Two-thirds of the way through the movie viewing year

We're two-thirds of the way through 2026, and I thought I'd share my work-in-progress ranking of favorite first watches of the year. It will be interesting to see how this list changes between now and the end of the year, in terms of both new additions and thinking more deeply about the films already on the list.

1. Harold and Maude (1971, director: Hal Ashby)

2. The Earrings of Madame de... (1953, Max Ophüls)

3. Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam)

4. The Great Dictator (1940, Charlie Chaplin)

5. UFOria (1985, John Binder)

6. Sinners (2025, Ryan Coogler)

7. Times Square (1980, Allan Moyle)

8. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994, Stephan Elliott)

9. Backrooms (2026, Kane Parsons)

10. Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)

And here's the big catch. My favorite segment of the year, by far, is Federico Fellini's "Toby Dammit," (starring Terence Stamp, pictured above) from the 1968 anthology film Spirits of the Dead. However, the other two segments are not compelling enough to pull the film as a whole into the Top 10. (Sorry, Fonda siblings.)

Overall, I've had 34 first watches so far this year. And I will say that list includes Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, and just leave it at that. The oldest movie I've seen is 1922's The Toll of the Sea, which is important historically but problematic on multiple levels. 

Here was 2025's final list. I ended up not ranking them last year, and that may be the case again this year! 

Tim Curry tribute post

With Tim Curry dying hours after Dolly Parton, I didn't want to let the week end without writing something in appreciation of Curry, too. But I don't really have any Curry ephemera, so I had to figure out what to post.

Then I remembered my newspaper's first local review of The Rocky Horror Picture Show phenomenon.

Jon Ferguson, whom I worked alongside for a few years when I joined the newspaper in 2014, wrote "The Theater Darkens, And Crowd Lights Up" for the Lancaster Intelligence Journal's Lifebeat section on April 6, 1979. As far I can tell from searching the archives, it's the first time Curry's picture appeared in the newspaper in something other than a movie advertisement for a midnight showing.

Curry isn't even mentioned by name in Ferguson's article (only Susan Sarandon gets that honor), but there are some interesting comments, nonetheless. Please remember that this is 1979 in ultra-conservative Lancaster County (current home of America's measles revival); the fact that Rocky Horror was showing in Amish country at all is kind of stunning. Ferguson writes:

• The fool foolish enough to wear his Sunday best was quickly warned as he stepped down the aisle. "You wore a suit to the wrong movie," a voice hidden in the darkness of the theater called out.
• "It's not the movie that provides the show, it's the audience. Don't expect the crowd to sit placidly back in silence as this trifle of a film about a 'sweet transexual from Transylvania' unfolds."
• "Basically, the movie focuses on the debauching of an innocent young couple at the hands of Dr. Frank N. Further, the travestite from the planet Transexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, and his demented minions. The plot is next to invisible, the acting reaches new heights of campiness and there is no hint of social redeeming value. But criticisms of this sort have no place when discussing 'Rocky Horror.' The movie is unto itself, and the same goes for its audience."

Last year, Sarah Nicell had some more contemporary insights when writing a column on the movie's 50th anniversary for LNP | LancasterOnline:

"Much about the movie is outdated, even if it pushed boundaries for its time. There are corny, blood-drip transitions and fourth wall breaks. Frank-N-Furter, the host of the castle played by Tim Curry, sings a seductive song about being a “Sweet Transvestite” from his home planet of 'Transexual' in the galaxy of 'Transylvania.' (It’s unclear in the film whether the character identifies with the antiquated term because he’s a cross-dresser or for his alien heritage. Perhaps it’s both.) The same character tricks his virginal guests into non-consensual sexual encounters. Alien siblings have an implied incestuous relationship. ... The movie is, regardless of the year you watch it, absurd. It is offensive and strange. Some lyrics are nonsensical, and the camera work is shaky."

Ahh well.

Personally, I think "Don't Dream It, Be It" is about as clear and sensible as you can get for a lyric that has been embraced by what is now generations of queer fans.

I also like the summary in Steve Appleford's Curry appreciation for the Los Angeles Times: "No one was ever bored watching Tim Curry onscreen."

To that end, Ashar and I greatly enjoyed watching Curry in 1980's Times Square and 1990's The Hunt for Red October the past two nights as we honored his memory. We're planning to watch Annie and Clue in the coming days. And, having seen some stills, we'd like to track down his 1978 British six-part series Will Shakespeare. 

