ALPHAVILLE
***½
France
Low-budget noir sci-fi set in a place mostly made up
of eerily lit contemporary buildings. It isn't hard to tell what
Godard is trying to achieve by making the future so chilling yet familiar
and he makes his vision more convincing than other people's. But he puts in about four barely related digressions too many (it was a bad
idea for his pictures to start getting longer around this point).
Another problem is Eddie Constantine as the detective. He looks convincingly burnt-out but more in
a brain-dead junkie sense than in a world-weary Bogart sense.
There is a scene involving Akim Tamiroff and a swinging
light-bulb in homage to Welles' "Touch of Evil". It
seems like a cute idea for a few seconds, but then you start wishing more
and more you were watching that movie instead.
wr/dir: Jean-Luc Godard
ph: Raoul Coutard
cast: Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Akim Tamiroff
BOEING BOEING
***
USA
Probably the most entertaining Jerry Lewis vehicle (though Tony Curtis
technically has the lead role) since he plays it straight for once, and he's got Thelma Ritter
as support. She steals every scene she's in.
CAT BALLOU
***
USA
A schoolteacher turns outlaw
after her father is shot.
A self-conscious, tongue-in-cheek Western parody that is generally
entertaining. But a little too self-conscious and tongue-in-cheek to be
likable.
dir: Elliot Silverstein
cast: Jane Fonda, Lee Marvin, Michael Callan, Dwayne
Hickman, Nat King Cole, Stubby Kaye
CHIMES
AT MIDNIGHT
****½
Spain/Switzerland
The corpulent, witty, tragi-comic Falstaff is very nearly Shakespeare's
richest creation. Orson Welles recognised this when he morphed the two
plays where the character pops up with bits of their prequel and sequel
and some of Hollinshed's history lessons for context. It's one of the many
potential Welles masterpieces hampered by dodgy production values, but
Shakespeare has never felt more alive on-screen before or since. The movie
is funny; it's bawdy; it's exciting; it's touching. And the battle at
Shrewsbury would fit in comfortably among the greatest hits of Eisenstein
and Kurosawa.
dir: Orson Welles
ph: Edmond Richard
cast: Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Jeanne
Moreau, Margaret Rutherford, Norman Rodway, Alan Webb, Marina Vlady,
Walter Chiari, Michael Aldridge, Tony Beckley, Fernando Rey, Beatrice
Welles
DARLING
***½
UK
An ambitious young model beds
her way up the social ladder.
A fresh, stylish portrait of sixties' swinging. Hardly
enlightening but smart and very relaxed on issues of amorality. It dates
well.
dir: John Schlesinger
wr: Frederic Raphael
cast: Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Harvey,
Roland Curram, Alex Scott, Basil Henson, Pauline Yates
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO
***½
USA
Through decades of Russian
revolutions and uprisings, a married physician carries on an affair with a
nurse.
A muddled, self-important, overlong epic, but with enough sweeping
sequences and striking imagery mounted on a huge scale to keep you
absorbed.
dir: David Lean
wr: Robert Bolt
ph: Freddie Young
m: Maurice Jarre
cast: Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Geraldine Chaplin,
Rod Steiger, Alec Guinness, Rita Tushingham, Ralph Richardson, Tom
Courtenay
FASTER,
PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!
***½
USA
Russ Meyer's Citizen Kane is this deranged but straight-faced campfest
about a trio of mammoth-breasted go-go dancers, who, for increasingly
confused reasons, murder a blank-faced racecar enthusiast, kidnap his
screechy bikini-clad girlfriend, and descend upon the isolated, ramshackle
farm of a family of eerie, variously demented hicks. A hypnotic piece of
titsploitation, it has the brain of a dodgy comic book and the conviction
of a hardboiled B-noir with on-off pop-psychological pretensions. And
when John Waters tells you it's without a doubt the greatest movie ever
made, please don't argue.
dir: Russ Meyer
cast: Tura Satana, Haji, Lori Williams, Sue Bernard, Stuart
Lancaster, Paul Trinka, Dennis Busch, Ray Barlow
FIST
IN HIS POCKET
****
Italy
In his debut as writer-director, Marco Bellocchio conceives of a family
that out-Tennesee-Williamses Tennessee Williams. Most of the four siblings
are epileptic, at least half of them carry half-repressed incestuous impulses and
all of them have a blind widow of a burden for a mother. They live in an
isolated, photogenically decaying villa in the Italian countryside.
