A pal forwarded the following obituary to me:
Charles Lane, the prolific character actor whose name was little known but whose crotchety persona and roles in hundreds of films made him instantly recognizable to generations of moviegoers, has died. His son, Tom Lane, said he was talking with his father at 9 p.m. Monday. "He was lying in bed with his eyes real wide open. Then he closed his eyes and stopped breathing." He was 102.
Lane, whose career spanned more than 60 years, appeared in such film classics as It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Twentieth Century. His crisp, stage-trained voice and no-nonsense appearance made him a natural for playing authority figures. He was a judge in God Is my Partner, a prosecutor in Call Northside 777, a priest in Date With an Angel and a member of Clark Gable's newspaper editorial board in Teacher's Pet.
Although the roles provided a good living, Lane objected to being typecast. "You did something that was pretty good and the picture was pretty good. That pedigreed you in that type of part, which I thought was stupid, and unfair, too," he told The Associated Press in a 100th birthday interview in 2005. "It didn't give me a chance, but it made casting easier for the studio."
Lane was born in San Francisco and was one of the last survivors of the 1906 earthquake (remembered in the MGM epic San Francisco). Lane was started working in the insurance business and dabbling in theater company productions at night when Irving Pichell, a well known actor of the time, advised him to study at Pasadena. He was eventually spotted by a Warner Bros. scout and cast in his first movie, an Edward G. Robinson/James Cagney melodrama, Smart Money in 1931. Lane remained at Warner Bros., sometimes working in three or four pictures a day. He would be rushed from one set to another and handed his few lines. "I was being paid $35 a day," he recalled in 2005. "When the Screen Actors Guild was being organized, I was one of the first to join."
In 1934, Frank Capra, then on his rise to prominence, cast Lane in a horse-racing film, Broadway Bill. Capra liked the actor's work so much he included him in nine more movies, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and You Can't Take It With You. In Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, he was a rent collector who shocks his boss, the evil Lionel Barrymore character, by telling him that hero James Stewart's character is a good businessman. One of Lane's most cherished possessions, meanwhile, was a letter from the fabled director declaring, "Well, Charlie, you've been my No. 1 crutch."
When it came to alcohol, he was a lifelong teetotaler. But his son noted that his father smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 70 years, quitting only when he became short of breath. "I know that smoking kills people, and I must be the exception," Lane said then.
Lane continued to act into his 90s, and when he accepted an award from cable television's TV Land channel in honor of his 100th birthday, he made a point of saying he was still available for work. The weekend before he died, Lane was working on a celebration of his life, a project with former child star Jane Withers. The two had appeared in three movies together.
I'm sure you all know him, even if you can't quite place the face. He made many television appearances. In fact, when I see him, I first think of his appearances on the old Dennis the Menace series.
R.I.P.
R.I.P.
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Moraldo Rubini
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moira finnie
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Moraldo Rubini
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Sinbad
Kerwin Matthews used to have a movie memorabilia shop in San Francisco.
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was released half a century ago, yet his partner of 46 years, Tom Nicoll said that "not a week has gone by in all those years when Mr. Mathews did not receive a note from a fan. He would, until the end, answer every piece of fan mail. If the movie was shown somewhere, he would get a flood of fan mail. If his name was in a magazine somewhere, he'd get a flood of fan mail."
Nice to know that he was appreciated until the end.
RIP
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was released half a century ago, yet his partner of 46 years, Tom Nicoll said that "not a week has gone by in all those years when Mr. Mathews did not receive a note from a fan. He would, until the end, answer every piece of fan mail. If the movie was shown somewhere, he would get a flood of fan mail. If his name was in a magazine somewhere, he'd get a flood of fan mail."
Nice to know that he was appreciated until the end.
RIP
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Moraldo Rubini
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Ingmar Bergman
Another cinematic giant has passed. Here is an excerpt of the New York Times' obituary of Ingmar Bergman:
Ingmar Bergman, the “poet with the camera” who is considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history, died today on the small island of Faro where he lived on the Baltic coast of Sweden. He was 89.
Critics called Mr. Bergman one of the directors — the others being Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa — who dominated the world of serious film making in the second half of the 20th century.
He moved from the comic romp of lovers in Smiles of a Summer Night to the Crusader’s search for God in The Seventh Seal, and from the gripping portrayal of fatal illness in Cries and Whispers to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life in Fanny and Alexander.
