Film historian Karina Longworth‘s “You Must Remember This” podcast has been beloved by cinephiles ever since it launched 11 years ago to explore “the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century.” The latest season, “The Old Man Is Still Alive,” is Longworth’s most enlightening and entertaining to date. A deep dive into the late-career transformations of Hollywood legends, including Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and Otto Preminger, “The Old Man Is Still Alive” explores how veteran directors met the challenges of an evolving industry and changing tastes with varying degrees of artistic and commercial success.
The idea for the season began with a 2023 trip to the Cinémathèque Française, where Longworth saw Vincente Minnelli’s “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” for the first time. “I thought of myself as a big Minnelli fan, and I had not even known this movie existed,” Longworth told IndieWire. “I went to see it by myself and had a very powerful experience. The fact that I didn’t have anybody to talk to about it afterward made me feel like I had to find some way to communicate that this movie exists, and it’s incredible.”
The following summer, Longworth found herself in the Cinémathèque again for a screening of John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” and the idea for a podcast season began to crystallize. “Connecting those two films together felt really important to me,” Longworth said of “Liberty Valance” and “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” “They’re both from 1962, and they’re both made by guys who are more associated with their movies of the 1940s but were working into the 1960s and, in Minnelli’s case, even into the 1970s and making some of their riskiest and most interesting movies during that time.”
Once Longworth had Ford and Minnelli, then it became a question of thinking about who else to include, and she quickly found that there were many other directors who created fascinating work at the very moment the film business and audiences were largely abandoning them. One of the great pleasures of “The Old Man is Still Alive” is Longworth’s articulate defense of films that have been unjustly reviled or ignored, like Billy Wilder‘s 1978 gem “Fedora,” a poison pen letter to Hollywood that makes “Sunset Boulevard” look like “La La Land.”
“Another one that I hope people will seek out is William Wyler’s ‘The Liberation of L.B. Jones,’ which was certainly not on my radar before I started this season,” Longworth said. “It’s an extremely daring movie for Wyler to make, not just as his last film but as his follow-up to ‘Funny Girl.’ There’s rarely a juxtaposition of two things that are so different right next to each other in one filmmaker’s career.” Longworth also points to George Stevens’ “The Greatest Story Ever Told” as underrated, though rumor has it a restoration is in the works. “Hopefully that film is in line to be reevaluated,” she said.
Longworth’s own reevaluations are eloquently articulated and consistently eye-opening, especially when she goes against the grain of calcified wisdom — as she often does throughout “The Old Man is Still Alive.” “There aren’t a lot of big doorstop books published about film directors these days, and when they are, they tend to be by the same half-dozen people, and they are not women,” Longworth said. “So I always feel like my perspective is a little different. Even putting gender aside, a lot of these directors have not been talked about the way I’m talking about them, going past the greatest hits to talk about what happened after.”
Longworth’s scholarship extends beyond her podcast to public programs that expand on her work; one of the most significant of these is an ongoing repertory series at Vidiots in Los Angeles consisting of double features programmed by Longworth in conjunction with “The Old Man Is Still Alive.” On Saturday, March 15, Vidiots will screen Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” and “Avanti!”; previous double bills included Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” and “Torn Curtain” and Minnelli’s “Gigi” and “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”
“The idea was to show a certified banger, one of the director’s most popular films, with one of the later, stranger movies,” Longworth said. “The idea is that hopefully people will come for both and have a richer understanding of who these filmmakers are.” This weekend, Longworth will also present a series of films at the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, California, among which is Peter Bogdanovich’s delightful (and criminally maligned in its time) musical comedy “At Long Last Love.”
“I think there are a lot of interesting parallels between that movie and what I’m talking about on this season of ‘You Must Remember This,’” Longworth said. “I always think of Bogdanovich as a bridge character between the old Hollywood and the new.” Speaking of the New Hollywood, Longworth also sees parallels between what her subjects went through in the 1960s and 1970s and what octogenarian auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Michael Mann are going through now.
“Look at Coppola sweeping the Razzies for ‘Megalopolis,’” Longworth said. “Luckily, he has a sense of humor and wrote a really elegant response to it. But right now, in Hollywood and in culture in general, there’s an appetite for attacking people who are perceived as stepping beyond their boundaries. There’s a desire to punish excess, and unfortunately, that leads to very homogenous filmmaking from the studios. But guys like Scorsese and Coppola and Schrader and Mann have an understanding that every film could be their last, so they’re really going for it, and I saw that in some of these earlier filmmakers as well.”
There’s no question where Longworth stands on the spectrum between conformist thinking and auteurist risk-taking. “I’ll take a thousand ‘Ferrari’s over most of what comes out on a weekly basis,” she said.
“Avanti!” and “The Apartment” will screen at Vidiots on March 15. “At Long Last Longworth” runs March 8-13 at the Frida Cinema. “You Must Remember This: The Old Man Is Still Alive” is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other platforms.
