John Gay Archives - Parallax View

[Originally published in Movietone News 43, September 1975]

Hennessy … the name offers to hang over this movie the way “Juggernaut” and “Drabble” spiritually pervaded theirs (Drabble having been the original title of The Black Windmill). That a fellow named Hollis lays more of a claim on our attention, let alone imagination, says a lot about the present object of inquiry. That Hollis is played by the man who dreamed up the original story, Richard Johnson, could say even more. He’s the English cop, specialist in Irish affairs, who’s become an obsessive on the theme of Hibernian politics of violence, to the extent that his own humanity seems ever on the verge of immolation by the fires of his corrective passion. There’s no getting away from seeing him as the counterpart of the eponymous Irish explosives genius who, shaken out of his determined pacific by the crossfire killing of his wife and daughter, has swaddled himself in gelignite and set out to blow up the Queen and most members of both Houses at the opening of Parliament. In this role Rod Steiger does his tightlipped, violence-benumbed shtick, and hence—inadvertently, I’d say—becomes a straightman to Johnson’s overtly raging hunter.

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[Originally published in Movietone News 52, October 1976]

In his autobiography I Remember It Well, Vincente Minnelli registers a very pragmatic regret that his producer-partner Arthur Freed took such good care of him all those years at MGM. Left to dream his cinematic dreams, cast fragile spells with camera and decor, and build to the visual equivalent of crescendos through flamboyant mise-en-scène, he never had to learn how to deal with the front-office boys, the money men, the guys who had the power to say when and how and even whether he would get to make a film. With the passing of Freed and the extravagant studio armament of Metro, Minnelli was left defenseless in the New Hollywood, and the effect was startlingly apparent: gross conceptual misfires like Goodbye Charlie, the pointlessly transatlantic misadventure of The Sandpiper, several years’ wait for an expensive Barbra Streisand musical liked by neither Streisand fans nor musical aficionados, and then more years waiting for … nothing at all, it appeared, until a couple of seasons ago we began to hear about an adaptation of Marcel Druon’s Film of Memory.

At last it’s here—A Matter of Time—and again Minnelli has been done in by the logistics of the nouveau cinema: the Italian locations obligatorily and tediously paused for, the Italian cast impossible to direct in any mode supportive to the stellar likes of Bergman, Boyer, and (for the sake of discussion) Liza Minnelli, the Movielab color a tawdry, enervating substitute for a man who dreams in richest Technicolor, the sets inadequately realized, the post-dubbed soundtrack deleterious to any evoking—let alone sustaining—of mood…. Whatever Louis B. Mayer might have been, he wasn’t Samuel Z. Arkoff, and if there be a prototype for co-exec-producer Giulio Sbarigia he’s that Italian who made Cinecittà hell on earth for “directors” Edward G. Robinson and Kirk Douglas in Minnelli’s now-prophetic Two Weeks in Another Town. Vincente Minnelli can swoop around corners with the utmost elegance, but he can’t cut them—and corner-cutting shows all over A Matter of Time.

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