Even filmgoers who have never seen the 1942 Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman Oscar winner have heard its famous lines quoted in countless spoofs, memes, and homages, both on and off the screen. So the next time you hear “Round up the usual suspects,” or “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” or the infinite variations on “I’m shocked, shocked, to find out that [fill in the blank] is going on here!” you must remember this: They all came from Casablanca.

Casablanca: The Road to Morocco

When it came to production and release timing, Warner Bros. struck gold—and not just Oscar’s gold enamel. Co-written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, their 1940 play (Everybody Comes to Rick’s) was snapped up by the studio immediately after the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked for—and was granted—a declaration of war against Japan and, within days, its European “Axis” allies Germany and Italy.

Before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. was ostensibly neutral regarding the war already raging in Europe. But with America’s decisive entrance into both the European and Pacific fronts, Warner Bros. launched into action, armed with a 43-year-old supporting actor who had made his name playing heavies in the studio’s bread-and-butter 1930s gangster films. Humphrey Bogart would not only star in Casablanca, but his command performance would win him a first-class new contract, making him Hollywood’s highest-paid actor.

Warners not only played the conquering hero at the 1942-43 Academy Awards (three Oscars including Best Picture), it went home a winner at the box-office, too. In production during the summer of 1942, the film’s late November New York City premiere astoundingly landed almost exactly when U.S. forces (under Gen. George S. Patton) marched into Casablanca following a cease-fire agreed to by the outmanned French “Vichy” army. With Germany’s blitzkrieg defeat of France in 1940, Paris and half the country fell under direct Nazi control, while French officials willing to collaborate with the Nazi occupation ruled the other half. The latter included France’s colonies in North Africa, including Morocco. Several hundred Vichy officials were executed as traitors following the war.

“The Same Old Story, a Fight for Love and Glory”

Of course, while the film contains realistic “big picture” elements reflecting the glum wartime context, it is nevertheless popular entertainment, however compelling it was for 1943 audiences, as well as modern ones. A platoon of screenwriters adapted and honed the play, chief among them the Epstein brothers, Julius and Philip, as well as the more politically minded Howard Koch. This type of “assembly line” scripting (with multiple writers working on different drafts in succession) was standard for classic Hollywood and especially in this case since the writers were reworking the script nearly every day of the production. It is a lesser-known trivia fact that the constant re-writes were such that co-star Ingrid Bergman was never sure which man she would romantically end up with until the finale was actually shot.

Against the war’s backdrop, Casablanca’s plot pitches a three-sided romantic battlefield. In one corner is Bogart’s Rick Blaine, a disillusioned American ex-pat who’s fled to the port city to open a swanky bar and night club. In the first years of Hollywood stardom after leaving her native Sweden, Bergman plays Ilsa, Rick’s old flame who arrives in Casablanca with her husband Victor (Paul Henreid), a dedicated Resistance leader on the run from the Nazis. Now cue Rick’s world-weary complaint about how, “of all the gin joints in the world,” one night Ilsa elegantly strolls into his. On the outside wryly looking in is Captain Renault (Claude Rains), the lecherous, easily corrupted Vichy prefect with an eye for young ladies in need. As for the Nazi villain of the piece, Conrad Veidt’s Major Strasser flies in to serve with meritorious menacing distinction.

Under the glossy black-and-white front of romance and intrigue, from almost the first shot the writers and director Michael Curtiz front-load the story with ammunition to keep audiences at attention. The action starts when a smuggler comes into Rick’s Café bearing two stolen “letters of transit” that will allow their owners safe passage out of Casablanca, on to Lisbon, and then hopefully to freedom in the United States or England. Ever the cool, chess-playing man’s man, Rick stashes the letters in the barroom’s upright piano. Now “captive” audience members have at least two key questions to keep them guessing: Who will eventually obtain these precious exit visas and fly from Casablanca? Will it be Victor and Ilsa, Rick and Ilsa, or some other lucky couple?

Vive la France

Except for the celebrated final departure scene (shot at Los Angeles’ Van Nuys Airport), the entire production took place on soundstages at the sprawling Warner Bros. lot in nearby Burbank. But for its legion of world-wide fans, Casablanca’s most memorable moment comes with the singing of the French “La Marseillaise” one evening at Rick’s. The stage is set once a group of German officers boisterously break into “Die Wacht am Rhein” (“Watch on the Rhine”), a patriotic, anti-French drinking song.

In unarmed yet vocal resistance, one by one the European émigrés and exiles respond by standing to sing the French national anthem, quickly drowning out the outnumbered, humbled Germans. It’s a beautiful, transcendent screen epiphany, one of Hollywood’s greatest, and a testament to the power of cinema to move and inspire with rich communal sentiment. Careful observers will also note that this resounding Francophile retort is silently sanctioned by Rick, who strikes up the band to play along with a subtle nod.

The scene is pivotal on several beats, most especially in how it sets off a diametrical shift in Rick’s own allegiances vis-à-vis the war. The film’s topical brilliance resides in how Rick is, in fact, an allegorical stand-in for America itself on the eve of World War II. Many times he asserts his “neutrality” and cynical and selfish sense of survival. “I stick my neck out for nobody” and “I’m the only cause I’m interested in,” he declares. As for his nationality, he sardonically says he is a “drunkard.”

Underneath his stoic isolation and indifference lies, alas, a broken heart, torn asunder by Ilsa when they had been lovers in Paris the year before. Thus, a revealing flashback fades in while Rick drinks himself into a stupor and his right-hand and piano man Sam (Dooley Wilson) plays the indelible theme song “As Times Goes By” (with its ever-quoted lyric “You must remember this”). Songs are of utmost importance in the drama, sparking personal memories (good and bad) as well as nationalist nostalgia and longing. As a side note, while some modern audiences may belittle the secondary role of Sam as a Black American “sidekick,” his close, unguarded friendship with Rick is historically unusual and progressive.

Digging deeper, it is also fascinating to consider the symbolic complexities echoing through Rick’s Café Americain itself. It is hardly just a “gin joint” where its ragtag ethnic émigrés find refuge; it is a microcosm that, in concentric circles, can be seen as the Warner Bros. studio, Hollywood itself, and finally the United States in toto. By the mid-1930s, scores of European artistic talents (especially Jewish ones) had fled their native countries with the spread of Nazism and relocated to the States. Naturally, many of those in the cinema gathered in the Los Angeles area for a chance to work in Hollywood.

Marquee directors such as Germany’s Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder were part of that wave, along with the iconoclastic Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. You will find other émigré names among the stranded denizens at Rick’s, including Peter Lorre, the star of Lang’s great 1931 crime thriller M. In 1942-43, during Casablanca’s theatrical run, America’s global image as a beacon of freedom, equality, and hope for the world was likely never brighter, most especially for would-be immigrants. Like Rick, many social observers today can only look back to that time with an aching hangover of nostalgia.

“Here’s Looking at You, Kid”

Since Rick is the clear protagonist, how and why does he migrate from cynical, on-the-fence loner to partisan joiner and combatant, ala the U.S. in World War II? The key is locked in that Paris flashback, together with a “sequel” of sorts that unfolds in Rick’s apartment above the bar. In Paris, Ilsa had suddenly deserted Rick just as the German troops were marching in, leaving only an enigmatic farewell note behind. After her arrival in Casablanca, provoking Rick’s anger and resentment, she shows up unannounced one night to demand that he hand over the letters of transit so that she and Victor can escape. His leadership fighting the Nazis must continue, she tells Rick, and he must get to Lisbon before he is arrested.

Yet as the night wears into the wee hours and she breaks down, it dawns (almost literally) on Rick why she left him. With that he not only understands her reasoning, but also that her shocking “Dear John” letter didn’t mean she didn’t love him. Far from it. From there, 1943 adult audiences might suspect what happens next, even if it is unsaid and censoriously left in the dark.  Once their heart-to-heart talk is over and they embrace, there is a passage of time suggested by a “dissolve” (one shot superimposed into the next). In the next shot, a relaxed Ilsa appears on Rick’s couch while he smokes a cigarette, old Hollywood’s wispy, time-honored signal of post-smoldering passion.

Building to that iconic last scene at the airport, Rick bluffs and puffs as long as possible before he lays all his cards on the table, holding both Strasser and Renault at bay until his final declaration of where he stands. But will it be a declaration of love or a declaration of war? Or will he hold his fire? You must remember this: The famous last words of Casablanca are, after all, “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Despite her relatively short acting career, Grace Kelly is one of the most famous names from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Helped along by legendary directors and talented designers, she captured the attention of her audience with radiance and class.

Her story turned into a real-life fairy tale when she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956. Though the marriage put an end to her film career, Grace continued to work hard, dedicating her time to charitable causes and helping those in need.

Grace Kelly’s Upbringing

Grace Kelly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 12, 1929.

Grace came from a wealthy family. Her father, Jack Kelly, had made his millions with a successful construction company. Even more impressively, he won gold medals at the 1920 and 1924 Olympic Games. Grace’s mother also came from a sporting background, having worked as a physical education teacher.

Grace was the third of four children and was raised in a Catholic household. She was a shy and fragile child, prone to sinus infections and colds. Unlike her parents, Grace didn’t have a great enthusiasm for sports, preferring to play with dolls. There was, however, a theatrical streak in the family: Uncle Walter was a vaudevillian, and Uncle George was a playwright.

In 1944, Grace’s time at Ravenhill Academy (a Catholic School for girls) came to an end, and she started at Stevens School. Here, she performed in school plays, including Peter Pan and The Taming of the Shrew. After graduating in the summer of 1947, Grace tried to get into Bennington College to study dance but failed the entrance exam. Instead, she went to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.

Grace graduated a few years later and obtained a Broadway role in August Strindberg’s The Father alongside Raymond Massey. She also appeared in television plays and worked as a model by advertising products and appearing on magazine covers.

Hollywood Star

Grace’s first Hollywood role was in a movie called Fourteen Hours (1951). During the production, veteran actor Gary Cooper spotted the young actress while visiting the set, and the following year, Grace starred alongside Cooper in High Noon (1952).

The success of High Noon—the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four of them—gave Grace’s career a big boost. Film studios offered the twenty-two-year-old actress long-term contracts, yet she was hesitant to accept, for her initial goal was to establish herself as a theater actress. However, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Hollywood’s largest film studio, offered her a contract, Grace couldn’t refuse.

Her first film with MGM was Mogambo (1953), which was filmed on location in Africa. The primary location was in Uganda, and the base camp included a police force tasked with defending the cast and crew due to the ongoing Mau Mau Rebellion in the neighboring country of Kenya. There were other problems too, with hot conditions and unpredictable lighting causing issues. Despite all this, the film was a box-office success, and Grace received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Grace’s next two films were both directed by the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. During the making of Dial M for Murder (1954), Hitchcock wanted Grace to wear an elaborate velvet robe in the scene where her character picks up the phone and is attacked from behind. But Grace pushed back against the idea, arguing it was unrealistic to wear this item just to answer the phone. Instead, she wore a simple nightgown, adding to the vulnerability and realism of her character.

In Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Grace played the romantic interest of James Stewart’s character, who is confined to his apartment with a broken leg. Designer Edith Head grew friendly with Grace during the film’s production and helped bring her character to life with a range of outfits, including glamorous evening dresses and a sleek nightgown.

Further Success and a Royal Engagement

Head joined Grace in her next two films: The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954) and The Country Girl (1954), with the latter earning Grace an Academy Award for Best Actress. Given her fellow nominees included Judy Garland and Audrey Hepburn, this was a highly commendable victory for the young actress.

