faye dunaway Tagged Articles at Cinematical

All this week we'll be highlighting some of our favorite scenes from Oscar-winning films and performances leading up to this year's Academy Awards on Sunday night.

The Republicans were voted out of office after eight traumatic years, the incoming Democratic administration was offering the nation change -- and along comes a movie that says it's all bulls***. Sidney Lumet's Network was released in late November 1976 and tried to rile up a country that was celebrating its bicentennial after being worn down by Watergate, a gasoline shortage, and raging inflation.

I didn't see Network during its initial theatrical release, but I certainly heard about the scene I've embedded below. Kids at school were quoting variations on its most memorable line ("I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"), which became an enduring catchphrase. Since then I've watched the movie at least a dozen times, and Peter Finch's stirring delivery of this speech, as newscaster Howard Beale, never fails to electrify me.

It's the context of the speech, though, that touches me now, and provides some evidence why Finch won Best Actor over his fellow nominees: Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, Giancarlo Giannini in Seven Beauties, and William Holden. (Finch, who died on January 14, 1977, was the first individual in Academy history to be honored posthumously with both a nomination and a win.) Holden appears briefly in the scene, expressing his dismay because he knows his friend Howard is suffering from a mental breakdown. Faye Dunaway, who won the Oscar for Best Actress, shows up, too, oozing odious charm as a ratings-hungry exec.

Network
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Celebrity interviews can be pretty nerve-wracking. The ante is upped even more when the interviewee doesn't give many interviews. You hope for the best, but sometimes that's not what you get. Xan Brooks got a chance to interview Faye Dunaway for The Guardian, and things didn't go so well. It started with a list of ixnayed topics, but one was left off the list -- Roman Polanski and rumors about Chinatown. He asked if it was true that she once threw a cup of urine at the famed director and well, she didn't take too kindly to that line of questioning. Follow the link to see what happened and then comment below: Was it okay for Brooks to ask her about that? Did she overreact?

And then there's a little bit of tennis. Variety reports that Frank Deford's adaptation of his novel Big Bill: The Triumphs and the Tragedy, which focuses on tennis legend Bill Tilden, has been optioned by Baldwin Entertainment. This is a pretty old-school story -- Tilden won six straight U.S. Open singles titles in the 1920s, and was the first American to win Wimbledon. The plus about this feature: there's a lot more to the man than just rackets and balls. "He was also a contract bridge champ, musicologist, novelist, playwright and actor. On the other side of the ledger, Tilden was famously self-destructive, going to jail twice for sexual misbehavior with teenage boys and dying penniless." That should prove interesting.

Finally, Michael Pena told MTV that he'd definitely be in if a feature version of The Shield, if one was schemed up. In fact, he thinks there could be a prequel and that it would be "awesome." Me, I caught some old-school Felicity eps recently, and now I can't see him as anything other than the wanna-be ladies man who lived in the dorm. He's come a long way in 8 years.

Where exactly does Bonnie and Clyde rank in the American pantheon? It's a bona-fide classic, to be sure. It placed on the American Film Institute's Top 100 in 1998 and again in 2007. It's also on the IMDB's Top 250 list. Upon closer inspection, however, it's far more than a perfect, polished gemstone. Rather, it's a bundle of contradictions. Everyone knows that it was a groundbreaking film of its day, the first to incorporate a new kind of violence and moral complexity into the mainstream. But screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman borrowed these elements directly from French New Wave films like Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1959) and Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player (1960). In fact, Truffaut was the first director approached for the project. Despite this, Bonnie and Clyde somehow transcends time. More than just a moldy relic of the 1960s, it has aged much better and is far more watchable today than, say, Easy Rider (1969) or even The Graduate (1967).

I bought my first copy of Chinatown on DVD when it was released in November 1999. The extras were limited to a theatrical trailer and a collection of short interviews with director Roman Polanski, writer Robert Towne and producer Robert Evans. The movie is so good that I didn't care about the lack of extras; DVD was still in its infancy and I was just glad to have it. Fast forward eight years and a new "Special Collection's Edition" is announced -- with no mention of a remastered transfer and only a few extras, which didn't sound so special to me.

The new version was released this week and the final edition sounds like a definite mixed bag. DVD Beaver reports that the video "looks cleaner, brighter, sharper, and more detailed than previous DVD releases. Colors are quite lush, and there is a lit bit more of the image on the sides depending on the shots."

As to the extras, however, Adnan Tezer at Monsters and Critics comments: "What is particularly disturbing about this new edition is that it seems like it was thrown together with little to no care." For example, the back of the DVD case says there are four new featurettes included, while the disk includes only three, two of which have different titles. On the positive side, the features total about 55 minutes and include new interviews with Polanski, Towne, and Jack Nicholson, while the interviews with Evans are from the 1999 sessions.

I'm very glad that the video has been improved, but I'm disappointed that more care was not taken to make this a true "Special Collector's Edition." More far-ranging interviews, including Faye Dunaway, would have been welcome, as well as archival materials and other extras that would delight collectors. The list price of $14.99 is modest, but I would have gladly paid more for a more comprehensive two-disk edition. Maybe that will have to wait until a new Chinatown is made?