Week in Review
I’ve passed 31 days total viewing time, if I had watched all 444 DVDs back to back, I would have spent a month solid watching movies. Not only am I losing patience with sub-par films, I’m running out of column ideas. After hating Kicking and Screaming and Ladybugs, I thought maybe I should write a column about sports films I like, but I’ve done that. I also watched two seasons of Little Britain, a huge British success that’s still not found an audience, followed by an idea to write a column about under-the-radar British films, but I’ve done that as well. The rest of the queue was filled with Paul Newman reissues, but they haven’t all shown up yet so I’d like to save that for next week. I don’t want to give a favorites list for the year yet, since this whole thing ends in another six weeks. So now I’ve seen 444 DVDs this year, and I have no idea what to write about. But there are a few people involved in films I watched who I think are undernoticed, while rated highly by critics.
Arthur Penn
Philo Farnsworth was the inventor of the cathode ray tube, along with his company Philco. When you add a couple of doohickies and gizmos to one of those tubes, you have a TV. Of course, TV was invented before there were TV shows, so one of the early producers of TV shows was Philco. Who was going to buy a TV if there was nothing to watch on it? Philco started The Philco Television Playhouse in 1948. Imagine a televison manufacturer today getting involved at that level, or Apple producing music recordings for the Ipod. But that was the way Philco sold their sets, and one of their early directors was Arthur Penn.
Penn has been around the business as long as anyone still alive, and he may yet direct another film. After earning his stripes in the earliest days of television, Penn went on to direct Alice’s Restaurant, The Miracle Worker, and Bonnie and Clyde. He received Oscar nominations for each of these films. Other films he directed that are worth seeing are: The Lefthanded Gun, starring Paul Newman as Billy the Kid; The Chase and The Missouri Breaks starring Brando; Little Big Man starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway; and Night Moves, starring Gene Hackman. His films have a stark sense of violence that doesn’t register the same shock of the time. Bonnie and Clyde was the Reservoir Dogs of the late ’60s.
Ernest Lehman
What do the films Hello Dolly!, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Sabrina, North By Northwest, The Sound of Music, The King and I, Somebody Up There Likes Me, and West Side Story all have in common? Ernest Lehman wrote them all. While he never won an Oscar for any of his six nominations, he did receive an honorary Academy Award in 2001 in what I like to call their Lifetime Apology award. There are so many in the history of Hollywood who never got his or her due while the works were contemporary.
Terrance Malick
Film nerds are no stranger to Malick, but he’s not a household name. He’s one of the few people in Hollywood who doesn’t like attention. His contracts stipulate that he doesn’t do publicity for the films he directs nor will he have any current photos published. Before he went on to write and direct masterpieces like Badlands and Days of Heaven, Malick got a degree in Philosophy from Harvard and taught at MIT. As a result, his films have a dark brooding sense about them, and often have existensial attitudes and messages.
