1962--The Year in Review

1962 saw a Hollywood-generated blowback against the influence of world cinema, with its native filmmakers obviously feeling challenged to deliver equally serious work. The American scene was dotted with glorious pictures--Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird, Morton Da Costa's The Music Man (in my heart of hearts, still my favorite musical ever), Sam Peckinpah's arrival with Ride The High Country (a forsaken B-picture at the time), John Ford's then-critically-drubbed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Frankenheimer's chilling Cold War tale The Manchurian Candidate, Sidney Lumet's ambitious Long Day's Journey Into Night, Robert Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (a progenitor for a whole slew of later quasi-horror films that would star fading actresses), and David and Lisa, an oddly moving early indie film by husband-and-wife team Frank and Eleanor Perry (theirs was the first independent film to get such major recognition). But none could brook the breathtaking work done by David Lean. His massive yet achingly intimate film about a reluctant British hero working out complex personal issues against the backdrop of a World War I sideshow in the Middle East would become the point against which all epics would subsequently be measured (especially since it contained a brilliant debut by Peter O'Toole, and another breakthrough performance by Omar Sharif). It was an astonishing year, though, for cinema from other countries, with films from Luis Bunuel (whose absurd dark comedy about insatiable bourgeoisie appetites still captivates), Truffaut, Godard, Ozu, Kobayashi, and Serge Bourguignon, a filmmaker who barely even tried to match his chancy tale about a chaste love affair between a shell-shocked war veteran and an abandoned 12-year-old girl (it would win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, even though it's a movie that could never be made--or, for some, even viewed--today). Yet I have to give its lead actress the top award, as Patricia Gozzi's performance always moves me to stinging tears (it was a stupendous year for young actresses, with To Kill A Mockingbird's Mary Badham, The Miracle Worker's Patty Duke, and Lolita's Sue Lyon all contributing remarkable work). The UK film world, too, was ratcheting up to an upcoming explosion, with the country's "kitchen sink" dramas and the first James Bond film both being early clues to a new direction. On the short film front, the offerings were becoming much more daring, with Chris Marker stunningly elegant 27-minute sci-fi tale La Jatee told in a devastating series of still photographs. Meanwhile, on the animated front, former Oscar-winners Chuck Jones and the Hubleys are bested by a French film that conveys a challenging, emotionally draining peer into the Holocaust--one that turned out to be a deep influence on the animated work of Monty Python veteran Terry Gilliam. NOTE: These are MY choices for each category, and are only occasionally reflective of the selections made by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (aka The Oscars). When available, the nominee that actually won the Oscar will be highlighted in bold. 

PICTURE: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (UK, David Lean)
(2nd: The Music Man (US, Morton Da Costa), followed by: 
Ride the High Country (US, Sam Peckinpah)
The Exterminating Angel (Mexico, Luis Buñuel)
To Kill a Mockingbird (US, Robert Mulligan)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (US, John Ford)
Sundays and Cybele (France, Serge Bourguignon)
Knife in the Water (Poland, Roman Polanski)
Harakiri (Japan, Masaki Kobayashi)
David and Lisa (US, Frank Perry)
The Manchurian Candidate (US, John Frankenheimer)
Jules and Jim (France, François Truffaut)
Lolita (UK, Stanley Kubrick)
An Autumn Afternoon (Japan, Yasujiro Ozu)
Billy Budd (UK, Peter Ustinov)
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (US, Robert Aldrich)
Cleo from 5 to 7 (France, Agnès Varda)
L’Eclisse (Italy, Michelangelo Antonioni)
Vivre sa Vie (France, Jean-Luc Godard)
Advise and Consent (US, Otto Preminger)
Dog Star Man (US, Stan Brakhage)
Ivan’s Childhood (USSR, Andrei Tarkovsky)
Mamma Roma (Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Carnival of Souls (US, Herk Hervey)
Dr. No (UK, Terence Young)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (UK, Tony Richardson)
Chushingura (Japan, Hiroshi Inagaki)
Le Doulos (France, Jean-Pierre Melville)
The Miracle Worker (US, Arthur Penn)
Merrill's Marauder's (US, Samuel Fuller)
Cape Fear (US, J. Lee Thompson)
Long Day’s Journey into Night (US, Sidney Lumet)
Days of Wine and Roses (US, Blake Edwards)
Birdman of Alcatraz (US, John Frankenheimer)
Lonely Are the Brave (US, David Miller)
The Intruder (US, Roger Corman)
The L-Shaped Room (UK, Bryan Forbes)
The Trial (France/US, Orson Welles)
The World’s Greatest Sinner (US, Timothy Carey)
Heaven and Earth Magic (US, Harry Smith)
A Kind of Loving (UK, John Schlesinger)
The Connection (US, Shirley Clarke)
Gay Purr-ee (US, Abe Levitow)
The Longest Day (Andrew Marton, Bernard Wicki, Ken Annikin and Darryl L. Zanuck)
How the West Was Won (US, Henry Hathaway, John Ford and George Marshall)
Two for the Seesaw (US, Robert Wise)
The Phantom of the Opera (UK, Terence Fisher)
Eegah! (US, Arch Hall Sr.)
Wild Guitar (US, Ray Dennis Steckler))

