John Schlesinger has died

I've seen quite a few of his films and of course Billy Liar is one of my favourites. Cold Comfort Farm is surprisingly good too.

cowboy won the oscar, which must have been the time and place, cause it was so radical and isolating that it would seem to be out of place during that gladhaddening.

The rating was downgraded to an R a few months after the movie's release, IIRC.

Part may be that I see all the Hoffman acting attributes I hate coming into place and being crystallized (that was a great perormance but I think he knew that and he kept doing a lot of those same tics over and over again)

Before I go off, respect to mr. schelsinger, and now could people explain why they respect or love MC so much?

Come to think of it, it would work well on a double-bill with the more recent "Together", concerning as it does the dilemma of The Liberal Heart in the field of open relationships.

I highly recommend it.

As for Schlesinger, "Billy Liar" is a great personal favourite, such an atmospheric film, and not just for the Dream Academy resonances (yeah, it was about Nick Drake, yada yada yada, well if you wanted us to realise that and not think that the last line is about Billy if he *did* get that train, Laird-Clowes, you should have called it "Life in a Midlands Village" and / or not released it just after the miners' strike ... sorry, off at a tangent there). But "Terminus" may be his finest work, historically one of the last documents of a London where Everyone Knew Their Place, and simultaneously in a few isolated moments as great a picture of bohemian London circa 1960 as "Victim". The prisoners' trains, the army trains, the Caribbean immigrants arriving (and the thought that there might just be a Mr Grant and his son Eddy in the crowd, such a long and short time before "Baby Come Back"), the shoeshine boys still plying their trade as though nothing would ever change, the holidaymakers in summer Saturday slip-coaches for small West Country resorts which were soon to lose their railway ... their every physical movement and expression to each other, the way they interrelated (or not), the way they spoke, speaks more than any narration ever could about how Britain was then, and by extension how Britain is now.

It's a terrific piece of work, and puts me in mind of the Pinefox (or some vague idea I have of his folks). June Brown was never better (though, funnily enough, she was never any different either).

good quote in the hal ashby bio im reading of when schlesh turned down directing 'coming home'

"The exact way he expressed it was that as a 'baroque English faggot,' he wasn't the right person to sit in the VA hospital and talk to these guys about their urine bags."

apparently Shlesh didn't like Darling very much (and i never have, either). His faves were MC, Yanks, Madame Sousatzka and I think A Kind of Loving, which has a nice semidocumentary feel for the vanished industrial North, even tho it presents hunky young Alan Bates as much more sexually innocent than seems plausible. Oh, and Sunday Bloody Sunday (most personal, he said), for which i am due a rewatch.

Day of the Locust did better at the box office than i suspected (ie it didn't totally crater), but I'm sure it was hell to make.

Watched Pacific Heights last night for at least the fifth time since it came out. Compelling junk that speaks to a very primal fear: the nightmare neighbour. (More applicable to apartment-dwelling, but I had issues at my previous house, too.)

Hmmmn...

Janet Maslin of The New York Times characterized the film as "perhaps the first eviction thriller," writing that it "taps into a previously unexplored subject, the source of so much excitement and so many conversational gambits within young urban professional circles. It is, of course, real estate."

Is she saying it's about the horror that landlords face? Yeah, I can see that too. I've never been a landlord, so I view it more from the viewpoint of Modine and Griffith as tenants.

They're not tenants though? They own the building? Unless I'm completely misremembering the film.

They're both--they own the building and they live in it. So they experience both: the nightmare of Keaton's hammering after midnight, and the nightmare of trying to collect rent and then to evict him.

A third way to look at the film--if you're able to overlook that Michael Keaton is psychotic, or if you're psychotic yourself--is that it's about the fear of eviction.

I've been on a junky thriller kick recently, watched Eye for an Eye, Schlesinger's second-last film. Mediocre vigilante stuff. Kiefer Sutherland's sort of scary at a comic-book level, nothing else very notable.

Watching the first few minutes of Marathon Man. Was that the first-ever depiction on film of road rage (before it even had a name)?

I think Slither (1973) with James Caan had it beat, and I’m sure there are others

I saw Margaret Cho introduce a screening of Darling once. She and Schlesinger were very close friends. They hung out at his house in New Mexico and rode in his Jeep.

Honky Tonk Freeway is unbelievable. Please buy it in Kino Lorber’s fall sale

What about Duel?

I figured there might be others...I've had a Blu-ray of Honky Tonk Freeway sitting here for months. You may have roused me into action. (It was really jumped on in its day as a Nashville imitation.)

Honky Tonk Freeway is genuinely one of the “truest” and funniest films about America that has ever been produced. It’s very polarizing, but I fell in love with it at first watch.

The Falcon and the Snowman (1985) and Cold Comfort Farm (1995) are phenomenal, too

I really do think Schlesinger is underrated--possibly overrated during his heyday, but (my sense, anyway), he just doesn't get the attention anymore that Altman, Peckinpah, and the other '70s directors continue to get.