A happy birthday to the late Don Murray
A happy birthday to the late Don Murray
--->and...FIRST PREVIEW OF THE FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT 2024
[Before our birthday salute to Don Murray, here is a quick tease with info about our two-part (!), 33-film (!!) “grand finale” FRENCH HAD A NAME FOR IT 2024 extravaganza. A more detailed look at both Part 1 (14 films, screening October 3-7) and Part 2 (19 films, screening November 29-December 3) will be posted here next week. All-festival passes for Part 1 will go on sale via the usual PayPal link process on Monday, August 19. Physical postcards with the full schedule for both Part 1 and Part 2 will arrive at the Roxie soon, and our combined physical program for the entire series will be available after Labor Day. My long-gestating book will be available during Part 2 of the series, with book signings scheduled for December 2 and December 3.
There is much, much more to come regarding all of this next week—I’m predicting that you will all be quite excited when all the details are available…]
TODAY would be Don Murray’s 95th birthday. As many of you may already know, our friend (and earnest but mercurial documentary collaborator!) passed away on February 1st. We were fortunate to be able to screen many of Don’s films in various venues, including a comprehensive tribute series at the Roxie Theater in July 2014—with Don himself in attendance.
Sadly, it’s unlikely that such will happen again for quite some time. The further constriction of repertory cinema into a tradeoff between specialized niches and what might be termed a “mixed arthouse/auteurist-actor retrospective structure”— combined with the accelerating anarchy of streaming services—leaves less and less room for actors like Don.
WE thank the Roxie for providing MCP with several more subsequent opportunities to present Don’s work and our documentary UNSUNG HERO, which remains unreleased due to a myriad of issues. A more lengthy discussion of the film and many of the still-unknown works and unusual events in Don’s life and career is working its way through editing and peer review, and should appear later in the year at a prominent Internet film studies web site. (We’ll keep you posted about that.)
THE good news is that some of Don’s impossible-to-find work has at last begun to surface. In response to his passing, members of the Murray family are working to make more of it more readily available. For example, the entire 26-episode run of his landmark 1968-69 series THE OUTCASTS (the first interracial western on network television) has been released on DVD. (Yes, it’s true, so far just in France: but talks for an American release are underway.)
And a proposal that would compile a generous slice of Don’s rarest and most interesting works—including several of his appearances during the “live TV” era—is being circulated and discussed as a template for how to bring such disparate classic works out of mothballs and into the light of day. (Those who’ve seen Don in “Billy Budd” and “Alas, Babylon” know that these rank amongst his most interesting works; fingers remain crossed that this idea will somehow achieve more traction.)
While Don’s exacting artistic principles may have had some adverse effect on his career (resulting in an unfortunate and unwarranted obscurity), there is genuine hope that his legacy will evolve in the years to come. A combined release of a documentary in conjunction with his memoirs (a heartfelt, empathic and scrupulously honest look at his life and career) is a tantalizing possibility—and I’m hoping to provide assistance to those efforts in 2025, once I’ve returned from “the lost continent” of French film noir. (Hmm…I’d better confirm that my passport is in order!)
SO let’s celebrate the exemplary life of Don Murray: he remains an incomparable role model for socially-conscious filmmaking, and his work with European refugees in the 1950s remains a template for healing the catastrophic effects of war. Keeping his works “in rotation” at repertory cinemas is a must, as his best work (whether as an actor, director, producer and/or writer) was always geared for a collective audience. He sometimes called his works “weapons of mass instruction”—a cheeky but telling phrase, particularly for such an ardent pacifist—but they still have much to impart to all of us.
We need more good men like Don Murray!