ACTOR: Peter O’Toole, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (2nd: Robert Preston, The Music Man, followed by: Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird; Joel McCrea, Ride the High Country; James Mason, Lolita; Hardy Kruger, Sundays and Cybele; Tom Courteney, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; Jack Lemmon, Days of Wine and Roses; Robert Mitchum, Cape Fear; Burt Lancaster, Birdman of Alcatraz)

ACTRESS: Patricia Gozzi, SUNDAYS AND CYBELE (2nd: Bette Davis, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, followed by: Katharine Hepburn, Long Day’s Journey into Night; Monica Vitti, L’Eclisse; Anne Bancroft, The Miracle Worker; Shirley Jones, The Music Man; Anna Magnani, Mamma Roma; Leslie Caron, The L-Shaped Room; Jeanne Moreau, Jules and Jim; Lee Remick, Days of Wine and Roses) 

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Omar Sharif, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (2nd: Peter Sellers, Lolita, followed by: Peter Ustinov, Billy Budd; Charles Laughton, Advise and Consent; Lew Ayres, Advise and Consent; Dean Stockwell, Long Day's Journey Into Night; Lee Marvin, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Ed Begley, Sweet Bird of Youth; Terrence Stamp, Billy Budd; Victor Buono, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?)



SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Mary Badham, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (2nd: Patty Duke, The Miracle Worker, followed by: Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate; Shelley Winters, Lolita; Hermione Gingold, The Music Man; Thelma Ritter, Birdman of Alcatraz; Mariette Hartley, Ride the High Country; Sue Lyon, Lolita; Shirley Knight, Sweet Bird of Youth; Cicely Courtenidge, The L-Shaped Room)



DIRECTOR: David Lean, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (2nd: Luis Bunuel, The Exterminating Angel, followed by: Sam Peckinpah, Ride the High Country; Robert Mulligan, To Kill a Mockingbird; Serge Bourguignon, Sundays and Cybele; Frank Perry, David and Lisa; John Ford, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Masaki Kobayashi, Harakiri; Morton Da Costa, The Music Man; John Frankenheimer, The Manchurian Candidate)

NON-ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FILM: THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (Mexico, Luis Buñuel) (2nd: Sundays and Cybele (France, Serge Bourguignon), followed by: Knife in the Water (Poland, Roman Polanski); Harakiri (Japan, Masaki Kobayashi); Jules and Jim (France, François Truffaut); An Autumn Afternoon (Japan, Yasujiro Ozu); Cleo from 5 to 7 (France, Agnès Varda); L’Eclisse (Italy, Michelangelo Antonioni); Vivre sa Vie (France, Jean-Luc Godard); Ivan’s Childhood (USSR, Andrei Tarkovsky); Mamma Roma (Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini); Chushingura (Japan, Hiroshi Inagaki); Le Doulos (France, Jean-Pierre Melville))



ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: N.B. Stone Jr., RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (2nd: Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Jakub Goldberg, Knife in the Water, followed by: Agnes Varda, Cleo from 5 to 7; J.P. Miller, Days of Wine and Roses; Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini, and Ottiero Otterei, L'Eclisse)



ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Horton Foote, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (2nd: Robert Bolt, Lawrence of Arabia, followed by: Luis Bunuel, The Exterminating Angel; James Gordon Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Eleanor Perry, David and Lisa)



LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM: LA JATEE (France, Chris Marker) (2nd: Zoo (Finland, Bert Haanstra), followed by: Window Water Baby Moving (US, Stan Brakhage); The War Game (UK, Mai Zetterling); Dylan Thomas (UK, Jack Howell))