He influenced many other film makers, including Woody Allen, who according to The Associated Press said in a tribute in 1988 that Mr. Bergman was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”
In his more than 40 years in the cinema, Mr. Bergman made about 50 films, often focusing on two themes — the relationship between the sexes, and the relationship between mankind and God. Mr. Bergman found in cinema, he wrote in a 1965 essay, “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.” Mr. Bergman often acknowledged that his work was autobiographical, but only “in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.”
He carried out a simultaneous career in the theater, becoming a director of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater. He married multiple times and had highly publicized and passionate liaisons with his leading ladies.
Mr. Bergman broke upon the international film scene in the mid-1950s with four films that shook the movie world, films that became identified with him and symbols of his career — Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and The Magician.
He had been a director for 10 years, but was little known outside Sweden. Then, in 1956, Smiles won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, the haunting and eloquent Seventh Seal, with its memorable medieval visions of a knight (Max von Sydow) playing chess with death in a world terrorized by the plague, won another special prize at Cannes. And in 1959, The Magician took the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Audiences flocked to art cinemas all over the world to see his films. Then, in 1960, The Virgin Spring, told of a rape and its mysterious aftermath in medieval Scandinavia; it won the Academy Award as best foreign film. In a few years, he had become both a cult figure and a box-office success.
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, in the university town of Uppsala, Sweden. His father, Erik, a Lutheran clergyman who later became chaplain to the Swedish royal family, believed in strict discipline, including caning and locking his children in closets. His mother, Karin, was moody and unpredictable. “I was very much in love with my mother,” he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.”
At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a battered magic lantern, a possession that altered the course of his life. Within a year, he had created, by playing with this toy, a private world, he later recalled, in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts.
He entered the University of Stockholm in 1937, nominally to study the history of literature but actually to spend most of his time working in amateur theater. He soon left home and university for a career in the theater and the movies.
He split his time between film and theater beginning in the early 1940s, when he first was taken into the script department of Svensk Filmindustri — a youth, as his first boss described him, “shabby, rude and scampish with a laugh born out of the darkest depths of the inferno.” In his theater career, he became head of the municipal theater in Halsingborg in 1944; in 1946, he switched to Goteborg for four years, then spent two years as a guest producer in a couple of cities before going to Malmo in 1952 to become associated with the municipal theater there.
In films, he wrote many scenarios as well as directed. His name first appeared on the screen in 1944 in Torment, which he wrote and Alf Sjoberg, one of the dominant figures in Swedish film, directed. The film, based on a story Bergman wrote about his final, torturous year at school, won eight Swedish awards as well as the Grand Prix du Cinema at Cannes. It made an international star of its leading performer, Mai Zetterling, who portrayed a shop girl loved by a young student and shadowed by the student’s sadistic teacher.
Mr. Bergman got his first chance to direct the next year. His early films were essentially training films — basically soap operas that enabled him to experiment with directorial style. Most experts agree that his first film of note was Prison, his sixth movie and the first all-Bergman production. The film is the story of a prostitute who committed suicide. He made it in 18 days, and while critics have called it cruel, disjointed and in many ways sophomoric, it was an early favorite of his.
In the next few years, he made Summer Interlude (1950), a tragedy of teen-age lovers; Waiting Women (1952), his first successful comedy; Sawdust and Tinsel set in a traveling circus and originally released in the United States as The Naked Night; A Lesson in Love (1953), a witty comedy of marital infidelity, and, finally, Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal, his breakthroughs to fame.
In 1957, the same year as Seventh Seal, Mr. Bergman also directed Wild Strawberries, his acclaimed study of old age. In the film, the 78-year-old Isak Borg (played by the silent-film director and actor Victor Sjostrom), drives through the countryside, stops at his childhood home, relives the memory of his first love and comes to terms with his emotional isolation. “I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through,” Mr. Bergman has said. “I was then 37, cut off from all human emotions.”
Mr. Bergman won his second Academy Award in 1961 for Through a Glass Darkly, and then came the turning point in his career — Winter Light, which he made in 1963, the second of his trilogy of the early 60s that ended with The Silence and portrayed the loneliness and vulnerability of modern man, without faith or love. Many of his earlier films had been animated by an anguished search for belief, Ms. Kakutani wrote, but “Winter Light” — which shows a minister’s own loss of faith — implies that whatever answers there are are to be found on earth.
Mr. Bergman explained that the philosophical shift occurred during a brief hospital stay. Awakening from the anesthesia, he realized that he was no longer scared of death, and that the question of death had suddenly disappeared. Since then, many critics feel, his films have contained a kind of humanism in which human love is the only hope of salvation.