Grace also worked closely with a designer named Helen Rose. Having worked together previously in the aforementioned Mogambo, they reunited for Green Fire (1954). Though Grace looked as fashionable as ever, the film itself was the low point of the actress’s career, with many considering it the only bad film she ever made.

Thankfully, she returned to form with another Hitchcock picture: To Catch a Thief (1955), in which Grace played the daughter of a wealthy American oil tycoon. Head outdid herself once again, designing several stunning dresses for the film.

Rose returned for The Swan (1956), in which Grace played a young Ruritanian princess who is courted by a crown prince and a handsome tutor, and High Society (1956), in which Grace played an aristocratic woman about to remarry. Having announced her engagement to Prince Rainier III of Monaco at the start of the year, the filming of the latter took place amid a storm of publicity.

Princess Grace

The wedding took place on April 19, 1956, just one day after the release of The Swan.

With hundreds of guests in attendance, MGM capitalized on the event by filming the ceremony, which was watched by over thirty million people worldwide. They also provided Grace with a professional makeup and wardrobe team, with Rose returning to assist once again.

After the ceremony at Saint Nicholas Cathedral, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace drove to the church of Sainte Devote, where Grace placed a bouquet of lilies as an offering to the patron saint of Monaco. The prince and princess returned to the palace and joined the guests for an elegant buffet, including a five-tier cake.

After a honeymoon aboard the royal yacht Deo Juvante II, Grace had to adjust to her new life. This involved learning a new language, adapting to royal protocol, and ignoring bouts of homesickness. Her first pregnancy made the pressure of her new life even more complicated.

Princess Caroline Louise Marguerite was born on January 23, 1957. Just five months later, Grace became pregnant again, and Prince Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre was born on March 14, 1958.

With her new family underway, Grace used her position to undertake charity and social work. In December, she recorded a Christmas radio appeal for the United Nations to help refugees in Europe. In 1963, Grace founded the Association Mondiale des Amis de l’Enfance (World Association of Children’s Friends), better known as AMADE. The organization’s purpose was to protect children from exploitation and abuse worldwide.

As well as being the President of the Monaco Red Cross, Grace founded the Princess Grace of Monaco Foundation in 1964. The foundation promoted local artisans and gave scholarships to gifted artistic children. The princess helped to modernize Monaco’s hospital, enlarge the home for the elderly, and grow the Garden Club into an international festival.

The Death of a Princess

After several tragic miscarriages, Grace delivered her third and final child, Princess Stephanie Marie Elisabeth, on February 1, 1965. As the children matured, the princess returned to the world of performing arts by joining the board of Twentieth Century Fox in 1976. She also narrated a ballet documentary by Robert Dornhelm called The Children of Theatre Street (1977).

Poetry was another outlet for Grace’s creativity. To help celebrate International Wildlife Year, she toured several American cities and delivered poetry readings. She also gave a poetry performance at the London Poetry Presentation in March 1981. Here, she met with Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

Hoping to promote Monaco’s annual flower festival, Grace played herself in a short film titled Rearranged (1982). The plot involved a scientist who the princess mistakenly believes is a champion flower arranger. The film had a small premiere in Monaco and was well-received. Following a pitch to ABC-TV in America, Grace agreed to extend the film by approximately fifteen minutes to fit it into an hour-long time slot.

However, before the extra footage could be shot, Grace was involved in a fatal accident on September 13, 1982. The princess was driving into Monaco from the family home in Roc Agel when she suffered a stroke, causing her vehicle to fall down a hill and roll several times.

Grace and her daughter Stephanie, who was also in the car at the time, were taken to hospital. While her daughter managed to recover from the accident, Grace’s injuries were too severe, and she died the following evening.

Flowers sent from many different countries covered the palace grounds. Almost a hundred million people watched the princess’s funeral on television, which was attended by royals and dignitaries from around the world.

Grace Kelly’s Legacy

Many stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood had extensive careers. Grace Kelly, on the other hand, only appeared in eleven feature films, yet she still managed to cement herself as a movie legend.

While certain actresses—like Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot—were known for their striking sensuality, Grace’s appeal was subtler yet arguably more remarkable. She was capable of lighting up the screen without compromising her elegance or propriety. The work of designers like Helen Rose and Edith Head was also key to the actress’s success, helping to turn her into a fashion icon.

Grace’s long-lasting popularity doesn’t just come from her films, though. The charity work she carried out as Princess of Monaco elevated her status still further. She recognized her privilege and did her utmost to help those less fortunate.

Science fiction. It’s one of the most popular movie and TV genres today—and one of the oldest. Even if the real “science” in a typical science-fiction film is rarer than Superman’s Kryptonite (or Black Panther’s Vibranium), it’s nevertheless no fiction to say that “sci-fi” is a universal audience favorite, especially among younger space cadets. Here are ten works of sci-fi cinema that you need to know.

Sci-Fi Cinema: Things to Know About the Film Genre

Of course, genre denotes a group of films that together have familiar settings, plots, and characters. The musical, romantic comedy, or gangster film, for instance. In sci-fi, those ingredients over the decades have shot to infinity and beyond: e.g., space travel, killer computers, and benign alien intelligence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or time travel, killer robots, and evil artificial intelligence in The Terminator. Science fiction has been speculating wildly and wowing spectators with spectacle ever since the trailblazing French director Georges Méliès rocketed to success with his global hit A Trip to the Moon in 1902. While screen science fiction often morphs and mutates into its sister genre horror (and vice versa), it hardly takes an Einstein or Oppenheimer to calculate ten of the genre’s classic—pre-Star Wars—favorites. Here’s a countdown!

10.  A Trip to the Moon (1902)

During an era of fantastic scientific and technological innovations—including the airplane and the automobile—Méliès hitched a ride from both authors Jules Verne and H.G. Wells to make likely his most important film, a “one-reel” (about 15 minutes) whimsical silent short that practically invented the genre for the screen. Released in both black-and-white and hand-tinted color, it tells the tongue-in-cheek story of a group of scientists who set out to first build a projectile spaceship, then climb aboard and shoot for the moon. Méliès was a true pioneer in exploiting the unique wizardry of cinematic special effects, especially “stop-action” that allowed him to make objects or people magically appear and disappear. Still popular in silent programs today (it was also featured in a 2015 music video by Cage the Elephant), A Trip to the Moon packs in such space oddities as Folies-Bergere acrobats cast as somersaulting moon creatures.

9. Metropolis (1927)

Utilizing the vast resources of Germany’s UFA studios and working from a script from his then-wife Thea von Harbou, director Fritz Lang created one of the towering sci-fi landmarks, however naïve if not preposterous in plot. In the not-too-distant future, masses of workers slave away in underground urban factories while the idle rich live and play high above in luxury skyscrapers. The city itself is controlled by a dictatorial business tycoon who’s likely some merger of Henry Ford and John Rockefeller.

While his diabolical plan is to have his wizardly inventor Rotwang build a female robot that will infiltrate and sabotage a worker uprising, Metropolis’ most electrically compelling story is visual, not narrative. From the oppressive subterranean factory with a huge clock-like machine at its center to the amazing creation of the sultry fem-bot (Brigette Helm) in Rotwang’s modern medievalist laboratory, Lang’s remarkably influential cinematic visions recur in future films from the original Frankenstein to Blade Runner.

8. The Thing from Another World (1951)

Remade by director John Carpenter in 1982 as a gory, outré creep show starring Kurt Russell, the original low-budget classic was one of the first to turn the prospect of an alien arrival on Earth into a close encounter of the monstrous kind. Feeding off well-publicized UFO sightings (and the US-Soviet Union Cold War) that reached near-hysterical levels in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, The Thing pits a hulking, blood-sucking humanoid vegetable against an Air Force flight crew and a cadre of sneaky scientists isolated on a remote base in the frigid Arctic Circle. Well-known Hollywood director Howard Hawks was originally tapped only to produce, but his tell-tale “auteur” fingerprints are all over the final product, from the snappy overlapping dialogue to the lone plucky dame who breaks into the ranks of the all-male circle of trust.

7. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

“Klaatu barada nikto.” Such were the words that launched a thousand Hollywood spaceships in director Robert Wise’s liberal-minded sci-fi rarity that gave audiences an eloquent, intelligent, handsome, and even Christ-like alien “invader” instead of a monstrously malevolent one. Freshly transported from the London stage, Michael Rennie stars as an emissary spaceman dispatched to warn Earthlings that they better cool it with nuclear warfare or risk annihilation by their intergalactic betters.

Rising star Patricia Neal plays a single mom who, together with her precocious son, believes that Rennie’s Klaatu should be listened to and not arrested as a dangerous extraterrestrial peacenik. The Day is not only enriched by the luscious night-time noir cinematography (when the giant robot Gort stalks Neal) but also by the great composer Bernard Herrmann’s creepy and otherworldly electronic Thermin score, which influenced the genre for years to come.

6. Godzilla (1954)

Titled Gojira in its native country, Japan’s super-sized entry in the global sci-fi sweepstakes stirs in a drop or two of real science since the colossal sea creature that surfaces to trash Tokyo is spawned from US nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean. Though charmingly campy in its seriousness and rubber-suited actor(s) stomping a miniature Tokyo, the original Toho studio version (without Raymond Burr cut-and-pasted in for Western audiences) radiates a palpable level of Japanese anguish and dread only a few years removed from the cataclysms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Partially cloned by director Ishirō Honda from Hollywood’s 1953 The Beast from 20000 Fathoms, Gojira is no doubt the mother of all Japanese monster movies, as well as several monstrously overproduced US knock-offs, like 2019’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

5. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

“You’re next!” If the number of remakes (three and counting) attests to a movie’s staying power, director Don Siegel’s noir-colored alien-invasion allegory grabs at sci-fi greatness. Made at the height of anti-communist Cold War paranoia, it’s a cautionary tale of how residents of an idyllic California town are replaced one-by-one by their cold, unfeeling lookalike doppelgangers—all hatched and grown from alien plant pods. Kevin McCarthy memorably stars as a local doctor who’s called in to investigate the cases of family members who start acting distant and strange. Hamlet’s “sleep … there’s the rub” doubly applies here since after a good night’s rest, you might awake as a totally different person, one of an army of robotic aliens determined to replace the human race.

4. Forbidden Planet (1956)

The M-G-M studio’s lavish color excursion into the 1950s sci-fi universe shot for higher ground, starting with a pop plot loosely beamed up from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A pre-Airplane, proto-Captain Kirk Leslie Nielsen stars as the intrepid skipper of an Earth-based space crew that lands on the Edenic planet Altair-4 to evacuate its only remaining colonizing humans—an arrogant, uber-brainy scientist (Walter Pidgeon) and his naïf mini-skirted daughter (Anne Francis). A noisy but invisible monster makes its presence known, providing more than a few hints to the unwanted visitors that they should forget about phoning home and just leave.

M-G-M farmed out the special effects to the Disney studio, and it responded with a payload of stellar sight-and-sound fireworks, starting with the monster’s nocturnal assaults on the spaceship’s protective force field. Destined, if not programmed, for Hollywood fame, “Robby the Robot” makes his scene-stealing debut.

