National Film Registry List for '06: Mel Brooks to James Brown
Filed under: Classics, Documentary, Drama, DIY/Filmmaking, Newsstand
Every year the Library of Congress announces that it will shelter 25 films for posterity and here's the list for this year, from Variety. Joining the 450 films currently in the vaults are a range of pictures from features to documentaries. This year's pack includes the 1913 protest film Traffic in Souls, a very early American feature film with a then-stunning budget of $25,000. A film "so fast-moving and so packed with direct and veiled references to the vice trade that it's a wonder audiences could keep pace with it," comments ace silent film historian Kevin Brownlow.
More familiar inductees include recent hits like Blazing Saddles, sex, lies and videotape, Rocky and Halloween. Then you have classics like Notorious, and key works like The Big Trail by Raoul Walsh, The Last Command by Josef von Sternberg, the debut of Rouben Mamoulian, and the first Garbo-Gilbert picture Flesh and the Devil. The rarities are perhaps even more interesting: the early Chinese-American film The Curse of Quon Gwon and long-time experimental filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas' Reminiscence of a Journey to Lithuania. A couple of the entries are performance films: St. Louis Blues (1929), a two-reeler that is the only existing film of Bessie Smith, seen singling the W. C. Handy song. And for more current relevance, the documentary The T.A.M.I. Show. with the late lamented James Brown performing "Night Train" and the Supremes doing "Where Did Our Love Go?" for purpose of comparison with The Dreams in Dreamgirls.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-29-2006 @ 1:02AM
Peter Nellhaus said...
I hope that someone is inspired to put "The T.A.M.I. Show" on DVD. I saw it about thirty-five years ago. The film is full of terrific performances from many of the top rock and soul musicians from the mid-Sixties.
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12-29-2006 @ 12:18PM
Richard von Busack said...
Check the link to the TAMI show above--they're selling it on Amazon. Just think, now our country will have a negative of this stashed in a very deep, secure and bomb-proof bunker in Culpepper, Virginia. It almost seems like a template for National Treasure II.
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12-29-2006 @ 11:43AM
Lefty said...
Blazing Saddles is a movie that should be protected. And not that crap version they made for TNT. It is actually a movie I feel could not get made today. It is the best standing definition of a Satire, of westerns, of movies, of bigotry, and of bigots. The funniest thing about this movie today is the fact that when it came out everyone was worried about the fart scene. They thought that that was over the top. If you have never seen it un-cut, Go Out & Rent It!
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12-31-2006 @ 1:55PM
shawn said...
GROUNDHOGS DAY!!!!
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3-01-2007 @ 10:28AM
moviesteve said...
I again nominate Stanley Kramer's comedy extravaganza, IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (1963), to the National Film Registry so that it can be reconstructed and restored to its world premiere length of 192 minutes; present prints run 161 minutes on home video, leaving gaping holes in the continuity and unexplained characters.
MAD WORLD is my favorite comedy of the sound era and most fondly remembered film of my childhood; I was 13 in 1964, when the movie planned all year in Cinerama. Restoring the picture would be like restoring my childhood family photo album.
The cast is a who's who of the golden age of TV, another reason to include it on the NFR and restore it. Imagine under one cinematic roof--Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Edie Adams, Jonathan Winters, Carl Reiner, Mickey Rooney, and two dozen camdos.
MAD WORLD is such an enjoyable film, with a fun greed and car chase plot that starts in reel one; character is revealed in hilarious dialogue and situations as the film progresses. Ernest Gold's melodic music is one of his greatest scores, and Ernest Laszlo's photography is sunny and airy.
I adore this movie and want it restored to 192 minutes. But modern studios are too obsessed with new product to be bothered with "an old movie". IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD will have to probably be reconstructed and restored by a film archive. Inclusion on the National Film Registry would go a long way toward achieving that goal.
Stephen H. Wood
South San Francisco, CA
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