Tag: Dustin Hoffman

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Papillon

Written by Richard T. Jameson September 19, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 29, January-February 1974]

Like Franklin Schaffner’s previous picture Nicholas and Alexandra, Papillon improves markedly in the second half. Not that, in the manner of a true roadshow, Papillon has an intermission (at least not in its present berth at the Coliseum—don’t take bets on the second run). And in some respects that’s what it looked to be, a roadshow: 150-minutes running time, reported $13,000,000 cost, bestseller origin. But the producers’ spectacular ambitions are undercut time and again by two factors: by the fact that the essential dramatic interest inheres in the grotesquely confined agonies of one man and, beyond that, in the unlikely (which is to say, in entertainment terms, likely) friendship and love of two men; and by the very nature of Franklin Schaffner as a director—that he is also one of the producers serves not so much to contradict my idea of Schaffner the director as to index an ambivalence that is the richest source of tension in the movie. Schaffner came from TV, and while he has few of the obnoxious visual affectations of the TV-trained director, he tends to restrict the most significant actions and relationships in his films to spatial arenas that could be served very adequately by the tube rather than the Panavision screen: the real convention hustle in The Best Man takes place in hotel rooms, hallways, and basements; the tensest moments in his strange and (to me) very sympathetic medieval mini-epic The War Lord are confined to a small soundstage clearing or that besieged tower; the battle scenes in Patton are hardly clumsy, but the real show is George C. Scott; and Nicholas and Alexandra comes alive only after the royal family has been penned up under the watchful eyes of Ian Holm and then Alan Webb, far from the splendor of St. Petersburg or the shambles of the Great War.

Review: Alfredo, Alfredo

Written by Richard T. Jameson June 7, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 31, April 1974]

Dustin Hoffman is seen without being heard in Pietro Germi’s Alfredo, Alfredo, but the disadvantage is minor, so adroitly does he adapt himself to the characteristic and very photographable behavioral style of the harried Germi male, made iconically vivid and familiar by Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style. As there and in subsequent films like Seduced and Abandoned and The Birds, the Bees, and the Italians, Germi employs hectic, sardonic, sometimes slapstick comedy to exemplify the very real agonies that result from the clash of love, sex, and social strictures in his native land. Whereas Divorce Italian Style satirized an existing dilemma, Alfredo celebrates historical progress: something like divorce American style has finally replaced the last resort, upholding the Unwritten Law, and the new picture actually begins with the protagonist in the lawyer’s office preparing to shed his less-than-ideal spouse. Not that divorce is the be-all, end-all, and cure-all in Germi’s scheme of things: he and his hero conclude the film with shaky optimism at best, almost certain that the new marriage being made in the final scene will also prove unworkable.

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by Rick Hermann, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Lenny

Written by Rick Hermann November 16, 2014

[Originally published in Movietone News 42, July 1975]

I came away from Lenny with the vague notion that the documentary angle employed by Fosse as a structural device facilitating the necessary chronological jumps through Bruce’s career never quite worked in the manner he had intended it to. Roaming through the mystique-tinged Xanadu of Lenny’s life and times, somebody armed with a tape recorder and a notepad is asking a lot of questions about the comic, social critic, iconoclast-at-large, but at the end of each cinéma-vérité sequence there is always Dustin Hoffman, master of histrionic disguises, masked here in yet another astonishing role. Just who eclipses whom is a question I won’t try to answer, but Hoffman’s own near-mythic status has such a strong pull that it’s hard to stop thinking what a fantastic job he is doing in imitating Bruce. Lenny’s hybrid combination of documentary and dramatic narrative offers no help in locating the interface wherein their respective images cross, and in fact gives rise to inconsistencies of its own: the tone of the interviews themselves runs counter to the mainstream of the dramatic current of which Hoffman is the center. In other words, Fosse tries to provide a context of realism (the interviews) to a stageplay, but that context, too, is a “fake.” One wonders why he went to such pains to imitate this kind of atmosphere, taking it to the point of making the interviewer’s presence a sort of bumbling non-presence which can never be heard distinctly and which forgets to charge reels on the recorder, when the reality he conjures is tantamount to pointless tautology—like trying to photograph a reflection in a mirror so that it looks like the real object.

Review: Straight Time / Short Eyes

Written by Robert C. Cumbow August 4, 2010

[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. It’s cleanly made, easy to watch, competently acted—three of the supporting roles are splendidly played: parole officer Earl Frank (M. Emmet Walsh), suburbanite crime-dabbler Jerry Schue (Harry Dean Stanton), and disturbed ex-con and family man Willy Darin (Gary Busey)—and never less than interesting. Yet in the end it contributes nothing in story or style that seems to add to the currently fashionable dialogue about rehabilitation and recidivism. If there is nothing especially faulty or offensive about the film, neither is there anything outstanding or affecting about it; and it’s that terminal blandness that finally kills Straight Time for me.

by Kathleen Murphy, Contributors, Directors, Essays, Film Reviews, Movie Controversies, Sam Peckinpah

The Ballad Of David Sumner: A Peckinpah Psychodrama

Written by Kathleen Murphy May 3, 2010

[Originally published in Movietone News 10, January 1972]

Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs reminds us that in our rush to civilization, we too often deny the violent origins of our favorite myths and rituals—and pretend that the primal power of our lizard brains never was. Who wants to recall that Christian Communion is a sanitized version of the actual sacrifice—sometimes involving dismemberment and cannibalism—at the heart of innumerable pagan religions? In the time of Sophocles, it was considered beneficial to communally cathect archetypal fantasies. Now we believe that if we just aren’t reminded too often (via the movies, for instance) of the dark underside of human experience, the unpleasantness will all go away, and we’ll all be polite and peaceful together. Isn’t evil all out there, not stubbornly in residence within us? Or if within us, it’s just a matter of biochemical misfires. Retro filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah should chill out, instead of unreeling incendiary words and images.

In Straw Dogs, David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman), in Cornwall to do mathematical research, ignores the possibility of forces and emotions which cannot be contained in neat theorems or controlled by the rational mind. The Cornwall locals question him about what he’s seen of the “troubles” in America—”Did you take part, sir?”—and he quips, “Just between commercials.” For him, the reality of disorder and violence is a made-for-TV movie safely sandwiched between the plasticized fantasy-worlds of Madison Avenue. The irrational is closer to the surface in David’s wife, Amy (Susan George), who deliberately changes the pluses to minuses in David’s neat little equations, trying to tell him that his mathematical framework fails to include certain realities. (For a screwball comedy take on Peckinpah’s psychodrama, check out Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, in which Cary Grant’s scientist, unmanned and paralyzed by living too much in the head, and Katharine Hepburn, a bundle of impulse, irrationality and energy, survive by finding a point of balance between creative chaos and rigid order.)