Jean Seberg - A Poem On Her Birthday

This poem was originally written and published last year to honour Miss Jean Seberg.  Now, to celebrate the 74th anniversary of the birth of this beautiful yet tragic figure from film history, I present it to you again.

An angel of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées

A killer, a maid, a reluctant gun moll
Her hair shorn for God and King and Jean-Luc

A delicate finger, gliding across once quivering lips
A creature of ravishing innocence, fair complextion

Gravitas in soulful, mourning eyes
Alive with the thrill of concluded death

This blessed child of Hollywood, Preminger's paramour
Turned toward the ancient eyes of Gaul

Blue jeans, milk shakes, thick red steaks
An American girl, gone to the wonders

A panther in a jaguar's body, a little girl lost
Lithe, she would purr with beatific ambiguity

Her look spoke with poetry, not prose
Her eyes open with the state of longing

Her cheeks, her breasts beneath hidden yellow
Heaving to the time of change, a rebirth

Lost in time, she spoke of voices
In the shadows of the bedrooms of kings

Hello sadness, her youth lost in a car
Heavenly tresses bound her to Earth

Mad men would condemn her
She could no longer live with her nerves

This angel of La plus belle avenue du monde
The chestnut trees wrap their arms about her

As saintly as her armoured maid of childhood
As born unto a star of despair, broken dreams

The flesh of her body, tender, hot to the touch
The flames of eternal lips, she stares at us

A messenger of the creation, she breathes
her tongue embroiled in the lies of truth

Desire has no meaning, no quarter
Faith in the vessel of behaviour

She would hold light to a candle
Dangle her eyes in frenzied apprehension

Her eyes, her touch, her chin, her toes
A striped dress of betrayal, sacrifice

A dalliance with a star, her director
Her legs rushing down her avenue

New York Herald Tribune
New York Herald Tribune

The voice of God, a sweet sad sigh
She stares into the camera, eyes wet

A look of immeasurable sadness
Gone is the toothy smirk of youth

Even in her own youth, faded dreams
She stares into the camera, lips drawn

A lost angel of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées

Happy Birthday Janet Gaynor, It Was Nice To Know Ya

Born Laura Augusta Gainor on this day, in the year that saw the city by the bay destroyed by madness, across the land in the city of brotherly love (before moving, oddly enough, to San Fran just a few years later), our intrepid little firecracker, after rising never any further than to the pixie-ish height of five foot nothing (same height as my lovely wife), and slapdashing her way through bit parts and uncredited doo-dads of several silent features and shorts, and reaching pre-stardom in The Johnstown Flood, not to mention being called out as one of the WAMPAS (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers for those who need to go past the acronym) baby Stars of that same year - an honour that also went to Mary Astor, Joan Crawford, Fay Wray and the two Dolores's, Costello and Del Rio that very same year - became the darlin' of the first Academy Awards, as she took home the first ever award for being the best darn actress in a motion picture, winning thricely, as she was credited for Sunrise, Seventh Heaven and Street Angel all in the same breath (pretty good breakthrough year the tiny starlet of just twenty-one did have), and shot to the top of the pops in the US, working with everyone from Borzage to Murnau to Borzage again and again and then some more (and let us not forget screen lover Charles Farrell, who she made a dozen films with, and were the cutest couple this side of the Pecos), before becoming a star once again in the first of three (soon to be four - yikes) versions of A Star is Born (directed by Wild Bill Wellman to make it official), a film that incidentally would garner her a second of those Oscar nomination thingees, and eventually leaving show biz for the love of a man - even if that man was famed designer Adrian, and was most likely a quite lavender marriage, at least on his part, though one hears rather substantiated rumours of the lovely little Miss Gaynor's sexual preferences as well (and one may even dream of them at night), but I must digress, in order to get on with the sad ending of our beautiful kewpie doll leading lady, from complications from a car wreck (a drunk driver nonetheless) that she was involved in two years prior to her 77th birthday (with "long time friend" Mary Martin), and finally say that this fan of the sexy, charming and cute as goddamn hell Miss Gaynor (drop dead gorgeous is another term one could just as easily use), had wished she had done more movies to be watched by me, but at least we have what we have - an angel (street or otherwise) with the eyes to conquer worlds and the alabaster cheeks to launch a thousand, no a million, no a billion ships a day.

