Ribbon of Memes

It's been over a century and a quarter since the first moving picture was committed to celluloid - the "ribbon of dreams", as Orson Welles mellifluously intoned.

And so, welcome, one and all, to Ribbon of Memes, a new podcast in which Roger Bell_West and Nick Marsh supply grateful listeners hot takes about films considered masterpieces by critics or filmgoers in general.

The rules: we choose one "masterpiece" from every year from the earliest days of cinema to our dreadful modern dystopia. Do we agree these films are classics? Are we entertained? Did we even understand what the film was trying to say? The questions are endless!*

We start in 1973 (for reasons explained in the first podcast) and progress vaguely chronologically (unless we think of another film that makes an interesting comparison to the one we have just seen, or are otherwise distracted by shiny new things).

Yes, that's right, we decided that what the world really needed was two more uninformed middle-aged white guys telling the world about media largely produced by similar people. Find out whether we were right or not herein!

*Actually, no, that's most of them.

We're also on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

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Marty (1955) 26 April 2025

It was intended as a tax write-off, but ended up winning four Academy Awards and the first ever Palme d'Or. Nick and Rger look at Ernest Borgnine's big break in Marty (1955).

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The story about the tax write-off isn't well documented, and we relied heavily on the "Lights, Camera, Tax Break" epispde of Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales audio production.

Tags: drama

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 04:29pm on 26 April 2025

    MacCarthyism began to burn out in 1954 with censure from the Senate and Edward R Murrow's famous TV speech. "Tailgunner Joe" died in 1957. I don't know how active the blacklists were by this point.

    'Kitchen sink drama' was a term in British theatre from John Osbourne's LOOK BACK IN ANGER in 1956. It probably peaks in the early 60s (before the wave of 'swinging 60s' and the high power absurdism of the later 60s).

  2. Posted by Nick Marsh at 07:09pm on 04 May 2025

    The point I understood was the beginning of the end was the takedown of MaCarthy by Senator Joseph Welch ('Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last, have you left no sense of decency?'), during televised hearings in 1954; I think Murrow had been pretty vocal about MaCarthy before this though.

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