Some critics lashed at individual films as obscure, pretentious and meaningless.
But every time he made a failure, he managed to win back critics and audiences quickly with such films as Persona — in which the personalities of two women break down and merge — The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers — a stark portrait of three sisters — and Fanny and Alexander. Fanny and Alexander won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1984.
Mr. Bergman often used what amounted to a repertory company — a group of actors who appeared in many of his films. They included Mr. von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson and, above all, Liv Ullmann, with whom he had a long personal relationship and with whom he had a child. He also for many years used the same cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.
He made a television film, After the Rehearsal — about three actors working on a production of Strindberg’s Dream Play — which was released theatrically in the United States. He wrote The Best Intentions, first as a novel and then in 1991 as an eloquent six-hour film directed by Billie August about Mr. Bergman’s parents’ troubled marriage just before his birth.
The Best Intentions was one of three novels he wrote in the '80's and '90's about his parents. The second, Sunday’s Children, was made into a film and directed by his son Daniel. The third, Private Confessions, about his mother, became a film directed by Ms. Ullmann.
He directed two plays every year at the Royal Dramatic Theater. In May 1995 the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a New York Bergman Festival that included retrospectives by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Television and Radio, presented the Royal Theater in two plays Mr. Bergman directed, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade.
He also directed operas, and wrote many plays and television dramas, several novels and a 1987 memoir, The Magic Lantern.
Mr. Bergman’s fifth wife, Ingrid Karlebo Bergman, died in 1995. He had many children from his marriages and relationships.
Ingmar Bergman, the “poet with the camera” who is considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history, died today on the small island of Faro where he lived on the Baltic coast of Sweden. He was 89.
Critics called Mr. Bergman one of the directors — the others being Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa — who dominated the world of serious film making in the second half of the 20th century.
He moved from the comic romp of lovers in Smiles of a Summer Night to the Crusader’s search for God in The Seventh Seal, and from the gripping portrayal of fatal illness in Cries and Whispers to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life in Fanny and Alexander.
He influenced many other film makers, including Woody Allen, who according to The Associated Press said in a tribute in 1988 that Mr. Bergman was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”
In his more than 40 years in the cinema, Mr. Bergman made about 50 films, often focusing on two themes — the relationship between the sexes, and the relationship between mankind and God. Mr. Bergman found in cinema, he wrote in a 1965 essay, “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.” Mr. Bergman often acknowledged that his work was autobiographical, but only “in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.”
He carried out a simultaneous career in the theater, becoming a director of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater. He married multiple times and had highly publicized and passionate liaisons with his leading ladies.
Mr. Bergman broke upon the international film scene in the mid-1950s with four films that shook the movie world, films that became identified with him and symbols of his career — Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and The Magician.
He had been a director for 10 years, but was little known outside Sweden. Then, in 1956, Smiles won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, the haunting and eloquent Seventh Seal, with its memorable medieval visions of a knight (Max von Sydow) playing chess with death in a world terrorized by the plague, won another special prize at Cannes. And in 1959, The Magician took the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Audiences flocked to art cinemas all over the world to see his films. Then, in 1960, The Virgin Spring, told of a rape and its mysterious aftermath in medieval Scandinavia; it won the Academy Award as best foreign film. In a few years, he had become both a cult figure and a box-office success.
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, in the university town of Uppsala, Sweden. His father, Erik, a Lutheran clergyman who later became chaplain to the Swedish royal family, believed in strict discipline, including caning and locking his children in closets. His mother, Karin, was moody and unpredictable. “I was very much in love with my mother,” he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.”
At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a battered magic lantern, a possession that altered the course of his life. Within a year, he had created, by playing with this toy, a private world, he later recalled, in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts.
He entered the University of Stockholm in 1937, nominally to study the history of literature but actually to spend most of his time working in amateur theater. He soon left home and university for a career in the theater and the movies.
He split his time between film and theater beginning in the early 1940s, when he first was taken into the script department of Svensk Filmindustri — a youth, as his first boss described him, “shabby, rude and scampish with a laugh born out of the darkest depths of the inferno.” In his theater career, he became head of the municipal theater in Halsingborg in 1944; in 1946, he switched to Goteborg for four years, then spent two years as a guest producer in a couple of cities before going to Malmo in 1952 to become associated with the municipal theater there.
