1960s
Graham Fuller
Here’s a rancid little hors d’oeuvre for the holiday season. The deliciously loathsome Gothic horror film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, 50 years old and back in cinemas, never ceases to amaze as director Robert Aldrich’s strychnine-laced missive to Hollywood – his second, following 1955’s The Big Knife – and as a psychodrama of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis’s unfeigned hatred for each other.The movie opens in 1917. The junior vaudeville star Baby Jane Hudson simpers through her vomitous song-and-dance numbers onstage and, enabled by her unctuous accompanist father, rules her family with Read more ...
mark.kidel
While living in Bombay in the late 1940s, betrayed by a business partner and his first marriage in the midst of painful implosion, Ravi Shankar decided to commit suicide. At the eleventh hour, a holy man, who happened to be passing by, knocked on his door asking for water. The man told Shankar that he was aware of his fateful decision. This wasn’t, he went on, the right time to be renouncing life. He had a great future ahead of him, the sadhu continued, and a major role to play in the dissemination of Indian music throughout the world. The man became Ravi Shankar’s spiritual teacher, and for Read more ...
kate.bassett
When I first mentioned to a colleague that I was embarking on a biography of the doctor/director Jonathan Miller, he instantly yelped, “My God, your work’s cut out! The man must have met half the famous names in the twentieth century!"My subsequent conversations with Miller provided a cornucopia of highly entertaining anecdotes. These included his brushes with Princess Margaret (who was very taken with his comic turns in the 1950s); Bobby Kennedy (who told him to shut up, shortly before being shot); Bridget Riley (who nearly sued); and Kevin Spacey (who got his big break by stalking Miller Read more ...
Jasper Rees
For all its playful, subversive energy, it’s sometimes easy to view the Czech New Wave as kind of a stylistic monolith. In fact, the slackening of state control between 1963 to 1968 spawned a variety of filmic departures, and three very different forks in the road are travelled down in this latest collection from Second Run, each profoundly radical in their own way.Earliest and, at just over an hour, shortest is the feature debut of Jan Němec, Diamonds in the Night (1964), an adaptation of Arnošt Lustig’s novel about two young fugitives in Nazi-occupied Bohemia (pictured below). With Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“It’s an expression of our collective souls coming together,” said The Beach Boys’ Mike Love of his band, in this celebration of their 2012 50th anniversary world tour and recent album That’s Why God Made the Radio. Subsequent to the making of Doin' it Again and during the ensuing global jaunt, Love announced he was ditching fellow Beach Boys Alan Jardine, David Marks and Brian Wilson, whom he had been sharing the stage with. Not much of a shelf life for this collective expression, with little chance of doing it again. Love’s own Beach Boys – without that trio – picked up the baton after Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pallant House Gallery is an extraordinary hybrid, an elaborate and magnificent early 18th-century town house on a narrow Chichester street in the heart of the city, with a soberly elegant extension by Colin St John Wilson (2006) which houses one of the finest collections of 20th-century British art anywhere in the country. Nothing could be more powerful and intelligently surprising than its present unusual combination of shows.Several first-floor galleries are filled with a substantial showing of work from the 1960s of that art brut – raw art - pioneer Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985): Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The return of The Rolling Stones to the world stage is headline news, but the man who put them there in the first place has decided to reveal the tricks of being an impresario, the hustler that can make or break a band. In this poignant, exclusive extract from Stone Free, their former manager Andrew Loog Oldham contemplates Phil Spector, one of his inspirations with whom he was reunited in the wake of the death of Lana Clarkson, the woman Spector was convicted of murdering in 2009.Stone Free is Oldham’s third book, following Stoned and 2Stoned. Unlike its predecessors, it isn’t an oral Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
Those of us growing up in the heady days of 1960s Liverpool knew that four local lads were taking the world by storm. Some really grown-up people might even have been to The Cavern and seen the phenomenon in their early days. And yet there was always an enigma in the background: the figure who made it happen but about whom we knew almost nothing.Brian Epstein – pronounced Epsteen – seemed to have it all: wealth, good looks, ability, contacts. He was the gifted businessman who launched several epic popular music careers, not to mention a major music business in Liverpool which continued well Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
"When you're making a movie, it's a movie; if they're still talking about it in 10 years' time it's a film. If they're still talking about it in 50 years' time, it's cinema. But you sure as hell can't start out making cinema." Legendary studio head Ned Tanen knew his business. That we’re talking about Lawrence of Arabia 50 years after its release confirms it as cinema - a word suggesting art taken to genius level, and Lawrence of Arabia is exactly that.In this way, the 50th Anniversary 4K restoration of Lawrence of Arabia is more important now than ever. Because the edited version of the film Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Blue Nile: A Walk Across The Rooftops, HatsGraeme ThomsonThe Blue Nile occupy a unique spot in the musical landscape. Formed in 1980 by Glasgow University graduates Paul Buchanan, Paul Joseph Moore and Robert Bell, four albums in 30 years suggests a certain neurotic creative sensibility which resulted in a pretty slim legacy but served the music well.From their first single – 1981’s “I Love This Life”, included on these expanded reissues – to their last album High, in 2004, a dedicated and deliberate artistic ethos has driven the music. Aesthetically, there is something immensely pleasing Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ennio Morricone: In ColourKieron TylerThe recent release of Berberian Sound Studio raised the level of interest in Italian film soundtracks. From the moment Ennio Morricone’s compositions for the spaghetti westerns of the Sixties attracted attention, it became obvious that Italy operated to a different metronome than the other filmmaking nations. Morricone will always be a prime interest, not least because he has made so much music, in a bewildering array of styles. This exceptionally good value, neatly packaged clam-shell box collects eight of his soundtracks from 1969-1979 over four discs. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo, black magic.” That about sums up The Devil Rides Out, Hammer’s fantastic adaptation of Denis Wheatley’s devils ‘n’ demons page-turner. If you’d seen it in on its release in July 1968, it would have been billed with Slave Girls, made by Hammer as an opportunity to recycle sets and costumes from One Million Years B.C. There was nothing cut-rate about the deadly serious The Devil Rides Out, a stylish dig into the wild wild world of Satanism.The Devil Rides Out was filmed between 7 August and 29 September 1967. It might have been the Summer of Love, but darkness was in Read more ...