Tag: Movietone News 51

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Directors, Film Reviews, Robert Altman

Out of the Past: Brewster McCloud

Written by Robert C. Cumbow December 12, 2011

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

Uniformed marching bands with twirlers. Red, white, and blue. Frustrated chauffeurs who can’t quite comprehend the world of their passengers. An arrival at the airport by charter plane, covered by an on-the-spot news announcer. The death and funeral of someone named Green(e). A reference to car racing. Some wild driving and a crash that brings many of the characters together. The more you look, the more similarities you find between Brewster McCloud and Nashville. Themes, motifs, devices, even characters and character relationships unite the two films. In each film, Shelley Duvall plays a naïve and sexually capricious free spirit, though in Brewster McCloud the impact of her affections on the men she favors is far more serious than in the frivolous flirtations of Nashville. In each film she takes up, at least briefly, with the son of a wealthy and powerful man: Bernard Weeks in Brewster McCloud is a sensitive and talented young man whose artistic inclinations have been stifled by his father, who has made him his business secretary—the same relationship, in fact, that Bud bears to Haven Hamilton in Nashville. In each film, too, Michael Murphy plays a visitor from California whose cool ways contrast sharply with those of the people around him, and whose comings and goings lend a kind of unity and purpose to the development of the film’s events. His escort, in each film, is a lovable but somewhat slow-witted man, whose home life we glimpse in a dinner scene (though Patrolman Johnson’s outrageous three sets of twin sons in Brewster McCloud contrast sharply in tone and intent with the two deaf children of Delbert and Linnea Reese in Nashville).

All these imagistic coincidences suggest similarities in more abstract areas as well; and sure enough, they’re there. Each film attempts a sweeping satirical commentary on virtually every major aspect of American life: sexuality, class-struggle, race relations, ambition, success and failure, economics, crime, politics, religion. The more obvious, less integrated Brewster McCloud uses original songs on its soundtrack to comment on action and character development, and counterpoints the loose, rambling structure of the film’s events with comment on philosophical and anthropological concepts from an anonymous Lecturer whose location and character never directly connect with the characters of the film’s story. Nashville‘s use of songs and the continuous comment of Hal Phillip Walker’s campaign truck are, however, not significantly different—only a more successful integration of these devices into the film. The purpose of the devices is the same: to extend the meaning and significance of the film’s events to a larger scope, to link microcosm with macrocosm.

by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews, Horror

Review: From Beyond the Grave

Written by Robert C. Cumbow December 8, 2011

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

The anthology film is by now familiar, even old hat, to devotees of British horror product. But, as already hailed in other quarters, Amicus Productions’ From Beyond the Grave may well be the best one since Dead of Night. The context in which it is set—encounters in a little antique shop called “Temptations,” presided over by Peter Cushing at his very best—is not so much a framing story as a prevailing moral philosophy. In the course of the film five people—four legitimate customers and a would-be holdup man—enter the shop, and their behavior there will affect them for the rest of their lives—which in some cases are short indeed.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Swashbuckler

Written by Richard T. Jameson December 7, 2011

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

In this life sure things are rare, and it were churlish not to pay tribute to one when found. Very well, then: see James Goldstone marked down as the director of a given film and rest assured it will be a shambles. Not that a mindless pirate picture would be the easiest project to bring off in the Seventies with a modicum of style and dash—commodities almost in shorter supply than sure things. But even if a director were capable of steering round the improbabilities in a pirate-meets-girl, pirate-foils-nasty-dictator, pirate-gets-girl-without-losing-a-PG-rating script, he’d still have to do something about making other generic conventions seem effortlessly natural: conveying a sense of fun and exuberance that would make those nonstop guffaws over the joys of fighting, guzzling and wenching seem other than forced, or the absence of any notion of danger—even when the air is full of live steel and cannonaded masonry—seem the only proper response to a world made for devil-may-care adventure. A gregarious raconteur like Raoul Walsh has it in his blood; a Michael Curtiz can cram his frames and send them hurtling after one another with such dizzying stylishness that any feeling of extravagant artifice all but becomes a virtue; even when a stolid craftsman like Henry King is in charge, the solemnity of his responsibility in marshalling a big-budget period picture lends a narrative stability of its own. Goldstone doesn’t come near suggesting any of these guys (although at one point he keeps the duelling Peter Boyle and Robert Shaw out of sight behind a staircase, and if you happen to spot their shadows on the wall amid the clutter of extras, you might feel generous enough to count it as failed-Curtiz) and, worse, has no consistent idea what to do on his own hook.