In films, he wrote many scenarios as well as directed. His name first appeared on the screen in 1944 in Torment, which he wrote and Alf Sjoberg, one of the dominant figures in Swedish film, directed. The film, based on a story Bergman wrote about his final, torturous year at school, won eight Swedish awards as well as the Grand Prix du Cinema at Cannes. It made an international star of its leading performer, Mai Zetterling, who portrayed a shop girl loved by a young student and shadowed by the student’s sadistic teacher.
Mr. Bergman got his first chance to direct the next year. His early films were essentially training films — basically soap operas that enabled him to experiment with directorial style. Most experts agree that his first film of note was Prison, his sixth movie and the first all-Bergman production. The film is the story of a prostitute who committed suicide. He made it in 18 days, and while critics have called it cruel, disjointed and in many ways sophomoric, it was an early favorite of his.
In the next few years, he made Summer Interlude (1950), a tragedy of teen-age lovers; Waiting Women (1952), his first successful comedy; Sawdust and Tinsel set in a traveling circus and originally released in the United States as The Naked Night; A Lesson in Love (1953), a witty comedy of marital infidelity, and, finally, Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal, his breakthroughs to fame.
In 1957, the same year as Seventh Seal, Mr. Bergman also directed Wild Strawberries, his acclaimed study of old age. In the film, the 78-year-old Isak Borg (played by the silent-film director and actor Victor Sjostrom), drives through the countryside, stops at his childhood home, relives the memory of his first love and comes to terms with his emotional isolation. “I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through,” Mr. Bergman has said. “I was then 37, cut off from all human emotions.”
Mr. Bergman won his second Academy Award in 1961 for Through a Glass Darkly, and then came the turning point in his career — Winter Light, which he made in 1963, the second of his trilogy of the early 60s that ended with The Silence and portrayed the loneliness and vulnerability of modern man, without faith or love. Many of his earlier films had been animated by an anguished search for belief, Ms. Kakutani wrote, but “Winter Light” — which shows a minister’s own loss of faith — implies that whatever answers there are are to be found on earth.
Mr. Bergman explained that the philosophical shift occurred during a brief hospital stay. Awakening from the anesthesia, he realized that he was no longer scared of death, and that the question of death had suddenly disappeared. Since then, many critics feel, his films have contained a kind of humanism in which human love is the only hope of salvation.
Some critics lashed at individual films as obscure, pretentious and meaningless.
But every time he made a failure, he managed to win back critics and audiences quickly with such films as Persona — in which the personalities of two women break down and merge — The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers — a stark portrait of three sisters — and Fanny and Alexander. Fanny and Alexander won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1984.
Mr. Bergman often used what amounted to a repertory company — a group of actors who appeared in many of his films. They included Mr. von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson and, above all, Liv Ullmann, with whom he had a long personal relationship and with whom he had a child. He also for many years used the same cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.
He made a television film, After the Rehearsal — about three actors working on a production of Strindberg’s Dream Play — which was released theatrically in the United States. He wrote The Best Intentions, first as a novel and then in 1991 as an eloquent six-hour film directed by Billie August about Mr. Bergman’s parents’ troubled marriage just before his birth.
The Best Intentions was one of three novels he wrote in the '80's and '90's about his parents. The second, Sunday’s Children, was made into a film and directed by his son Daniel. The third, Private Confessions, about his mother, became a film directed by Ms. Ullmann.
He directed two plays every year at the Royal Dramatic Theater. In May 1995 the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a New York Bergman Festival that included retrospectives by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Television and Radio, presented the Royal Theater in two plays Mr. Bergman directed, Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade.
He also directed operas, and wrote many plays and television dramas, several novels and a 1987 memoir, The Magic Lantern.
Mr. Bergman’s fifth wife, Ingrid Karlebo Bergman, died in 1995. He had many children from his marriages and relationships.
I know he wasn't a movie star or even an actor, but I know a lot of people around San Francisco especially, are going to miss Bill Walsh, ex-head coach of the S.F. 49ers. He seemed like a very nice man when I saw him in interviews in relation to football, and the sports world is going to miss him. We don't have enough of his kind around.
Thanks for all the Good Times, Coach!
Anne
Thanks for all the Good Times, Coach!
Anne
Anne
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At the time I posted my last post about Bill Walsh, I wasn't aware of Ingmar Bergman. Since I don't know a whole lot about him, I've seen a few of his movies but not enough to give an intelligent appraisal of him. I'll leave that to a real genuine fan. I can however, say that I know he was held in high esteem by his peers. As I said before, this world doesn't have enough true idols to dismiss an icon when they pass away.
