Smart Words About Cinema
Movietone News contributor
[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 60-61, February 1979] BIG BAD WOLVES: Masculinity in the American Film. By Joan Mellen. Pantheon. 368 pages. $12.95. If memory serves, Professor Joan Mellen is not a fan of Pauline Kael’s, but the two ladies have things in common. Both have the (fortunately) rare gift of being simultaneously very readable [...]
[Originally published in slightly different form in Movietone News 51, August 1976] Nicolas Roeg’s extraordinary film is, amongst other things, a scathing satire and a science-fiction tragedy. Even the title is multi-layered. The hero is an extraterrestrial visitant who literally falls out of the sky; “falling to earth” implies a painful coming to senses; and [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977] Billy Wilder’s chief motives in making the third film version of the 1928 Hecht–MacArthur Broadway smash were plain, and he admitted them: he wanted a box-office hit, badly, and this had all the elements for a 1974 killing. It’s a buddy story, a nostalgia piece, a celebration [...]
[Originally published in slightly different form in Movietone News 55, September 1977] I can’t recall ever being so disappointed by a film. I was surprised. After all, the black, cruel jokes Chaplin is so fond of tend to appeal to me more than the pathos; the true story of Henri Landru is a fascinating one; comedies of murder have often beguiled me, from [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 56, November 1977] Children have joined the cinema’s minorities, what with Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, Taxi Driver, Small Change, Bugsy Malone et al.; and if the movement has an on-screen leader it’s surely the extraordinary Jodie Foster. What, one wonders, will happen to this child in the next [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 56, November 1977] Who’s the biggest box-office star at the moment? Not Redford, not Newman, not Eastwood, but, it would seem, the Prince of Darkness, whose presence in or on the periphery of a large number of popular movies in recent years has led to what Variety might call a [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] Sleuth and Murder on the Orient Express. More than puzzles are to be teased out in these two jokey, backward-looking thrillers. Two ultra-British subjects are handled by two very American directors, and whodunit – or whodunwhat – is only one of many queries to be resolved. In [...]
[Originally published in slightly different form in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] Asked to name the absolute quintessence of the late-1960s film hero, whom would you choose? Benjamin Braddock? Antoine Doinel? Cool Hand Luke? Rooster Cogburn? Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid? Frank Bullitt? Wyatt or Billy from Easy Rider? My vote would go to none of [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] As everyone must know by now, the title of Steven Spielberg’s science-fiction extravaganza refers to an actual meeting with an extraterrestrial visitant; or, as the advertising more directly puts it, “contact.” “Contact” is very much what the movie is all about. No film since 2001: A Space [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] I don’t know anything about Alfred Sole beyond the fact that he has described himself as “a good Catholic boy,” and barely a single name on either side of the cameras in this extraordinary film of his was familiar to me (though I recognized bald-headed, bespectacled Gary [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979] Seek and thou shalt find … or not, as the case may be. There is by now a good deal of useful critical writing available in English on the work of every film buff’s favourite genius maudit, Nicholas Ray. But Ray experts fall curiously taciturn on the [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979] If your friendly neighbourhood TV station or film society is tonight showing an uncut print of Clair’s And Then There Were None or Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution, you need not miss such delights in favour of Death on the Nile. But if not, you could do worse [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979] Having ripped off just about every other kind of commercial movie, Michael Winner has inevitably turned his attention to the Bond-style action thriller. Since the Bond films have been ripping themselves off for the past dozen or so years, the pilferings involved in Firepower don’t seem too [...]