[Originally published in Movietone News 24, July-August 1973]
One of the most interesting things about O Lucky Man! is that it is readily comprehensible at the same time that it consistently achieves a sense of mystery. Nearly three hours in length, it is another social-consciousness film from Britain’s Lindsay Anderson, and it’s also much more than that. A picaresque tale for the 1970s with strong political leanings, it’s also a satire, a set of Brechtian parables, a rock film, an ironic pilgrim’s progress, etc., etc. Like Anderson’s If…, it has Malcolm McDowell in the lead as a character named Mick Travis. But the character is different here, and while the politics of If… turn up now and then, O Lucky Man! goes well beyond both of Anderson’s previous feature films (the other being This Sporting Life). Along the way, Anderson through the persona of Mick takes on big business, imperialism, the police, the class structure in Britain, Cold War politics and paranoia, scientific irresponsibility, and bourgeois hypocrisy, while also building a sweeping vision of human limitation.
Ostensibly a remake of the 1942 classic by the same name, Paul Schrader’s 1982 Cat People is a cat of a different species entirely. At the time, it was accused of being garish and gory and literal in its exploration of sexuality as an animal impulse, in contrast to the shadowy psychological suggestions of the Jacques Tourneur-directed original. Schrader, who was a brilliant film critic before he turned to writing scripts and then directing films, had written Taxi Driver and Obsession and Raging Bull and came to Cat People after American Gigolo, his third film as a director but his first big success. Cat People was the first project he had not written himself, a script that had been developed by other directors, and while he had screenwriter Alan Ormsby significantly rework the script with his own ideas, Schrader took no screen credit for it. Yet Schrader himself remarked years later that “when I look back on it, I see Cat People as being almost the most personal film I’ve done.” He reunited much of the creative team from American Gigolo–director of photography John Bailey, composer Giorgio Moroder, and most importantly visual consultant Ferdinando Scarfiotti–and transformed a sleek, sexy horror remake into a Paul Schrader film.
[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980]