3. The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

The story may be on the “small” side, but director Jack Arnold and writer Richard Matheson think big, expanding the plight of their disappearing hero into a weighty contemplation of human existence in the face of both mortality and a hostile, overwhelming universe. Exposed to a radioactive fog while sailing with his wife, Scott (Grant Williams) almost immediately notices he’s losing weight fast, and not because of any crash diet. If his doctors find his condition incredible, what is credible is his day-by-day diminishment.

Far from living large, he has to move into a model playhouse, where he’s terrorized by his own darn cat. Then he’s trapped in the basement, where he must battle what’s now a man-eating spider armed with a sewing needle acting as his harpoon. One of the few consistently interesting auteurs in 1950s sci-fi, Arnold takes this weird little tale of a downsized man and makes it a sizable (even existential) sci-fi statement.

2. Planet of the Apes (1968)

Evolved from a script by Michael Wilson and TV’s Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) from Pierre Boulle’s 1963 French novel, director Franklin Schaffner’s box-office smash turned what might have been bottom-of-the-barrel movie monkey business into the cash-cow sire of several generations of simian-themed screen and TV sequels. Along with the one-two punch of the Oscar-winning makeup and costumes, there’s the two-fisted acting from macho Hollywood Homo Sapien Charlton Heston, playing an astronaut who crash lands on a planet brutally ruled over by a society of brainy apes. Smart observers, however, may be less shocked than Heston at the famed final reveal, especially if they noticed that all those “damn, dirty apes” Heston battles speak curiously good English.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The “ultimate trip” or the ultimate bore? When director Stanley Kubrick’s watershed science-fiction hit first landed in press previews, most critics bailed out in baffled dismay. But once the 1960s counterculture generation turned on and tuned in to Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke’s far-out extraterrestrial speculation, 2001 boomeranged from lost in space and into thousands of packed theaters, many for the ultra-wide Cinerama showings.

Before 2001, that is, before 1968, science fiction films were almost exclusively low-budget, low-status studio entries with few expectations of conquering the box office. All that changed in the decades after, most astronomically with the 1977 dynamic duo sensations of George Lucas’ Star Wars and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, closely followed in 1980 by Lucas’ Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back and Spielberg’s own E.T.  The Extra-Terrestrial two years later. The sci-fi space race—and the Hollywood box-office race—were on.

Surrealism is an art movement dating back to the 1920s. A permutation of Dada, which is characterized by chaos and nihilism, Surrealism applies the random, destructive energy of Dada constructively to explore the unconscious mind. Heavily inspired by psychoanalytic theory, surrealism challenges the very structure of rational reality. Surrealism has been vividly brought to life in cinema, but how have surrealist artists brought their visions to the screen? Discover 10 surrealist movies that define the genre.

10. The Seashell and The Clergyman – 1928, dir. Germaine Dulac

Groundbreaking female director Germaine Dulac’s adaptation of the original work by Antonin Artaud, The Seashell and the Clergyman, is considered the first surrealist film. It is a twisting, unreliable descent into the psyche of a priest constantly lusting over a woman of his church, who is married.

Upon its release, the film was censored in Britain, with the claim that “it is so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable.” Surrealist themes of eroticism, the tortured subconscious, shame, and desire, are coupled with criticism of the church and a proto-feminist upending of objectification of women. Dulac presents these themes in an unreliable manner, with no clear definition of narrative or differentiation between reality and unreality.

9. Limite – 1931, dir. Mário Peixoto

Limite is a 1931 movie with a mythology almost as spellbinding as the film itself. The only feature poet Mário Peixoto ever completed, it was a commercial bust in 1931, but won over passionate (and famous) fans, such as writer Vinicius de Moraes. With prints heavily degraded by 1959, the only known copy of the film was taken to be restored, then confiscated by the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 60s, then restored once again. Part of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, it is now also part of the Criterion Collection, but with one scene lost forever.

The film follows a man and two women, stranded on a boat. As they drift off at sea, not even attempting a rescue, their backstories are visited through flashbacks. Limite, aptly named, works in the hazy limits of physicality and intangibility, memory, and fantasy. The flashbacks of each unnamed character bleed into each other and are pulled in and out of the present like the tide.

8. The Blood of a Poet – 1932, dir. Jean Cocteau

The first installment of Jean Cocteau’s classic Orpheus trilogy, The Blood of a Poet explores the labyrinths of the inner mind. Not just any mind, but the mind of an artist. With a higher production value than most early surrealist films, Cocteau’s film feels like a quasi-fantasy. The artist enters other worlds through looking glasses, encounters stranger and stranger creatures and places, mostly his own creations. He destroys them, reaches far corners, and travels into the unknown. He is taken inside himself through his art as Alice is taken by the story to Wonderland.

Seeking to tap not into the unconscious, but into the in-between spaces of consciousness, irrationality, and instinct, The Blood of a Poet is the visual translation of the inwards of an artistic process, the inverse of creativity.

7. Rose Hobart – 1936, dir. Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell was one of the most prominent American Surrealists, well known for his shadow box sculptures and his love for starlets. Cornell made Rose Hobart in 1936 by painstakingly cutting and re-editing the adventure flick East of Borneo to mostly actress Rose Hobart’s parts. This is one of the earliest versions of a fan video.

Rose Hobart shaves the Hollywood blockbuster down to character shots of Hobart, intercut with a documentary solar eclipse. By reordering the footage and focusing on the character’s reactions instead of the narrative action, Cornell completely deconstructs the narrative of the original. He inverts the entire logic of mainstream movies and makes a work of surrealist, sensory, and affective automation.

6. Meshes of the Afternoon – 1943, dir. Maya Deren

Meshes of the Afternoon doesn’t simply explore dreams; it is a moving picture nightmare. A young woman, played by director and writer Maya Deren, comes home after seeing a figure in the street. She falls asleep on the couch and dreams of hooded figures, keys, flowers, knives, mirrors, and mirror faces. Death, self, and angst are evoked by the oneiric, circular pace of the film.

Meshes of the Afternoon was an impactful film in the experimental cinema of post-war America. It has been linked to Film Noir as well as to Surrealism. It was written and filmed with Deren’s then-husband, Alexandr Hackenschmied, and in 1959, it was especially scored by Deren’s third husband, Teiji Ito.

5. Spellbound – 1945, dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Spellbound is not a surrealist movie; it can’t even be called a post-surrealist film. It is, however, a movie that works almost as a meta-commentary on Surrealism, and the perfect example of how Hollywood absorbed bits of Surrealism into its mainstream films. Spellbound is a thriller/romance starring Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman as psychologists working in a mental clinic.

Spellbound deals directly with the early-1900s fascination with psychoanalysis and the theories that influenced Surrealism (which includes a great deal of psychobabble). It deals with themes such as amour fou, insanity, amnesia, guilt complex, dreams, identity, and the subconscious. Like many Hollywood films at the time, particularly film noirs, it features a fully surrealist dream sequence, this one painted by Salvador Dalí.

4. Last Year at Marienbad – 1961, dir. Alain Resnais

Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad is a twisting tour inside the labyrinths of time, mind, memory, and self-delusion. In a luxury hotel, a man approaches a woman claiming they had an affair in a similar location a year before. The woman denies knowing him at all, and the two of them, alongside a third man who might or might not be her husband, explore what the nature of their relationship really is.

Last Year at Marienbad blurs the lines between memory, fiction, and reality, between time and place, and between the physical location and the mind. Marienbad has a quality of meditative, nearly oppressive silence. In a cyclical narrative, memories contradict and over-impose on each other as the camera tracks the opulent halls of the hotel. Marienbad was inspired by psychological dramas of the silent era. This is reflected in the direction, makeup, and dramatic, unrealistic shadows. The clothing in the film was designed by Chanel, and combined with the singular direction, this helped make the film the most elegant of all surrealist movies.

3. Daisies / Sedmikrásky – 1966, dir. Věra Chytilová

Věra Chytilová’s surrealist, provocative, comedic extravaganza Daisies is a foundational film of the Czechoslovakian New Wave. The film follows two girls, Marie I and Marie II, who decide that “if the world is spoiled, they will be too.” Foregoing morality and rational living, the Maries engage in hedonistic, gluttonous, and nonsensical desires. They drink, party, scam men, play pranks, eat and fight with food, dance on tables, and destroy phallic-looking ingredients. There is a lot of food in this work, so much so that the film was censored by the Soviet government for promoting wastefulness.

Daisies is stylistically and narratively submerged in the sensual and the sensory. The audience is taken on a journey into pure ego, a cinematographic feast that fills you up until you feel sick. The film can, and has, been read in contradictory ways. It has been seen as a criticism of excess, consumerism, authoritarianism, war, institutional values, patriarchy, and the objectification and infantilization of women in art.

2. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – 1972, dir. Luís Buñuel

Luís Buñuel is a name practically synonymous with surrealist cinema. His early films, including Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’or (1930), established the paradigm of surrealist films and still deliver some of the most shocking images ever put on screen.

Fifty years after those, Buñuel was still turning out gems. In 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Buñuel’s surrealism is more mature but no less biting. Critiques of inequality, the church, and bourgeois institutions continue to be present. In beautiful color and superbly acted and edited, the film follows a group of bourgeois people attempting to have dinner. They are constantly interrupted by things like the attendants’ own dreams, which in turn mesh back in with their reality.

1. Mulholland Drive – 2001, dir. David Lynch

David Lynch’s work can safely be categorized, perhaps more than any other contemporary director, as post-surrealist. The 2001 Mulholland Drive is considered one of his masterpieces. The film follows aspiring actress Betty Elms and Rita, a woman suffering amnesia after surviving a car crash, as they attempt to piece together what happened to her.

Similar to his famous series Twin Peaks, Lynch inverts the genres of mystery and crime thriller through surrealist horror. The investigation and mystery are twisted around into something that evades logic and explanation. Similar to Deren’s Meshes in the Afternoon, Mulholland Dr. has a nightmarish quality and a cyclical, oneiric approach wherein reality melts into the mysteries of the subconscious.

While the Odyssey’s 8th-century B.C. authorship credited to an obscure, allegedly blind poet called Homer remains under debate, it inarguably lives on as one of the cornerstone “great books” of Western literature. Despite the tome’s voluminous 24 books (i.e., chapters) and some 12,000 lines, all written in classical dactylic hexameter verse, the plot is open-and-shut if boiled down to Hollywood “high concept” terms: a valiant soldier’s Herculean quest to return to his wife and homeland after years away at war.

The Iliad, Part II

That soldier, of course, is Odysseus (“Ulysses” or “Ulixēs” in Latin), one of the legendary leaders among the Greek armies that invaded and eventually conquered the coastal fortress city of Troy. While most historians believe there was an actual war between the Greeks and Trojans (the latter located in today’s westernmost Turkey), the entire saga was first mythologized into the Iliad and then the Odyssey “sequel” by Homer. Both were initially passed down through the generations through the oral storytelling tradition.

In the Iliad (from “Ilium,” the Greek name of Troy), Homer lays the blame on Troy’s Prince Paris for starting the hostilities, set off when he spirits away the fair Helen, wife of Sparta’s King Menelaus. None too happy, Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon enlist the mightiest Greek warriors to sail to Troy and lay siege. The war lasts ten long years, and the Greeks eventually triumph, despite losing their seemingly invincible Achilles, but only due to a little trick that famously involves a colossal wooden horse, a cache of hidden soldiers, and a naïve Trojan citizenry that should have feared the Greeks “even when they offer gifts.”