Anne
Anne
Anne
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Mr. Arkadin
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klondike
>[quote="Mr. Arkadin"]One of the greatest film makers of our time. He might have lost his game of chess with Death, but taught us much about life in doing so." <
Nicely, nicely put Mr. A!
Every time we watch Seventh Seal, we are being invited to sit down "to the board" along with the Knight, and no matter what we take away with ourselves from that, I feel it is always a win/win scenario!
Farewell, Ingmar, you beloved Storyteller . . . and please, hurry back!
Nicely, nicely put Mr. A!
Every time we watch Seventh Seal, we are being invited to sit down "to the board" along with the Knight, and no matter what we take away with ourselves from that, I feel it is always a win/win scenario!
Farewell, Ingmar, you beloved Storyteller . . . and please, hurry back!
Italian director Antonioni dies at 94
BY GENE SEYMOUR
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director who brought a poet's affinity for metaphor and a novelist's instinct for subtlety to the art of making movies, died Monday at his home in Rome. He was 94.
Antonioni's passing came almost a day after that of Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who died earlier Monday at age 89. Both men brought a literary, almost philosophical sensibility to filmmaking and influenced artists of all kinds.
Antonioni's cinema, whose touchstone works include "L'Avventura" (1960), "La Notte" (1961), "Blow Up" (1967) and "The Passenger" (1975), was distinguished by allusion and inference more than explicit action. His cameras probed the enigmas in people's silent expressions and lingered on the shadows hovering over desolate landscapes.
He and Bergman were among the last of a generation of post-World War II film directors who sought to widen the possibilites for telling stories with pictures - and to trust the audience to make its own connections and draw its own conclusions.
"In the empty silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places in our hearts," actor Jack Nicholson said of Antonioni in 1995 when presenting the filmmaker with a lifetime achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Nicholson starred in "The Passenger" as a hopelessly lost foreign correspondent who changes his identity.
When receiving the award, Antonioni, his capacity for speech weakened by a stoke he'd sustained in 1985 could only say, "Grazie."
Acceptance for Antonioni's innovative storytelling did not come easily. When "L'Avventura," his story of a rich young couple's search for a missing friend, premiered at the 1960 Cannes International Film Festival, it was jeered almost as loudly as it was cheered by the audience. The subsequent praise the movie received from influential critics helped boost it and its director to global prominence.
Audiences receptive to the stylistic upheavals in international cinema throughout the 1960s came around to Antonioni's method. Yet his films continued to generate polarizing reactions from reviewers and moviegoers alike. "Blow Up," a stylish mystery about a bored London fashion photograper who thinks he may have inadvertently caught a murder on film, was both embraced as an emblem of the "swinging sixties" and reviled as an example of the era's overindulgence in flash and filigree.
Antonioni's next film, "Zabriskie Point" (1968) was an even more emphatic engagement with 1960s youth culture, with its rambling storyline about student revolutionaries on the run. Though it was a critical and commercial flop upon its initial release, the film has since gained a cult reputation among subsequent generations of filmmakers and audiences.
"I suspect Antonioni's best films will continue to grow and shift, like dunes in the centuries of desert," writes critic-historian David Thomson in "The Biographical Dictionary of Film." "In that process, if there are eyes left to look, he will become a standard for beauty."
BY GENE SEYMOUR
Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian director who brought a poet's affinity for metaphor and a novelist's instinct for subtlety to the art of making movies, died Monday at his home in Rome. He was 94.
Antonioni's passing came almost a day after that of Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who died earlier Monday at age 89. Both men brought a literary, almost philosophical sensibility to filmmaking and influenced artists of all kinds.
Antonioni's cinema, whose touchstone works include "L'Avventura" (1960), "La Notte" (1961), "Blow Up" (1967) and "The Passenger" (1975), was distinguished by allusion and inference more than explicit action. His cameras probed the enigmas in people's silent expressions and lingered on the shadows hovering over desolate landscapes.
He and Bergman were among the last of a generation of post-World War II film directors who sought to widen the possibilites for telling stories with pictures - and to trust the audience to make its own connections and draw its own conclusions.
"In the empty silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places in our hearts," actor Jack Nicholson said of Antonioni in 1995 when presenting the filmmaker with a lifetime achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Nicholson starred in "The Passenger" as a hopelessly lost foreign correspondent who changes his identity.
When receiving the award, Antonioni, his capacity for speech weakened by a stoke he'd sustained in 1985 could only say, "Grazie."