1978 book on "misappreciated" American films

(Please pardon Snugs' disinterested yawn.)

I found this book a couple of years ago in Bookman's. It's a 1978 hardcover put out by the Royal Film Archive of Belgium with the unwieldy title The Most Important and Misappreciated American Films Since the Beginning of Cinema.

Basically, it's a book of lists of important films, but also of lesser-discussed movies. Right up my alley.

The preface by Jacques Ledoux of the Royal Film Archive of Belgium lays out the book's mission:

"Most written histories of cinema are full of cliches and the attentive reader is easily able to single out those films which the historian has not recently seen or of which he writes second hand. And how could it be otherwise, since so many films remain inaccessible to researchers, often for geographical reasons?

"On the other hand, it could be imagined that the results of an enquiry such as that offered in this volume, with more than two hundred specialists participating from twenty-two countries, would lead to a statistical judgment of greater reliability than an individual historical appreciation. ...

"Still ... we were wary of ending up with a banal list of obvious classics. In order to avoid this, we decided to ask each participant to compile two lists: one, limited quite arbitrarily to thirty titles, and films considered the most important; the other, not limited in number, of films considered misappreciated. It was also specified that the films were to be cited without any order of preference and that no account need be taken of date of production, genre, or length."

The final list of Most Important Films is indeed fairly banal, with the best inclusion, in my opinion, being F.W. Murnau's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and the most unsurprising and frustrating inclusion being D.W. Griffith's racist Lost Cause of the Confederacy epic The Birth of a Nation (1915).

The Top 10 vote-getters looked like this: 

1. Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
2. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, F.W. Murnau)
3. Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim)
4. Intolerance (1916, D.W. Griffith)
5. The Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith)
6. Singin' in the Rain (1952, Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
7. Nanook of the North (1922, Robert J. Flaherty)
8. The General (1926, Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman)
9. The Gold Rush (1925, Charlie Chaplin)
10. The Crowd (1928, King Vidor)

This is a good place to add that I scanned the list of the book's 203 respondents and only 15 stood out to me as obviously being women. The actual number is probably a bit higher, because there are a lot of non-American names, but I doubt it's more than about 20 — so, 10%. Bah, humbug!

The true value and fascination of this book is in the respondents' lists of "misappreciated" films along with, in some instances, their commentaries on those lists. It's a wealth of movie titles to scan for little-known gems — little-known even in this day and age of physical media and online streaming, when more movies from throughout history than ever before are available to the casual viewer.

I don't know what "Misappreciated" means (more on that from Jonathan Rosenbaum in a moment), but here are some films I was happy to see listed:

• The Night of the Hunter (1955, perhaps the most frequently cited film)
• Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
• Titicut Follies (1967)
• Easy Street (1917)
• The Pawnbroker (1965)
• Trash (1970)
• The Son of Frankenstein (1939)
• Johnny Guitar (1954)
• Night Nurse (1931)
• The Seventh Victim (1943)
• The Haunting (1963)
• Nashville (1975)
• Ace in the Hole (1951)
• Salt of the Earth (1953)
• Lonesome (1928)

A surprising number of horror films make these lists, only some of which are listed above. It's better, I guess, to be respected as "misappreciated" than to not be mentioned at all. Film noirs also tended to do very well on the "misappreciated" lists, including Kiss Me Deadly and Gun Crazy.

More importantly, the "misappreciated" lists include many films that are new to me and browsing this book takes me down many happy rabbit holes.

American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum was one of those who submitted a list for the book. Reflecting on the process in a 2024 post on his blog, he wrote:

"By 'misappreciated,' I’m sure that what was meant was 'underrated'. I find that I still agree to a surprising degree with many of my judgments in the mid-70s – including even my belief that Hollywood at the time was going through one of its more meager periods (even though Pauline Kael and many of her disciples seemed to think, and some of them apparently still think, that this was the richest period Hollywood has ever had in its entire history)."

I disagree with Rosenbaum's thought on 1970s American film, especially given the mostly tepid decades that preceded it, but that's the fun of discussing movies and movie history! (I also have a great love for watching 1970s movies, documentaries and TV, so I'm biased.) 

