“The Birds” (1963)
“Master of Suspense” is well-known as a nickname for the great Alfred Hitchcock, but it can slightly undersell the diversity of his filmography. And perhaps the most remote outlier in the roll call of his most famous signature films (aside possibly from “Vertigo“) is “The Birds,” which suits the arthouse profile of Cannes by being Hitch’s most enigmatic film —in a subtle, well-disguised way, it’s about as avant garde as the classicist filmmaker ever got outside of dream sequences and flashbacks. Like Hitch’s hit “Rebecca,” it’s based on a Daphne Du Maurier story, concerning a burgeoning romance between Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren, whose arrival in a small coastal town coincides with its avian residents suddenly and inexplicably beginning to attack the human population. Unlike almost everything else in his canon, the mystery is never solved and the film ends on a very ambiguous note. At first blush, “The Birds” can feel unsatisfying — it’s technically marvellous in the brilliant bird-attack sequences but is frustrating and opaque on a narrative and characterization level. Yet as a direct result of its eerie unfathomability, it is also endlessly rewatchable and re-interpretable, and has grown in stature since release to become one of Htich’s most studied and most admired movies, as much for what it doesn’t do (explain, resolve etc), as for what it does.
What they said at the time: The 1963 review from The Times suggested that while it was hardly top-tier Hitch, “…when all this is said, second-grade Hitchcock is still about twice as exciting as first-grade anyone else.”
“Amarcord” (1974)
It would have been a shame if Frederico Fellini had never got the chance to open Cannes, but it’s truly satisfying that the festival picked “Amarcord,” one of the Italian master’s finest hours, to kick off the 1974 instalment of the festival. Made at the peak of his powers (and arguably his last truly great film, though he continued working for another fifteen years), it’s a grotesque comic ensemble tale that, as the title, which translates loosely as “I remember,” might suggest, is steeped in autobiography. The sprawling cast of characters pivots around Titta (Bruno Zanin), a character based specifically on a childhood friend of the director, but which serves as something of a surrogate for his own experiences of growing up in a small village in Mussolini-era Italy. Rich, novelistic and very, very funny, it’s a film about burgeoning sexuality, and yet a time of relative innocence in the country, when fascism was mostly a subject of fun and mockery, though Fellini makes it clear that darker days are ahead for the film’s colorful community. Episodic and almost dream like (there’s an unforgettable moment where a giant Mussolini head begins talking), “Amarcord” plays with tone and form in a way that serves as not just Fellini’s look back at his own adolescence, but also his career up to that point. He would never make anything quite as good again, but he almost seems aware of that here: this is his grand summing up statement, and as such a perfect pick to open a festival that had awarded him a Palme d’Or for “La Dolce Vita.”
What they said at the time: Winning the Foreign Language Oscar and nominations for writing and directing, “Amarcord” was among the director’s best reviewed pictures. Roger Ebert wrote that “moviemaking for [Fellini] seems almost effortless, like breathing… He’s the Willie Mays of movies.”
“The King of Comedy” (1983)
Martin Scorsese‘s brilliantly scathing satire of television, media and fame now stands as proof that people in olden tymes, like the early 1980s, were stupid: it was a huge flop on release. To be fair, it’s firmly established as a not-even-cult-anymore cult classic nowadays, and it’s not hard to see why. “The King of Comedy,” centering on Robert de Niro‘s indelibly oleaginous performances as ultimate antihero Rupert Pupkin, can be genuinely hard to watch —especially the first half, in which Pupkin’s desperate and ill-founded delusions have not yet sublimated into violence. But it’s part of Scorsese’s genius that by the time Pupkin springs into totally misguided, bumbling and very dangerous action, you find yourself rooting for this hideous creep. As awful as Pupkin undoubtedly is (and he is a pantheon all-time creep), he is a product of forces more malign, insidious and dangerous than he is for being glazed in a sheen of social success. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King, and in Scorsese’s dark vision of the morally repugnant rot beneath the inanity of late-night laugh-track chatter, Rupert Pupkin deserves to be our King of Comedy.
What they said at the time: Unlike the public, critics were on board though even positive reviews, like Ebert’s 3-star take in the Chicago Sun-Times sound like a warning-off : “[It is] not a fun movie. It is also not a bad movie. It is frustrating to watch, unpleasant to remember, and, in its own way, quite effective.”
“Dreams” (1990)
If there was ever a chance of Akira Kurosawa becoming neglected by cinephiles, the patronage of the younger filmmakers he’d inspired like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Scorsese prevented that: they talked him up, presented him with an honorary Oscar and teamed up to persuade Warner Bros. to back this curious, experimental collection of vignettes that proved, even at the age of 80, that the Japanese legend could come up with something awe-inspiring. Based, as the title indicates, on dreams that Kurosawa had, the eight segments follow Kurosawa’s various different surrogates through visually stunning, abstracted not-quite-stories, from a peach orchard full of living dolls, to a hellish Second-World-War landscape by way of a post-apocalyptic world full of demons, to a strange vignette featuring Scorsese himself as Vincent Van Gogh. The film frustrated many fans and critics at the time: a master of cinematic narrative was eschewing storytelling altogether for an abstract, self-consciously difficult and inarguably indulgent work. Yet the film’s aged beautifully in the last couple of decades, providing a still-dazzling selection of imagery (though the blue-screen in the Van Gogh sequence is lacking) that doesn’t just look pretty, but provides rare insight into the mind of one of the greatest, most complicated filmmakers the medium’s ever produced. In light of the film’s fantasy elements, you wouldn’t quite call it autobiography, but as a portrait-of-the-artist-as-an-unconscious-man, it’s something unique, remarkable and a worthy film to have opened Cannes.
What they said at the time: Critics were sharply divided: Rolling Stone said the film “will knock your eyes out without ignoring the mind and heart,” but Jonathan Rosenbaum criticized the film’s “sentimentality and preachiness.”