ANIMATED SHORT FILM: LES JEUX DES ANGES (France, Walerian Borowczyk) (2nd: The Hole (US, John and Faith Hubley), followed by: Now Hear This (US, Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble); Self Defense...For Cowards (UK, Gene Deitch); Human Zoo (Japan, Yoji Kuri))

BLACK-AND-WHITE CINEMATOGRAPHY: Lionel Lindon, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (2nd: Henri Decaë, Sundays and Cybèle, followed by: Yoshio Muyajima, Harakiri; Vadim Yusov, Ivan’s Childhood; Russell Harlan, To Kill a Mockingbird)

COLOR CINEMATOGRAPHY: Frederick A. Young, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (2nd: Lucien Ballard, Ride the High Country, followed by: Robert Burks, The Music Man; Yahuru Atsuta, An Autumn Afternoon; Harry Stradling Jr., Gypsy)

BLACK-AND-WHITE ART DIRECTION: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, The Manchurian Candidate, To Kill a Mockingbird, Days of Wine and Roses, Harakiri

COLOR ART DIRECTION: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, The Music Man, Gypsy, Mutiny on the Bounty, That Touch of Mink

BLACK-AND-WHITE COSTUME DESIGN: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Days of Wine and Roses, Harakiri, Billy Budd

COLOR COSTUME DESIGN: THE MUSIC MAN, Lawrence of Arabia, Gypsy, My Geisha, Mutiny on the Bounty 

FILM EDITING: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, The Manchurian Candidate, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Music Man, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 

SOUND: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, The Music Man, The Longest Day, Days of Wine and Roses, The Manchurian Candidate 



ORIGINAL SCORE: Maurice Jarre, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (2nd: Elmer Bernstein, To Kill a Mockingbird, followed by: Bernard Herrmann, Cape Fear; Henry Mancini, Days of Wine and Roses; John Barry and Monty Norman, Dr. No; Nelson Riddle, Lolita)

 
ADAPTED OR MUSICAL SCORE: Ray Heindorf, THE MUSIC MAN (2nd: Frank Perkins, Gypsy)



ORIGINAL SONG: "Days of Wine and Roses" from DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES (Music by Henry Mancini, lyrics by Johnny Mercer) (2nd: "I've Written a Letter to Daddy” from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Music by Frank DeVol, lyrics by Bob Merrill), followed by: "Peppermint Twist" from Hey Let's Twist (Music and lyrics by Joey Dee and Henry Glover); "Walk on the Wild Side" from Walk on the Wild Side (Music by Elmer Bernstein, lyrics by Mack David); "Tender is the Night" from Tender is the Night (Music by Sammy Fain, lyrics by Paul Francis Webster); "The World's Greatest Sinner" from The World's Greatest Sinner (Music and lyrics by Frank Zappa))

SPECIAL EFFECTS: THE LONGEST DAY, Mutiny on the Bounty

MAKEUP: WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, Lawrence of Arabia, My Geisha

The 30 Day Cinephile Challenge: My Answers (Part 1)

On Facebook, there are multitudes of 30 day movie challenges (which consist of one probing movie question a day for...well, you know). I wanted to participate, but most of them bored me. It wasn't until I encountered the 30 Day Cinephile Challenge, with its vastly more inventive queries, that I opted to take part in one. My cohorts on this challenge, by the way, are extra worldly and so, by participating in this business, I'm learning much more about the global film scene than I ever expected. Anyway, just in case you're not one of my FB friends, and on the outside chance you perhaps wanted to know more about me, I thought I'd relay these questions and my answers to them here on filmicability. So here we go...

Day 1: My favorite opening scene
The Music Man (Morton DeCosta, 62). The original (white) rap, written by Meredith Willson and, amazingly, our hero Harold Hill doesn't even appear on-screen until the scene's tail end! An incredible rant about the values and pitfalls of the free market, and it still moves and rocks me years after I learned every line while listening to a homemade recording of the film on cassette tape. A powerful first scene.



Day 2: My favorite closing scene
The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 59). An escape to freedom, but with nowhere to go. It still gives me goosebumps!



Day 3: My most underrated filmmaker of all time
Peter Watkins. Every one of his films displays a fresh, chilling, immediately recognizable worldview, iced with an utter mastery of film craft. Even my least favorite film by him, Privilege, is something unique. But The Gladiators, Culloden, Edvard Munch, The War Game (for which he won an Best Documentary Oscar in 1965), La Commune (Paris 1871) and especially the radically scary Punishment Park are each uniformly magnificent, even if most people haven't seen them.



