Smart Words About Cinema
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] The consistency of Young Frankenstein and Silent Movie have served to make us forget how embarrassingly unfunny Mel Brooks can be when he’s off his feed. It’s a long, hard road to the first genuinely good laugh in High Anxiety; and, though the film picks up after [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] The Turning Point is a gentle, properly humble film whose joys are nearly always thespian rather than cinematic. The oohs and aahs that have marked response to this film in just about every quarter are pitiable, since they only serve to overrate the film and prepare the [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] Corey Allen is best remembered as the Nick Ray actor whose sleeve got hung up on a car door handle during the chickie run in Rebel without a Cause. Last year he directed a Roger Corman programmer about moonshiners and badder cats in the B-movie South where [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] Sydney Pollack has carted the same thematic luggage down the road so consistently that running a standard, connect-the-dots literary tracer through his feature works is relatively easy. Pollack has concerned himself not so much with issues of death as with things that are dead, or so close [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] 1969: That Cold Day in the Park: Lazslo Kovacs’s camera bridges one sequence to another with frequent use of focus-in/blur-out visuals, stylistically underscoring the film’s dual theme: the ambiguity and the dissolution of personality. It’s a film whose greatest strength lies in its atmosphere. Altman’s and Kovacs’s [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] While an attendant whose deformed face and skin make him look like the Elephant Man pulls levers like those that start an amusement park ride, an ectoplasmic spermatozoon plunges squirming into a pool, making its way toward a globe that gradually crumbles, until we take the viewpoint [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] Bahia both is and isn’t the kind of film you’d expect from the maker of Black Orpheus. Like the earlier film, it was made in Brazil and focuses on a society of New World blacks; it is intimately bound up with music and with the joyous dance [...]
[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] Whatever Lillian Hellman’s attitude about herself may be—in Pentimento and elsewhere—Fred Zinnemann’s Julia is at pains to glamorize her. Not only is she played by a woman much more attractive than she ever was; her struggling pre-fame days are also recounted in glossy, romantic terms that revere [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] Give Jon Peters full credit, he’s honest with his audience. At the beginning of A Star Is Born a voice called out advising “all you assholes out there” that the show wasn’t about to get under way until everyone quieted down, and Jon’n’Barbra proceeded to treat their [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] The Lacemaker (La Dentellière) was shown in the 1977 New York Film Festival. Claude Goretta, the director, and Isabelle Huppert, who costarred with Yves Beneyton, were interviewed before the film had opened commercially. The Lacemaker is the story of a young girl, employed at a beauty parlor, [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] Updating the setting of de Sade’s novel, Pasolini’s Salò proposes that in the final months of fascist rule in northern Italy a quartet of authorities (a noble, an administrator, a banker, and a monsignor) sign a pact, intermarry with one another’s daughters to ensure solidarity, systematically capture [...]
By Norman Hale [Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] Max Ophuls, the great European film director, once observed in conversation with a friend that different love relationships are expressed by different tokens: traditionally a man gives fresh-cut flowers to his mistress, but a potted plant to his wife.* Social rituals with their attendant [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] I saw Straight Time on a double feature, and didn’t know quite what to make of it. Next day, I remembered the second feature vividly and Straight Time almost not at all. Yet I had trouble finding anything specifically wrong with this Chinese dinner of a movie. [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] In intent and intensity, Saturday Night Fever falls somewhere between West Side Story and Mean Streets. The former film is specifically evoked by the dwelling on Romeo and Juliet. When disco king Tony Manero takes his prospective dance-contest partner Stephanie Mangano out to tea, she plays a [...]