Gods, Monsters, and Men

While Homer’s follow-up also condenses a ten-year span, it covers much more territory (practically the entire Mediterranean in fact) while at that same time trimming its main mortal characters down to three: the “long-suffering” Odysseus, king of Ithaka (aka Ithaca); Penelope, his legendarily loyal wife back home; and Telemachos, his grown son. That Homer curiously shuffles the overall narrative to and fro and inserts what today can be labeled story “flashbacks” retelling Odysseus’ iconic death-defying adventures (the Cyclops, the Sirens, the Lotus-eaters, et al.) arguably points to the epic poem as passing down through history as the tapestry-like creation woven from several narrators, not just one.

Speaking of sewing, this indeed is Penelope’s distaff diversion, as well as sleight-of-hand, in her daily battles against a jackal pack of “haughty suitors” who have rudely taken up residence at the palace. With her husband long gone and feared dead, these brazen interlopers continually badger the queen for her hand in marriage, meaning that one of them will be the new king, of course. The wily Penelope pledges that she will make her choice once she finishes a shroud she is weaving for her father-in-law. What’s a chaste, faithful, “trad” wife to do? By day she labors at weaving the garment, but each night she undoes the work so that she’ll never finish.

Completing Homer’s character triumvirate is Telemachos, whom Odysseus was reluctantly forced to leave as an infant to go off to battle. While his father is no doubt the hero of the Odyssey (after all, it’s named after him), Homer’s first four books tell of the son’s own voyages to seek proof that his father is still alive and where he might be. He sets off on that quest at the urgings of the shape-shifting goddess Pallas Athene (aka Minerva), who is Odysseus’ divine benefactor and booster throughout this tale. She takes his side in opposition to Poseidon, roiling and riled-up god of the sea, who has it in for Odysseus ever since he blinded Poseidon’s monstrous man-eating son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, on the island believed by some to be Sicily.

In a textbook example of a story opening in medias res (“in the middle of things”), the Odyssey’s narrative commences not when Odysseus sails from Troy with his men up the coast to Ismarus, chronologically, but only alludes to that violent clash later on. Given that writer/director Nolan is almost ritually drawn to out-of-sequence plots, even disjointed ones (see Oppenheimer, Inception, Memento, et al.), this observer can pretty well prophesize that his Odyssey will retain and perhaps even complicate Homer’s fractured, fateful timeline over its three-hour length.

Star Treks and Screen Voyages

Odysseus’ superhuman quest is indeed a timeless one and the through-line of scores of legends and lore transcending East and West. Consider the word “nostalgia,” meaning a “longing for home,” an emotion that has surely prompted eons of wistful daydreams or retro physical journeys. Now there are those hardened sages who warn that “you can’t go home again,” but that certainly didn’t stop young Dorothy Gale in Hollywood’s wonderful 1939 The Wizard of Oz, who only had to chant “there’s no place like home” and click her heels to magically return to her family’s Kansas farm.

It’s unsurprising then that the Odyssey has inspired dozens of dramatic journeys, directly and indirectly, old and new, testifying to its deep, buoyant resonance. Nolan has hardly been the first to tackle it on the big screen. There are short, silent, European versions going back at least to 1911. These early “sword and sandal” costume pictures strode into the sound era, with one high point coming with matinee idol Kirk Douglas’ brawny, bearded turn as Ulysses in a lush 1954 Technicolor version produced by Italian film titans Carlo Ponti and Dino De Laurentiis. On U.S and European TV as well, Homer has had long “legs,” charging into several episodic iterations, including a star-studded, visually ravishing 1997 miniseries that featured Armand Assante in the lead role and Greek diva Irene Papas as Odysseus’ mother.

It’s lesser known that Odysseus’ wanderings have served as the source for fictional riffs far and wide, often ironically. In 1922, trailblazing Irish “stream of consciousness” author James Joyce published the scandalous Ulysses, shrinking the adventures down to 24 hours in the everyday, anti-heroic lives of a Dublin man, his wife, and a young stranger. In a contemporary comedic vein, the filmmaking brothers Coen (Joel and Ethan) cleverly mined Homer for 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, in which escaped convict George Clooney must survive sultry sirens, a big bad bandit, and even the Ku Klux Klan in his paternal quest to return home and keep his ex-wife from marrying her “bona fide” Southern suitor. More serious, yet seriously flawed, is director Anthony Minghella’s frigid 2003 Cold Mountain, in which a Civil War deserter (Jude Law) turns Odysseus’ trek home into a marathon with all the speed of molasses flowing uphill.

Devoted cinephiles will also know that in French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard’s brilliantly modernist Contempt (1963), he cast the eminent German director Fritz Lang as “Fritz Lang,” arduously filming his version of the Odyssey at Rome’s storied Cinecittà studios. Even deeper down the meta movie rabbit hole, Lang’s feckless screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) begins to suspect his bewitching blonde wife (Brigitte Bardot) is no Penelope when it comes to keeping her marriage vows.

IMAX, Not iMac

Nolan is no stranger to cinematic risk, and has long been undaunted by the Hollywood box-office seers who’ve predicted his doom, most recently with Oppenheimer, which not only won seven Oscars (including best picture and director) but took home a billion dollars in global ticket sales. More than a few mordant observers thought he ginned up his Cold War atomic-bomb biopic with gratuitously incendiary sex scenes formulated only to feed the hydra-headed commercial hoi-polloi. Since Homer’s Odysseus (Matt Damon) has few conjugal moments with his stalwart wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) on Ithaca, perhaps Nolan will spice up his picture with a torrid romance between his shipwrecked, pre-GPS sojourner and the lonely nymph Kalypso (Charlize Theron), who for seven years keeps him as her playmate on her fantasy island of Ogygia?

Nolan’s Olympian task will be to keep 21st-century, spectacle-seeking, text-challenged audiences captivated by a costume action drama short on spaceships, lightsabers, evil aliens, and fantastic planets. His solution no doubt will be to use the gargantuan IMAX screen like a vast immersive canvas fit for the gods as well as mortals, and where he’ll want viewers to marvel at only a fraction of the Promethean two million feet of 70mm film he shot in all, culled from locations in six countries including Greece, Italy and Morocco.

Say what you will about Nolan’s commercialized leanings that bare his artistic Achilles’ heel, but there is no question that his fidelity to the tools of old-fashioned analog filmmaking in the manner of British director David Lean (or Hollywood’s Cecil B. De Mille) puts him closer in artistic temperament to 20th century big-screen classicism than to today’s “edgy” postmodern simulated storytelling that is often as hollow and empty as, well, that legendary Trojan horse.

Honey, I’m Home!

By Zeus, Homer’s old-school Odyssey in no way lacks the big, cataclysmic, Armageddon-like climax that younger audiences have come to expect, even demand, from their blockbuster superhero fantasy flicks. Indeed, as written, Homer’s gory coup-de-grace finale that takes place with Odysseus’ ultimate return to Ithaka might test the macho directing mettle of the joined forces of Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino. Can audiences expect, gulp, the split-second zinger when the bloodthirsty Odysseus sends an arrow through the neck of his haughtiest rival, Antinous (Robert Pattinson), while he’s blithely downing a goblet of wine?

For all its blood, guts, and maritime thrills and spills, the Odyssey is and should be a paean to marital love and devotion, sentiments here outlasting the ravages of time, separation, war, and death itself. Whether such old-fashioned themes will score a bull’s eye with jaded audiences in an age trampled by divorce, high infidelity, and dysfunctional families is a question, for now, only the movie gods can answer.

Despite its epic length and the leagues of fleeting, faceless characters that cross paths with Odysseus and his son, ingrained in Homer’s archetypal opus is a fistful of vivid passages that have long hit home with readers from Athens to Atlanta. For this one and countless others, it’s the poignantly passing moment when the hero reaches Ithaka, 20 years on, to find his decrepit dog Argos waiting. While no one recognizes his aged and disguised master, old Fido does. And, with that, his own lifelong quest comes full circle too.

Ever since Hollywood’s The Jazz Singer broke the “sound barrier” in 1927, filmmakers have sought to record live musical acts for audience entertainment and posterity. With the seismic breakthrough of rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s, those cameras began cuing up a new type of documentary (or “rockumentary”) capturing Rock ‘n’ Roll on film by mixing live concert footage with offstage interviews and interludes. By the early 1960s, smaller, portable 16mm cameras and tape recorders had revolutionized the field, leading to early experiments such as 1962’s Lonely Boy.

Rock ‘n’ Roll on Film

In America and the U.K., those early minimalist “cinema verité” (“truthful cinema”) shorts were soon succeeded by feature-length hybrids on the new pop superstars. First and foremost was the Beatles’ smash A Hard Day’s Night (1964), which dropped the Fab Four—and nine of their songs, within a shaggy quasi-fiction as the Liverpool lads flee, belittle, or battle the 24/7 zaniness of Beatlemania. In 1966’s Dont Look Back, director D.A. Pennebaker offered a warts-and-all, fly-on-the-wall mostly offstage view of Bob Dylan during his pre-electric 1965 U.K. tour, with Dylan playing the guitar, the piano, friends, and visitors alike with a virtuosity backed up by vitriol. Here are 7 movies you need to see!

1. The T.A.M.I. Show (1965)

The T.A.M.I. Show (1965) may be, as it is often billed, the “best concert film you’ve never seen.” In the fall of 1964, just months after the Beatles took America by storm on The Ed Sullivan Show, promoters filled California’s Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with one of the best (and most diverse) line-ups ever assembled, shuffling vintage U.S. rock, soul, Motown, surfer music, Brill Building pop, and the first wave of the “British Invasion,” all shot by director Steve Binder and his crew with unprecedented show-stopping panache.

Just how many concerts could boast Chuck Berry, Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, Lesley Gore, James Brown, Smokey Robinson, and Marvin Gaye—topped by the Rolling Stones in one of their first U.S. engagements? (OK, Gerry and the Pacemakers were lightweights, but they had a couple of hits, including the lovely “Ferry Cross the Mersey.”) It gets even better: Binder’s house band was the now-legendary “Wrecking Crew,” touting Glen Campbell, Leon Russell, and drummer Hal Blaine. Sharp eyes will pick out Teri Garr and Toni Basil among the gyrating go-go dancers.

2. Monterey Pop (1968)

During what would be famously dubbed the West Coast counterculture’s “Summer of Love,” organizers (including John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas) staged arguably the first all-star outdoor rock concert, spanning one idyllic weekend in June 1967 south of San Francisco in Monterey. From several hundred hours of footage, director D.A. Pennebaker cut his landmark documentary down to a decidedly pithy, if not puny, 80 minutes. Even so, the results were historic for the star-making U.S. breakthroughs of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Jefferson Airplane, Ravi Shankar, et al.

Not many rock concerts had their own theme song, but Phillips wrote “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” for Scott McKenzie, whose recording ruefully evokes an era that would crash and burn in a few years. Armed with hand-held 16mm cameras, Pennebaker set the groove for the pop concert film, orchestrating a medley of tight close-ups on the performers (and Joplin soulfully up on her heels) and expansive shots of the jazzed crowd and the genuinely mellow scene. For those wishing an encore, the Criterion Collection’s 2017 DVD re-release includes several hours of that “lost” footage, with additional songs by Joplin and Hendrix (and his flaming guitar) as well as by performers left off the film, notably the Grateful Dead in an early live gig.

