Marli Renfro Movies
- 1961
Every filmmaker has to start somewhere, and in 1961, years before making The Godfather, The Conversation, or Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola was a UCLA film student looking to get his foot in the door. He took footage from a short nudie film he'd made called The Peeper, added material from an unfinished Western set in a nudist colony, and threw in some sequences filmed by Jack Hill. The result was Tonight For Sure, a nudie-cutie comedy about a pair of hypocritical blue-noses who want to shut down a local burlesque house, even though they're secret smut enthusiasts. Many scenes are presented as dreams or flashbacks in order to give the disparate sequences a sense of continuity. The film features a score by Carmine Coppola, Francis' father, who also wrote music for many of his later films; the cast features Playboy model Virginia Gordon. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Don Kenney, Karl Schanzer, (more)
In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock was already famous as the screen's master of suspense (and perhaps the best-known film director in the world) when he released Psycho and forever changed the shape and tone of the screen thriller. From its first scene, in which an unmarried couple balances pleasure and guilt in a lunchtime liaison in a cheap hotel (hardly a common moment in a major studio film in 1960), Psycho announced that it was taking the audience to places it had never been before, and on that score what followed would hardly disappoint. Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is unhappy in her job at a Phoenix, Arizona real estate office and frustrated in her romance with hardware store manager Sam Loomis (John Gavin). One afternoon, Marion is given $40,000 in cash to be deposited in the bank. Minutes later, impulse has taken over and Marion takes off with the cash, hoping to leave Phoenix for good and start a new life with her purloined nest egg. 36 hours later, paranoia and exhaustion have started to set in, and Marion decides to stop for the night at the Bates Motel, where nervous but personable innkeeper Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) cheerfully mentions that she's the first guest in weeks, before he regales her with curious stories about his mother. There's hardly a film fan alive who doesn't know what happens next, but while the shower scene is justifiably the film's most famous sequence, there are dozens of memorable bits throughout this film. The first of a handful of sequels followed in 1983, while Gus Van Sant's controversial remake, starring Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche, appeared in 1998. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, (more)