You can read Rosenbaum's list of most important films on his blog post, but I'm sharing his "misappreciated" list here:

• Me and My Gal (1932)
• Her Man (1930)
• Judge Priest (1934)
• Rope (1948)
• The Trouble with Harry (1955)
• Park Row (1952)
• The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1952)
• The Old Dark House (1932)
• The Woman on the Beach (1947)
• The Seventh Victim (1943)
• Sylvia Scarlett (1936)
• Black and Tan (1929)
• Such Good Friends (1972)
• Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)
• The Young One (1960)
• Family Plot (1976)
• Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969)

Several of these I haven't seen. I strongly agree with The Old Dark House and The Seventh Victim. And with Make Way for Tomorrow, the film that inspired Tokyo Story. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is a one-of-a-kind fantasy that is way too hokey for me at times but deserves credit for translating the imagination of Dr. Seuss into a live-action picture. Rosenbaum writes more about his love for it, much of which is nostalgia-based, in a separate post.

Giving schoolchildren a proper monster education in 1976

Fifty years ago, in our bicentennial year of 1976, Scholastic published an amazeballs guide to monsters. School was just cooler then, wasn't it? Movie monsters, mythical creatures and cryptids could be mixed into the lesson plans alongside multiplication tables, the metric system and spelling quizzes. I'm guessing Pennywise, Slender Man and the backrooms don't get that same treatment today, but what do I know? 

Well, what I do know is that this 32-page staplebound booklet rocks. I mean, it has Blacula (William Marshall) right there in the center of the cover, alongside such icons as Lon Chaney Jr., Medusa, Frankenstein's monster and King Kong. Fredric March's Hyde gets a very prominent spot, as does one of the Village of the Damned kiddos. 

What a cover! According to the credits, it was designed by Bonnie Bishop, who also served as the booklet's overall designer and art director. Some of Bishop's papers ended up at the University of New England Library, which notes that she had loved drawing, writing and making books ever since childhood and later became a full-time book artist. That love shows on this cover.

Let's hear it for the rest of the booklet's production crew, too. Lewis Gardner (1943-2020) was the editor and contributed a poem and a short story. Katherine Robinson was the supervising editor and Eve Sennett was the production editor. Ira Peck and Margaret Ronan handled some of the writing, which included retellings of classic horror stories. As a teenager, Ronan corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft (!!) according to the website Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein, and those letters informed some of her work at Scholastic.

In addition to those already mentioned, this book pictures and/or mentions the big-headed alien from 1957's Invasion of the Saucermen, Paul Wegener's 1920 performance as the Golem, the Loch Ness Monster, The Thing from Another World, Cat People, Bigfoot, zombies (but only the kind who obey masters — Romero's flesh-munching zombies might have been a bit much), The Incredible Shrinking Man and Michael Landon's teenage werewolf. 

There are photos of both Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee as Dracula. The book doesn't sugarcoat Lugosi's life for the young audience. Ronan notes: "When Lugosi was 70, he admitted to being a drug addict. He kicked the habit in a hospital. A year later, he died. He had no money left from his days as a monster star. About all he had left was his Dracula cape. So he was buried in it."

The last page of the book is titled "People and Monsters" and has this introductory paragraph: "Why do some people believe in monsters? And why are monster stories popular? Here are some possible answers. Which ones do you think are true?" There are then 11 short paragraphs, all of which seem plausible but some of which are very bizarre for a school activity book:

• Some people fear others who are strange looking or deformed. They may have trouble seeing such people as fully human. They may believe such people have special powers and are evil.
• Drugs have been used in magic and religious ceremonies. After taking drugs, people have seen monsters. They have also imagined themselves as having supernatural powers.
• Monsters usually do horrible things. Deep within us, we may wish to do horrible things. Normal people keep these wishes under control. They may not even be aware of having such wishes. But they may enjoy hearing about monsters that break human laws.

If you're hankering to get your hands on one of these absolute-gem booklets, there's an eBay seller who apparently has a whole stash and is selling them for $12.99. It's well worth the trip down monster memory lane.

 

WKBS-TV bumper-palooza

I'm in a Facebook group in which folks share memories of the old WKBS-TV (Channel 48) out of Burlington, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. (I've mentioned this group before on Papergreat.) In recent months, users have been sharing and commenting upon a wide variety of bumpers that were used by the station, mostly in the 1970s.

I want to reshare them here for posterity, to give them a greater opportunity to be preserved. They are indeed amazing and bring back a lot of memories. Almost all of these were originally shared with the Facebook group by either Ed Yungmann or Susan Keiser. They should be lauded for their preservation efforts!