15 Obscure Movies That Definitely Existed (We Promise)
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Not every great movie can be viewed everywhere, all the time, and all at once, even in the age of multiverses. The opposite is true: many excellent films have vanished from popular culture. This is mostly because, as the recently departed Jean-Luc Godard eloquently observed, “old films” are frequently seen differently than older art pieces.
While vintage paintings or books frequently gain a “classic” status that makes them accessible to new generations, vintage movies are usually written off as “old-fashioned” or as not having the high-tech production values that viewers in the 21st century—especially younger ones—frequently demand.
Sight and Sound: The Cinema of Walter Murch (2019)
Walter Murch is not just one of the best editors in movie history but also has a lot to offer aspiring screenwriters. Initially trained as a sound editor, Francis Ford Coppola should have entrusted The Conversation (1974), the small-scale surveillance thriller he filmed between the two Godfathers, to Murch’s completion.
Gamlet (1964)
The screenplay team David Simon created for The Wire, Gamlet (Russian for Hamlet), may have been the best gathered, aside from “The Murderers’ Row” of writers. Not only did Director Kozintsev have the greatest writer of all time, Shakespeare, but he also possessed his countryman, Boris Pasternak, the creator of Doctor Zhivago and a Russian translator of many other great plays and books.
Gamlet also features the on-screen brilliance of Innokenty Smoktunovsky, who was dubbed the best Hamlet on screen by Laurence Olivier. This Soviet Shakespeare is brought to life by Smoktunovsky’s cinematic soliloquizing and Kozintsev’s roving camerawork. This demonstrates that Communist Russia was just as much a police state as Elizabethan England, the play’s original setting.
Savage (1996)
Our best estimate is that there is an evil corporate head who uses computer technology to create an extraterrestrial invasion in an attempt to become eternal. In the process, he unintentionally turns a guy into a superpowered caveman who kills his family and sets out to get revenge.
To be honest, though, we have no idea. We have witnessed it five times. This is somewhat cryptic, maybe because there isn’t a single star on this straight-to-VHS gem.
Samurai Cop (1991)
A police officer trained in Japan and considered the best American samurai (even though we never see concrete proof of this claim) faces the Yakuza in his native land. Comedy follows. Its performances are so egregious that they make Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place seem like The King’s Speech, which is why it is so obscure.
If we were all watching Samurai Cop, we wouldn’t have time to worry about operating railroads, rearing livestock, or serving as actual police officers.
Mind Game (2004)
Nishi is a loser tired of living a life that he believes is full of missed chances. However, Nishi’s view on life is permanently altered when he happens to run with his childhood sweetheart, and several enraged Yakuza in a restaurant.
This trip takes Nishi to heaven, limbo, and the belly of a whale. Despite being included in several festivals, mind Game has never had an official distribution in the UK or America. It’s amazing; if you ever witness it, don’t hesitate to take advantage of it.
Italianamerican (1974)
Having outlasted his initial 1970s peers, Martin Scorsese is perhaps the best director of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However, Italian American, a documentary about his parents, has not attracted the same attention despite his immense fame. The film, appropriately enough for a film about Italian-American life, opens with supper at their apartment.
The film is one of the finest “home movies” ever made, especially when it concludes with the recipe for Ma Scorsese’s amazing-looking meatballs, a post-credit “reveal” that surpasses anything in the MCU. The title sums up Scorsese’s own dualities: Italian and American, old and modern.
The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953)
Even many Ealing enthusiasts have never watched the finest Ealing comedy, Titfield Thunderbolt. It’s the tale of a village outside of London that might soon lose its only means of transportation—its rail connection to the city and the larger rail system. What follows embodies Ealing and the post-war British attitude as a whole, which was frequently socialist without even recognizing it.
Despite resistance from local chancers who wish to run a bus service instead and doubts about the network, the townsfolk band together to manage the train. As a result, there is a comedic pleasure and, fittingly for a movie about trains, a twin-track denouement that is subtly innovative, much like a lot of Ealing’s other work.
Same Time, Next Year (1978)
Since he hardly “expands” the play, Bernard Slade may have had the simplest time adapting his play into a screenplay. Considering that the action takes place in a log cabin where two individuals who are married to other people get together once a year to recreate their 1951 one-night affair, it would have been very difficult to do so.
