Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Walt Disney’s classic Mary Poppins are among 25 titles that have been added to the US National Film Registry.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Michael Moore’s documentary Roger and Me have also been chosen for preservation at the Library of Congress.
Other new additions include John Wayne film The Quiet Man (1952) and sci-fi favorite Forbidden Planet (1956).
This year’s selections bring the number of films in the collection to 625.
The registry was instigated in 1989 to ensure that notable titles from America’s movie history would be preserved for posterity.
The films admitted, which must be at least 10 years old, are selected from hundreds of titles nominated by the public.
Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction is among 25 titles that have been added to the US National Film Registry
“The National Film Registry stands among the finest summations of more than a century of extraordinary American cinema,” said the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington.
Michael Moore said that he was “grateful” his 1989 film, about the economic decline of his Michigan hometown, had been deemed culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.
Also admitted this year are 1946 film noir Gilda starring Rita Hayworth, 1960 western The Magnificent Seven, 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg and 1983’s The Right Stuff.
A Virtuous Vamp, a 1919 silent film starring Constance Talmadge, and Daughter of Dawn, a 1920 romance with an all-Native American cast, are the oldest of this year’s new additions.
The inclusion of Mary Poppins coincides with the release of Saving Mr. Banks, a drama about how the Disney film came to be made.
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Saving Mr. Banks – a film about the long and difficult process of making the Disney musical Mary Poppins – had its world premiere in London on Sunday night.
The film, which stars Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, officially brought this year’s BFI London Film Festival to a close.
Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks walked the red carpet in Leicester Square to the delight of hundreds of fans who had braved heavy rain earlier in the day.
The film focuses on the real-life battle of wills between prickly author PL Travers, played by Emma Thompson, and Walt Disney over the movie rights to her famous literary creation.
Directed by John Lee Hancock, the film is already being tipped for Oscar success.
Saving Mr. Banks is a film about the long and difficult process of making the Disney musical Mary Poppins
This year’s BFI London Film Festival kicked off with maritime thriller Captain Phillips, a true story in which Tom Hanks plays a ship’s captain taken hostage by Somali pirates in 2009.
Speaking about his role as Walt Disney, Tom Hanks said: “In a lot of ways Mary Poppins was the crowning achievement of everything he did, it won all the Academy Awards, it was a huge monster hit and it was the last movie that he truly was hands-on.”
In reality, Walt Disney had spent some 20 years in pursuit of the film rights to Mary Poppins. The main focus of the film is the two weeks in 1961 that PL Travers reluctantly spent with Walt Disney in Los Angeles as he tried to win her over.
During the visit she was played songs by the Sherman brothers, which ended up in the 1964 film, such as A Spoonful of Sugar and Let’s Go Fly a Kite.
PL Travers, who died in 1996, so disliked the Oscar-winning Disney production that she never allowed any more Mary Poppins books to be adapted into films.
The cast of Saving Mr. Banks also includes Irish actor Colin Farrell and English actress Ruth Wilson, who play the parents of the young PL Travers in 1906 Australia.
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