3. Woodstock (1970)

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong, and everywhere there was song and celebration. So sang Joni Mitchell about the watershed “Three Days of Peace & Music” that was Woodstock, the most famous of all rock-music festivals. Happening over a long, wet, wild weekend in August of 1969, it was more than simply a “gathering of the tribes”—over 400,000 strong—of the growing U.S counterculture. It was, perhaps miraculously, a communal, largely peaceful mass demonstration of “Flower Power” and its musical might, especially in the face of the recently elected, politically repressive Nixon presidency.

After those momentous three-plus days, at three hours-plus long, Woodstock the movie was another hit, receiving celebratory reviews and casting a long shadow over rock festivals to come. If today several of the performances are a drag (like the 1950s nostalgic act Sha Na Na), the song that hums through Woodstock comes from the many young fans interviewed, all part of a generation that gathered on upstate New York farmlands not simply to dance to the music but to truly find a (high) way “to get back to the garden.” Among the highlights: Joplin and Hendrix again, along with new groups like Santana and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, though the latter—Neil Young—refused to be filmed.

4. Gimme Shelter (1970)

It’s a long-running cliché to say that the Rolling Stones’ disastrous free concert at California’s Altamont Raceway proved to be not only the horrific flip side to peace-and-love Woodstock, but also symbolized the ugly, bitter end of the counterculture 1960s. Then again, clichés often are amplified from reality. Made by the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, and Charlotte Zwerin in cinema verité (or “truthful cinema”) style, it is among the most disturbing of modern documentaries. While meant to be a chronicle of the bad-boy British band’s 1969 U.S. tour—starting in New York City’s Madison Square Garden—the Maysles foretell the mayhem to come by having Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and company preview the Altamont footage first, underscoring the ensuing scenes with a downbeat of doom.

Much has been written about this controversial film, yet even that can’t take away from the visceral shock of watching what happened that December evening when the concert organizers (including the Stones) carelessly tossed a match into an incendiary mix of rock ‘n’ roll, 300,000 or so young fans, an orgy of drugs and alcohol, the Hells Angels (hired as, OMG, “security”), and a ridiculously ramshackle stage under siege by the teeming crowd—all bottled up in a remote, shelter-less (and phone-less) wasteland. In this nightmare Walpurgis Night, it’s not a little eerie that all hell breaks loose during Jagger’s “Sympathy for the Devil.”

5. The Last Waltz (1978)

While in hindsight, director Martin Scorsese’s classy 35mm record of the Band’s last full performance together fudges a few missteps, it remains in the first tier of concert films. Today the unsung, meteoric Canadian-U.S. group might be best remembered for their pivotal collaborations with Bob Dylan, but its five members (Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson) were among rock’s most versatile musicians, and their early albums blazed a jaunty new trail for others to follow, uniquely riffing classic rock with the old-time traditions of the blues, country, bluegrass, and Americana.

Their Thanksgiving 1976 concert footage at San Francisco’s old Winterland doesn’t betray the discord within the group, but revelations about lengthy re-dubbings and edits do leave a bit of a sour aftertaste. Nevertheless, even if Scorsese’s film was indeed “saved in the editing room,” it serves up a cornucopia of scrumptious, foot-stomping guest performances, from Van Morrison’s (“Caravan”) to Muddy Waters (“Mannish Boy”), Dr. John (“Such a Night”), Joni Mitchell (“Coyote”), and Neil Young (“Helpless”), along with the Band itself kicking up its heels with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” and more from their bounty of underrated tunes. For dessert, Mr. Dylan himself steps in, along with Ringo Starr, Ron Wood, Eric Clapton, et al., letting loose on “I Shall Be Released.”

6. Stop Making Sense (1984)

Check it Out! director Jonathon Demme’s minimalist Talking Heads concert documentary is a joyous non-stop house party that exuberantly gets down as much as it jumps and jukes to the top. Stop starts quietly on a bare stage at Los Angeles’ Pantages Theatre as lead singer David Byrne enters carrying a boom box, announcing he has a tape to play. Jammed in the next eighty-five minutes are 16 of the New York band’s buoyant New Wave art-funk-rock songs, all delivered by the Heads with pounding heart and soul.

With Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz, and company backing him up, the indefatigable, rubber-necked Byrne takes center stage—including in his outré “Big Suit”—for “Psycho Killer,” “Once in A Lifetime,” “Life During Wartime,” “Naïve Melody,” and other hits. It all comes to a delirious, burning-down-the-house crescendo during their deep dive into Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” And when Byrne takes five, there’s no slowdown: Save a shout-out for the Weymouth-led Tom-Tom Club, drumming out their infectious, infinitely sampled “Genius of Love.”

7. Rock ‘n’ Roll on Film: The Beatles Rooftop Concert (1969)

OK, director Peter Jackson’s epic 2021 makeover/restoration of the Beatles’ long-shelved 1969 Let It Be documentary doesn’t strictly qualify as a concert film, since only its last hour presents those four famed Liverpudlians’ last public performance. But, hey, this was the most phenomenal rock group in history, and their cheeky “rooftop concert” above their London Apple Corps offices has long had the air of legend. Peeled from over 60 hours of footage, Jackson and his crew struck a supersized three-part documentary as the Beatles set out to record a new album, which was to culminate in a filmed concert, perhaps for TV.

In the first two parts and much of the third, audiences are privy to the unbeatable sense of musical collaboration that marked the band’s unprecedented preeminence in global popular culture of the 1960s and beyond. Whether it was Paul McCartney’s charm and creative brilliance, John Lennon’s cock-eyed jokester genius, George Harrison’s cool aplomb, or Ringo Starr’s rock-steady back-beat, together the Fab Four was, well, fabulous. For proof, look (and hear) no further than that last concert; however, it consists of repeat takes of the six or seven songs. Audiences get a ticket to ride back to that chilly January afternoon when the boys (with keyboard wiz Billy Preston) went up on a London roof and played rock ‘n’ roll like they had always been together—and always would be.

Call them female-centered melodramas, tearjerkers—or just “weepies”—these were the marquee movies that made the early careers of such celebrated screen divas as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck. Later on, as those stars aged out of such roles, Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Jane Wyman, and others starred in a hit parade of “three-handkerchief” classics. More so than other genres, women’s films mirrored the stresses and strains of the struggle to define what was “women’s place” in a radically modernizing 20th century.

Women’s Film: Sacrifice, Identity, and the Illusion of Having It All

If there was a common thread running through these distaff film features it was, indeed, motherhood. On a deeper, structural level, keen viewers will note how frequently the female protagonist either embraces her traditional role as mother or resists and denies it. Often there’s a schizoid tension between the two alternatives, typically brought on by the demands of child-rearing and/or professional career. Dollars to donuts, the “good woman” will ultimately choose self-sacrifice over self. In the last reel, she will typically exit standing by her man, her child, or her home—and often all three. This is not exactly what the 21st-century working woman means by “having it all.” So let’s take a walk down movie memory lane leading to that white picket fence surrounding home, sweet home.

Maternal Melodramas Are Born

Where might one witness the birth of these screen melodramas? While the 1920s were the prodigal “Jazz Age” of flappers, bootleggers, and social-climbing Jay Gatsbys, it was also the decade that plenty of silent movies blew kisses to the prim, old-fashioned, 19th-century female. Few directors were better at this than the pioneering D.W. Griffith, whose film legacy has been sadly—if righteously—stained by his notoriously racist 1915 Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation.

That has overshadowed such little gems as his 1919 True Heart Susie, starring his favorite actress, Lillian Gish. While the title is tell-tale, it hardly does justice to Gish’s spunky, self-effacing Susie, a small-town girl who suffers in silence while the bumpkin (Bobby Harron) she’s loved since childhood is tricked into marriage by a gold-digging “painted lady” from the big city. Susie can only watch as her gullible beau gets hooked and reeled in by Bettina, a prototype two-faced femme fatale who smokes, parties, and dances the Charleston on the sly. Gish’s Susie never sours on her mom-and-apple-pie goodness, and Griffith salutes his heroine by serving up a handful of remarkably audacious close-ups that wordlessly express her lovelorn sorrows.

The Great Greta

She was a 1920s otherworldly star phenomenon, the “Swedish sphinx,” or just simply “the Face.” This was Greta Gustafsson, aka Greta Garbo, and soon after Hollywood’s glamorous M-G-M studio signed her, she shot to worldwide fame. Yet, M-G-M seemed to always plop the ethereal, mysterious Garbo in the driver’s seat for a trip around the same suffering-for-love back-lot block.

But with 1933’s Queen Christina, loosely based on the life of the 17th-century Swedish monarch, Garbo finally grabbed a role to match her regal beauty. She was no doubt aided by both Rouben Mamoulian’s attentive direction and the casting of John Gilbert, Garbo’s onetime swain whom she insisted on as her leading man. In the clever, gender-bending plot that reveals more than a little about Garbo’s own persuasions, Christina is one ruling monarch who not only “mans up,” but likes to dress like one too.

For a Garbo double-feature, viewers could hardly follow the Queen with better pomp and circumstance than 1937’s Camille, based on an old stage warhorse by Alexandre Dumas, fils. While noted “woman’s director” George Cukor credited storied M-G-M production mogul Irving Thalberg with perhaps Garbo’s greatest picture, it’s Cukor who elicited the excellent supporting performances, all opposite Garbo’s fated Paris courtesan, Marguerite Gautier. As Armand, Robert Taylor is the strapping young blue-blood who falls hard for the fallen lady. Lionel Barrymore plays his protective father, who schemes to prevent Armand from tainting his career—and family name—with such an unholy alliance, while Henry Daniell plays the suavely diabolical Baron de Varville. Credit for the tight, nuanced adaptation goes to two of old Hollywood’s most notable female scenarists, Zoe Akins and Frances Marion, along with co-writer James Hilton.

Martyred Mothers

Few Hollywood actresses could match the resume of Barbara Stanwyck, whose long, prolific career encompassed every sort of female role, from card-shark grifter and helpless heiress to cattle baron and murderous femme fatale. She also went domestic in a big way for the title role in director King Vidor’s 1937 stellar remake of Stella Dallas, based on a book by Olive Prouty. Poor Stella might be from the wrong side of the tracks, but she nevertheless railroads a fancy-pants gentleman into marriage. It doesn’t last, leaving Stella to raise a daughter (Anne Shirley) to whom she lavishes all the things she never had—i.e., money, taste, and class. But soon enough Stella will face the mother of all motherly dilemmas: Does she love her daughter enough to give her up?

She was born Lucille Le Sueur in Texas, trained as a dancer, and skipped to Hollywood in the mid-1920s. Her new name—Joan Crawford—was Tinseltown personified, as it was chosen after a national publicity contest. From the silent era and into the Thirties, she was a huge star at the M-G-M studio, typecast in saucy “flapper” or working-girl parts that flirted with the censors. In the 1940s, her career in the doldrums, Crawford not only made a triumphant comeback in her Mildred Pierce title role, it won her only Best Actress Oscar. Directed by the veteran Michael Curtiz from James M. Cain’s “hardboiled” novel, Crawford’s 1945 tour-de-force is a delectable hybrid that spices up the classic woman’s film with a dash or two of sinister film noir. Bailing out on her sad-sack husband, Mildred moves from dirty dishes to L.A. riches, stepping up from stay-at-home mom to ritzy restaurateur. But what happens when Mildred’s spoiled, snobby daughter (Ann Blyth) hungers for more than one silver spoon?

