Blow-Up

Michelangelo Antonioni had the grass in Maryon Park painted green for the tone he wanted: in a film testing how far seeing can be trusted, nature in frame is arranged too. The source story is Julio Cortázar’s Las babas del diablo, renamed Blow-Up afterwards to tie it to the picture, so the shared name came after the film. In America the Production Code board refused MGM a seal over frontal nudity; MGM released it through a subsidiary, Premier Productions, and played it unsealed, and the Legion of Decency condemned it. The Yardbirds club scene was shot at Elstree on a replica of the Ricky-Tick club, 12 to 14 October 1966. Herbie Hancock wrote the score. At Cannes in 1967 it took the festival’s top prize at the time, the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film; at the first National Society of Film Critics awards it won best picture and best director. It was nominated at the 39th Academy Awards for directing and original screenplay and at the 21st BAFTAs for best British film, colour cinematography and colour art direction, winning neither. A good fit if you want a mystery built on evidence that dissolves the more it is enlarged, not on proving a murder. Not for anyone waiting for a solution after the enlargements; the question stays open.