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.

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.

THE BLOB (1958): Criterion Blu-ray of a Sci-Fi Classic

When I was five, I remember standing outside my local movie theater, the Crotona, and seeing a poster for the movie, THE BLOB (1958), with this massive jello-like substance covering buildings and people and it looked genuinely scary. I was intrigued, but it wasn’t the kind of films my parents were likely to take me to.

60 Years Ago at the Movies: JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963)

In the summer of 1963, on my tenth birthday, I was taken by my parents to see my first Broadway show, “She Loves Me,” and afterwards we walked through Times Square at night, the first time I got to see it in all its glory. What I was most impressed by were the giant billboards for two films set to open the next day, THE GREAT ESCAPE at the DeMille and JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS at the Loew’s State, two films I was eagerly anticipating. I had to wait till they came to the Bronx before I could see them, so when I found out that JASON would open at the Loew’s Paradise on September 4, I made a point of taking a walk on September 3 to find out exactly where the Paradise was (about a half-mile northwest from where I lived) and made plans to see it at the first show.

This is the image used in the billboard I saw advertising JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS.

50 Years Ago: When Kung Fu Came to Times Square

50 years ago, on March 20, 1973, Warner Bros. held two free screenings of a new movie at the Loew’s State Theater on Broadway and 45th Street in Times Square. It was called FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH and was set to open officially the very next day, March 21. It promised action on a scale that exploitation fans had never quite witnessed before, being the very first of a new wave of English-dubbed kung fu films from Hong Kong to hit the U.S. These films would galvanize grindhouse and neighborhood theater audiences even more than the Italian westerns and Blaxploitation action thrillers that had been keeping us busy up to this point.

I had managed to beat the line and enter the lobby area to join a friend of mine who had been recruited by Warner Bros. to help pass out posters, stickers and promo material to the crowd leaving the first showing. So I helped out, too, and there was sure a clamor for the items as wildly enthusiastic fans came filing out of the theater and passing the table. When the clamor died down and all the piles were gone, I managed to slip into the second of the two free screenings that night, forced to sit much closer than I would have liked. I can assure you that the packed audience was won over by the opening fight sequence in which an elderly kung fu teacher under attack by a group of thugs leaped upward into the air and kicked two separate opponents in the head at the same time. The crowd went completely nuts and the level of excitement was maintained for the film’s entire 106-minute running time.

Greats or Favorites? How to Make a List of 100 Top Films

The recent Sight and Sound list of The Critics’ Top 100 Greatest Films of All Time and the Variety list of 100 Greatest Movies of All Time got me to think about my own criteria for creating such a list, and the distinctions between “Best films” and “Favorite films.” The problem with the Sight and Sound and Variety lists is that they’re created by committees and are designed to appeal to a variety of different fan bases and constituencies. Choosing 100 gives plenty of room to placate as many different factions as possible, with cultural politics often playing a role and the ranking based on the number of votes the films get. A Great or Best film should be lauded, taught, studied, and viewed repeatedly. But, for me at least, there should be some unifying set of aesthetic principles linking the films and a recognition of their cultural, social and artistic importance within the context of their production and release, making their inclusion on the list obvious. This is hard to do when you’re relying on committee and other input for the choices. I agreed with 16 of Sight and Sound’s choices and 19 of Variety’s. While some of the odder choices, particularly on the Variety list, made me cringe (and I won’t name names), there’s a huge middle ground of films represented that I never felt strongly enough about to include on such a list myself but which I can accept as meeting the various criteria employed by this sampling of critics. And there are numerous non-Asian foreign critical favorites I never bothered to see. I also have much narrower criteria on which to base such a list than the folks involved in the creation of these.

Hong Kong Fandom in the ’90s: Chinatown Theaters

Thirty years ago, on September 30, 1992, I made my first trip to a Chinatown theater in Manhattan to see Hong Kong movies. It was the old Sun Sing Theater, on East Broadway under the Manhattan Bridge, and the double feature was DRAGON INN and TWIN DRAGONS, one a historical wuxia martial arts adventure starring Brigitte Lin and the other a modern kung fu comedy thriller with Jackie Chan playing twins.

50 Years in Times Square: Kurosawa and his Western Remakes

On April 8, 1971, 50 years ago today, I made my first trip to see a Japanese movie on the big screen. It was Akira Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) and it may have been the first time the full three-and-a-half-hour cut of the film was shown on the big screen in New York. It was also the first fully foreign-language film with English subtitles that I would see in a theater. The theater was the tiny Bijou Cinema on West 45th Street, between Broadway and 8th Avenue in Times Square in Manhattan.  Interestingly, just over two months earlier, on January 28, 1971, I’d seen John Sturges’ THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960), a western remake of SEVEN SAMURAI, for the first time at a theater around the corner from the Bijou, the Victoria on Broadway and 46th Street. On May 20 of that year, I would see Sergio Leone’s A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964), the first in the Italian director’s “Man with No Name” western trilogy starring Clint Eastwood, at the Astor Theater, adjacent to the Victoria on Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets. A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS was an Italian western remake of Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO (1961), which I would then see on July 17, 1971, at the Bijou Cinema around the corner. So I saw Kurosawa’s two greatest samurai films and their western remakes in a six-month time period on one strip of real estate in Times Square, all while I was still in high school. Where else and at what time period could that have happened? I was so lucky to be coming of age as a film buff at just that time.