Day 4: Most overrated filmmaker of all time
James Cameron. Though I like The Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss well enough (the director's cut of the latter is his best film), the heaps of praise, awards, and cash dumped on to this guy for his other travesties literally makes me sick to my stomach. Avatar was so bad that it made me question the sanity of a world that would flip its shit for it. Cameron is quite an inventor, though--he should just stick to that and leave the moviemaking to others.

Day 5: The best movie from my favorite filmmaker
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Whether you think it boring or not, it's the greatest movie that has been made or will be made. It is completely successful in dramatizing the history of man from ape until superhuman. No other movie will ever even attempt to do such a thing without being compared to this progenitor. And no movie could ever do it, anyway.



Day 6: The biggest disappointment from one of my favorite filmmakers
Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002). I knew it was a project that he and Jay Cocks had been contemplating for over 20 years. When it arrived, with that awful U2 score over its opening scene, I was mortified. Daniel Day Lewis does his very best (and it is almost enough), but even he cannot save this misfire. The casting of DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz is laughable, and this faux-operatic movie just plods on and on. I'm sorry, but this much lauded battle sequence was ridiculously phony to me.



Day 7: A film I would love to share with everyone
A Little Romance (George Roy Hill, 79). The finest film ever made about the possession of a deep intelligence and the encountering of a soulmate. It never ceases to amaze me how deeply it affects me each time I watch it; I'm a weeping mess at its end. It says so much about me--as a romantically-minded film fan--and about humanity. But still it remains a minor cult movie at best. It should be required viewing in every film school class, I believe.



Day 8: My favorite experimental film
Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 63). Brakhage had no film stock available, but he didn't let that stop him. He took strips of 16mm editing tape and embedded in them pieces of moth wings and grass. I heard about this film in my 20s, but didn't get to see it until YouTube arrived. It was worth the wait. It's dazzling.



Day 9: My favorite North American filmmaker of all time (includes U.S.A. and Canada)
Barring the American Kubrick, who did his best work in Britain, I'll pick Orson Welles. No explanation necessary.

Day 10: My favorite Latin American filmmaker of all time
Mexico's Alfonso Cuarón. Like many others, I discovered him with the gorgeous A Little Princess. As a longtime love of the David Lean original, I avoided Great Expectations for a long time, but admired Cuarón's cheekiness greatly it when I finally saw it. Y Tu Mama Tambien is absolutely beyond reproach. He made the best Harry Potter series entry with The Prisoner of Azkaban. And Children of Men is a stone-cold masterpiece of the first order. I look forward to whatever he does in the future.

Day 11: My favorite African filmmaker of all time
Ousmane Sembene, from Senegal. Mandabi is a brilliant but sad comedy, Xala is vibrantly terrific, and Moolade is a complete shocker. I sure would like to see more films by him, but they're hard to find. And I'd like to see MORE African films, in general.

Day 12: My favorite Asian filmmaker of all time
Akira Kurosawa, of course. Why say anything else? Although I must say that Apitachapong Weerasethakul, from Thailand, is impressing me more and more these days.

Day 13: My favorite European filmmaker of all time
Ingmar Bergman, naturally. No one else even comes close.

Day 14: My favorite filmmaker of all time from Oceania
I could easily go with Peter Weir, and perhaps should, but few filmmakers make me more excited now than Andrew Dominick. With both Chopper and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, he's a shining voice in 21st Century world cinema. With his next movie, due in 2012, being about Marilyn Monroe, it's clear he's fascinated with the trappings of fame, and how it affects the famous and everyone surrounding them. This is a perfect subject for our media-driven age, and thus makes Dominick a supremely relevant director.

Day 15: Two directors I would like to see working together on a film
Shane Meadows (Somers Town, This is England) and Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy). One is uniquely British, the other uniquely American, but both are similarly understated and humanistic in their approach to character-driven storytelling. I envision a film about two British brothers (12 and 14) being transplanted to New England, circa 1982.

Day 16: My favorite female filmmaker
Joan Micklin Silver, the vastly underrated director of Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Between The Lines, Hester Street, Chilly Scenes of Winter, Crossing Delancey and Loverboy. No one writes better dialogue and has such a winning way with actors. And she really knows how to build a complex story without dropping the many pins she's juggling.

Day 17: My second favorite female filmmaker
Kelly Reichardt, director of River of Grass, Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek's Cutoff. To me, she is now one of our primary filmmaking talents. She has a loving view of people with differing opinions on how their world is progressing, and what their place is in such a world, and I adore that about her. Plus, she has an unassailable vision of American life, and a smart cinematic prowess.