1967: It Was a Very Good Year

The following is my contribution to The Movie Waffler's The Year I Made Contact Blogathon, wherein we the contributors discuss the cinematic year of our birth.  As I just turned forty-five last week, that would make this contribution about the cinematic year of 1967, and me being me (ie: an obsessive list monger) I have decided to give you my ten favourite films of this very same year.  So, without further ado, here are my choices for the ten best films of 1967.

1. Bonnie and Clyde - One of the first films I ever saw (I was just sixteen in a high school film class at the time) that made me think perhaps that this thing called cinema had more to it than what one saw on the shiny surface.  Brilliant and subversive (and unbeknownst to my still uneducated mind at the time, one of the most important films that would revolutionize American cinema) there was something about this film that got me all quivery inside.  Perhaps it was Faye Dunaway and her sexy, brazen comehitherness, perhaps it was Warren Beatty and his rebellious anti-hero image, perhaps it was the violence that was like none I had seen at the time - whatever the case, the film has haunted me from the beginning as much as it still does today.  Not only the best film of 1967 but one of the greatest films of any year.

2. Playtime - Ever since seeing M. Hulot's Holiday, Jacques Tati's lovable bumbling M. Hulot has always held a soft spot in my cinematic heart.  With each subsequent adventure, Tati places his intrepid hero and alter-ego into an ever-increasing modernist nightmare of dangerous gadgets and disgruntled gadflies. The pinnacle of this almost dystopian comic effect (played out in the most giddy undystopian way of course) is the film Playtime.  Hulot, let loose on a modern society way ahead of his own old-fashioned comprehension, is a hoot, as they say, to watch.  And the gags - the ones that have come to verily define Tati's hapless alter-ego over the course of half a dozen films - are as sharp-witted as any dialogue anyone would attempt in such a film.  And it all comes off as a genius-level screwball comedy of pantomime.

3. Week-end - This was actually the first Godard I had ever seen (yes, even before Breathless) and I was immediately taken in by the Nouvelle Vague auteur's use of colour as well as his way of using the camera to as full effect as possible - and then taking it further.  Many consider this to be the director's final film of his so-called early days (I mean if you are going to call it a New Wave, it has to end sometime lest it become an Old Wave again) and thus it is a dividing point between Godard's early ultra-cinematic pieces and his later more essayaic pieces.  It is this more visually cinematic earlier period which I like the best and Week-end was a great introduction to it indeed.  Brash, bold and without reservations, Week-end is Godard at his visual apex.

4. The Graduate - A cinematic sign of its deeply disenfranchised times, Mike Nichols paean to teenage disillusionment, and the film that made stars out of both Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross (one's stardom has held up a bit better), is a deadpan comedic look at the youth in America not only at this quite turbulent time, but I believe the youth of all generations that have come after it.   Tossed off as a hipster movie by many critics, the film does go a lot deeper than this criticism makes you think, and its long term influence (many teens and young adults still see it as if were speaking to them personally) is what makes a classic a classic.  Plus, how can you beat that soundtrack.

5. Belle de Jour - Sexy, stunning and scary as hell.  These adjectives can be used to describe either star Catherine Deneuve, the film itself or in a strange kinda way, the entire oeuvre of director Luis Buñuel.   The story of a young wife who takes up the art of prostitution one day, Belle de Jour is more than meets the eye.  Taking on, as Buñuel is apt to do, the morality of society, pitting the bourgeois against the proletariat but never in the way one would expect a semi-surrealist, anarchist auteur to do, the film has been hailed as both a brilliant masterpiece and panned as a pretentious bore.  Why can't it be both in a way?  Probably a bit beyond my rather naive grasp when I first saw the film (around eighteen but still quite innocent in mind) it has however grown deeply into my psyche.  And then you have Deneuve - ooh la la indeed.

6. Point Blank - Let's face it, Lee Marvin was the very epitome of cool in his day and that assessment is no different in John Boorman's gangster exercise in cool cinema, Point Blank (incidentally the first film to be shot on location on Alcatraz after the prison's 1963 closing).  Marvin is tough as nails and love interest Angie Dickinson has never looked better.  Throw in Keenan Wynn and a wonderful turn from Carroll O'Conner (the man could do more than Archie Bunker ya know) and Point Blank just gets cooler and cooler and tougher and tougher.  How tough was Marvin you ask - so tough that when he and John Vernon were practicing a fight scene, Marvin hit Vernon so hard that Vernon fell to the floor crying.  'nuff said.

