If You Like Mad Men, You Might Also Like…
If AMC’s hit TV series Mad Men has you hungering for similar kinds of stories (and style), or you fear you may have to suffer through detox when the current season ends, here are eight movie suggestions that bear some similarities to the show. Put them in your rental queue, buy the DVDs, or check the screening schedule for your local arthouse cinema. All of these are quite good and well worth watching, whenever you’re able to track them down.
1. Some Came Running (1958)
Sinatra’s war veteran returns to his hometown carrying baggage and secrets, which makes him no different from most of the other residents. Maybe they’re all just looking for comfort, but that’s awfully hard to come by. (Bonus feature: Dean Martin in a cowboy hat throughout.)
2. Written on the Wind (1956)
A heavily, strikingly stylized depiction of the intersection of family life and business, set in the world of ’50s Texas oil barons. Money, sex, and power all get a good workout here.
3. Contempt (1963)
What happens when the love you once shared with another goes sour, when you can no longer make each other happy, or even please yourself? A married couple struggles not to drift so terribly far apart, as he settles for script doctor work on a major movie production, and she tries not to settle for life as an object of beauty, merely to be coveted.
4. The Red Desert (1964)
The wife of a successful engineer finds herself increasingly alienated from the modern world around her, and flirts with the possibility of an affair. One of the most visually striking and expressionistic films ever made; it’s meticulously crafted, and the mysteries it holds are dense and intriguing.
5. The Leopard (1963)
This captures a precise historical moment, and a society in transition, in its story of an Italian aristocratic family’s declining fortunes. The hopes and dreams and fears of its characters are deftly probed even before the movie’s extraordinary final third, which all takes place at a ball room dance, and finds Burt Lancaster’s patriarch surrounded by people, yet lost in his own little world.
6. Revolutionary Road (2008)
The opening sequence is over the top, and this could’ve ended several minutes earlier (on a more devastatingly ambiguous moment), but otherwise it’s a strong and heartbreaking portrait of marriage, career, and conformity.
7. Two For The Road (1967)
Married couple Albert Finney & Audrey Hepburn fall in and out (and in, and out…) of love as they navigate the ’50s and ’60s together. Expertly handles shifts back and forth in time, as well as shifts in the leads’ relationship and emotional states.
8. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Three veterans return from war and struggle to readjust to civilian life and work amidst changing times. Longer than it needs to be, but quite sincere and affecting.
