Hotel (1967) Review
Rod Taylor runs a grand old New Orleans hotel through one week of takeover threats, a jewel thief and a hidden hit-and-run in this glossy adaptation of Arthur Hailey's novel. It's an 8.5.
Tag: 1960s
Films released between 1960 and 1969, the decade the Production Code collapsed and the studio system went with it. What replaced them arrived from several directions at once: the European art film, the spy cycle, the revisionist western, and a generation of American directors who had watched all of it. The reviews here cover a period where two incompatible kinds of filmmaking were in cinemas at the same time.
1960sStar Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969) Review
Star Trek: The Original Series rates 6 to 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale, with The Trouble with Tribbles at the top and Spock's Brain as the outlier at 1. Heavily dated, cheaply built, corny in places, and…
1960sTrue Grit (1969) Review
True Grit (1969) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Wayne finally won an Oscar for playing a fat, drunk, one-eyed marshal who shoots men in the back, and the performance works because he is willing to…
1960sThe Wild Bunch (1969) Review
The Wild Bunch (1969) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Peckinpah cut the violence at multiple film speeds and assembled it at a rate nobody had attempted, and the result changed how every action film since has…
1960sThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) Review
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Ford spent thirty years building the Western myth and then made the film that takes it apart, shot on a soundstage in black…
1960sThe Magnificent Seven (1960) Review
The Magnificent Seven (1960) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Kurosawa's Seven Samurai relocated to the Mexican border, shortened by an hour, and improved in one specific way. Every gunman gets an introduction that is also an…
1960sButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) Review
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. William Goldman sold the screenplay for four hundred thousand dollars and the film is a comedy about two men becoming obsolete. The freeze frame…
1960sEasy Rider (1969) Review
Easy Rider (1969) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It invented the modern road movie and killed the counterculture's mythology in the same hundred minutes. The film is loose, self-indulgent and occasionally incoherent, and the ending is…
1960sCleopatra (1963) Review
Cleopatra (1963) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It was budgeted at around two million dollars and cost forty-four, was the highest grossing film of its year and still did not break even, and Fox sold off…
1960sPoint Blank (1967) Review
Point Blank (1967) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Lee Marvin threw the script in the bin, handed his script and casting approval to a British director who had never worked in Hollywood, and the result is…
1960sIn Cold Blood (1967) Review
In Cold Blood (1967) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Richard Brooks shot Capote's book in the actual house where the murders happened, cast two unknowns for their resemblance to the killers, and used seven of the…
1960sThe Manchurian Candidate (1962) Review
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Frankenheimer made a political thriller that is also a comedy, a nightmare and a story about a mother, released it thirteen months before Dallas, and Angela Lansbury…