Mario Bava’s elegant 1964 slasher picture as ballroom dance, bathed in intense, unreal sprays of red and purple and green, is where the distinctly Italian horror genre known as giallo was born.
Tag: 1964
‘Goldfinger’ – James Bond goes blockbuster on Hulu and Paramount+
Sean Connery helped turn the James Bond spy series into a blockbuster franchise in his third outing as 007, perhaps the most iconic film in the series.
‘Dr. Strangelove’ – the screwball satire of mutually assured destruction on HBO Max
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s screwball satire of cold war posturing and mutually assured destruction, is the funniest film ever made about nuclear holocaust. But it didn’t begin as a comedy. The source novel, Peter George’s Red Alert, was a grave contemplation of the […]
Satyajit Ray’s ‘Charulata’ on Criterion Channel
Satyajit Ray considered Charulata (India, 1964) his masterpiece. An historical piece about the forces of modernity in 19th century India, the story focuses on young Charu (Madhabi Mukherjee), the gifted and sensitive wife of an idealistic newspaper editor, Bhupati (Shaileen Mukherjee) who gives lip service to women’s rights yet neglects Charu (both emotionally and artistically) […]
Rod Steiger is ‘The Pawnbroker’ on Amazon Prime and Hulu
The Pawnbroker (1964), the Sidney Lumet-directed 1964 film based on the novel by Edward Lewis, is a real time capsule. It’s the first American film to really take on the legacy of the Holocaust on a personal level, and it’s set in a Harlem pawnshop where a stream of slum stereotypes wander in and out […]
‘The Long Hair of Death’ – Barbara Steele takes sweet revenge on Amazon Prime Video
Antonio Margheriti is best known to modern audiences (if at all) thanks to Quentin Tarantino, who memorialized his name in Inglorious Basterds; it’s Brad Pitt’s cover name as he infiltrates a Nazi function and he can’t even pronounce it. The real Antonio Margheriti was a prolific director cranking out genre pictures through the 1960s and […]
‘Umbrellas’ and ‘Young Girls’ – the essential Jacques Demy on Kanopy
Jacques Demy, the most romantic of the French nouvelle vague filmmakers, loved American movies, especially musicals, but his taste for American musicals and candy-colored romance was balanced with a bittersweet sensibility. For all the energizing music and dreamy love affairs, his romances more often than not don’t really get happy endings. Kanopy presents these essentials. […]
‘Zulu’ on Amazon Prime Video
The sun sets on the British Empire in Zulu (1964), an historical epic built around a legendary colonial battle of the late 19th century. Legendary to British history, that is. The Battle of Rorke’s Drift in South Africa would be all but unknown in the U.S outside of historical societies were it not for Zulu. […]
‘Kwaidan’ – Japanese ghost stories on VOD and Blu-ray/DVD
Kwaidan (Japan, 1964), Masaki Kobayashi’s quartet of ancient ghost stories, may not be strictly speaking a horror film. It’s not scary or particularly unsettling apart for a few exquisitely created images. It is, however, breathtakingly lovely, visually composed like a painting, scored and sound designed by Toru Takemitsu with a spareness that leans on silence, […]