7. Two For the Road - The best of Stanley Donan's solo directorial work (Singin' in the Rain, co-directed with Gene Kelly, being the best overall) this quite acerbic non-linear tale of a marriage both coming together and falling apart is a revelation of dark comedy blended with giddy tragedy.  Shooting back and forth from present to past to future to past again and back (a trait that could be quite disorienting to a casual moviegoer), this way-ahead-of-its-time motion picture stars George Segal and Audrey Hepburn in what may be both actor's best performance.  Hepburn, usually more fairy tale-esque in her acting, opens up a whole new side of her ability here and proves to the world (or at least the handful of people who have seen this woefully forgotten film) that yes Virginia, she can act.

8. Mouchette - Along with Au hasard Balthazar the year before, this is Robert Bresson at his sentimental best.  A jarring and dangerous film (as is per usual with a filmmaker such as Bresson) about the tragic life of a young girl, Mouchette still manages to reach out from such pyschosexual depths with an undercurrent of strangely esoteric humanism.  I first saw this film (having seen just three Bresson's prior) after seeing it referenced in Bertolucci's The Dreamers and this drama of faith helped to solidify my already growing worship of the French auteur.  Someone once said that to not get Bresson is to not get cinema, and they may very well be true - even in what is probably one of the director's least cinematic films (and no, I do not mean that as an insult).

9. The Fearless Vampire Killers - This Roman Polanski comedy-thriller's full title, a la Dr. Strangelove, is The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck - how can one go wrong with that.  Sardonic, with more than a touch of that classic Polanski humour (and featuring the director's wife Sharon Tate in one of her final roles before that brutal night in the summer of 1969), this film is a multilayered romp of devilish delights.  Starring the elfin director himself in one of the title roles (years before any tabloid headlines would creep their way into his world) this may be one of the unscariest vampire movies ever made, but still it has a comic sense of dread that is palpable throughout its strangely partially-pantomimed two hours spent inside what seems like a beautiful yet quite macabre snow globe.

10. Wait Until Dark - I first saw this film in a film class I took in my senior year of high school.  Dissecting the film piece by piece in class (I had never done such a thing before) one could see the many layers that were going on in Terence Young's superb psychological thriller.  Still to this day, when I am watching the film and I see the demented Alan Arkin tormenting the seemingly helpless blind damsel-in-distress Audrey Hepburn, I feel a twinge of fear for the poor girl trapped in the dark,, I can feel her terror as this brutal and unknown force terrorizes her, even though I know full well she's going to wind up the victor when the end credits roll - and I know too that Arkin will get his much-deserved comeuppance as well. 

Special Mention: Wavelength - Experimental filmmaking icon Michael Snow's Wavelength consists of one shot (basically) that lasts for 45 minutes.  As time goes on, the camera edges, ever-so-slowly from one end of what appears to be a mostly empty warehouse to a picture hanging on its far wall.  Seriously, that is it.  Sure, the colour will fluctuate and every once and a while someone will walk into and out of the shot, but basically that is all it is.  I saw this film at MoMa a few years back and was oddly riveted to the screen for the entirety of the aforementioned 45 minutes.  I could hear people grumble in the background behind me (I of course was front and center) and I heard several get up and leave in what I must assume is frustration, but my eyes stayed glued to that strangely mesmerizing screen.  Granted, this is not a film I will likely revisit on many occasions, which is why it does not make the list, but it is still a fascinating experimental work that needs to be made mention of. 

A Few Runners-Up (in no particular order) - Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort; Miklós Jancsó's The Red and the White; John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye; Jean-Piere Melville's Le Samourai; D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back; Glauber Rocha's Terra em Transe; Luchino Visconti's The Stranger; Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood; Vigot Sjoman's infamous I Am Curious (Yellow) and Mark Robson's Valley of the Dolls (yeah, that's right).

Fifteen Years Later and They are Still Looking For Me

Those in the know understand my cinematic birthday reference.  All others need not apply.