Acceptance for Antonioni's innovative storytelling did not come easily. When "L'Avventura," his story of a rich young couple's search for a missing friend, premiered at the 1960 Cannes International Film Festival, it was jeered almost as loudly as it was cheered by the audience. The subsequent praise the movie received from influential critics helped boost it and its director to global prominence.
Audiences receptive to the stylistic upheavals in international cinema throughout the 1960s came around to Antonioni's method. Yet his films continued to generate polarizing reactions from reviewers and moviegoers alike. "Blow Up," a stylish mystery about a bored London fashion photograper who thinks he may have inadvertently caught a murder on film, was both embraced as an emblem of the "swinging sixties" and reviled as an example of the era's overindulgence in flash and filigree.
Antonioni's next film, "Zabriskie Point" (1968) was an even more emphatic engagement with 1960s youth culture, with its rambling storyline about student revolutionaries on the run. Though it was a critical and commercial flop upon its initial release, the film has since gained a cult reputation among subsequent generations of filmmakers and audiences.
"I suspect Antonioni's best films will continue to grow and shift, like dunes in the centuries of desert," writes critic-historian David Thomson in "The Biographical Dictionary of Film." "In that process, if there are eyes left to look, he will become a standard for beauty."
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Mr. Arkadin
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Moraldo Rubini
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White Nights?
Are you referring to Antonioni, Mr. Arkadin? If so, maybe you're referring to Le Notte; his movie with Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti (as opposed to Vicsonti's Le Notte Bianche -- also with Mastroianni, but this time paired with Maria Schell)? I've never seen Le Notte, Antonioni's depiction of a dissolving marriage, and am curious.Mr. Arkadin wrote:Le Notte Blanche is my personal favorite of his work.
[Visconti's similarly named film is one of my favorites though!]
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Mr. Arkadin
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Re: White Nights?
Oops! I think that's the second time you've caught a boo boo of mine. Yep I like both films, but I meant Le Notte (1961).Moraldo Rubini wrote:Are you referring to Antonioni, Mr. Arkadin? If so, maybe you're referring to Le Notte; his movie with Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti (as opposed to Vicsonti's Le Notte Bianche -- also with Mastroianni, but this time paired with Maria Schell)? I've never seen Le Notte, Antonioni's depiction of a dissolving marriage, and am curious.Mr. Arkadin wrote:Le Notte Blanche is my personal favorite of his work.
[Visconti's similarly named film is one of my favorites though!]
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Moraldo Rubini
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Re: White Nights?
If it's any consolation, that was one of the most sophisticated boo-boos I've ever seen; a minor polyglot slip with Visconti and Antonioni. I'd say that's most impressive.Mr. Arkadin wrote:Oops! I think that's the second time you've caught a boo boo of mine. Yep I like both films, but I meant Le Notte (1961).Moraldo Rubini wrote:Are you referring to Antonioni, Mr. Arkadin? If so, maybe you're referring to Le Notte; his movie with Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti (as opposed to Vicsonti's Le Notte Bianche -- also with Mastroianni, but this time paired with Maria Schell)? I've never seen Le Notte, Antonioni's depiction of a dissolving marriage, and am curious.Mr. Arkadin wrote:Le Notte Blanche is my personal favorite of his work.
[Visconti's similarly named film is one of my favorites though!]
It reminds me though of what a fortunate period of work Sr. Mastroianni had in the late 1950's - early 1960's, working with such creative directors as Visconti, Antonioni, Dassin and Fellini. It must have been a heady time for him.
Do you remember any impressions of Antonioni's Le Notte? Having never seen it, I'm curious to hear more...
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Mr. Arkadin
- Posts: 2645
- Joined: April 14th, 2007, 3:00 pm
For me, La Notte was not as flamboyant as L'Vventura and the characters had more depth to them instead of being symbolic or "chess pieces" that just serve to move the plot along as a whole. Not that L'Vventura was bad or anything. I guess the easiest way to compare them would be if L'Vventura was Kane, La Notte is Ambersons.
I also really love both Mastroianni and Moreau in tons of different films so I naturally gravitate towards this one. Unfortunately it's not very well represented on DVD at this time, but I'm hopeful a better product will arrive (or maybe Criterion will do a restoration).
I also really love both Mastroianni and Moreau in tons of different films so I naturally gravitate towards this one. Unfortunately it's not very well represented on DVD at this time, but I'm hopeful a better product will arrive (or maybe Criterion will do a restoration).
Last edited by Mr. Arkadin on August 7th, 2007, 7:01 am, edited 1 time in total.