Movie historian Karina Longworth‘s “You Should Keep in mind This” podcast has been beloved by cinephiles ever because it launched 11 years in the past to discover “the key and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century.” The most recent season, “The Previous Man Is Nonetheless Alive,” is Longworth’s most enlightening and entertaining to this point. A deep dive into the late-career transformations of Hollywood legends, together with Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Otto Preminger, “The Previous Man Is Nonetheless Alive” explores how veteran administrators met the challenges of an evolving trade and altering tastes with various levels of creative and business success.
The thought for the season started with a 2023 journey to the Cinémathèque Française, the place Longworth noticed Vincente Minnelli’s “The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse” for the primary time. “I considered myself as an enormous Minnelli fan, and I had not even identified this film existed,” Longworth advised IndieWire. “I went to see it on my own and had a really highly effective expertise. The truth that I didn’t have anyone to speak to about it afterward made me really feel like I needed to discover some method to talk that this film exists, and it’s unbelievable.”
The next summer season, Longworth discovered herself within the Cinémathèque once more for a screening of John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” and the concept for a podcast season started to crystallize. “Connecting these two movies collectively felt actually necessary to me,” Longworth mentioned of “Liberty Valance” and “The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” “They’re each from 1962, they usually’re each made by guys who’re extra related to their motion pictures of the Nineteen Forties however had been working into the Nineteen Sixties and, in Minnelli’s case, even into the Nineteen Seventies and making a few of their riskiest and most attention-grabbing motion pictures throughout that point.”
As soon as Longworth had Ford and Minnelli, then it turned a query of enthusiastic about who else to incorporate, and she or he rapidly discovered that there have been many different administrators who created fascinating work on the very second the movie enterprise and audiences had been largely abandoning them. One of many nice pleasures of “The Previous Man is Nonetheless Alive” is Longworth’s articulate protection of movies which have been unjustly reviled or ignored, like Billy Wilder‘s 1978 gem “Fedora,” a poison pen letter to Hollywood that makes “Sundown Boulevard” appear like “La La Land.”
“One other one which I hope individuals will hunt down is William Wyler’s ‘The Liberation of L.B. Jones,’ which was actually not on my radar earlier than I began this season,” Longworth mentioned. “It’s a particularly daring film for Wyler to make, not simply as his final movie however as his follow-up to ‘Humorous Lady.’ There’s hardly ever a juxtaposition of two issues which are so completely different proper subsequent to one another in a single filmmaker’s profession.” Longworth additionally factors to George Stevens’ “The Best Story Ever Instructed” as underrated, although rumor has it a restoration is within the works. “Hopefully that movie is in line to be reevaluated,” she mentioned.
Longworth’s personal reevaluations are eloquently articulated and constantly eye-opening, particularly when she goes towards the grain of calcified knowledge — as she usually does all through “The Previous Man is Nonetheless Alive.” “There aren’t a whole lot of massive doorstop books revealed about movie administrators nowadays, and when they’re, they are typically by the identical half-dozen individuals, and they don’t seem to be ladies,” Longworth mentioned. “So I at all times really feel like my perspective is a little bit completely different. Even placing gender apart, a whole lot of these administrators haven’t been talked about the way in which I’m speaking about them, going previous the best hits to speak about what occurred after.”
Longworth’s scholarship extends past her podcast to public applications that increase on her work; one of the crucial vital of those is an ongoing repertory sequence at Vidiots in Los Angeles consisting of double options programmed by Longworth along side “The Previous Man Is Nonetheless Alive.” On Saturday, March 15, Vidiots will display screen Billy Wilder’s “The Condo” and “Avanti!”; earlier double payments included Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” and “Torn Curtain” and Minnelli’s “Gigi” and “The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
“The thought was to point out a licensed banger, one of many director’s hottest movies, with one of many later, stranger motion pictures,” Longworth mentioned. “The thought is that hopefully individuals will come for each and have a richer understanding of who these filmmakers are.” This weekend, Longworth will even current a sequence of movies on the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, California, amongst which is Peter Bogdanovich’s pleasant (and criminally maligned in its time) musical comedy “At Lengthy Final Love.”
“I feel there are a whole lot of attention-grabbing parallels between that film and what I’m speaking about on this season of ‘You Should Keep in mind This,’” Longworth mentioned. “I at all times consider Bogdanovich as a bridge character between the outdated Hollywood and the brand new.” Talking of the New Hollywood, Longworth additionally sees parallels between what her topics went via within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies and what octogenarian auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Michael Mann are going via now.
“Have a look at Coppola sweeping the Razzies for ‘Megalopolis,’” Longworth mentioned. “Fortunately, he has a humorousness and wrote a extremely elegant response to it. However proper now, in Hollywood and in tradition generally, there’s an urge for food for attacking people who find themselves perceived as stepping past their boundaries. There’s a want to punish extra, and sadly, that results in very homogenous filmmaking from the studios. However guys like Scorsese and Coppola and Schrader and Mann have an understanding that each movie may very well be their final, so that they’re actually going for it, and I noticed that in a few of these earlier filmmakers as effectively.”
There’s no query the place Longworth stands on the spectrum between conformist considering and auteurist risk-taking. “I’ll take a thousand ‘Ferrari’s over most of what comes out on a weekly foundation,” she mentioned.
“Avanti!” and “The Condo” will display screen at Vidiots on March 15. “At Lengthy Final Longworth” runs March 8-13 on the Frida Cinema. “You Should Keep in mind This: The Previous Man Is Nonetheless Alive” is presently accessible on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and different platforms.