It’s a tradition on Film Twitter. On the first day of the month, you post your top five “first views” of the previous month. They could be new releases or classics you’d never gotten around to watching, but they have to be films you’ve not seen before. Posting the list every month is a great way to expose your followers to old, sometimes obscure films they might never have discovered on their own
So far, I’ve resisted turning this Substack into a consumer guide, where I Just recommend movies (it’s prosaic to me), but this seems like a fun and relatively painless way to do it. So from now on, I’ll publish every month’s first-views and maybe throw in a couple other notable films I’ve seen recently. Let’s get started.
Best First-Views:
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice (1968) - When I was a kid, I always imagined this as the Ultimate Movies for Grown-Ups. The cover of the VHS tape featured four adults in bed together. It turns out there is no sex in Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, but there is a lot of talk about sex and love and relationships. Robert Culp and Natalie Wood play a married couple who go on a retreat and come back with a more open attitude towards sex. The film chronicles their efforts to practice free love in the real world, with an eye towards its impact on their best friends, another married couple played by Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon. Keep waiting for it to devolve into softcore porn. You’ll be waiting a long time. Instead, we get a film that practices what it preaches: It loves its characters entirely, which means it listens, observes, and embraces in equal measure.
Oppenheimer (2023) - I already wrote about this film, especially my problems with the film’s third act, but the more it sits with me, the more I see my criticisms as mere quibbles. I was concerned that reducing the film to a courtroom drama was a cheap ending for a film that, for most of its runtime, lived in the unknown. I’d like to see Oppenheimer again to make up my mind, but now I feel that perhaps the government inquisition that concludes the film can best be understood as a character beat, a moral judgment that Oppenheimer himself felt he needed. Perhaps those government stooges were voices inside his own head. Perhaps the film is a subjective character study more than a great-but-complicated-man biopic. Maybe the end is not meant to redeem him, but to further expose his fractured psyche.
The Owl and the Pussycat (1970) - I’ve been nibbling around a new project lately that involves Jewish cinema, and it led me to what film critic J. Hoberman called the American Jew Wave, that period between 1967 and and 1974 when the silver screen was flooded with young, hip Jewish stars. The Owl and the Pussycat, based on a hit play, is a two-hander between George Segal and Barbra Streisand. He’s a neurotic aspiring writer. She’s a zany call girl. Over the course of one, long, exasperating night, they fall in love. We’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again—in fact, Streisand would play a similar agent-of-chaos character a couple years later in the superior What’s Up Doc—but the stars are so engaged, and the staging by veteran director Herbert Ross so sharp and thoughtful, that it never falters. I’d watch this one again real soon.
Getting Straight (1968) - A real time capsule. Shot in the weeks after the Kent State shooting, Getting Straight concerns a disillusioned activist (Gould, again) who has abandoned The Fight to take an administrative job at a UC-Berkleyesque college. Candice Bergen plays his girlfriend, and a very young Harrison Ford shows up as a stoner. It plays a little oddly today, as the sides have shifted. Only anti-woke mobsters would see a liberal college like Berkley as an enemy of the youth, but if you put yourself in the shoes of someone watching it in 1968, Getting Straight is revealed as a messy, complicated film for a messy, complicated time.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - Look, I walked into my wedding reception to the booming trumpets of John Williams’ Indiana Jones score, so I was always going to be a sucker for this, Harrison Ford’s for-sure final ride as the globetrotting archaeologist. And to be honest, there are long stretches here just as middling as Crystal Skull, the fourth and most-maligned Indiana Jones film. But with a few bold creative strokes and a heartbreaking performance by Ford, Dial of Destiny nails the ending, and that goes a long way, Dr. Jones.
Worst Movie: Hanky Panky
Recently, I’ve been looking into the sparse film work of Gilda Radner, wondering if there was a hidden gem in her filmography. So far, nope. 1982’s Hanky Panky is a particularly baffling misfire. It’s fashioned as a “wrong man” comedy, in which Wilder gets wrongfully accused of murder and goes on the lam, accompanied by Radner’s naive reporter, but it has no actual jokes in it. I suppose they were hoping Wilder and Radner could just funny it up, but that’s almost never an effective strategy. Jokes work better. The other problem is that Wilder’s character is named “Michael Jordon” (yeah, he spells it weird), and he spends half the movie trying to clear his name by saying, “I’m Michael Jordon! I’m Michael Jordon!” It’s a bit distracting.
Best Rewatch: Don’t Look Back
I hadn’t seen this documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England in probably 20 years, and it is even more compelling now. It’s probably because every bit of footage we get today of our biggest pop stars—even the stuff that’s supposedly candid—is so packaged and manicured that it reveals nothing. In Don’t Look Back, Dylan is a beautiful mess of contradictions: an obnoxious little prick who comes at everyone with maximum hostility but who also seems to be trying to get at larger truths through his incessant questioning. He is at his most caustic with journalists—I especially like the bit where he refuses to acknowledge he and the reporter have the same definition of “people”—but the musical performances scenes make us forgive it all. Dylan had, and still has, a talent of such monumental proportions that you’ll do whatever you can do be near it. Like Donovan, who challenges him to a sing-off just to get slayed by him for our viewing pleasure. Catch up with this one again, if it has been a while, or even if it hasn’t.
See you next month.
The Indiana Jones picture deserved a better reception.
"A heartbreaking performance by Ford" makes me both want to watch Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny more but also prepare for the anxiety of "I'm pretty sure this is gonna get sad."