This Quarter in Film History -

‘Broadway’ Playback

January 1, 2009

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s film legacy is its musicals. Perhaps because it was the most politically conservative of the major studios, MGM was more comfortable with melodramas and musicals than with social issues.

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Altman’s Grand Ole Soap Opry

June 1, 2015

After 40 years, Robert Altman’s satiric tapestry of American society looks more accurate than ever.

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The Original Road

November 1, 2011

Forty years ago, Steven Spielberg transformed television narrative with his made-for-TV movie Duel, which aired on ABC in November 1971.

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The Awakening of ‘Anger’ 25 Years Later

December 1, 2015

This year, as part of its annual selection of fully restored classics, the 72nd International Venice Film Festival presented, along with Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973), Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard (1965) and Sergei Eisenstein’ Alexander Nevsky (1938), among others, Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger (1990) — the most recently made of all the dramatic features chosen.

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Down Went ‘McGinty’

August 1, 2015

Seventy-five years ago, on August 14, 1940 — back when studios still owned theatres — The Great McGinty, written and directed by Preston Sturges, premiered at the Paramount Theatre in New York’s Times Square.

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Museum of ‘Intolerance’

July 1, 2006

By juxtaposing the four ancient and modern eras, Griffith replicated the synapses of the brain that can connect nonlinear information.

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A ‘Lion’ For All Seasons

November 1, 2008

‘The Lion in Winter’ is probably one of the few perennially popular films from 1968.

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Fruitless ‘Aran’

March 1, 2009

Documentarian Robert J. Flaherty was regarded by the poet e.e. cummings as “a god among men,” an opinion echoed by Orson Welles, who compared Flaherty to the poets Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau.

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