Day 18: My third favorite female filmmaker
I originally went with Lina Wertmuller, only for her exquisite, profound and hilarious Seven Beauties. But now I am rethinking this and am deciding upon Diane Kurys, whose three autobiographical movies Peppermint Soda, Entre Nous, and C'est La Vie, are remarkably frank chronicles of her rocky childhood as the daughter of divorced parents. I haven't seen any of her other works, but these three are enough for me, though I'd love to see more.

Day 19: My favorite British filmmaker
Leaving out Hitchcock, who did his best work in America, I have to go with Mike Leigh, whose detailed examinations of London life, across all strata of time and class, continue to astound me. None of his 19 feature-length films (many of them produced for UK television) are anything less than resolute genius, but I must confess a special love for Life is Sweet, Topsy-Turvy, All or Nothing, Vera Drake, High Hopes, Naked, and Abigail's Party. Leigh is currently my favorite filmmaker working right now. I believe he can do no wrong. This is a devastating scene from his 2002 film All or Nothing, with Timothy Spall as a despondent husband and Leslie Manville as his in-denial wife. In its simplicity, it is a wrecking ball.



Day 20: Best quote from a filmmaker
"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible" -- Alfred Hitchcock

Day 21: An actor you love who became a filmmaker
I could easily go with Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Sidney Lumet, Robert Redford or Orson Welles. But I side with Bob Fosse, an actor/choreographer in Kiss Me Kate and Damn Yankees who's remarkable genius blossomed into a sadly short filmmaking career that gifted us with four unique, dark show-biz-related masterpieces: Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz and Star 80. Here he is, more than a decade before his 1969 directorial debut with Sweet Charity, doing the "Who's Got The Pain" number from Damn Yankees with his one-time wife and lifelong collaborator Gwen Verdon.



Day 22: A filmmaker who is also a good actor that you love
There is, of course, John Huston. And Francois Truffaut is superb in both Day for Night and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But I'm going with actor-turned-director-turned-actor-again Sydney Pollack, who impressed me in Tootsie, Eyes Wide Shut and especially in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives. Here he directs himself, playing Michael Dorsey's humorously harried agent in 1982's Tootsie.



Day 23: A film, short or clip of your own making; if you don't have one, your favorite film or short clip from someone close to you
Here I am on an early episode of The Latest Show on Earth, with Joe Hendel, talking about the 2008 Oscars and some great midnight movies to rent. I've made films, but I'm not a filmmaker.



Day 24: A pretentious film
UK Filmmaker Peter Greenaway is unfailingly gassy, and I thought of including his stilted stink bomb Prospero's Books as my entry. But then I remembered one of his UK contemporaries, Derek Jarman, and his silly movie Blue, which consists of a blue screen for 90+ minutes, with a yawning audio background. It makes Andy Warhol's Empire look like Die Hard. This is where film experimentation goes too far, friends.



Day 25: An actor/actress whom you feel is wasting his/her talent on crappy films
Many people dismiss her talents, but let's not forget than Jennifer Aniston has been sublime in Brad Bird's The Iron Giant, Miguel Arteta's The Good Girl, Nicole Holofcener's Friends with Money, and Peyton Reed's The Break-Up. Somehow, despite her glamor, she's landed at the start of the 21st Century as American cinema's premier everywoman (though Kristen Wiig deserves a shot at that prize). But Aniston keeps taking below-par assignments in sad shit like The Bounty Hunter, The Switch, He's Just Not That Into You, Management, Just Go With It, and the terribly overrated Horrible Bosses (although at least with the last film she was trying something different). Her career desperately needs to meet another turn in the road.



Day 26: A lousy actor/actress who keeps appearing in good films
Every time I see Tom Sizemore, I wince. Such a small bag of tricks he has--he's always either a scummy cop, a scummy criminal or a steadfast but doomed soldier. Luckily, his stock has gone way down in the past decade, after appearing in such 1990s classics as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Heat, and Natural Born Killers. Still, when he pops up in movies like the Brian Cox starrer Red, I roll my eyes.

Day 27: A filmmaker you would like to work with
I wouldn't deign to work with any filmmaker I respected--I'm just not worthy. But I'd be content to be a mere fly on the wall on any set that Terrence Malick was in control of. I just wanna see what this guy is like.

