Part 2:

• Jazz on a Summer’s Day : (seen) (1959) 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Director Bert Stern treats jazz musicians (including Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, and Anita O’Day) with the same smooth idol worship he brought to his Marilyn Monroe pinups.
• The Killing (1956) : (seen) Stanley Kubrick down-and-dirty caper picture. Kubrick transforms the perfect-crime material into the screen equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle, leaping back and forth in time and showing the same scenes from many points of view.
• Kiss Me Deadly (1955) : (seen) Robert Aldrich’s style is perfectly suited to Mickey Spillane’s prose as Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) goes after a gang.
• Lonely Are the Brave (1962) : (seen) Kirk Douglas is a lonesome cowboy who hates fences and seems to belong to another century. He’s pursued by sheriff Walter Matthau. This lovely, understated film shot in high-contrast black and white has a real feeling for the cowboy’s stoic melancholy.
• Macao (1952) : (seen) Josef von Sternberg’s moody action picture (partly reshot by an uncredited Nicholas Ray). Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell star. This was as hot and suggestive as it got in the ’50s.
• Marked Woman (1937) : (seen) Bette Davis in this brutal crime melodrama based on the case in which Lucky Luciano was brought down by his hookers.
• Mikey and Nicky (1976) : Two gangsters (Peter Falk and John Cassavetes) engage in a soul-searching, all-night talkathon. Directed by Elaine May, this explosive comedy is done in the improvisational style of Cassavetes’ own films.
• Miracle Mile (1989): Anthony Edwards makes a date with Mare Winningham, only to discover that nuclear war is an hour away. Directed by Steve DeJarnatt, Miracle posits that Armageddon will look like an epic shopping-mall riot.
• Mixed Blood (1985) : Paul Morrissey’s drug-war revenge comedy is so deadpan that it barely has a pulse. But Marilia Pera is a campy stitch and the dialogue has the loopy, vicious ring of truth.
• Monkey Business (1952): Not the 1931 Marx Brothers film, this gem from Howard Hawks is probably the last great screwball comedy. Scientist Cary Grant and wife Ginger Rogers accidentally drink a youth serum. There’s a young Marilyn Monroe as a bonus.
• The Naked Kiss (1964) : (seen) Constance Towers, a hooker who arrives in a small town pretending to be a champagne saleswoman, reforms. Written and directed by Sam Fuller.
• The Naked Spur (1953) : (seen) James Stewart, seeking a bounty, tries to bring killer Robert Ryan back to justice in Anthony Mann’s complicated morality tale as Janet Leigh, Ralph Meeker, and Millard Mitchell get in the way.
• Near Dark (1987) : (seen) Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire revamp.
• 1918 (1984): Writer Horton Foote turned his memories of small-town Texas into a whole cycle of plays and films; 1918 is the heart of the bunch. Hallie Foote, Matthew Broderick.
• The Ninth Configuration (1980): The new head of an Army nuthatch (Stacy Keach) turns out to be crazier than his wards, but the plot soon gives up in favor of bizarre philosophical exchanges and inscrutable passions.
• On Dangerous Ground (1951) : (seen) Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino. Nicholas Ray’s strikingly composed film is tough, taciturn, and finally very tender.
• One-Eyed Jacks (1960): The only movie Marlon Brando ever directed is the first fully enlightened Western and its portrait of an America in which courage and camaraderie no longer hold sway makes it a neglected precursor to the cinema of Sam Peckinpah.
• Over the Edge (1979) : (seen) Jonathan Kaplan’s juvenile-delinquent fable was the first film to update the James Dean ethos to the permissive ’70s, when forms of teen rebellion had been co-opted. Matt Dillon.
• Paris Blues (1961): (seen) Trombonist Paul Newman and saxman Sidney Poitier wail, Paris seems a doped-up wonderland. Smitten tourists Diahann Carroll and Joanne Woodward argue that they’d all be happier back in the States. Duke Ellington’s score grooves.
• Payday (1973): (seen) This little number leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. Rip Torn does wonders with the role of an addicted, low-rent country singer on tour. The movie, fueled by dead-on dialogue, follows Torn on his bender of self-destruction without message-making.
• Peeping Tom (1960): (seen) Michael Powell effectively destroyed his career with this portrait of a camera-obsessed killer. Powell forces viewers to acknowledge the prurient kick they get from cinematic violence, making them accomplices to Carl Boehm, who murders women to capture their terrified expressions on film.
• Personal Best (1982): Screenwriter Robert Towne’s debut as a director is both a visual celebration of women athletes and an insightful look at the relationship between competing runners Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly. One of the better sports movies ever, it’s also the sole mainstream film of the early ’80s to handle homosexuality without either hysteria or coy timidity.
