Category: Home Viewing with Peter

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The 1971 Oscars continued the trend of the previous few years in trying to walk a fine line between the innovative and the tried and true. On the one hand, the Best Picture nominees included Stanley Kubrick’s fabulously futuristic A Clockwork Orange and Peter Bogdanovich’s…

New This Week Twenty-five years after the end of World War II, Patton seemed to be the last major Hollywood film we’d see about World War II. Little did we know, then, that forty years later they would still be making them. It seemed then, that this would be the last time to honor a…

Featured CLICK HEREfor other featured releases this week. The DVD business is not dying. Sales have slowed due to the rotten economy, but rentals are strong and booming year-end sales of HDTVs and Blu-ray players bode well for the near future. The day when streaming videos become our only source of old movies is not…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The battle lines were drawn at the 1969 Oscars between the Old Guard, represented by Anne of the Thousand Days and Hello, Dolly! and the Young Turks, represented by Midnight Cowboy and Z, with the middle-of-the-road Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid seen as the…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Movie musicals go back to the birth of the talkies in 1927, which was also the year of the birth of the Oscars. At the first Oscar ceremony, honoring the movie year 1927/28, the first talkie (The Jazz Singer)earned Warner Bros. an honorary Oscar “for…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The April 1968 presentation of the 40th Annual Academy Awards had to be delayed a week due to the assassination of Martin Luther King. Fittingly, Oscar’s Best Picture award went to Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night, a murder mystery that was also…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The screen adaptations of Broadway’s 1962 and 1963 Best Play winners battled it out for the 1966 Oscars. Paul Scofield repeated his Tony award winning role of Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and nabbed an Oscar for his brilliant…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Conventional wisdom says that The Sound of Music was such a huge hit in 1965 because everything else around it was dark and dreary and generally disappointing. Maybe so, but that doesn’t explain the film’s enduring popularity with succeeding generations in all parts of the…

New This Week Jack Warner paid the then astronomical sum of $5,000,000 for the screen rights to Lerner and Lowe’s smash Broadway musical, My Fair Lady. His dream star cast consisted of Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Cagney in the roles created by Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway. Both Grant and Cagney…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 1963 has a reputation among revisionist critics as being the weakest year in Oscar history, with the Oscar winning Tom Jones one of the least deserving Best Picture winners of all time. Balderdash! It’s one of the best, but I guess you had to be…

New This Week There was a newspaper strike in New York at the end of 1962 which prevented the New York Film Critics for the first and only time in their history from bestowing their annual awards. Thus, Oscar’s most reliable precursor was missing. No matter, David Lean’s spectacular Lawrence of Arabia was the obvious…

New This Week Adaptations were the thing at the 1961 Oscars. Of the five films nominated for Best Picture, two were adaptations of Broadway musicals, twowere from best-selling novels and one was based on an acclaimed teleplay. The most eagerly awaited film of the year was Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ adaptation of the Leonard…

New This Week Mature themes prevailed at the 1960 Oscars. An insurance clerk who provides his bosses with a cozy nest for their extra-marital trysts, a phony evangelist, an agnostic attorney providing comeuppance to a fundamentalist politician, a twisted transvestite killer, a mother with incestuous feelings for her son, a homosexual author, a male rape…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Oscar turned to religion in 1959 for three of its five Best Picture nominees – Ben-Hur, The Nun’s Story and The Diary of Anne Frank. This was not at all surprising given that there was a new religious fervor in the world following the election…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. 1958 was an interesting year at the Oscars. The two films now regarded as the greatest of the year, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil were not on Oscar’s short list. Nevertheless some very good films were. Oscar chose to embrace, instead,…