Read This! Book Excerpt: "Cinema '62: The Greatest Year at the Movies"

This week on the show, we were pleased to welcome film critic Stephen Farber and film programmer Michael McClellan, who made the case for 1962 as the best year for movies—a case they make eloquently, and at length, in their terrific book “Cinema ‘62: The Greatest Year at the Movies.” They were kind enough to let us share an excerpt from the book’s introduction below; if you’d like to buy the book (and we highly recommend doing so), you can do that here, and you can use the discount code RCINEMA62 to get free shipping and 30% off.

From the book:

At the end of the studio era and before the full-blown emergence of the New Hollywood, 1962 stands out as a pivotal year in film history. Many movie buffs have anointed 1939—the year of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz—as the greatest in cinema history. Other critics have enshrined other years or decades as their personal favorites. But the honor should really belong to 1962, a single year that saw an explosion of provocative cinema that has never been equaled. Although 1939 may have been the golden year of the Hollywood studio era, with a plentiful number of high-quality entertainments, the output that year did not come close to matching the breadth and depth of movies released in 1962.