One of the visual thrills I get from watching Japanese films is noting the intricate design of Japanese buildings found in period settings, from the details of the roofs, walls, verandas and gardens to the interior spaces designed for living quarters and reception areas for visitors in homes of nobles and officials. Even the simple dwellings of farmers, artisans and craftsmen are designed with efficiency, practicality and comfort.
Double Feature Memories, Part 1: The 1960s
2 AprTurner 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:
Japan and the Foreign Language Film Oscar
3 MarJapan’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
19 Feb“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.)
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
28 JanOn 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 20th 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
30 DecSince 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
23 Dec1973 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.
Hayao Miyazaki in New York: The Lost Interview (1999)
16 DecIt’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.
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.)