Episode 75: 1964 with Ben Mankiewicz
A podcast about the great movie years.
Film critic, historian, and TCM stalwart Ben Mankiewicz joins us, on the eve of a new season of his essential podcast The Plot Thickens (focusing on the life and work of John Ford) to discuss the nuclear meltdowns of Fail-Safe, the political paranoia of Seven Days in May, the complex delights of Marriage, Italian Style, and more of the movies of 1964.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Seven Days in May is streaming on Tubi and is available for digital rental or purchase. The Killers is not streaming anywhere (what the hell!), but we highly recommend the Criterion Blu-ray, which includes not only this film but the 1946 version we discussed.
The Train is on Hoopla, Tubi, and PlutoTV, is available for digital rental or purchase, and has a crackerjack 4K Blu-ray from KL Studio Classics. Marriage, Italian Style is on Kanopy, Hoopla, and Metrograph at Home, or you can rent it from Amazon.
And Fail-Safe is available for digital rental or purchase, or on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
If you’d like to hear our last pass at 1964, with comedian and Mystery Science Theater 3000 alum Frank Coniff, you can listen to that here.
You can follow Ben on Instagram here and Twitter here; you can listen to The Plot Thickens here, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can follow Jason on Blusky, Instagram, and Letterboxd - where you'll find his lists of all the movies on every episode of the show (including this one). You can follow Mike on Instagram, Blusky and Twitter/X/whatever.