Parallax View

In honor of the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival, Parallax View offers a festival flashback: the Movietone News report from the 20th SFIFF. [Originally published in Movietone News 53, January 1977] The 20th San Francisco International Film Festival was … lively. A half-dozen outstanding films from Europe were perhaps the most newsworthy events (and [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980] It is appropriate that they just took “There she is, Miss America” away from Bert Parks. I too have been deprived of the opportunity to sing my same old song again. One could say rhetorically that after 1978 the movies had nowhere to go but up; but [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979] You know and I know, and each knows that the other knows, that 1978 was the worst year for movies since sound came in, so let’s not belabor the subject. Living through it was labor enough. Apart from the superfluousness of such a gesture, one reason I [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] I felt a little off-balance throughout film year 1977, and it took me most of that time to figure out why. Even eccentric filmwatchers fall into patterns of expectation, and my Platonic Ideal of eccentricity was taking a beating. Too many of the big, heavily financed productions [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 53, January 1977] 1976 is a year I’m very pleased to see the back of. Several especially nice things happened to me during the past twelvemonth, but an oversupply of cloaca also insisted on hitting the fan with dispiriting frequency, and a good deal of it was cinematic cloaca. Any [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 48, February 1976] ‘B’ MOVIES. By Don Miller. Curtis Books. 350 pages. $1.50. KINGS OF THE Bs. Edited by Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn. Dutton. 561 pages. $6.95. “If some bright new critic should awaken the world to the merits of Joseph Lewis in the near future,” Andrew Sarris once [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977] THE NEW WAVE. By James Monaco. Oxford University Press. 372 pages. $15.95. The French New Wave is the richest single “trend” in the cinema of the second half of this century, and the only aspect of film history that presently seems to have much relevance to the [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August, 1978] VISIONARY FILM. By P. Adams Sitney. Oxford University Press. 452 pages. $13.95. ABSTRACT FILM AND BEYOND. By Malcolm LeGrice. The MIT Press. 160 pages. $12.50. THE CUBIST CINEMA. By Standish D. Lawder. New York University Press. 265 pages. $11.75 (paperback). THE ESSENTIAL CINEMA. Edited by P. Adams [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976] One tends to think of Luis Buñuel’s “early” career in terms of long desert spaces between highly personal landmarks: almost two decades of relative anonymity between the collaboration with Dalí—Un Chien andalou (1929) and L’Age d’ôr (1930)—and the explosive resurfacing occasioned by Los olvidados (1950), and then [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] I believe the really good people would be reasonably successful in any circumstance; that to be very poor and very beautiful is most probably a moral failure much more than an artistic success. Shakespeare would have done well in any generation because he would have refused to [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] Céline and Julie Go Boating just may bring Jacques Rivette from the background to the foreground in the continuing history of French New Wave directors. Rivette is another of the Cahiers du cinéma writers who made his way from critic to director but, at least until now, [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980] Russ Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens is a rowdy, funky, and occasionally obnoxious comedy which just happens to be one of the livelier entertainments of 1979. Meyer, of course, has long been known as an uncommonly talented filmmaker on the burlesque-house side of the industry, [...]

By Peter Hogue and Marion Bronson [Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980] Luna is just a word, a magic word, by means of which everyone can project his or her own dream. The moon, of course, is a very rich symbol, but the only reference to it I‘d accept is the simplest one: [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 66-67, March 1981] Honeysuckle Rose is apparently so sure of its audience that it isn’t the least concerned about having a good story to tell. The film, of course, is a vehicle for Willie Nelson, but regardless of whether you’re one of this popular singer’s fans, you can’t help feeling [...]

[Originally published in Movietone News 66-67, March 1981] The Black Stallion is more pretty than beautiful, more contrived than inspired. In reporting on the San Francisco Film Festival last fall, I wrote: “The Black Stallion, directed by Carroll Ballard for Francis Coppola’s Omni Zoetrope, was clearly a success with its ‘hometown’ audience. It’s an adaptation [...]