Postwar Women in Love

It’s striking how many of these classic Hollywood melodramas (meaning “music” plus “drama”) were directed by East European émigrés. Having fled to the U.S. during the early years of World War II, German-born Max Ophuls had to wait until 1948 to deliver his first-class Letter from an Unknown Woman, starring Joan Fontaine in one of her best roles, rivaling her performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Based on a 1922 novella by Stefan Zweig and more Germanic than American in tone, Letter is a heartbreaking valentine to the perils of storybook “true romance,” most especially when one of the lovers is a dashing, self-absorbed rake.

While the story is framed by a confessional letter written and narrated by Fontaine’s Lisa to Stefan (Louis Jourdan), what matters most to Ophuls and his cinematographer Franz Planer is not strictly her words and feelings but rather how to translate them into pure cinematic language. And that they do, in a sublime symphony of bravura dolly and tracking shots that deftly fill in what’s between Lisa’s grievous lines.

Ah yes, Douglas Sirk. In retrospect, he’s likely the most prominent woman’s film director of the 1950s. He scores at least two on any “greatest hits” list, including 1956’s All that Heaven Allows, the story of a taboo romance between a suburban widow (Jane Wyman) and her young, handsome, Thoreau-natured gardener (Rock Hudson). A divine Hollywood melodrama for contemporary directors like Todd Haynes (who remade it as Far from Heaven in 2002), it nurtures the scandalous suggestion that a middle-aged woman can have romantic drives and desires, much to the alarm of her busybody friends and neighbors. While today the cat is out of the bag that Hudson was a closeted gay actor—adding perhaps a subversive slant to his roles like this—it’s really Sirk’s caustic treatment of conservative, TV-worshiping Eisenhower 1950s that allows Heaven to transcend its glitzy Technicolor façade.

In 1959 Sirk remade the restrained, exemplary 1937 version of novelist Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life (starring Claudette Colbert) as an extravagant coda to his Hollywood career, rebooting it into Universal Pictures’ biggest bona-fide moneymaker up to then. While the remake has its critics for being so inimitably over-the-top, Sirk’s swan song bangs every melodramatic note, including Lana Turner’s performance as a shallow single mother who, ala Mildred Pierce, wildly succeeds in her solo career by trying really, really hard. Indeed, Sirk makes acting and performance front-and-center in his critical undertones, whether Turner as Lora, drama-queen actress, her dutiful African-American maid Annie (Juanita Moore) or Annie’s light-skinned daughter (Susan Kohner), who continually and desperately tries to “pass” as white in public, much to her mother’s despair.

Woman’s Film: She’s Leaving Home

Despite his reputation as a masterful auteur of blistering true-crime dramas and sinewy biopics, early in his career Martin Scorsese was sought out by rising star Ellen Burstyn (on a tip from Francis Coppola) to direct her in a novel “New Hollywood” film about a suddenly single wife who hits the road west to start her life over, toting her ornery young son with her. The result was 1975’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, an Oscar-winning sleeper success that consciously takes on and revises (and perhaps aborts) the vintage woman’s picture with a strong dose of stark, shot-on-location naturalism. While softened by a dreamy fledgling romance between Alice and a rugged but mild-mannered rancher (the late Kris Kristofferson), Scorsese and writer Robert Getchell’s modernist maternal road movie doesn’t give its abruptly liberated heroine an easy out, least of all through any over-the-rainbow rabbit holes.

Dubbed the Master of Suspense, English filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock is known for his expert writing, impeccable cinematography, and storytelling proficiency. Whether you are interested in visual aesthetics, well-written stories, or simply movies in general, Hitchcock has something for you. This list serves as a resource for both seasoned Hitchcock fans and newcomers to explore his top films, what makes them special, and why they remain relevant today. Here are Alfred Hitchcock’s top 8 movies:

8. To Catch a Thief (1955): How Hitchcock Pioneered Modern Action Cinematography

To Catch a Thief follows American John Robie (Cary Grant) as a retired thief living peacefully until a handful of burglaries on the French Riviera point the police in his direction. Hoping to prove his innocence and earn the trust of the police, Robie decides to take matters into his own hands and catch the thief in the act. After meeting two different, yet equally fatal, femme fatales, Francis Stevens (Grace Kelly) and Danielle Foussard (Brigitte Auber), Robie realizes that his escapade may prove to be far more challenging than he previously predicted.

To Catch a Thief earns its place on this list not only for its realistic portrayal of an American navigating a foreign locale but also for exhibiting how Hitchcock can bring a character to life who is struggling with so many difficulties all at the same time. A police investigation, asking old friends for favors, romantic interests, and exploring multiple suspects simultaneously; what could easily be a full season of a TV series is expertly and concisely written into a one-hour and 45-minute film.

From a technical point of view, Hitchcock used this film to advance aerial photography, a concept that had been explored very little leading up to the 1950s. To Catch a Thief is one of the first films to use a helicopter to film a car chase sequence. The film crew made a makeshift camera mount for a helicopter using the materials they had on set. This use of cutting-edge technology makes the viewing experience of To Catch a Thief all the more exciting and intriguing.

7. The Lodger (1927): The Silent Masterpiece That Invented the ‘Hitchcockian’ Hero

Alfred Hitchcock’s third film and first commercial success, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, highlights how Hitchcock’s films from the silent era still hold up to the intellectual standards that Hitchcock has earned for himself today. Loosely based on the many stories of Jack the Ripper, The Lodger takes place in a London neighborhood that is home to a serial killer called “The Avenger.” The Avenger is described as having a covered face and only targets young, blonde women who are out late at night.

This news is shocking to the Bunting family, but the shock turns to dread as they realize that the strange man living in their room for rent goes out every night on mysterious errands, never forgetting to conceal his face. This intelligent thriller doesn’t forget to keep the twists and turns coming, keeping viewers engaged for its silent yet vivid runtime.

What makes The Lodger such a fascinating watch is that it shows how not-so-different the people of the past were compared to us today. Technology, fashion, and the way people speak certainly changed over the years, but this near-century-old film shows audiences that the way people think and what they deem important have remained the same. For those interested in watching the people of history seemingly return to life, The Lodger is the perfect movie.

6. Rear Window (1954): Why This One-Room Set Is Cinema’s Most Perfect Thriller

Told entirely from the perspective of a crippled L.B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) confined to his Manhattan apartment, Rear Window tells the deeply compelling story of a man who thinks he overheard a murder occur yet can do very little about it. Critically praised and universally regarded as one of Hitchcock’s very best, Rear Window proves that you don’t need exotic locations or nonstop thrill-a-minute action sequences to craft an effective thriller. A professionally written script (in this instance by John Michael Hayes) will suffice.

Filmed entirely in a massive Paramount Studios soundstage, Rear Window fully utilizes every detail of the intricate setting where the narrative takes place. Simple features such as a railing or garden wall, which are innocuous at first glance, may prove to be challenging obstacles for the characters later in the film. A two-hour film taking place in one location may sound like a boring or tedious affair, but in the hands of skilled filmmakers, it makes for a thriller that is not to be missed.

5. Psycho (1960): The Low-Budget Gamble That Shattered Hollywood Taboos

Known as possibly the greatest horror film of all time, Psycho roared onto the big screen in 1960 with a tremendous cultural buzz surrounding the release. As the oldest R-rated film—having been made eight years before the founding of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America)—Psycho has been frightening generations with not only its black-and-white depictions of gore but also its portrayal of a vividly realistic and diabolical serial killer. Starring Janet Leigh alongside Anthony Perkins and John Gavin, Psycho proves that even with a low budget, a talented group of filmmakers and actors can create a timeless piece of storytelling.

As exemplary as the horror sequences in Psycho are, what stands out in the film more than what people give credit for is the main character: Marion Crane. Marion, played by Janet Leigh, is a fascinating character who slowly reveals more and more of herself to the audience as the film progresses. At first, clad in all-white clothing, Marion’s wardrobe becomes darker and darker as the choices that she makes do the same. Along with a diabolically complex performance by Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh brings life to an incredible character who once again points to the brilliance of Alfred Hitchcock.

4. Notorious (1946): Why the FBI Followed Hitchcock During Production

Notorious, aptly released in 1946, is about the daughter of a German spy sent to Rio de Janeiro in order to track down and spy on a ring of Nazi scientists who fled from Germany after World War II. Alicia Huberman, portrayed by Ingrid Bergman, thinks she is up to the task, but everything changes when she is reunited with an old flame of hers who just so happens to be the leader of the ring of Nazi scientists. Coupled with a growing infatuation for a fellow US spy (Cary Grant), Alicia must choose between two lovers and navigate through her mission, all while her life hangs in the balance.

With the great efforts made by the Allied countries during the post-World War II period in order to seek out Nazis in hiding, it’s impressive for a Hollywood film to tackle this issue simultaneously, one which was such a critical element of the political zeitgeist of the time. Notorious captured this period of time so effectively, as a matter of fact, that Hitchcock claimed to have been followed by the FBI for a few months during the production of the film because the movie dealt with uranium as a key plot element.

Notorious earned its place on this list because of its compelling narrative, aesthetically pleasing black-and-white cinematography, and motivation to push the Motion Picture Production Code (MPPC) to its limit. One oft-mentioned scene from the film portrays a two-minute and thirty-second kiss between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. However, the MPPC did not permit an on-screen kiss longer than three seconds. The solution crafted by Hitchcock was a collage of short kisses between the actors intertwined with brief pieces of dialogue. A crazy solution, but effective and, more importantly, memorable.

3. North by Northwest (1959): The Blueprint for the Modern Spy Epic

Starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint, and James Mason, North by Northwest follows a New York City businessman named Roger Thornhill who is mistaken by a group of foreign adversaries for being an American agent, forced to drive a car while severely intoxicated, then framed for murder. What follows is a thrilling cross-country pursuit that wraps up in an iconic fight sequence atop Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.

What places North by Northwest so high on this ranking is its fantastic writing and iconic setpieces. Thornhill is a great character for an audience to follow because he is so out of his element and oblivious to the forces at work around him. Right from the start of the film, the tension skyrockets as Thornhill is thrown into a dangerous and exciting world of spies and murderers. Actor Cary Grant even remarked on set that he “can’t make head nor tail of [the script]!” With all the workings of a great thriller—and a femme fatale thrown in for good measure—North by Northwest is a film better experienced than read about.

2. The Birds (1963): Turning Ordinary Nature Into an Avian Nightmare

Departing from the usual human-versus-human drama, Alfred Hitchcock pits city girl Melanie Daniels (played by Tippi Hedren) against a flock of bloodthirsty seagulls in a small Northern California town. Known as one of the best horror films of the 1960s, The Birds achieves “must-watch” status because of its effectiveness at building suspense and uncertainty around its avian antagonists. The movie first portrays its mysterious birds as simply unusual, but by the end of the film, the terror experienced by the characters is so intense that a sense of dread is found just by watching a bird sit still.

A common trend among films with absurd premises (particularly horror movies) is that the movie abandons character and plot in pursuit of scares and spectacle. The Birds is able to avoid this pitfall by first spending lots of time with the main characters in order for the audience to build up empathy for the protagonists and also by creating a very compelling drama among the principal characters that underlies the “killer seagull” aspect of the film. By taking the ordinary and turning it into the villain, The Birds stands as one of the great Hitchcockian thrillers that’s still effective well into the 2020s.

1. Vertigo (1958): Why This Tale of Obsession Is Potentially the Greatest Film Ever Made

John Ferguson is a retired police detective of the San Francisco Police Department who’s been hired to follow a woman who’s convinced that she’s being stalked by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, a woman who’s been dead for years. Ferguson is carefree about the matter, believing this to be an open-and-shut case of hysteria. However, his carelessness turns to obsession as he’s walking down the street one day and sees Carlotta Valdes.

