Smart Words About Cinema
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] Joan Darling’s feature-film debut as a director is mostly disappointing, a college-age love story frequently indistinguishable from other misty, slowmo entries in the genre. Boy (William Katt, Carrie‘s prom date), who is hip on Dante and tired of careless sexual flings, becomes smitten with girl (Susan Dey), [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] In the final shot of A Bridge Too Far, a Dutch widow, accompanied by a doctor, her children, and a cart loaded with a few precious possessions, moves slowly across the entire width of the Scope screen, leaving behind her home in Arnhem, ravaged by the worst [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] Charles Bronson—who plays a Soviet KGB agent in Telefon—is introduced to us in the act of coaching a Russian boys’ hockey team. “How do you make sure you are the first one to hit the puck?” he asks them rhetorically. The answer is, Don’t watch your opponent, [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] If I didn’t already know Robert Aldrich was an intelligent filmmaker, I’d have a hard time guessing it from The Choirboys. From the leering flatulation of the opening titles–a stained-glass window announcing “The Choirboys” with a gloved fist smashing through in freeze frame, while a chanting chorus [...]
[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 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 Movietone News 57, February 1978] September 30, 1976 Could you tell me what Kings of the Road is about and how you came to make it? It’s a film about two men and they’re making a journey across, along the border of East Germany from the North to the South, which is [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] I was going to put Looking for Mr. Goodbar on my end-of-the-year list as “Best Film of 1967.” But although Richard Brooks’ self-consciously flashy techniques are at least that dated, I think even a decade ago his shallow, cheating approach to both subject and audience would have [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] Back in February, Marty Scorsese privately screened a rough cut of New York, New York that lasted four-and-a-half hours. The film as finally released is little more than half that length. We can assume that Scorsese knew he’d never get a four-hour movie released commercially. We can [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] Dersu Uzala is about a man who’s getting old and can’t live as he always has, who’s facing life’s end. As a forebodingly “late” film by an aging director, it might also be about Kurosawa himself. Kurosawa was born in 1910, which happens to be the first [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 57, February 1978] • Archetypal cinema: the opening of Star Wars. The foreword plunges us, in media res, into the serial of our moviegoing lives. Then the camera drops its field of view, a planet heaves into sight to lend scale to the universe, and a spacecraft angles into frame [...]