Bellocchio suppresses the theatricality you'd expect to be
intrinsic to his movie. He pounces on you and calmly keeps you
disconcerted throughout, significantly aided as he is by Lou Castel's icy,
unwavering grip on psychosis.
wr/dir: Marco Bellocchio
ph: Alberto Marrama
ed: Silvano Agosti, Anita Cacciolati
m: Ennio Morricone
pd: Gisella Longo
cast: Lou Castel, Paola Pitagora, Marino Masé, Liliana
Gerace, Stefania Troglio, Jeannie McNeil, Mauro Martini, Gianni Schicchi,
Alfredo Filippazzi, Jeannie McNeil
FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE
***½
Italy
Two bounty hunters in El Paso
pursue the same man for different reasons.
A satisfactory sequel to "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964),
it really feels more like an extended remake.
dir: Sergio Leone
cast: Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonte,
Klaus Kinski
HELP!
***
UK
The second Beatles movie, a
follow-up to the previous year's "A Hard Day's Night"
with even less of a plot to get in the way of the rather shoddy video
clips. Reportedly this one was done on a bigger budget, though it looks
even cheaper than the first. It feels very loosely patched up, in a way
that suggests cheap, inept crafting more than it does New Wave homage, but
the songs are catchy and most of the jokes are at least mildly funny (and
Monty Pythonesque in spirit).
dir: Richard Lester
cast: The Beatles, Leo McKern, Eleanor Bron, Victor
Spinetti, Roy Kinnear, John Bluthal
JULIET OF THE SPIRITS
**½
Italy
A housewife fears her husband
may be unfaithful and invents a fantasy life for herself.
Years had passed since Fellini first turned self-indulgent, but there
had really been little to complain about until this arrived. Masina gives
her most fascinating performance and hers is the picture's only true attempt at
a study
of a woman's psyche. But the surrealism that permeates the film is rarely
courteous to the eyes and a generally flashy, unwelcome distraction.
dir: Federico Fellini
cast: Giulietta Masina, Mario Pisu, Sandra Milo,
Valentina Cortese
THE KNACK... AND HOW TO GET IT
*****
USA
Judging from the virtuosic command Richard
Lester displays over the medium here, the two Beatles films he
made beforehand feel like practice, like cheap technical exercises. This
film, the Palme d'or winner at Cannes, is the consummation of the style he
hints at in "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!".
He appears influenced by the French New Wave, but he doesn't seem as
motivated by a philosophical standpoint. He seems to have responded more
to Godard and co.'s spontaneity, the restlessness, the exuberance than
their politics.
The plot
concerns a young primary school teacher unlucky in love (and sex) who
seeks advice on how to seduce women from his playboy housemate. The film
is adapted from a play - and you can tell this from the stylised dialogue
and the generally mannered performances (with Donnelly as the exception).
But the wisecracks and the sight gags and the puns and the camera tricks
fly by so fast, you don't get a chance to complain, or even feel the need.
There's a particularly lovely sequence where three of the principals
transport a large bed on wheels from a rubbish tip to the bachelors' home.
By the time they get there, you'll feel as if you've just sped through
"swinging London".
dir: Richard Lester
wr: Charles Wood
ph: David Watkin
m: John Barry
cast: Michael Crawford, Ray Brooks, Rita Tushingam,
Donal Donnelly
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LAUREL AND HARDY'S LAUGHING TWENTIES
***½
USA
A compilation of mostly hilarious clips from Laurel and Hardy shorts.
MAN IS
NOT A BIRD
*****
Yugoslavia
From his first feature, Dušan Makavejev established his relaxed,
invigorating collage approach - take a loose frustrated love story, splash
on some documentary footage, pepper it with hints of the contemporary
political climate, throw in a jump cut here, a montage there and starkly
composed, startlingly rich imagery all over the place.
wr/dir: Dušan Makavejev
ph: Aleksandar Petković
ed: Ljubica Nešić
m: Petar Bergamo
cast: Milena Dravić, Janez Vrhovec, Eva Ras, Stole
Arandjelović, Boris Dvornik
PARIS VU PAR...