Day 28: A film you wish you had made
Noah Baumbach's Greenberg. No other movie out there seems to be portraying ME quite as much as this film seems to be. While watching it, I felt like I had been spied on. It's the one and only time in which I felt the filmmaker was speaking DIRECTLY to me. It says so much about how I view the world, it makes me cry and, also, shudder.



Day 29: A filmmaker you would like to make love to
I'm speaking only from a purely physical standpoint here (although I think she's terrifically smart and talented): Kathryn Bigelow. ROWRR!

Day 30: A country from which you would like to see more films
Ingmar Bergman's movies made me fall in absolute love with the cadence and poetry of the Swedish language. But now that he's gone, we here in the USA can only hear the language in the films of Lukas Moodysson, reliably (Let the Right One In's Tomas Alfredson seems to have been seduced by Hollywood). I'd like to see more films from Sweden, thank you very much. This scene (not included in the theatrical version of the film) is from Bergman's Fanny and Alexander; please notice, primarily, the lilting beauty of the language itself.



The 30 Day Cinephile Challenge now extends to another month, effectively becoming a 60 Day Cinephile Challenge. I now embark on answering 30 more questions, much to my delight. I will post my answers to these as well and, when I am done with them, will try to provide a link for them here.

SIDE ORDERS #9

For my first entry into this month's quickly-written SIDE ORDERS, we have the opening scene of Morton DaCosta's 1962 musical masterpiece The Music Man. If one were listing great opening scenes of any movie or stage production, one would have to include "Rock Island," the incredible white-rap penned by Meredith Wilson. The amazing thing about this scene is that only two of the characters on this chugging train will ever be seen in the movie again (and you only see the film's lead character, Robert Preston's Harold Hill, very quickly). It's a whiz-bang opening, filled with glib turn-of-the-20th-century references that now sound like otherworldly gibberish (though if you know what these guys are talking about, it deepens the piece). When I was a kid, I used to listen to the soundtrack of The Music Man on a cassette I recorded off of TV. Thus I can recite "Rock Island" (and the rest of the movie) completely by rote; I'm apparently the only one in the world who considers it one of the most notable movie musicals. I'd love to do "Rock Island" in kareoke one day, but, alas, I think this is simply a beautiful, unattainable dream.
I was talking to my friend Stacy McClendon in Atlanta today, and she admonished me for not including the soundtrack to Midnight Cowboy on my recent list of the 170 best soundtracks ever. I do think John Barry's theme to the Oscar-winning movie is brilliant, but the soundtrack as a whole--excepting Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'"--seems packed with filler (Midnight Cowboy is just one of scads of films that sport a catchy title theme which fails to take deep root in the score's body). Anyway, me and Stacy kept chatting, and I mentioned that I thought Ferrante and Teicher's version of the song was one of the 100 greatest singles of the rock era. Stacy then revealed to me that she was a Ferrante and Teicher uber-fan. See, this is why Stacy is my friend; she knows what's cool. Ferrante and Teicher, the piano-playing pair that cornered the market in 60s/70s-era elevator music, are the shit--just take a look at them performing John Barry's Midnight Cowboy theme in frilly tux shirts and cool sideburns. Then you can consider yourself edumacated.
One of the greatest of recent credits sequences: Kuntzel and Deygas's wonderfully retro title sequence to Steven Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can, from 2002, with astonishing music from John Williams.
Bugsy Malone's "My Name is Tallulah," written by Paul Williams, was crafted as the intro for the film's star, Jodie Foster, who in this same year, was nominated for an Oscar for a similarly precocious role as the underaged NYC prostitute Iris in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. As fine as she is here, Foster doesn't do the vocals (all the singing in Bugsy Malone was overdubbed by adults, to surprisingly laudable effect). Pay close attention to the background players here, as well as to the expertly scaled-down sets and costumes: though it's a 30s-era gangster movie, there are nothing but kids in the cast. It's really a one-of-a-kind movie, Bugsy Malone (directed by Alan Parker, who also did four more musicals: The Committments, Pink Floyd The Wall, Fame, and Evita).
Finally, just because I love the film, the original trailer to Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter's perfect sci-fi spoof Dark Star. Somehow, this movie's dread-filled atmosphere still gives me chills, even while it delivers uproarious laughs.
And now, finally, speaking of uproarious laughs, the famous "vessle with the pestle" scene from The Court Jester (Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, 55). Courtesy of Danny Kaye, has there ever been in cinema a more impressive diplay of verbal gymastics? I don't think so. (By the way, that's Glynis Johns as Maid Jean, and on the throne, Angela Lansbury and Cecil Parker, with Basil Rathbone off to the side).