The New Hollywood as we know it blossomed in the '70s, with filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola leading the way for a new generation of movie brats. But the seeds were planted in the '60s, when, as you might have heard, a whole lot in American society changed.
The movies of this tumultuous decade will get a close-up in my new Dallas Morning News Screening Room series, A Decade on the Brink: Films of the 1960s. The series will kick off Feb. 28 with The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer's 1962 satirical thriller about a nefarious plot to put a Russian agent in the White House. March 28 will bring Ride the High Country, a great and early Sam Peckinpah Western that pointed the way for the genre's bold new directions at the end of the decade.
The series will run monthly through August. More titles will be announced soon.
We'll have a new venue and partner this time around: The Texas Theatre, whose repertory programming I have long admired. And Bart Weiss of Dallas VideoFest will return in his role as learned co-host. Admission is free for Dallas Morning News subscribers, but you must RSVP at dallasnews.com/film. If you're not a subscriber - and really, you should be - you can purchase tickets at the theater. All shows start at 7 p.m.
In the meantime, check out this episode of the KERA Big Screen show, in which I talk with SMU film professor Rick Worland about his new book, Searching for New Frontiers: Hollywood Film in the 1960s. Rick's book, and an independent study he led me through last fall, inspired the new series.
