Go, Go Second Time Virgin (1969)

In the 1970's loosening censorship standards brought erotic imagery flooding onto cinema screens around the world.  Throughout North America, Europe and Asia, frank depictions of sex and nudity became normalized as part of the cinematic grammar.  Although the genie could never be put back into the bottle, the coming of widespread home video adoption in the 1980's meant that the prevalence of big-screen sexuality in the 1970's would never be matched in subsequent decades.  Yet even in the context of this global atmosphere of anything goes eroticism, the pinku eiga (or pink film) of Japan stands apart.  Nowhere else was softcore sex as readily embraced by both the mainstream and the avant-garde; nowhere else did one of the oldest studios of a national cinema devote itself entirely to the production of sexually explicit films.  The publication of Jasper Sharp's mammoth tome  Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, one of the most significant works of film history in recent years, is testament to the enduring popularity and critical interest in Japan's erotic cinema.  It would not be an overstatement, however, to say that this unique configuration of mainstream appeal and critical consideration would not have been possible without the daring early work of director Koji Wakamatsu throughout the 1960's. 

The Fortune Cookie (1966)

Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in their first screen pairing

Billy Wilder's 1966 comedy tries to tempt lightning into striking twice by redecorating The Apartment as a satire about the great American pastime: lawsuits.  As in that 1960 tragicomic masterpiece, Jack Lemmon plays a man whose general decency is all too easily swept under the rug when it gets in the way of the more powerful men in his life.  Although it can't play in the same league as Wilder's greatest films, it's nevertheless a nimble comedy that introduced one of cinema's great comedy duos by pitting Jack Lemmon against Walter Matthau for the first time.

Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1964 collaboration with novelist and screenwriter Kobe Abe has at its core a central premise so ubiquitous, so mythic, that one can only conclude that it must resonate with something primal in our understanding of the world.  A figure or figures leaves their home and familiar social surroundings, setting out for the countryside, the unexplored.  They may be driven by fear, occupation, or curiosity.  Along their way they find a beacon of the familiar in this territory, a semblance of what they've left behind and are drawn to it -- the home of another.  But rather than finding a recreation of the social order they recognize, the familiarity is a trap which now imposes terrifying new rules upon them -- rules that resist all attempts at reason or logic.  From Hansel and Gretel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this premise ignites our most terrible nightmares about the foundation upon which we build our lives.  Shifting sands, indeed.

The Naked Kiss (1964)

Constance Towers as Kelly - K E double-L Y.

The cinema is a mountain you never finish climbing.  My co-author and I both spend far too much time watching movies, buying DVD's, and reading about film history, and yet there still remain (will always remain) tremendous vistas yet to be admired, staggering cliff-faces yet unnoticed.  Odin willing, that will always be the case.  As a film fan I know of few pleasures as great as the discovery of a talent or genre that previously lurked just off your personal radar.

Take Aim at the Police Van (1960)

Some writers, like Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward in their Film Noir encyclopedia, have claimed that film noir is a "wholly American film style."  For many, film noir can only refer to the set of black and white American crime films produced during, and in the first decade and a half following,  WWII -- the films to which French critics first applied the label.   With all due respect to Silver and Ward, whose book demands a place on the shelves of any serious film fan, we don't cotton to that around here.  It's all fine, well and good for film historians in love with typologies to narrowly define and sub-divide genres all they want; I'm sure it makes a great parlor trick to impress the ladies.  But I don't see much use for that way of thinking.  As my grandfather probably never said, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's probably a duck, or at least an advanced robotic simulation of a duck."  So film fans interested in following the hunted men and dangerous women through shadowy urban mazes are bound to eventually find themselves in spaces far removed from post-war America.  The noir thread continues, of course, in subsequent American films like Blade Runner and Brick, but it also crosses the oceans to be woven into the tapestries of other national cinemas.  In England, for example, the filmmakers at Hammer Studios developed the skills in gloomy atmospherics that would make the studio's name synonymous with horror while working on assembly line noirs.  In France, Jean-Pierre Melville would meld the genre with a chilly existentialism that elevated it to high art.  And in Japan, there was Nikkatsu.