Almost There: Paul Newman & Robert Redford in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"

by Cláudio Alves

From 1944 to 2008, we had a five-wide Best Picture race in the Oscars, as well as four acting categories. During those years, it became rare for a movie to score a Picture nomination without also nabbing some sort of acting nod. It was especially unusual for the majority of a given line-up to be devoid of acting nods, happening only three times during those 65 years. One of those times was the 1969 Academy Awards, when Z, Hello, Dolly! and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid didn't get any love from the acting branch. Considering the general bias against "foreign language" performances and the horrible reviews of a certain musical, it's easy to understand why the actors of Z and Hello, Dolly! went unrecognized. But what about the revisionist western in the bunch?…

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Eric Rohmer Centennial: Six Moral Tales

by Eric Blume

Last weekend marked the 100th birthday of one of France’s greatest directors, Eric Rohmer, and we here at TFE figured that a nice way to celebrate him would be a look back at the six-film series that launched his career, the Six Moral Tales, which were released between 1962 and 1972.  

These films basically have the same plot:  a man obsessed or in love with one girl finds himself distracted by another woman, only to return to the first girl.  Rohmer uses this framework to examine the stunted male psyche, the rationalizations of behavior, and the mystery of love...

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50th Anniversary: The 42nd Academy Awards

by Cláudio Alves

Here we are again. After revisiting the Oscars of 1994 for their 25th anniversary, it's time to go further back to the 1969 Oscars, whose ceremony was celebrated 50 years ago today. Unlike the Forrest Gump year, when the Academy Awards were pretty much business as usual, the 1969/70 awards season was part of a transitional period. The tension between the decomposing corpse of the studio system and the brats of New Hollywood was on full show for these Academy Awards. Each victory represents a prickly negotiation between the new and old guards. On one hand, we have the only X-rated movie to ever win Best Picture. On the other, John Wayne is our Best Actor for True Grit.

Speaking of the Duke, there's no better way to understand the singular contradictions of these Oscars than to look at the cowboys of 1969…

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West Side Story... is forever.

by Nathaniel R

Rita Moreno, still sensational at 88 years young.It occurred to us last week while looking at photos from Steven Spielberg's 2020 remake of West Side Story that a huge swath of the original cast members from the 1961 Best Picture winner are still with us today. It's not just the legendary trailblazer Rita Moreno though she's the liveliest of the bunch despite being the oldest at a spritely 88. 

So after the jump all the surviving cast members!

We honor their contributions to an indelible piece of film history even though there are a great many of them that didn't say in movies thereafter. Anyway, thiis is us doing our small part to suggest and hope that they get a bit of attention when the new iteration of the greatest musical ever written arrives. Invite them to the December premiere at least, Spielberg, won'tcha?

Here they are...

Character names in white = the actor is still with us today

THE JETS

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Toshiro Mifune @ 100: Yojimbo

Team Experience is celebrating the Centennial of Japan's great movie star Toshiro Mifune for the next couple of nights. Here's Eric Blume...

When the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo was released in 1961, he and Toshiro Mifune already had collaborated on over a dozen films, and this collaboration is widely considered one of their greatest.  It essentially birthed the character of The Man With No Name, was remade three years later by Hollywood as A Fistful of Dollars with Clint Eastwood, and has had an enduring influence on films for almost sixty years...

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