Bon anniversaire à Jean-Pierre Léaud

From childish stealings, wheelings, dealings
Arms stretched out to grasp what Cinema gave

Running, running, running toward nowhere
A lost youth, grown up into cinematic dissidence

May 1968 and the Cinémathèque Française
Shouting for freedom as pretty girls clung to the gates

Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!
Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!

Stealing kisses for amour, stealing for bed and board
A child of the New Wave, an icon of a cinematic left

Marked with permanent defiance, the most natural
A born actor, arrogant but affectionate, a born leader

For François, for Jean-Luc, for Rivette too
A boy, a man, a symbol of Gallic irreverence

Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!
Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!

Thirteen hours, the mystery of Balzac unraveled
A mother, a whore, two pretty English girls

Night, day, a legend growing up, on the run
A film with his idol, but never able to meet

A Godardian detective story, Midas without the touch
Godfather to a post new wave generation gap

Putting girls in skin-tight leather for silent art
Dangling from rooftops in homage to Feuillade

Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!
Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!

Giving Louis his cigarette flip, his eyes and mouth
Giving his wink and stare, his walk, talk & bravado

A boy grown up like Peter Pan, his scream intact
His shadow pinned to the great wall of cinephilia 

A man-child of je ne sais quoi, stealing, wheeling
Growing up in bohemian Parisian savoir faire

Born unto Les quatre cents coups, wheeling, dealing
Eternal icon of the New Wave and beyond 

Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!
Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!  Antoine Doinel!

Seberg - A Poem On Her Birthday

An angel of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées

A killer, a maid, a reluctant gun moll
Her hair shorn for God and King and Jean-Luc

A delicate finger, gliding across once quivering lips
A creature of ravishing innocence, fair complextion

Gravitas in soulful, mourning eyes
Alive with the thrill of concluded death

This blessed child of Hollywood, Preminger's paramour
Turned toward the ancient eyes of Gaul

Blue jeans, milk shakes, thick red steaks
An American girl, gone to the wonders

A panther in a jaguar's body, a little girl lost
Lithe, she would purr with beatific ambiguity

Her look spoke with poetry, not prose
Her eyes open with the state of longing

Her cheeks, her breasts beneath hidden yellow
Heaving to the time of change, a rebirth

Lost in time, she spoke of voices
In the shadows of the bedrooms of kings

Hello sadness, her youth lost in a car
Heavenly tresses bound her to Earth

Mad men would condemn her
She could no longer live with her nerves

This angel of La plus belle avenue du monde
The chestnut trees wrap their arms about her

As saintly as her armoured maid of childhood
As born unto a star of despair, broken dreams

The flesh of her body, tender, hot to the touch
The flames of eternal lips, she stares at us

A messenger of the creation, she breathes
her tongue embroiled in the lies of truth

Desire has no meaning, no quarter
Faith in the vessel of behaviour

She would hold light to a candle
Dangle her eyes in frenzied apprehension

Her eyes, her touch, her chin, her toes
A striped dress of betrayal, sacrifice

A dalliance with a star, her director
Her legs rushing down her avenue

New York Herald Tribune
New York Herald Tribune

The voice of God, a sweet sad sigh
She stares into the camera, eyes wet

A look of immeasurable sadness
Gone is the toothy smirk of youth

Even in her own youth, faded dreams
She stares into the camera, lips drawn

A lost angel of the Avenue des Champs-Élysées

Let's All Have a Very Groucho Weekend

Sunday, October 2nd will mark the 121st anniversary of the birth of Julius Henry Marx, better known as Groucho, the middle of five rather famous brothers (well, four rather famous brothers and one relatively unknown one).  Let's all celebrate this weekend by watching some Marx Brothers films.  That's all.  Hello, I must be going.