Jimmy Stewart, who plays Ferguson, is known by many as a “family man” who’s acted in such films as It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and How the West was Won. This reputation is cast aside as Stewart takes on a character of such unsatiated obsession towards a woman that Vertigo is genuinely an uncomfortable movie to watch. Flanked by talented actresses Kim Novak and Barbara Bel Geddes, Jimmy Stewart is the primary reason this movie should be watched by all interested in film, and a perfect script by Hitchcock only makes the experience all the more riveting. To experience what the epitome of the “thriller” is and to simply see what the medium of film as a whole is capable of, Vertigo is that top Hitchcock movie.

The Tudors is an English historical drama that ran between 2007 and 2010. Since its release, it has become known for its popularity amongst history enthusiasts, but it is also notorious for its many historical inaccuracies. Were these inaccuracies accidental as a result of poor research? Or were they intentional changes made by the writers and producers to enhance the viewing experience of their audience?

In this article, we will count down the five most obvious historical inaccuracies in The Tudors, review the most shockingly contrived scenes, and question why they were included in the series at all.

The Tudors: Artistic License or Accidental Blunder?

There is nothing that divides history enthusiasts like the discussion of period dramas.

Some people credit period dramas as being the origin of their interest in history. Some people enjoy them for what they are, not a factual documentary, but a little light-hearted entertainment based on events of the past. On the other hand, some people simply cannot stand to watch anything that is not 100 percent accurate.

There are many period dramas to choose from. The White Queen, The White Princess, The Spanish Princess, Reign, Becoming Elizabeth, Gunpowder, and The Power and the Passion are just a few of the television series based on 15th to 17th-century figures and events. The Tudors, another such series, was created and written by Michael Hirst for the American television channel, Showtime. 

The series ran for 38 episodes and followed the reign of King Henry VIII. Although the timings are jumbled pretty much all the way through, we can derive that the series begins around 1520 and ends with King Henry’s death in 1547. The star of the show is Johnathan Rhys Meyers, who gives an outstanding and often sympathetic portrayal of King Henry and artfully brings to life the most iconic moments of his reign.

Michael Hirst himself acknowledged the fact that his work was not one of unquestionable accuracy. However, he has also claimed that he hoped and expected people to draw inspiration from the series and carry out their own research as a result of their enjoyment. Of The Tudors, he said the following. “One of the effects of The Tudors has been to drive people back to the history books with renewed interest, and we’re drawing in those who had initially no interest in the subject. From the feedback I’ve been getting, the show has galvanised interest even in academic history.” 

Let us now delve into The Tudors and review five of its craziest inaccuracies. These are not just slight errors with costumes, multiple uses of words and phrases that did not exist during the era, or notable moments where modern-day items are left in shots on screen. These are incomprehensible errors that must surely have been made consciously, occasionally for reasons that are not completely clear to the viewer.

Inaccuracy Number 1: The Absent Tudor Sister

Of all the mistakes, inaccuracies, and anomalies included in the television series The Tudors, the absence of King Henry VIII’s sister is the most obvious. Furthermore, it may actually be the most historically problematic.

King Henry had two sisters. They were named Margaret and Mary Tudor, and both were equally important. Margaret was the elder; she first married King James IV of Scotland, and later married twice more. Mary was the younger; her first husband was King Louis XII of France, and her second was Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk.

In The Tudors, however, King Henry is provided with only one sister. Interestingly, it is almost impossible to determine which has been kept and which has been omitted. The character is given the name Margaret. In contrast, although her story is almost entirely fictional, it seems to align a little more with the life of Mary Tudor.

So, for what reason was the second sister excluded from the drama altogether? The answer given was that there were already too many characters named Mary. Mary Boleyn and Princess Mary already featured as somewhat minor characters. Obviously, the production team concluded that Mary Tudor was just one Mary too many for their audiences to cope with. This is somewhat patronizing to viewers, who are more than likely to be able to distinguish between three entirely different characters and storylines, even if they do have the same name.

Apparently, the same problem does not apply when it comes to the name Thomas, for we have Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas More, Thomas Howard, Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Boleyn, Thomas Tallis, and Thomas Seymour, none of whom were selected for removal.

It is a particular shame that neither sister married the king of Scotland, for it is only through King James IV and Margaret Tudor that we can get to the bottom of the royal family tree. King Charles III of England is descended not from King Henry VIII or any of his children, but through King Henry’s elder sister Margaret and her offspring. Without Margaret and James, Britain’s current royal family, as we know it in 2025, would simply not exist.

Inaccuracy Number 2: Portugal, Marriage, and Murder

Inaccuracy number two follows directly from inaccuracy number one. Margaret Tudor, the only sister King Henry VIII has been left with, is appointed for marriage not to the king of Scotland or the king of France, but instead to the king of another European nation. For an unknown reason, it was the king of Portugal that Margaret was to wed. This would have come as something of a surprise to Maria of Aragon and Eleanor of Austria, the real wives of the actual King of Portugal, Manuel I.

Perhaps the writers assumed that their audiences would know very little about the history of Portugal, and therefore be less likely to complain about the obvious error?

Marriage to either the king of Scotland or the king of France would have been more appropriate, since those were the monarchs whom Margaret and Mary actually married. However, by the time of Margaret’s marriage, the new king of France (Francis I) had already inherited the throne and was already married to Queen Claude. Scotland was not an option, for it was mentioned so little in the series that it hardly seems as if it exists at all.

So, in episode four of series one, Margaret is accompanied all the way to Portugal by the Duke of Suffolk. The two are clearly attracted to each other (as Mary and the duke were in real life). During a violent storm at sea, and after a game of cards, they dismiss their servants and sleep together before even arriving in Portugal.

One thing the series does get right is the reluctance with which Margaret sets sail in the first place. She was horrified by the idea of marriage to the king of Portugal, just as the real Princess Mary was by the idea of marriage to the king of France. Upon meeting her future husband, the fictional Margaret is disgusted, and makes an excellent first impression by publicly fainting at the mention of bearing his children.

By the end of the episode, the fictional Princess Margaret has boarded a ship, had sex with the Duke of Suffolk, married the mysteriously unnamed king of Portugal, and then, as a final flourish, murdered her weakening husband by smothering him with a pillow the morning after the wedding.

In reality, it was Mary who married the Duke of Suffolk in this hectic manner. Her husband, King Louis XII of France, died on the first day of January in 1515. Following this death, Mary was kept in isolation at the Hotel De Cluny for a period of six weeks, the intention being to confirm that she was not carrying an heir to the throne. Of course, this was not the case.

When King Henry VIII heard this news back in England, he sent none other than his best friend, the Duke of Suffolk, to France to collect his sister. The duke was given strict instructions to negotiate with the French Council, to put Mary’s affairs in order, and to transport her safely back to England.

Predictably, the Duke of Suffolk and Princess Mary were married within a few weeks of his arrival. Although the exact date of their secret wedding is unknown, it has been suggested that they married sometime between the 15th and 20th of February that same year.

By the time the newlyweds returned to the English court, King Henry had learned of what had taken place. He was so angry over the betrayal of trust that he decided to have Mary sent into exile and the duke executed. It was Cardinal Wolsey who stepped in and suggested an alternative, financial punishment. Predictably, both Mary and Charles were restored to favor within a month or two.

Inaccuracy Number 3: A Fling With Mary Boleyn

In The Tudors, the role of Mary Boleyn was played by an actress named Perdita Weeks. She is not a major character, but appears several times for short periods throughout seasons one and two. Mary Boleyn is portrayed as a likeable, fun-loving, unambitious, and promiscuous character. She is mistress not only to King Henry VIII of England, but also to King Francis I of France. It is for this reason that she is known as “the great prostitute.” 

It is suggested in The Tudors that King Henry becomes bored with Mary very quickly. After just two or three encounters, he rejects her advances and demands that she leave his presence. The affair begins in the episode entitled Simply Henry, and is over in less than 60 minutes of screen time.

In reality, the length of the relationship between King Henry and Mary is unknown. However, historians are fairly sure that it exceeded three years. This is quite a different affair from the three days of passion represented in the series. In fact, two of her children were rumored to have been fathered by King Henry rather than her first husband, William Carey. Both Catherine Carey and Henry Carey later became favorites of Queen Elizabeth I, who at the least was their cousin, but at the most could have been their half-sister.

So, why was Mary Boleyn done away with so quickly, even though she played such a central role in the lives of both King Henry VIII and the rest of the Boleyns? Viewers can only assume that writers wanted to get her out of the way in order to move swiftly onto the love story starring Anne, the other Boleyn girl.

Inaccuracy Number 4: The Death of Cardinal Wolsey

It is in episode ten of series one that Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, one of the principal characters in the series, is finally killed off. This is not a problem in itself, for Cardinal Wolsey died around halfway through King Henry VIII’s reign. On the whole, the circumstances seem to make sense, and the timings appear to add up correctly. The only thing that is wrong—something that is glaringly obviously wrong—is the manner of the Cardinal’s death.

In reality, Cardinal Wolsey died of natural causes, possibly brought on by the anxiety, distress, and upheaval caused by his downfall and disgrace. Evidently, this death was not exciting enough for The Tudors. Instead, they had poor Cardinal Wolsey commit suicide in his prison cell.

Out of all of the episodes of The Tudors, this is perhaps the biggest injustice done to a historic figure. The series suggests that Cardinal Wolsey prematurely ends his life out of fear, whilst in reality, he bravely soldiered on to whatever end awaited him. He died not by his own hand in an empty jail room, but of weakening health, surrounded and comforted by the brothers of the Abbey of Saint Mary in the Meadow.

Cardinal Wolsey breathed his last on November 29 in 1530, having arrived at his final resting place just three days earlier. At the command of King Henry, he had been travelling back to London, but had been forced to break his journey due to the worsening of his sickness. His last words were apparently, “If I had served God as diligently as I have served the King, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.” 

Most historians insist that, as far as he himself would have been concerned, Cardinal Wolsey’s death was conveniently well-timed. It is thought that by dying a natural death, he escaped the fate that awaited him at the Tower of London. However, there are a few academics who argue that Cardinal Wolsey might have been forgiven by King Henry VIII, and may even have been pardoned and granted permission to live away from court as archbishop of York.

On the whole, Cardinal Wolsey’s character was given an excellent portrayal by Sam Neill. He was also granted a fair amount of screen time. In 1988, the historian John Guy stated the following regarding the relationship between King Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey: “Only in the broadest respects was the King taking independent decisions; it was Wolsey who almost invariably calculated the available options and ranked them for Royal consideration; who established the parameters of each successive debate; who controlled the flow of official information; who selected the King’s secretaries, middle-ranked officials, and who promulgated decisions himself.” It is fair to say that—if nothing else—the series adequately brings to life this manner of relationship.

Inaccuracy Number 5: The Death of Henry Fitzroy

With the correct casting and some major amendments to both timeline and script, Henry Fitzroy may have had the potential to become an engaging and memorable character. Unfortunately for King Henry’s much-loved but illegitimate boy, he played such an insignificant part in The Tudors that viewers may wonder why the writers bothered including him at all. He appears in only two episodes, numbers two and five of season one, and is killed off around twelve years too early. It seems likely that the production had no place for another Henry, or simply did not know what to do with him during the years leading up to his death.