Review: Matatabi

Written by Movietone News contributor December 6, 2011

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

by Ken Eisler

I felt a funny kind of letdown when The Wanderers ended, and it took me awhile to figure out why. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the ending. After a fight, the film’s young protagonist Genta slips and tumbles down a long steep bank: a fall that begins comically but becomes by turns frightening because of an accelerating sense of the loss of control, and then, like Marie Dubois’ long snowy death fall in Shoot the Piano Player, strangely lyrical. Finally, with a thud, Genta’s head hits a rock: freezeframe, full stop. Up above, Genta’s pal Mokutaro slows down, turns around, and walks back along the road to the spot where he took off running, one arm bloodily slashed, the snarling, shouting, sword-wielding Genta in hot pursuit. Mokutaro looks around for his friend; calls his name repeatedly; shrugs. “Well,” he says aloud, “he must be taking a shit somewhere,” and the camera starts backing away from him, last of the three hapless young wanderers, alone in a wide screen landscape.

Stardust – ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’

Written by Pierre Greenfield December 5, 2011

[Originally published in slightly different form in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

Nicolas Roeg’s extraordinary film is, amongst other things, a scathing satire and a science-fiction tragedy. Even the title is multi-layered. The hero is an extraterrestrial visitant who literally falls out of the sky; “falling to earth” implies a painful coming to senses; and “the man who fell” recalls “the Fall of Man,” which the plot allegorically depicts. There is also a lot of literal falling: the hero, his wife and his spacecraft tumble through various areas of space, vast and small; a central character is murdered by defenestration; crucial scenes involve descent by elevator, high-diving into a swimming pool, collapsing onto beds. The hero’s name on Earth is Thomas Jerome Newton—Thomas after the doubter, Jerome after the saint who compared men to insects, and Newton after the scientist who evolved the law of gravity after being conked by a falling apple (a symbolic enough item—the event took place in a garden, too!).

Newton was celebrated in Alexander Pope’s couplet, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night / Till God said, Let Newton Be, and all was light.” Thomas Jerome Newton seems to hold similar promise, but things don’t work out. Newton emerges from his fall to Earth carrying a British passport—a tall, spare, quiet ascetic, youthful as Dorian Gray and with a similar faintly androgynous handsomeness. He has a gift for making money. This is the purpose of his arrival on Earth, for his own unnamed planet is dying—much as the eco-warriors say ours is—and to save it, Newton has to ferry reserves of energy back to it from Earth. His technological wizardry has done nothing to save this planet, but it causes amazement here on Earth. In no time at all Newton, aided by a New York patents lawyer, has revolutionized every single one of the various communications industries, becoming a billionaire. But the effect is not to make all things light. Newton’s plan to finance a private space program fails and he is stranded on another dying planet, our own, having become one with the Earthlings. By film’s end he has become a human being and, by a terrible irony, he has lost his humanity.