***
France
A 95-minute compendium of six short films by six then-fashionable directors,
each working with 16 mm within a particular area of Paris. The great thing about this kind of format is that as soon
as you get the feeling you're in the wrong hands, you gain comfort from
knowing it will be over soon. Your hopes get renewed roughly every 15
minutes. But they also get dashed nearly as often.
The first film, by Jean Douchet, is a bland, badly
acted, thoroughly forgettable little thing about a one night stand between
an American student and a Parisian lothario.
The second one, by Jean Rouch, takes a frustrated young wife
as its subject and seems as risible as the first until it takes a morbid
turn towards the end.
The third one, by Jean-Daniel Pollet, starts off promisingly,
with a brash prostitute strutting into her funny-faced, introverted
client's decrepit apartment. But then it goes nowhere. The characters
don't get developed much beyond their second minute of screen-time. Pollet
spends the rest of it devising a few unimaginative interferences to delay
the sex act which he wouldn't be able to get past the censors. This is a
shame since it would have been the highlight.
The fourth segment has the least amount of conversation out
of the six, and yet it's the one directed by Eric Rohmer. It tells of a
meek shoe salesman who thinks he may have accidentally killed a drunkard
in a sidewalk altercation. It's spare, quiet and subtle. It's mildly
diverting more than memorable, but in this context you're happy it's at
least that.
For the fifth segment, Jean-Luc Godard rips himself off. It's
a lengthier repeat of the scene from "A Woman Is a Woman" when
Anna Karina sends a letter to each of her two lovers and accidentally
switches the envelopes. The first time around it was cute. This time
around it's dreary, especially since these actors aren't anywhere near as
charismatic as Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
The final segment is done by Claude Chabrol and is easily the most
impressive. Of the six auteurs, he is the one to adapt his standard
hang-ups and fascinations to the short-film format the most comfortably.
The only one to boast a narrative drive, it features Chabrol himself and
his then-wife Stéphane Audran playing a bourgeois couple whose
quarrelling drives their son to ear-plugs with bizarrely tragic
consequences. It's striking, well-paced and haunting.
dir: Jean Douchet, Jean Rouch, Jean-Daniel
Pollet, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol
cast: Barbara Wilkin, Jean-Pierre Andréani, Jean-François
Chappey, Nadine Ballot, Barbet Schroeder, Micheline Dax, Claude Melki,
Jean-Michel Rouzière, Joanna Shimkus, Serge Davri, Philippe Haquilly,
Claude Chabrol, Stéphane Audran, Gille Chusseau, Dany Saril
PIERROT LE FOU
*****
France
A middle-class Parisian leaves
his rich wife for a gangster's moll and heads to the South of France.
Probably among the two or three best things Godard ever did. It's a strange
and spontaneous tale about two lovers on the run that starts off as a sort
of neo-noir, evolves into a bucolic hippie fantasy and finally, a
nihilistic nightmare. Some of the social commentary is heavy-handed
(making everybody at a posh dinner party sound like a TV commercial is
maybe a good idea, but not flawlessly executed). But it's easy to look
past them. The mood overwhelms them.
As the lovers, Belmondo and Karina look impossibly cool together. But
each of them finds little moments when nobody's looking to hint at a vulnerable streak,
which makes you relate to them more intimately.
wr/dir: Jean-Luc Godard
ph: Raoul Coutard
m: Antoine Duhamel
cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna
Karina, Dirk Sanders,
Raymond Devus, Graziella Galvani, Sam Fuller
REPULSION
***½
UK
The sexual repression of an
attractive virgin leads into schizophrenia and homicide.
A minimalist, deliberately paced descent into a disturbed mind with a psychology
that doesn't quite cohere. It's too drawn out to be consistently frightening,
but it's undeniably effective at times.
dir: Roman Polanski
cast: Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, John Fraser,
Yvonne Furneaux, Patrick Wymark, Renee Houston, Helen Fraser
THE
SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT
****
Poland
Imagine, if you will, a cinematic cross between Jorge Luis Borges and
Laurence Sterne set against a Polish conception of Inquisition-era Spain
revolving around a Chinese box of stories within stories within stories as
narrated by a Belgian captain, a hanged man, a man possessed by a demon, a
magician, a rationalist, a sullen Gypsy and many many others. They tell of
things like frisky, incestuous Muslim princesses, abandoned inns and
houses, a multitude of skulls and carcasses, ghosts, hallucinations,
swordfights, killings, resurrections and lots and lots of cleavage. Absurd though
this picture is (to
the extreme) and inconsequential and incomprehensible, it's beguiling in
the way that only an airy, literate, mock-epic mindfuck could ever be.