But what are the few facts regarding this real, historic figure? Firstly, Henry Fitzroy was born out of wedlock in the year of 1519. His mother was King Henry VIII’s mistress, Elizabeth Blount. Of all his illegitimate children (of whom there were surprisingly few), Henry Fitzroy was the only one that King Henry chose to acknowledge as his own. The chosen name tells the historian everything they need to know. Firstly, the child was Henry, just like his father. Secondly, the following name of Fitzroy literally translates as “son of the King” from Norman French.

King Henry was thrilled to have been given a male child. Over the previous decade, he had seen no success in producing an heir with Catherine of Aragon. Now, Henry Fitzroy was living, breathing proof that the fault lay not with the King. The baby was described as a “goodly man child of beauty.” 

In the series, Henry Fitzroy is killed off fairly swiftly, at an unspecified age, after suffering from an unnamed childhood disease. To be fair, since infant mortality was shockingly high during this era, the idea hardly seems unreasonable or outlandish. However, in reality, this is not how events panned out. Whilst residing at Saint James Palace in London, Henry Fitzroy died on July 23, 1536. At the time of his death, he was aged 18. He had lived even to see the downfall and death of his godfather, Cardinal Wolsey, and also to see the disgrace and execution of his stepmother, Anne Boleyn.

The famous chronicler Thomas Fuller stated the following regarding the death of Henry Fitzroy. “Well was it for them that Henry Fitzroy his natural son was dead, otherwise had he survived King Edward the Sixth, we might have heard of a King Henry the ninth, so great was his father’s affection and so unlimited his power to prefer him.” 

Henry Fitzroy left behind his young wife, Mary Howard of the Norfolk family. The union had produced no children. Strangely, despite his love for his deceased son, King Henry VIII did not grant Henry Fitzroy a state funeral. Instead, he left all arrangements to the Duke of Norfolk. Consequently, Henry Fitzroy received only a simple and modest funeral service and was buried without much ceremony. He was laid to rest in the Howard family vault in Thetford Priory, with only the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Surrey in attendance.

King Henry did not forget about Henry Fitzroy. In April of 1537, the year after Fitzroy’s death, King Henry ordered 80 masses to be said for his soul.

Is The Tudors Worth It?

In this article, we have reviewed five of the biggest mistakes in the television series The Tudors. The main question to answer is: Is it worth viewing, in spite of its shortcomings?

The long and short of it is that no production can please everyone. No matter how qualified the writers, no matter how experienced the cast, no matter how knowledgeable the designers, no matter how immaculately researched the script, there would always be a problem for a small percentage of viewers. Even if the production were written and directed by King Henry VIII himself, there would be somebody, somewhere, who would take great delight in declaring… well, that’s not right.

The viewing of period dramas such as The Tudors is an entirely personal choice. Whether you grow to love it or hate it is down to many factors and preferences.

One may argue that, what it lacks in historical accuracy, it more than makes up for in style, excellent performances, ample excitement, and overall entertainment value.

Few artists enjoy such enduring popularity and prestige as Edward Hopper. The famous American artist had a unique relationship with cinema. Hopper was a known lover of the movies. At the same time, his works have had a lasting and far-reaching impact on the world of film for decades. Let’s explore the connection between movies and Edward Hopper’s timeless paintings.

Edward Hopper’s Cinematic Inspirations: Did He Paint Movie Scenes?

The pensive movie theater usherette of New York Movie, or the ominous mundanity of Gas, are as likely to be seen hanging on museum walls as they are on dime store walls. They are also frequently referenced in movies, cartoons, TV shows, and advertisements.

Edward Hopper is considered the ultimate painter of 20th-century solitude. He was actively painting from the beginning of the 19th century until 1965. His name is often followed by words like loneliness, isolation, alienation, and timelessness.

There is an undeniable feeling of melancholy in Hopper’s paintings. In a departure from most of his realist contemporaries, Hopper depicted urban life in a subtly stylized manner, brimming with psychological layers. His artworks stand somewhere among realism, impressionism, expressionism, and surrealism.

Hopper’s art is populated by lonely figures, looming buildings, ominous skies, voyeuristic windows, and mysterious facades. The pure colors, stark lighting, and economy of background noise or detail give his paintings the effect of silence and timelessness that they are so known for. His figures are solid and austere, but the work is moving, intense, and often, dramatic. Hopper’s art is often likened to freeze frames from movies. His pictorial choices—the subtle expressionism of his composition, framing, and lighting—converse closely with movies.

Hopper’s Cinematic Worlds and Narrative Tension

In his 2020 film Two or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper, German director Wim Wenders remarks: “In front of Edward Hopper’s paintings, I get the feeling they are scenes from movies that were never made… I start wondering what’s the story that is beginning here; What will happen to these characters in the next moment?”

Wender’s questions echo a common reading of Edward Hopper. It seems there is a constant desire to uncover what his art is about or to bring it to life, to insert movement and narrative into the paintings. This can come across as a merely illustrative reading of the artwork, but it seems to be much more emphatically a response to the cinematic tension that is a fundamental aspect of Hopper’s career.

Hopper created worlds when he painted. Worlds filled with their own rules, moods, characters, emotions, and themes. These spaces are heavy with narrative suggestions, even if they do not need any narrative conclusion; the images are powerful enough to make the audience wonder anyway.

Exploring the Cinematic Tension in Edward Hopper’s Art

There is a kinship between Edward Hopper’s production process and that of filmmaking. Hopper walked and sketched the city for long hours, just like a location scout working on a film. He planned all his paintings in dozens of ink and pencil sketches, like a storyboard. These sketches, always accompanied by the annotations of his wife and fellow artist Josephin Hopper, resemble a cinematographer’s translation of a screenplay into visual language.

Cinematographer Ed Lachman, who has worked with Wim Wenders, Sofia Coppola, and Todd Haynes, said: “Hopper created a state of spirit, atmospheres, and emotional contexts for his characters, without telling anyone story. He only gave clues. We, photography and art directors, also work like that. Our language, the strength of cinema, is the images.”

Hopper’s Mastery of Emotional Composition

Hopper was an expert at conveying emotion and conflict through images alone. His human characters, who are often the subject of much speculation, rarely have expressive manners. The drama of his scenes is a drama of composition. The four non-conversing figures in Nighthawks do not have easily readable expressions. Some viewers project their own dysfunctions onto them, while others project hope.

The ominous quality of the painting comes from the still darkness that’s pressing down on the light of the diner. In Office at Night, nothing in the expression of the characters indicates any particular emotion. It is the harsh, artificial light, the high, oblique viewpoint, and the odd shape of the room that creates the feeling of unease.

Hopper’s Cinematic Techniques: Light, Perspective, and Tension

Hopper’s point of view is sometimes voyeuristic, showing us an outside view of unsuspecting subjects. At other times, he takes us inside the rooms, restaurants, train cars, and city streets of the Hopperesque world. Even when we are brought inside, we are still dislocated, much like the experience of watching a movie or a play. We follow the characters into their worlds but remain unable to affect the scene.

As a highly regarded American Realist, Hopper uses unconventional techniques to give his paintings emotional weight. He breaks the rules of realist perspective with oblique angles, contradictory viewpoints, and unstable spaces, creating an aura of disorientation that evokes visual tension, a technique also seen in silent films.

Light is a key component in Hopper’s work. The artist reportedly once affirmed, “All I want is to paint light at the side of a house.” Light in Hopper is not just light; it is color, form, and atmosphere as well.”

The artificial illumination of Automat washes out the sitting figure, and the light shapes in the background further explain her sense of isolation. The bright midday light creates stark shadows in Second Story Sunlight and House by the Railroad, dotting these buildings with unsettling, mysterious auras. Hopper’s light shapes his spaces and figures. In his works, light is so elevated that it is just as important as it is in the world of cinema.

Edward Hopper’s Love for Cinema

Edward Hopper’s history with cinema is a mutual affair. His love of film and theater is well documented, as is the far-reaching impact his art has had on movie directors and cinematographers. Born in 1882, Hopper saw the birth, rise, and many revolutions of cinema. He was a young boy when audiences saw the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat for the first time. During his student years, Hopper traveled to Europe several times, where he acquainted himself with European pictures and the European art scene.

It was around this time, during the early 1900s, that several ground-breaking film movements were developing in Europe, including German expressionist cinema. This movement pioneered several filmmaking techniques. It helped authors express their ideas through lighting, framing, and set design. Hopper seemed to develop a conceptual affinity with these movies at a moment when he was trying to find his own style. This is better seen in his etchings from this period. The 1921 etching Night Shadows marks one of his most unrealistic configurations, very similar to expressionist film trends of the time.

Hopper’s Symbiosis with American Cinema and Film Noir

Hopper’s interest in the movies was two-fold: there were the stories told on screen and their visual language, and there were people who went to see them. Hopper observed and captured it several times throughout his career. In the 1940s, Edward Hopper and American cinema achieved true symbiosis. The transition from the Great Depression into yet another Great War ushered in a darker tone in Hollywood and the rise of film noir.

The bleak crime thrillers and violent melodramas of film noir were popular in post-war America. These seemed to be Hopper’s favorite types of movies. The noir tone had a visible influence on Hopper’s art. In turn, filmmakers found ample inspiration in Hopper’s moody, cynical, psychological, and mysterious America.

The Legacy of Nighthawks: How Hopper’s Iconic Painting Shaped Movies

Hopper’s most famous work, Nighthawks, is a movie staple, having been referenced in everything from Twin Peaks to The Peanuts. The first of many Nighthawks references in cinema happened in 1946, in the noir classic The Killers. The Killers is a screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s story of the same title. Nighthawks was also inspired by Hemingway’s book, and it incorporates visual elements of the crime films of the 1930s, even calling back to a street corner diner in the proto-noir Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). When Robert Siodmak adapted The Killers to film, he reproduced Nighthawks into the moving picture, and its cinematography features many Hopperesque silhouettes, lighting, and framing.

Edward Hopper’s Enduring Impact on Filmmakers and Movie Classics

Just a few years later, while developing his film Force of Evil (1948), director Abraham Polonsky took his cinematographer George Barnes to a Hopper exhibit, pointed to the paintings, and said: “This is how I want our film to look.” The influence of Hopper’s voyeuristic point of view and sublimated tension of banal scenes can be felt in films like The Naked City, Vertigo, Scarlet Street, and most evidently in Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

Hitchcock was very candid about Hopper’s influence on his work. The American master also influenced Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lynch, and Roy Andersen. Famously, Hopper’s House by the Railroad was a key inspiration for Hitchcock’s famous film Psycho (1960). The painting has also inspired the foreboding houses in Giant, Days of Heaven, and even The Addams Family.

Hopper’s Lasting Legacy in Cinema and Pop Culture

Even after his death in 1967, which coincided with a cinematic revolution in Hollywood, Hopper’s works still influenced many filmmakers. He has been referenced in cult classics, thrillers, psychological dramas, comedy cartoons, teen shows, and music videos. Forty years after Abraham Polonsky, director Ridley Scott took his crew to see Nighthawks, directing his crew to base the entire look of his ground-breaking sci-fi Blade Runner on it.

Wim Wenders channeled Hopper’s America in his cult classics Paris, Texas and The End of Violence, years before his homage 2 or 3 things I know about Edward Hopper (2020). In 2013, the Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch told a woman’s life story in 20th-century America through recreations of Hopper’s paintings in Shirley: Visions of Reality.