This week, Criterion and Eclipse’s salute to the late films of an Italian master takes the top spot, opposite a handful of notable classics and a bunch of recent junk.

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5. KATHARINE HEPBURN (1907-2003)



Given her longevity, and her four Academy Awards (out of a total twelve nominations), it's easy to forget what a tough time of it Hepburn had early in her career. With the aristocratic-goddess bone structure that was built to last and the tremulous voice and her no-nonsense regal quality and the tall frame and strapping physicality that went with it, she stood apart from the run of Hollywood ingenues in the 1930s: a Fox News commentator would proclaim her "elitist"-like. (In her first movie, she played John Barrymore's daughter. In her first Oscar-winning role, in Morning Glory, she played an ambitious young actress who cares more about her career than about finding love with Mr. Right -- exactly what the mass audience had been indoctrinated to view as an unsympathetic character.)  She had great successes in such comedies as Bringing Up Baby and Alice Adams, but there was always a love-hate relationship going on with her and the movie audience, and after a string of flops (which included a number of deadly costume dramas but also the inventive and risky Sylvia Scarlett, where she was in male drag for most of the picture) got her designated box office poison by distributor's groups. She retreated to Broadway and came back in the film version of the hit play The Philadelphia Story -- which made her bigger than ever, but in a comedy whose point was partly to bring her down a peg. Her character there has to be humiliated a little so that she can be humanized and become more of a regular Josephine Sixpack, an idea that was also a constant of the many, mostly dull movies she made with Spencer Tracy. She left a more durable image co-starring with Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen -- a comic marriage of mismatched equals -- and in the very fine 1962 version of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. She spent much of her last several years tending to her image and the images of those closest to her in a string of books and interviews.

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Truman Capote's In Cold Blood:  A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences was born to be a movie.  The book was an immediate best-seller on its release in 1966, and plans were afoot to film it almost before it rolled off the presses.  Capote's improbable inspiration was a 300-word piece in the New York Times — then, as now, little more than a blurb — about a murder in a remote corner of Kansas; something about it captivated his imagination, and he spent the next seven years crafting, along with his friend and fellow novelist Harper Lee, a masterful true-crime story about the pointless killing of the Clutter family.  Just as Capote had no idea at the time how obsessed he would become with the story of the Clutters and the murderous drifters, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who took their lives, the public had no idea that the book he wrote about them would launch a new genre of fiction — the 'non-fiction novel' — and stand out as an early example of what would become known as 'the New Journalism'.  It would also cast a huge shadow over Capote's life and career; of all his works, none save Breakfast at Tiffany's would so resonate with the public.

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