• The Plague Dogs (1982): (seen) A dark tale of two dogs who escape from a laboratory only to enter an equally fierce landscape, this may be the most disturbing animated film ever made.
• Point Blank (1967): (seen) John Boorman’s gangland melodrama. Lee Marvin comes back for revenge.
• Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) : There’s a pterodactyl living in the Chrysler Building. Cops David Carradine and Richard Roundtree want to know why window washers are losing their heads, and Michael Moriarty is the cheeseball who finds the nest in this hilarious tabloid sci-fi/horror film.
• The Revolt of Job (1983) : A Jewish couple (Ferenc Zenthe, Hedy Temessy) adopt a Christian child (Gabor Feher) just before the Holocaust engulfs them. Quietly harrowing, its real achievement is to show the progress of love without ever resorting to easy, tried-and-true ways.
• Ride the High Country (1962) : (seen) director Sam Peckinpah. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea are former lawmen in the changing West in this drawling, droll, and sometimes violent character study.
• Riot in Cell Block 11 (1954) : Don Siegel’s tense, hard melodrama is far more than just a ”prison movie.”
• The Saga of Anathan (1953) : Josef von Sternberg made this final, bizarre one-shot, filmed in Japanese with a Japanese cast and crew. Based on a true incident in which 12 sailors and a woman were marooned on a desert island, Anatahan is a mocking distillation of the director’s lifelong themes of human folly and the cruelties of romance.
• Saint Jack (1979): Peter Bogdanovich came through with this character study of Jack Flowers (Ben Gazzara), an American pimp in early-’70s Singapore. Denholm Elliott plays a burnt-out businessman.
• Say Amen, Somebody (1983) : (seen) Documentary on gospel singers.
• Secret Honor (1984): Robert Altman’s film of Philip Baker Hall’s one-man show is an outrageous affront to the American Presidency. Hall creates a drunken dark-night-of-the-spleen monologue that’s hilarious and terrifying.
• The Sender (1982) : Zeljko Ivanek gives a sensitive performance as a suicidal young man brought to a psychiatric hospital, where he transfers his bad thoughts to the institute’s population.
• Shack Out On 101 (1955) : A one-set camp classic that gives you Lee Marvin as a Communist short-order cook named Slob, Keenan Wynn doing calisthenics on a diner counter, Whit Bissell recovering from a nervous breakdown, and Terry Moore acting with her pointy ’50s bra as the hash-slinging heroine who finds a Red in every bed. Good bad movies don’t get better than this.
• The Shanghai Gesture (1941) : Josef von Sternberg directed. Ona Munson is proprietress of Shanghai’s most depraved casino, and Gene Tierney is memorably petulant as Poppy. It’s a richly entertaining piece of nonsense.
• Smile (1975) : Michael Ritchie’s behind-the-scenes satire set at a ”Young American Miss” competition was a flop in ‘75, too cynical for those who like beauty pageants, too humane for those who don’t.
• Songwriter (1984): Willie Nelson essentially plays himself as the musician outlawed from the Nashville establishment and his own home, and Kris Kristofferson is the ex-partner he hooks up with again. Alan Rudolph directs with a relaxed touch.
• The Stepfather (1987): Terry O’Quinn is impressively screwy as a bland charmer. Directed by Joseph Ruben, this white-knuckle special never mistakes itself for anything but a taut, creepy-funny B screamer.
• Straight Time (1978) : (seen) Dustin Hoffman plays a compulsive, small-time crook who is released from prison and can’t get the hang of living in the straight world.
• Streamers (1983): (seen) Robert Altman helps detonate the verbal grenades in David Rabe’s play set in a Virginia Army barracks, where several young men nervously await transfer to Vietnam. Matthew Modine leads.
• Streetwise (1985) : (seen) This portrait of homeless Seattle street kids is the rare documentary with the dramatic power of great fiction.
• The Tenant (1976): Roman Polanski directs and stars in this funny thriller about a Polish expatriate who moves into a Paris apartment and begins to have delusions about his sinister neighbors. The third chapter in his apartment-house trilogy (after Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby), this is the most personal.
• They Live by Night (1949): The first film made by Nicholas Ray, later remade by Robert Altman as Thieves Like Us, Night stars Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell as young hicks in love and on the lam.
• Ticket to Heaven (1981): Psychodrama about an ordinary guy (Nick Mancuso) who is seduced into the communal, accepting circle of the Heavenly Children (Moonies).
• Track 29 (1988): This film starts to make sense only if you know the work of its writer, Dennis Potter. Like The Singing Detective, it’s a reality-versus-pop culture black comedy, about a housewife (Theresa Russell) who imagines that the baby she gave up years ago has returned as randy, spooky Gary Oldman.