Film of the Day | MovieSteve

Salute

2023-10-292014-04-03 by Steve

Peter Norman, Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium, Mexico 1968

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 April Martin Luther King assassinated, 1968 On this day in 1968, the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. He’d gone there to intervene in a strike of black sanitary public works employees, who were employed on zero-hours contracts, while their white counterparts were paid by the day, irrespective of hours worked. There had been a bomb threat against King’s plane en route and he was clearly expecting trouble. On 3 April, at Mason Temple, he delivered his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech – “Like anybody, I would like to live a … Read more

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

2023-10-292014-04-02 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 3 April Jesse James dies 1882 On this day in 1882, the outlaw Jesse Woodson James died. Born in Missouri, he had come to prominence as the leader of the James-Younger gang having served as a Confederate guerrilla in the American Civil with his brother Frank. Continuing in peacetime the activities that had been sanctioned during the war, he robbed banks, trains, stagecoaches. His gang was most prolific from the years immediately after the War, which had ended in 1865, and it continued successfully until 1876 when its raid on a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, failed, resulting in the death or … Read more

Nymphomaniac: Vol. I

2023-10-292014-04-01 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 April Serge Gainsbourg born, 1928 On this day in 1928 Lucien Ginsburg was born, to refugees from the Russian revolution who had fled in 1917. Later, he would change his name from Ginsburg to Gainsbourg to reflect his admiration for the British landscape painter Gainsborough, and from Lucien to Serge to honour his Russian heritage. Originally intending to be a painter, Gainsbourg wound up supporting himself by playing piano in bars and so entered the world of music more by accident than design. However, once he realised he had something of a knack for chansons in the Jacques Brel style, … Read more

Our Idiot Brother

2023-10-292014-03-31 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 April April Fool’s Day In many countries, today is April Fool’s Day. It’s unclear where this day – nowadays often dedicated to the playing of practical jokes – has its origin, though there was a medieval Feast of Fools (28 December) and a Roman festival of Hilaria (25 March).It is also possible that the old custom of celebrating the new year on 25 March (the weeklong holiday would end on 1 April) is involved somehow. Another theory sees Persia as the source of April Fool’s Day, the Sizdah Bedar tradition of going out and having fun on 1 April going … Read more

This Film Is Not Yet Rated

2023-10-292014-03-30 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 March Motion Picture Code introduced, 1930 On this day in 1930, the Hollywood studios introduced a new code which laid out what was and was not acceptable in movies. It was a system of self-regulation which a scared Hollywood adopted after a series of widely reported scandals and after a number of risqué movies had prompted numerous states to introduce censorship bills. Rather than navigate through all this restrictive detail – what was fine in Iowa might not be in Texas – Hollywood bought off the objectors by introducing a code that satisfied nearly everybody. Working from a list of … Read more

Parkland

2023-10-292014-03-29 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 March Ronald Reagan shot, 1981 On this day in 1981, after just over two months in office, President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton. His would-be assassin was John Hinckley Jr, whose attempt on the president’s life seemed to be part of a plan to impress Jodie Foster, with whom he’d become obsessed after seeing her in the film Taxi Driver. Hinckley’s intention was not to kill Reagan but the President – he’d been focused on killing President Jimmy Carter when Carter was in office until being arrested on a firearms charge. Reagan just happened to be the … Read more

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

2023-10-292014-03-28 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 29 March First batch of Coca Cola made, 1886 On this day in 1886, Colonel John Pemberton made his first batch of Coca-Cola. It was a non-alcoholic version of his popular Pemberton’s French Wine Coca and he introduced it because Atlanta, where he was based, had just announced the prohibition of alcohol. Pemberton’s French Wine Coca contained alcohol mixed with psychoactive coca, caffeine-containing kola nut and the aromatic aphrodisiac damiana. Pemberton had originally formulated it as a way of weaning himself off an addiction to morphine he’d picked up after being injured in the Civil War. Like the European Vin Mariani, … Read more

The Charge of the Light Brigade

2023-10-292014-03-27 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 March Crimean War escalates, 1854 On this day in 1854, Britain and France declared war against Russia. Russia and the Ottoman Empire had been at war since October the previous year, when conflict had broken out ostensibly about the rights of Christians in the Holy Land – being restricted by Muslim Ottomans and being protected by Orthodox Russian if you accept the Russians’ diplomatic rhetoric. In fact the war was about territory, the Turks being on the decline after centuries of dominance in the region, the Russians keen to continue their expansion west into Europe and particularly south to the … Read more

Mulberry St

2023-10-292014-03-26 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 March Typhoid Mary quarantined, 1915 On this day in 1915, Mary Mallon was quarantined for the second and final time. A carrier of typhoid who remained healthy herself, Mallon’s career as an itinerant cook meant she was perfectly placed to spread the disease. As she moved from position to position after arriving in the US from Ireland, she spread typhoid at every kitchen she worked in. 49 people came down with typhoid; three died. She resolutely refused to give any samples to health researchers, claiming that since she was healthy herself, she couldn’t be spreading illness. She had been quarantined … Read more

Die Another Day

2023-10-292014-03-25 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 March AE Housman born, 1859 On this day in 1859, Alfred Edward Housman was born, in Bromsgrove, UK. Most famous for his poetry cycle The Shropshire Lad, Housman was the son of a solicitor. His mother died when he was 12, on his birthday in fact, and Alfred became a bookish withdrawn child who excelled at academic subjects. He won a scholarship to Oxford, where he failed to get a degree, thanks to a mix of indolence, arrogance and infatuation with a fellow student, Moses Jackson. In spite of a lack of degree Housman wrote and published academic works about … Read more