Manhattan to see PEACE HOTEL (1995), the last film Chow Yun-Fat made in Hong Kong in the 20^th century. The screening was followed by a press conference with Mr. Chow, at a nearby venue, which I also attended. At the time, Chow was best-known in the U.S. for such John Woo-directed shootout-heavy action films as A BETTER TOMORROW, THE KILLER and HARD-BOILED and the Ringo Lam thrillers CITY ON FIRE and FULL CONTACT. He was in town to promote a retrospective series of his films at the Cinema Village Theater in Manhattan, programmed by Peter Chow, who had curated several series of Hong Kong films at the theater prior to this. Chow was being offered roles in Hollywood films and was in the process of choosing which project to commit to when the press conference was held.

I wrote up the event and pitched it to the magazine Entertainment Weekly in hopes of getting my foot in the door there as a freelance contributor covering the burgeoning popularity of Japanese animation and Hong Kong films in the U.S. I never got anywhere, since they relied on in-house staff writers for everything, but I still have a few short pieces I wrote and pitched during that time. Since the Chow Yun-Fat piece was never published and I recently discovered it languishing in a file, I thought I’d share it with my readers here, especially since it offers a snapshot of a time when Hong Kong movies were attracting attention in Hollywood and gaining wider acceptance in the U.S. beyond the niche audience that had initially embraced them.

I faxed the piece to Dave Karger at Entertainment Weekly on April 30, 1996. (Karger, of course, is now well-known to movie buffs as one of the on-camera hosts on Turner Classic Movies.) Here’s the pitch memo to Karger, followed by the complete piece:

The Films of 1973, Part 2: A Great Year for Movies

Since I covered so many cop and crime films, Blaxploitation and kung fu in Part 1, I decided to post a second entry for everything else from 1973: westerns, horror, sci-fi, animation, critical favorites, and some of the great 1973 releases of all genres I discovered much later in revival theaters, on television, or home video. Here are more films I saw in their original release either in 1973 or 1974, when they finally showed up at neighborhood theaters. (There was more of a slow roll-out in those days and films that opened in two or three theaters in Manhattan sometimes stayed there for months.)

Westerns

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID

One of Sam Peckinpah’s western masterpieces, this one stars James Coburn as Garrett and Kris Kristofferson as Billy, with a high-powered supporting cast of western veterans. The version released to theaters was disowned by Peckinpah and new versions were crafted long after his death, one in 1988 and again, from Turner Entertainment, in 2005. I watched the most recent cut for this piece, which includes scenes that were cut from previous versions. I also remember seeing a TV cut in the 1980s, which doesn’t seem to exist anymore, which had some of the missing scenes.

The Films of 1973, Part 1: Cops, Crime and Kung Fu

1973 offered a wealth of riches for regular moviegoers, particularly those at neighborhood theaters. Hollywood released a ton of exemplary crime films, alternating hard-nosed cops with career criminals. Westerns were still popular as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood continued to thrive at the boxoffice and Italian westerns continued to make their way to U.S. screens. Blaxploitation was peaking and the floodgates opened for Hong Kong kung fu films to finally reach the American market. My three favorite directors of the time, Don Siegel, Robert Aldrich, and Sam Peckinpah, were making some of their best films. Their contemporary, Phil Karlson, made his biggest boxoffice hit, while another contemporary, genre deconstructionist Robert Altman, was busy also. William Friedkin followed up the success of THE FRENCH CONNECTION with one of the biggest boxoffice hits of the era and newer filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, George Lucas and Brian De Palma were making a splash. In addition to kung fu, foreign genre films from Italy, France and Japan were among the regular offerings at neighborhood theaters, while arthouse theaters showcased new works by acclaimed European directors like Francois Truffaut, Bernardo Bertolucci and Lina Wertmuller.

SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON: An Animated Western Classic

One day late last year, I got to thinking about my favorite American animated movie of the 21st century, SPIRIT: STALLION OF THE CIMARRON, and realized I hadn’t seen it since it had come out in 2002, twenty years earlier. Thinking about trying to find a copy of it, I paid a casual visit to Barnes & Noble in Union Square later that week and thought to browse in the DVD section and there it was on the first sale rack I saw–with a discount sticker! I paid less than $10 for it and instead of placing it on the already large pile of unwatched discs at home, I watched it immediately and afterwards looked up my rave review of it on IMDB, first posted after a press screening in May 2002, in which I called it, “The first great western of the 21st Century.” In the review, I lauded the filmmakers’ choice to make it a real western, with brilliantly rendered recognizable backdrops, and to not allow the horse characters to talk (with the no-doubt inevitable celebrity voices), focusing instead on the life of a nonverbal mustang in the 1860s west and its turbulent encounters with Indians and the U.S. cavalry, all while trying to get back to his own herd and home valley, picking up a mate along the way.

Hayao Miyazaki in New York: The Lost Interview (1999)

It’s currently Hayao Miyazaki season in the U.S. as the latest film of the Japanese animation pioneer, THE BOY AND THE HERON, opens wide and becomes a bonafide boxoffice hit, attracting the most audiences since SPIRITED AWAY opened in 2003 and became the director’s breakout hit for American audiences. Numerous pieces about Miyazaki have popped up in newspapers and magazines, including “A Beginner’s Guide to Miyazaki” in the current issue of Den of Geek, a free magazine available in comic book shops.

THE BOY AND THE HERON (2023)

I had hoped to write a piece about my discovery of Miyazaki and his work in the late 1980s and ’90s and the change in direction his films took in the 21st century, culminating in his latest film, but in researching it I found an article I wrote documenting Miyazaki’s trip to New York in September 1999 in conjunction with the showing of PRINCESS MONONOKE at the New York Film Festival and it includes quotes from the interview with Miyazaki I conducted at the time (with two other journalists). As far as I can tell, this piece was never published anywhere nor do I have any record of whom exactly I did it for. (I was writing at the time for Animerica Magazine and Family Wonder.com, a website that reviewed children’s videos. The latter site published my full transcript of the interview.)

Black-and-White Cinema in 1960s Hollywood

Black-and-white films were regularly produced and released by the major Hollywood studios right up through 1966, which happened to be the last year that the Academy Award categories of Cinematography, Costume Design and Art Direction & Set Decoration had separate divisions for Color and Black-and-White. Interestingly, the 1966 winner in the black-and-white division of all three categories was the last black-and-white film nominated for Best Picture in the 1960s, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, Mike Nichols’ film based on Edward Albee’s play and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as a dysfunctional, bickering hard-drinking couple living on a college campus. The only other Hollywood studio releases in b&w to get Oscar nominations in any categories that year were THE FORTUNE COOKIE, SECONDS, and MISTER BUDDWING. Walter Matthau won Best Supporting Actor for THE FORTUNE COOKIE. Other b&w films nominated that year were all from Europe.

Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton in WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

Ron Rich, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau in THE FORTUNE COOKIE

Rock Hudson, Richard Anderson in SECONDS