Among its chief strengths is the score by Krzysztof Penderecki, incorporating
Latin guitar jazz and psychedelic hippie dirges with a regal, classical
score. And the pristine 'Scope cinematography by Mieczyslaw Jahoda serves
to firstly ground then increasingly underscore the lunacy within a context
of stately highbrow moviemaking.
dir: Wojciech Has
wr: Tadeusz Kwiatkowski
ph: Mieczyslaw Jahoda
m: Krzysztof Penderecki
cast: Zbigniew Cybulski, Iga Cembrzynska, Elzbieta Cembrzynska,
Elzbieta Czyzewska, Gustaw Holoubek, Stanislaw Igar, Joanna Jedryka,
Janusz Klosinski, Bogumil Kobiela, Jadwiga Krawczyk
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
***
USA
In Austria 1938, a singing nun
is sent to care for the seven children of an anti-Nazi widower.
Cinema's most efficiently wrapped box of confectionery.
There's scenes, elements and plot points that beg for ridicule and
nobody self-respecting could fail to see through all the candy-coated patronizing
and manipulation. But ultimately it's healthiest to compromise, to forget you're capable of disbelief and just smile and nod along to the insanely catchy tunes,
the pretty scenery and the perennially, ubiquitously spirited star.
dir: Robert Wise
wr: Ernest Lehman
ph: Ted McCord
cast: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Eleanor
Parker, Richard Haydn, Peggy Wood, Anna Lee, Marni Nixon, Charmian Carr
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE
COLD
***
UK
Martin Ritt's irreproachably civil adaptation of John LeCarré's de-glam
exposé of Cold War espionage seems intended as an antidote to
the Bond films. It's thought-provoking to a degree, even if Ritt's conception
of gritty East Berlin never sheds the Shepperton Studios aura.
dir: Martin Ritt
ph: Oswald Morris
cast: Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner, Sam
Wanamaker, George Voskovec, Rupert Davies, Cyril Cusack, Peter Van Eyck,
Michael Hordern, Robert Hardy
THAT DARN CAT
***
USA
An entertaining Disney non-cartoon feature, of sentimental value for me, since
it's the movie I watched most often as a kid.
THUNDERBALL
***
UK
The first feature in the Bond series to turn out underwhelming, despite cute
bits a clearly impressive budget.
WALKOVER
****
Poland
A continuation and a companion piece - as well as esssentially the same film
- to Skolimowski's earlier Identification
Marks: None, this one tracks the same protagonist (again played by the
director himself, with striking charisma) in restless existential turmoil on
the eve of his 30th birthday. Like the earlier film, it's charming,
meandering, evocative and wonderfully melancholy, but also somewhat more
forceful and formally exciting. The entire film consists of 29 (very lively)
shots.
wr/dir: Jerzy Skolimowski
ph: Antoni Nurzynski
cast: Jerzy Skolimowski, Aleksandra Zawieruszanka,
Krzysztof Chamiec, Andrzej Herder, Franciszek Pieczka, Henryk Kluba
THE WAR GAME
****½
UK
Peter Watkins' docudrama about the harrowing potential of a nuclear attack
on Kent gained notoriety, a cinema release and even an Academy Award after
BBC (which commissioned it) refused to broadcast it or let other networks
do the same. It's a 45 minute piece of hysterical paranoia but its
conviction is infectious. Between street interviews with English suburbanites highlighting the local ignorance over the consequences of a
nuclear attack, Watkins stages the hypothetical aftermath of one such
attack, utilising newsreel techniques with an arresting, matter-of-fact
skill, which renders the scenario not only plausible but uncannily,
horrifyingly real. And a big part of why these images of destruction and
carnage are still so unsettling is that 40+ years on they are about as
relevant and conceivable as they were at the peak of the Cold War.
wr/dir: Peter Watkins
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