Happy Birthday Michelle, My Belle

Happy 235th Birthday America

"Just get up off the ground, that's all I ask. Get up there with that lady that's up on top of this Capitol dome, that lady that stands for liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see something. And you won't just see scenery; you'll see the whole parade of what Man's carved out for himself, after centuries of fighting. Fighting for something better than just jungle law, fighting so's he can stand on his own two feet, free and decent, like he was created, no matter what his race, color, or creed. That's what you'd see. There's no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties." - Senator Jefferson Smith

Upon Turning 44 Today, My Top 10 List for the Year of My Birth

Yes true believers, your humble narrator is 44 today.  Born in the so-called Summer of Love (conceived in the Winter of Our Discontent) this seems to be as good a time as any to talk about the films of that long ago year and give the readers my choices for the ten best films of said year.  Actually any time is a good time to concoct a movie list - the birthday celebration just gives it a bit more legitimacy.   So without further ado, here are my choices for the ten best films of 1967.

1. Bonnie and Clyde

One of the first films I ever saw (probably around sixteen in a high school film class) that made me think perhaps that this thing called cinema had more to it than what one saw on the shiny surface.  Brilliant and subversive (and unbeknownst to my still uneducated mind at the time, one of the most important films that would revolutionize American cinema) there was something about this film that got me all quivery inside.  Perhaps it was Faye Dunaway and her sexy, brazen comehitherness, perhaps it was Warren Beatty and his rebellious anti-hero image, perhaps it was the violence that was like none I had seen at the time - whatever the case, the film has haunted me from the beginning as much as it still does today.  Not only the best film of 1967 but one of the ten greatest films ever made.

2. Playtime

Ever since seeing M. Hulot's Holiday, Jacques Tati's bumbling yet dapper Mr. Hulot has always been a favourite character of mine.  With each subsequent adventure, Tati places his intrepid hero and alter-ego into a more and more modernist nightmares of dangerous gadgets and disgruntled gadflies.  The pinnacle of this almost dystopian comic effect (in the most fun and giddy un-dystopian way of course) is the film Playtime.  Hulot let loose on a modern society way ahead of his own old fashioned comprehension is a hoot to watch as they say.  And the gags - the ones that have come to define Tati's bumbling alter-ego over the course of half a dozen films, are as sharp-witted as any dialogue anyone would attempt in such a film.  I suppose it all ends up being a screwball comedy of pantomime.  Genius.

3. The Graduate

A cinematic sign of its deeply disenfranchised times, Mike Nichols paean to teenage disillusionment, and the film that made stars out of both Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross (one's stardom has held up a bit better), is a deadpan comedic look at the youth in America not only at this quite turbulent time, but I believe the youth of all generations that have come after it.  Sort of the grandaddy of Mumblecore in a way (but don't hold that against it) The Graduate has passed the test of time and is still loved by the even more disillusioned (and quite a bit more jaded and quite  a bit less innocent) youth of this post-9/11 world we live in now.  Plus how can you beat that soundtrack?

4. Week-end

This was actually the first Godard I had ever seen (yes, even before Breathless) and I was immediately taken in by the Nouvelle Vague auteur's use of colour as well as his way of using the camera to as full effect as possible - and then taking it further.  Many consider this to be the director's final film of his so-called early days (I mean if you are going to call it a New Wave, it has to end sometime lest it become an Old Wave again) and thus it is a dividing point between Godard's early ultra-cinematic pieces and his later more essayaic pieces.  It is this more visually cinematic earlier period which I like the best and Week-end was a great introduction to it indeed.  Brash, bold and without reservations, Week-end is Godard at his visual apex.

5. Belle de Jour

Sexy, stunning and scary as hell.  These adjectives can be used to describe either star Catherine Deneuve, the film itself or in a strange kinda way, the entire oeuvre of director Luis Bunuel.   The story of a young wife who takes up the art of prostitution one day, Belle de Jour is more than meets the eye.  Taking on, as Bunuel is apt to do, the morality of society, pitting the bourgeois against the proletariat but never in the way one would expect a semi-surrealist, anarchist auteur to do, the film has been hailed as both a brilliant masterpiece and panned as a pretentious bore.  Why can't it be both in a way?  Probably a bit beyond my rather naive grasp when I first saw the film (around eighteen but still quite innocent in mind) it has however grown deeply into my psyche.  And then you have Deneuve - ooh la la indeed.

