Best of
Movies

1975

The Jaws Log


Carl Gottlieb - 1975
    Long out of print, a new, expanded paperback edition was published in 2000 to mark the movie's 25th Anniversary, featuring a 22-page behind-the-scenes photo album, a new afterword by Gottlieb updating readers on the fates of thefilmmakers, and an introduction by Peter Benchley.Now, on the occasion of the movie's 30th Anniversary, The Jaws Log is available for the first time in an affordably-priced hardcover edition with a new foreword by the author.

Bring on the Empty Horses


David Niven - 1975
    He recounts stories and anecdotes of the stars, producers, directors, tycoons and oddballs, many of whom were his friends.

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Expanded and Updated


David Thomson - 1975
    In addition to the new “musts,” Thomson has added key figures from film history–lively anatomies of Graham Greene, Eddie Cantor, Pauline Kael, Abbott and Costello, Noël Coward, Hoagy Carmichael, Dorothy Gish, Rin Tin Tin, and more. Here is a great, rare book, one that encompasses the chaos of art, entertainment, money, vulgarity, and nonsense that we call the movies. Personal, opinionated, funny, daring, provocative, and passionate, it is the one book that every filmmaker and film buff must own. Time Out named it one of the ten best books of the 1990s. Gavin Lambert recognized it as “a work of imagination in its own right.” Now better than ever–a masterwork by the man playwright David Hare called “the most stimulating and thoughtful film critic now writing.”

Taxi Driver


Paul Schrader - 1975
    When his tentative efforts at a relationship with elegant political campaign worker Betsy come to naught, Travis conceives of an assassination attempt upon her boss, Senator Charles Palantine. But as he cruises the streets at night, Travis encounters a hapless child prostitute, Iris, and her sinister pimp, sport. Travis's mounting psychosis acquires a new focus, and violence erupts . . .One of the key films of the 1970s and winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, Taxi Driver was the first of several potent collaborations between Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese. Inspired by Ford's The Searchers, Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, the diaries of real-life gunman Arthur Bremer, and an especially tormented period in Schrader's own life, Taxi Driver remains a devastating portrait of a man in urban purgatory.

The Silent Clowns


Walter Kerr - 1975
    It covers such characters as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy.

The Films in My Life


François Truffaut - 1975
    Equally fascinating is the very large body of film criticism Truffaut wrote over many years for Cahiers du Cinema and other leading film journals. Wonderfully varied, personal, and informal, these reviews all communicate unabashed love for and an enormous excitement about the movies. The Films in My Life is Truffaut's own selection of more than one hundred essays that range widely over the history of film and pay tribute to Truffaut's particular heroes, among them Hitchcock, Welles, Chaplin, Renoir, Cocteau, Bergman, and Buñuel.

Minamata


W. Eugene Smith - 1975
    Its people joined the industrial age when the Chisso Corporation built a chemical factory there. The disaster that then befell them, and the ways in which some have managed to respond, reach far beyond Japan. Their courage is a flag of hope for all life - but it will have signaled no victory unless it awakens other people to action in every corner of this planet. An uneasiness developed in the town in the early 1950's. Many individuals fell ill with the same symptoms: limbs and lips tingled and then became numb; speech slurred; motor functions went out of control. Some died. Was this strange new disease contagious? Nobody knew.Minamata's disease was recognized as methyl mercury poisoning from industrial wasters. The mercury reached people through contaminated fish. Some doctors suggested that the number of persons affected might reach 10,000. So far 103 have died and some 700 others have been verified seriously - and permanently - damaged. As groups of victims pressed a turbulent, multi-sided crusade to force industry and government to take responsibility, W. Eugene Smith and his wife, Aileen, moved to Minamata. The result of their collaboration is an enduring document that crowns the work of one of the world's great photographers.

Movie Monsters: Monster Make-Up & Monster Shows To Put On


Alan Ormsby - 1975
    . .It's a whole fangtastic creep of monster tips, straight from a Master of horrifying monster movies!

The Making of King Kong: The Story Behind a Film Classic


Orville Goldner - 1975
    

Life Goes to the Movies


David E. Scherman - 1975
    

The Men Who Made the Movies: Interviews with Frank Capra, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, and William A. Wellman


Richard Schickel - 1975
    The directors are Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, William A. Wellman, King Vidor, and Raoul Walsh. Speaking with them, Mr. Schickel found in these men a special quality: "They felt in their bones the character and quality of a vanished America." There was something valuable to be learned from them, not merely about the cinema but about the conduct of life. Each of these directors created a canon of work that even today sustains critical analysis without sacrificing popular appeal. Each maintained his artistic integrity while working in an atmosphere generally credited with ruining rather than nurturing talent. Their attitudes, Mr. Schickel writes in his introduction, were "composed of a toughness that was never harsh, a pride in achievement that was never boastful, a self-reliance and an acceptance of the difficulties under which they had labored which contained neither self-pity nor a desire to blame others for the things that had gone wrong." Rich in behind-the-scenes stories about such modern classics as It Happened One Night, Dawn Patrol, The Champ, Born Yesterday, Father of the Bride, and Shadow of a Doubt, as well as in anecdotes about the men and women of Hollywood, this book is an enduring tribute to the men who made the movies. With 33 black-and-white photographs. "Immensely readable and richly informative...it provides a real education in just how movies are made.... One of the best introductions to the cinema that one could ask for."-Library Journal.

Complete Films of Cary Grant


Donald Deschner - 1975
    

The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar


Frank Hohimer - 1975
    

The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock


André Bazin - 1975
    

Basil Rathbone: His Life and His Films


Michael B. Druxman - 1975
    

The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History


Diana Serra Cary - 1975
    A handful of discarded horsemen, however, stumbled upon an entirely new frontier-Hollywood. In a rare insider’s view, Diana Serra Cary tells the story of these cowboys, who survived for another fifty years as riders, stuntmen, and doubles for the stars. Filled with humorous anecdotes, The Hollywood Posse reveals the full story of the cowboys’ long and bitter feud with autocratic director Cecil B. De Mille; their relationships with the great Western stars-from the flamboyant Tom Mix to the durable John Wayne; and above all, their touching loyalty, code of honor, and devotion to each other.

Ronald Colman, A Very Private Person


Juliet Benita Colman - 1975
    Juliet Colman's warm and wonderful biography of her father will appeal to that enormous public who look to Ronald Colman's movies in the golden age of the medium as part of entertainment history.

Films of the Forties


Tony Thomas - 1975