Perception and loss: the twin themes of Nicolas Roeg. The hoodlum Chas in Performance gains understanding and tendresse immediately before being taken off to death. John Baxter in Don’t Look Now solves the mystery that has bedeviled him in the instant of his own murder. Both these films are directly recalled in the saga of Thomas Jerome Newton (Newton’s red hair is patently as false as Chas’s in his hideout period; like Baxter, he has brief ESP-style hallucinations), but the end is more like that of Walkabout, whose unnamed heroine, like Newton, does not die, but is crushed into a passive zombie-like state tinged by regret only in moments of furtive memory. Like her, Newton is at his most free and his most naked in the desert: it’s amidst the sands of New Mexico that he confesses the truth about himself to Dr. Nathan Bryce, the inquisitive scientist. Ironically, he has fled his own planet because it is turning into a desert. But it proves less desolate than the neon wasteland of New York, which literally becomes a prison for him. Captured by a mysterious organization—which might be the Mafia, might be the CIA, might be Big Business, what’s the difference?—Newton is endlessly subjected to a sort of benign torture in a succession of rooms arranged like the interlocking pieces of different jigsaw puzzles. Size varies bafflingly, as does style of decoration. In one room, empty save for a Ping-Pong table, nature itself has been subverted, turned into mere decor, the wallpaper being photographs of a California redwood forest. Truth is overwhelmed by lies: Newton’s smiling, patient torturers conduct their enormities behind a mask of kind concern, claiming to be medical men out to help him.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Une Partie de Plaisir / La vallee

Written by Richard T. Jameson December 2, 2011

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

A vaguely arty bourgeois couple experiment with sexual freedom and end by pretty thoroughly disassembling their lives as they have known them. The bored wife of a New Guinea–based diplomat leaves the capital long enough to scout up some exotic feathers for the world of haute couture, learns of a likelier source farther from civilization, and ends by disappearing into a white area on the map in quest of Paradise. Claude Chabrol directed Une Partie de plaisir and Barbet Schroeder made La Vallée but, while each film makes sense in the context of its director’s career, some broad thematic similarities suggest that Paul Gégauff, the screenwriter they claim in common, has been at least equally important in determining the nature of the finished films.

Une Partie de plaisir, in fact, may be even more Gégauff’s film than Chabrol’s: in addition to having written the script, Gégauff plays the leading role—opposite his wife Danièle—and has freely called attention to the psychodrama aspect of the whole venture. Suggesting both a visual and characterological cross between George Macready and Shepperd Strudwick, Gégauff’s protagonist is first seen introducing his wife to the pleasures of baiting a fishhook with a live crawfish and then making love to her on a rock by the sea. At one of Chabrol’s dinnertable interludes shortly after they have left this vacation site, he brings up the subject of extramarital sex—Has she indulged? Ever wanted to? How would she feel if he did?—because, well, he has, it was no big deal, and he wouldn’t mind at all if she yearned for a temporary change now and again. She’s shy, dubious, just a little wounded by both the revelation and the suggestion; but when a house party affords the opportunity not long afterward, she opts for a brief adventure with a gentle Arabian friend of a friend. The husband listens to her sounds of pleasure somewhere in the house, and tenderly looks in to be sure their child is sleeping peacefully. But life-events get away from the teacher. While still abiding by his libertarian principles—and copping friendly feels from another mutual friend in the kitchen—he begins to compete with the lover, and insults the friend that this interloping friend of a friend has brought to the next party. While she screws the Arab, the husband can’t manage to stay the course with the kitchen cuddler. And so, with increasing psychosexual complications, it goes, as the wife continues to discover her own identity and Gégauff becomes more and more desperate about—and insistent on—his male supremacy.

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Lifeguard

Written by Richard T. Jameson November 30, 2011

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

Lifeguard belongs to that elect, if scarcely elite, class of film fondly designated “the nice little movie.” It would be a poor summer indeed that didn’t yield one or two specimens of this type (which I say rhetorically since it is a miserable movie summer but there’s Lifeguard anyway)—not that its modest feeling for decent folks of no particular distinction getting on with their lives as best they can would be out of season at any time. The storyline isn’t much; its cinematic narration, still less so. But it’s a friendly movie that manages to be ingratiating without flashing too bright a smile or scuffing its soles ostentatiously in the sand. Watching it, you like the people and expect to remember them—looks, stances, tones of voice—like a pleasant vacation in years to come.