6. Point Blank

Let's face it, Lee Marvin was the epitome of cool in his day and that assessment is no different in John Boorman's gangster exercise in cool cinema, Point Blank (incidentally the first film to be shot on location on Alcatraz after the prison's 1963 closing).  Marvin is tough as nails and love interest Angie Dickinson has never looked better.  Throw in Keenan Wynn and a wonderful turn from Carroll O'Conner (the man could do more than Archie Bunker ya know) and Point Blank just gets cooler and cooler and tougher and tougher.  How tough was Marvin you ask - so tough that when he and John Vernon were practicing a fight scene, Marvin hit Vernon so hard that Vernon fell to the floor crying.  'nuff said.

7. Wait Until Dark

I first saw this film in a film class I took in my senior year of high school.  Dissecting the film piece by piece in class (I had never done such a thing before) one could see the many layers that were going on in Terence Young's superb psychological thriller.  Still to this day, when I am watching the film and I see the demented Alan Arkin tormenting the seemingly helpless blind damsel-in-distress Audrey Hepburn, I feel a twinge of fear for the poor girl trapped in the dark,, I can feel her terror as this brutal and unknown force terrorizes her, even though I know full well she's going to wind up the victor in the end - and Arkin will get his much-deserved comeuppance.

8. Terra em Transe

This brilliantly subversive film was one of the highlights of the Cinema Novo, or Brazilian New Wave of the 1960's.  Directed by one of the movement's brightest talents, Glauber Rocha, the film is a look at the political and social turmoil going on in the hypothetical Latin-American country of Eldorado (which of course could stand in for just about any country in that part of the world at that time in history).  Rocha's unique sense of filmic timing and the way his camera's eye roves and weaves and delves into every nook and cranny of screen space, along with his obvious political bent and skills as a social satirist make for a movie that works as a blend of rousing satiric adventure and sardonic art film.

9. Mouchette

Along with Au hasard Balthazar the year before, this is Robert Bresson at his sentimental best.  A jarring and dangerous film (as is per usual with a filmmaker such as Bresson) about the tragic life of a young girl, Mouchette still manages to reach out from such pyschosexual depths with an undercurrent of strangely esoteric humanism.  I first saw this film (having seen just three Bresson's prior) after seeing it referenced in Bertolucci's The Dreamers and this drama of faith helped to solidify my already growing worship of the French auteur.  Someone once said that to not get Bresson is to not get cinema, and they may very well be true - even in what is probably one of the director's least cinematic films (and no, I do not mean that as an insult).

10. The Fearless Vampire Killers

This Roman Polanski comedy-thriller's full title, a la Dr. Strangelove, is The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck - how can one go wrong with that.  Sardonic, with more than a touch of that classic Polanski humour (and featuring the director's wife Sharon Tate in one of her final roles before that brutal night in the summer of 1969), this film is a multi-layered romp of devilish delights.  Starring the elfin director himself in one of the title roles (years before any tabloid headlines would creep their way into his world) this may be one of the un-scariest vampire movies ever made, but still it has a comic sense of dread that is palpable throughout its strangely partially-pantomimed two hours.

Special Mention: Wavelength

Experimental filmmaking icon Michael Snow's Wavelength consists of one shot (basically) that lasts for 45 minutes.  As time goes on, the camera edges, ever-so-slowly from one end of what appears to be a mostly empty warehouse to a picture hanging on its far wall.  Seriously, that is it.  Sure, the colour will fluctuate and every once and a while someone will walk into and out of the shot, but basically that is all it is.  I saw this film at MoMa a few years back and was oddly riveted to the screen for the entirety of the aforementioned 45 minutes.  I could hear people grumble in the background behind me (I of course was front and center) and several get up and leave in what I must assume is frustration, but my eyes stayed glued to that strangely mesmerizing screen.  Granted, this is not a film I will likely revisit on many occasions, which is why it does not make the list, but it is still a fascinating experimental work that needs to be made mention of.

**********************

A few films that did not make the list but can serve as runners-up (in no particular order) are: Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort; John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye; Melville's Le Samourai; Pennebaker's Don't Look Back; Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood and Vigot Sjoman's infamous I Am Curious (Yellow).

And then, as is always the case, there are those films that I have yet to see, but that could realistically take a crack at the top ten.  They are (again in no particular order of preference): Cool Hand Luke; Two for the Road; Ulysses; War and Peace; The Stranger (Visconti) and A Countess From Hong Kong.

Once Upon A Time...He Was Born

"Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch." 

- Orson Welles

Happy Birthday Wes