Smart Words About Cinema
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Vincent is losing his mistress, his factory and his health. In the dark night of the bourgeois soul he goes to see the wife he’s already lost because of the mistress. Embarrassed by his needs, discomfited by the sudden knowledge that another man has just left his [...]
The original French title of Going Places is Les valseuses, French slang for “The Testicles” (“The Nuts” would be its English counterpart). That’s a pretty accurate description of Bertrand Blier’s characters, a pair of aimless, amoral twenty-something buddies bouncing (or escaping) from one situation to another, all instigated by their own mix of childlike bad [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 66-67, March 1981] MTN 55′s Tracking Shot noted: “Is that the best way? Novelist Patricia Highsmith saw her Strangers on a Train become a film classic under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock, but she rejected Hitch’s offer to direct her This Sweet Sickness. Claude Miller inherits the job.” Aha, but wait. [...]