“Our Man In Havana (1958) is a novel set in Cuba by the British author Graham Greene. He makes fun of intelligence services, especially the British MI6, and their willingness to believe reports from their local informants. The book predates the Cuban Missile Crisis, but certain aspects of the plot, notably the role of missile installations, appear to anticipate the events of 1962. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1959, directed by Carol Reed and starring Alec Guinness. In 1963 it was adapted into an opera by Malcolm Williamson, to a libretto by Sidney Gilliat, who had worked on the film. In 2007, it was adapted into a play by Clive Francis, which has since toured the UK several times and been performed in various parts of the world. Greene joined MI6 in August 1941. In London…

Two films starring Pina Menichelli were screened at the 2018 Il Cinema Ritrovato where we enjoyed this programme which included films and extracts also featuring Francesca Bertini and Lyda Borelli.

Pina Menichelli was born in Sicily into a theatrical family and started out in a stage career. She started in films in 1913 at the Roman studio of Società Italiana Cines. She achieved stardom in 1915 with the director Giovanni Pastrone in The Fire (1915, Il fuoco) for Itala. She became a popular actor both at home and abroad and her persona came embody the idea of the femme fatale. In 1919 she moved to Rinascimento Films and remained popular, despite the decline in the diva genre, until her retirement in 1924.

As is the case with other Italian films and other diva films, many are lost. We enjoyed two, an incomplete one-reel film and an incomplete feature, originally…

I was among those who felt some affection for the Grateful Dead’s 1967 debut album, but perhaps that’s because I hadn’t seen them live by the time of its release. Most people who had—including the group themselves—said that the record paled in comparison. It barely made a dent in the charts and garnered weak reviews.

The gap between the Dead’s live shows and their studio work bothered the band, but the lack of commercial success apparently didn’t. Instead of looking for a hit in the wake of their disappointing debut, they focused on capturing the improvisational nature of their concerts and on innovating. They spent so long on these pursuits—half a year—that Joe Smith, the Warner Bros. A&R man who’d signed the band, wrote to them to insist that they promptly wrap up and send over the masters. The Dead responded by underlining the passages they most disliked in…

“Provo was a Dutchcounterculturemovement in the mid-1960s that focused on provoking violent responses from authorities using non-violent bait. It was preceded by the nozem movement and followed by the hippie movement. Provo was founded, on 25 May 1965, by Robert Jasper Grootveld, an anti-smoking activist, and the anarchistsRoel van Duijn and Rob Stolk. The term was used for the movement as a whole and for individual members. Provo was officially disbanded on 13 May 1967. The Provos are thought to have evolved out of the artist Robert Jasper Grootveld‘s anti-smoking happenings in June 1964. The following year other groups appeared as a fusion of small groups of youths sympathetic with the pacifist ban-the-bomb movement. Roel van Duijn is thought to have been the group’s theorist, influenced by anarchism, Dadaism, Herbert Marcuse and the Marquis de Sade. The Provos borrowed their name…

“The Baader Meinhof Complex (German: Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) is a 2008 German film by Uli Edel in his first non-TV directorial project since 2000’s The Little Vampire. Written and produced by Bernd Eichinger, it stars Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck, and Johanna Wokalek. The film is based on the 1985 German best selling non-fiction book of the same name by Stefan Aust. It retells the story of the early years of the West Germanfar-left militant group the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction, or Red Army Faction, a.k.a. RAF) from 1967 to 1977. … On 2 June 1967, the Shah of Iran visits West Berlin and attends a performance at the Deutsche Oper. Angered at his policies in governing Iran, members of the German student movement protest his appearance. The West Berlin police and the Shah’s security team…

“‘Rock & roll is electronic music – because if you pull the plug, it stops.’ So says Louis ‘Cork’ Marcheschi of Fifty Foot Hose, whose sole album, Cauldron – a pioneering collision of abstract electronics and psychedelic rock originally released in 1967 – was reissued for the first time on vinyl at the end of 2017. Marcheschi’s remark is a reissue too, in a way. He originally made that assertion early in ’67 when he and guitarist David Blossom were drunkenly hatching the idea for Fifty Foot Hose, as a rock group that ‘really incorporated the concepts of electronic music not as sound effects but as a substantive part of the music.’ Fifty Foot Hose weren’t the only ’60s rockers who’d had this lightbulb moment. Although these bands were largely unaware of each other’s existence at the time, you could group Fifty Foot Hose among a confederacy of acid-era bands…

“Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American epicwar film directed, produced, and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola. It was co-written by John Milius with narration written by Michael Herr. It stars Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, and Dennis Hopper. The screenplay, written by Milius, adapts the story of Joseph Conrad‘s novella Heart of Darkness, changing its setting from late nineteenth-century Congo to the Vietnam War. It draws from Herr’s Dispatches and Werner Herzog‘s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). The film revolves around Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Sheen), who is on a secret mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz, a renegade Army officer who is presumed insane. The film has been noted for the problems encountered while making it, chronicled in the documentary Hearts of Darkness:…