Old Guy 70:
I've seen every Kubrick feature but The Killing and Lolita. I've seen stills of Sue Lyon, who is certainly siren-esque. I'll have to check it out soon. I saw Barry Lyndon not long ago and was pretty impressed, although crestfallen, by the hero's fate.
Avocado's Number:
The set-design and expressionistic lighting on Night of the Hunter were like a demented Disneyland, very memorable. The camera work is incredible--the underwater shot of Shelly Winters floating with her face obscured by tendrils of hair and aquatic vegetation just burns into your retinas permanently, despite its horrible import (it's hard to miss this film's influence on David Lynch.) Laughton takes direct aim at religious delusion & hypocrisy. Mitchum's murderous minister glides around unquestioned and operates with ease among the faithful. Their belief and blind assumptions are his camouflage, his lair. It's pretty great when he runs up against Lillian Gish's no-nonsense farm gal, and she just fvcks him up. And then once Mitchum is apprehended, it's just icing on the cake that a lynch mob starts to form from Mitchum's former flock! A fierce and courageous film from the 1950's.
I've got a Bogdanovich story, too (though yours is better.) Bogdanovich made a disappointing crime-caper-comedy (Illegally Yours), which was shot in my hometown of St.Augustine, Florida. Rob Lowe was its primary star. As you know, Bogdanovich is a huge champion of Ford, so maybe he was aiming for something along the lines of The Quiet Man or Donovan's Reef, but it didn't quite pan out. Anyhow, Hollywood fever gripped St. Augustine for a couple of months in the Spring of 1987. There were giant lighting booms that loomed over the ruins of an old Spanish Fort, illuminating the sky for a couple of nights, while scenes were shot within. I had friends who scored art-dept. internships with the film, so we were able to schlep our way into a couple of cast & crew parties, notable not so much for their proximity to Lowe (or, Raw-Blow as my friend called him,) but more so for the open bar and a chance to ogle unknown starlets (then and now.) Then one afternoon I was driving through a part of town where filming was occurring. It was lunchtime and I was on an errand with my Boss when we turned a corner and were confronted by the sight of Rob Lowe before us--just as he was being attacked, mauled, and basically scalped by a wolf-pack of frenzied high school girls. Lowe had just stepped from a trailer and was trying to walk a few yards up the sidewalk to enter a building and location shoot. In the not so distant future, he would be caught on camera in an Atlanta hotel while coking & frolicking with a pair of nubile underage femmes and his career would temporarily tank, but here, as the mob spilled into the street and he cowered and grimaced and our car came to a halt and we rolled down our window, I felt pity for the guy. As the whole spectacle approached, I called out, saying: "We thought they were after us." He sort of snorted and said: "Yeah, I wish." So I guess everyone has a Hollywood story and that's mine--insignificant as it is.
One more bloviation, then I'm done: There were 2 great films that came out of 1960's England, and both used Sport as a kind of microcosm or springboard for social commentary. I'm talking about:
THIS SPORTING LIFE (Richard Harris' first film) and
THE LONELINESS OF A LONG DISTANCE RUNNER (with Tom Courtenay.)
Both films are in the Criterion Collection, and both are totally ACE, with This Sporting Life maybe slightly better. It follows Harris's ascent from a street tough to a local rugby star, as he rises from the working poor into parlors of wealth. Harris is a brutal player on the field, and like De Niro in Raging Bull, he applies the same ethos to his relations with others, particularly in his "romance" with a young widowed mother, whom he poignantly but disastrously courts.
Both films have great acting & camera work, and non-linear, elliptical plots. In Long Distance Runner, Courtenay's running form is unbelievably bad, but I think he may have been theatrically exaggerating to convey running's difficulty. Anyhow, they're both pretty great. Highly recommended.