Movietone News

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“The best publication on film in the English language” – Molly Haskell

Not to be confused with the famous Twentieth Century Fox newsreel series of the same name, Movietone News began as a newsletter from The Seattle Film Society in 1971 and soon turned into a vibrant little film magazine that published out of Seattle, under the editorial guidance of Richard T. Jameson, through 1981.

Parallax View is undertaking a project to make every issue of this magazine available to readers in .pdf form, with entire issue reproduced page by page (Adobe Reader, a free program, is needed to read the files). Also, select articles will be republished on the Parallax View website (with the consent of the respective authors). These are identified with a link to the republished piece. This project will take years to complete at the rate of about one issue a month.
The title “Movietone News” is the property of Twentieth Century Fox Movietonews Inc. and is used by permission.
Note that some of the .pdf files of the complete issues are very large and may take some time to load.

Editor Richard T. Jameson on the “Quickies”:

It just growed.

Ye Olde Quickie—as a headline in Movietone News 6 had it—is a form that evolved with little conscious thought on anyone’s part, yet it became the mainstay of the magazine. There were scarcely any reviews in the first several, 16-page issues of the “Newsletter of the Seattle Film Society,” whose main mission was to announce the neophyte organization’s programming. Then the SFS season came to an end and summer 1971 was upon us. It seemed appropriate in MTN 5 to turn the membership loose with a helpful guide to films currently in theaters. In spirit, the Quickies date from that offering, though those “Summer Stock” entries were much shorter than any that followed, and the term quickie didn’t come into play for another issue yet.

We took a cue from the UCal–Berkeley publication Film Quarterly, which, along with feature articles and article-length reviews, ran “Short Notices”—movie reviews several hundred words long and treated as integral textblocks, no paragraphing. Such a format somehow licensed a stream-of-(critical-)consciousness approach to addressing a movie: making whatever points seemed pertinent while also accommodating digressions, the dragging-in of other film references, internal footnotes, and expressions of personal ecstasy or peevishness. You could shorthand or belabor, as the mood struck and the material warranted. For the writer, it was like seeing how long you could hold your breath. Eventually, quickies running a few hundred words and occupying a column-and-a-half of 8-point type on a three-column page gave way to quickies running as much as a page-and-a-half. At that length, the editor might declare the specimen a mule—a hybrid neither quickie nor feature article—shift to a two-column format, and start making paragraph breaks. Still, there persisted an air of freedom—to run on, to dart sideways, to throw a wide loop without submitting to the discipline (restriction?) of a formal essay. But it needed to be done well. The very name quickie implied something tossed off yet also consummated.

Now, the printed page and the Web page are different creatures—especially the odd, 8 1/2–by–14–inch sheet folded in half that made up MTN’s pages—so the custodians at Parallax View have broken up some of the longer quickies into (sigh) paragraphs. You can still experience the uninterrupted gestalt via the PDF repros of the original pages. The repros also will give you the unapologetic ur-text, though for the Web versions we’ve sometimes tweaked punctuation, corrected typos, and made other minor adjustments to enhance the reading experience. Authors also have the license to tinker with their writing as it reenters the film conversation, but we encourage that this be done by footnote or afterword rather than wholesale revision of the text.

Quickies. They’re baaa-aaack! Hope you enjoy.

Movietone News Double Issue No. 62-63: December 29, 1979

“It doesn’t take any imagination at all to feel awed” (published on Parallax View here)
Peter Weir interviewed
By Judith M. Kass

“Everything happens at its appointed time” (published on Parallax View here)
An appreciation of Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock
By Pierre Greenfield

Rejoicing in things Australian (published on Parallax View here)
Phillip Noyce, director of Newsfront, interviewed
By Judith M. Kass

Rossellini’s Strombol and Ingrid Bergman’s Face
The watcher’s itinerary through the landscape of the soul
By Dana Benelli

Telluride ‘79
A singular film festival in Colorado: notes and photographs
By William M. Wehrbein

Quickies
Comes a Horseman, The Electric Horseman, Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, Cuba, The Europeans, Martin, Dawn of the Dead, Watership Down, The 39 Steps, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Death on the Nile, The Medusa Touch, Prophecy, The Seduction of Joe Tynan, The Muppet Movie, The Illustrated Man, Diary of Forbidden Dreams, The Great Train Robbery, Quintet, The Deer Hunter, The In-laws, Sammie’s Bicycle, North Dallas Forty, The Dark, The Corn Is Green, No Time for Breakfast, Moonraker, The China Syndrome, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Firepower, Hardcore, Bloodline
(reviews by Leslie Clark, Robert C. Cumbow, Pierre Greenfield, Richard T. Jameson and Ken Eisler)

A pdf of the original issue can be found here:
Movietone News Double Issue No. 62-63 (.pdf)

Movietone News Double Issue No. 64-65: March 13, 1980

Bertolucci’s Luna: The Surrealist’s Strategem (published on Parallax View here)
A fresh approach to a much-maligned film
By Peter Hogue and Marion Bronson

Dossier ‘79
A survey of the best film year since 1974 – at least
By Richard T. Jameson
plus Ten Best Lists by other MTN Contributing Writers

Moments out of Time
Looks, lines, gestures, stances, moods – the mise-en-scene of eternity for one film season

“Like Dracula”: David Thompson
An appreciation of a neglected critic
By Robert Horton

Limeys in Lotusland (published on Parallax View here)
A whirlwind having been reaped long ago, a reappraisal of The Loved One
By Pierre Greenfield

Quickies:
The Wanderers, 10, The Private Files of Edgar Hoover, Quadrophenia, American Gigolo, Yanks (1), Yanks (2), Hollywood’s Wild Angel, Star Trek, The Onion Field, The Black Marble, Alien, The Runner Stumbles, Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, Time after Time (1), Time after Time (2), Cuba, Skidoo, When Time Ran Out, The Silent Witness, The Life of Brian, The Rose, Windows
(reviews by Robert Cumbow, Pierre Greenfield, Peter Hogue, Robert Horton, Tom Keogh and Richard T. Jameson)

A pdf of the original issue can be found here:
Movietone News Double Issue 64-65 (.pdf)

Movietone News Double Issue No. 66-67: March 13, 1981

“And then I just go ahead and write that dialogue.” (published on Parallax View here)
John Sayles, writer-director of The Return of the Secaucus 7, talks a lot of sense about movie-writing, moviemaking and movies in general

Going Inside with Alain Tanner
Appraising Cinema Dead or Alive, a film about the making of Tanner’s Jonah
By Michael Tarantino

“I don’t like those hard goodbyes” (published on Parallax view here)
A conversation with an irreplaceable man, Strother Martin

Quickies
L’Amour viole, Best Boy, One and One, Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Dites-lui que je l’aime, ffolkes, The Sea Wolves, Bronco Billy (1), Bronco Billy (2), The Island, Ordinary People, Can’t Stop the Music, The Black Stallion, The Blue Lagoon, The Shining, Making The Shining, The Hunter, Tom Horn, Violette et Francois, The Big Red One, Used Cars, McVicar, Carny, Honeysuckle Rose, Fame, Coal Miner’s Daughter (1), Coal Miner’s Daughter (2), My Bodyguard, The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami, Zulu Dawn, The Changeling, Rough Cut, The Great Santini
(reviews by Robert Cumbow, Pierre Greenfield, Peter Hogue, Robert Horton, Richard T. Jameson and Douglas McVay)