Even yet, Same Time, Next Year is a fantastic film that masterfully captures the play’s brilliant language while portraying the passing of the decades through stills of popular actors, ranging from Alan Ladd to Mark Hamill.
Swallows and Amazons (1974)
The film Swallows and Amazons is the 1974 original, not the ridiculous 2016 remake, which shamelessly attempted to “sex up” the novel by adding a spy subplot.
The creators of the remake defended their reworking of the best children’s book ever written by claiming that Arthur Ransome was a spy, maybe for both Russia and Britain. That tale should have been its movie and not crammed into any novel adaptation.
Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) (1963)
Perhaps the greatest suicide film ever created, Le Feu Follet, is the classic French new wave movie that very few people, if any, have ever seen. The story revolves around Alain, an alcoholic who, although attending a recovery center, is nevertheless terrified to go back to the “real world”—that is, the environment that made him start drinking. When he returns, he discovers that everything has changed from what he had recalled, and he ultimately commits suicide.
Like Erik Satie’s, Le Feu Follet’s work is especially potent because of his seemingly straightforward piano compositions, which serve as the unrecognized soundtrack to the 20th century. Though Satie’s music has appeared in several movies, none has been as good as Le Feu Follet. Alain knows he will never achieve the tranquility he wants, but its slow, longing cadences are the aural expression of that realization.
Shoot The Moon (1982)
It is particularly remarkable that Shoot the Moon, which was a part of not one but two imperial stages by renowned directors, is essentially forgotten now. One of the best films ever directed by Alan Parker (known for Bugsy Malone and Midnight Express), it also marks the conclusion of the “Insanity Trilogy” written by playwright Bo Goldman, who previously wrote the outstanding drama Howard and Melvin and adapted One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
With Tom Finney and Diane Keaton portraying a once-loving couple that starts to come apart—in the iconic words of John Updike—”first slowly, then suddenly,” Shoot the Moon could be the finest divorce picture ever filmed. It’s one of the greatest ever box office mysteries, masterfully written, filmed, and played.
That Sinking Feeling (1979)
Bill Forsyth was essentially a one-man Ealing Studios in the early 1980s. Still, he was based in working-class Scotland under Thatcher instead of operating in post-World War II middle-class and upper-class London. Gregory’s Girl (1980), Local Hero (1983), and Comfort and Joy (1984) are his three masterpieces. However, That Sinking Feeling, a movie that not even most of Forsyth’s admirers have seen, launched his career.
“Eight Teenagers, Ninety Sinks, and The Crime of the Century!” was the slogan that encapsulated everything. Four of the youngsters would go on to star in Forsyth’s later films; the teens’ “heist” targets the stainless-steel sinks; the Crime of the Century is everything but, as the best-laid schemes of the teen’s “gang aft agley” (go awry), to use the words of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns.
Ulysses (1967)
Among the best books written in the 20th century is Ulysses. It is also the most “unfilmable” novel, although Joseph Strick’s 1967 version valiantly attempts to show otherwise. It is a naturally shortened adaptation, at a little over two hours, but that shouldn’t detract from its excellent qualities.
The cast of Strick’s film is its best feature. The ideal Leopold Bloom is a youthful Milo O’Shea; Barbara Jefford is sensually perfect as his wife, Molly; and Maurice Roëves is superb as Joyce’s avatar, Stephen Dedalus. They are, in fact, so flawless that if you read the book after watching the movie, they will be the Leo, Molly, and Stephen that you will always have in your head.
Something Weird (1967)
A handsome man has psychic abilities and enters the clairvoyance industry after suffering face burns in an odd pylon accident.
When he genuinely can see into the future, an ugly old witch notices him and offers to make him attractive again in exchange for being her lover. Given that Herschell Gordon Lewis wasn’t particularly well-known, this is regarded as one of his weakest films.
Symbol (2009)
A wrestler is getting ready for a significant match in Mexico. A Japanese guy awakens to find himself imprisoned in a doorless white chamber. That is the extent of what we are willing to part with.
The reason it’s likely been kept secret is that Symbol has sequences and moments that would make even the most ardent movie buff lose their mind. Of course, we think it’s awesome.
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