THE AMERICAN SOLDIER
***
Germany
A Vietnam veteran enters the
Munich underworld as a hired hitman.
Moody early Fassbinder - a noir homage reportedly filled with in-jokes
and curiosities, but little to truly hold interest.
dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
cast: Karl Scheydt, Elga Sorbas, Jan George, Hark Bohm
THE ARISTOCATS
**½
USA
An amiable but unimaginative Disney cartoon feature, which sadly turned
out to be one of its studio's more respectable efforts of the decade.
BED
AND BOARD
***½
France
The fourth instalment in the increasingly artificial and superficial
Antoine Doinel series tracks the early days of his marriage to the safer
of his conquests from Stolen Kisses. Most of the scenes are
structured around a cute, quirky joke rather than the more substantial
impulses you imagine would be playing a role in Doinel's behaviour. But
the movie can be a happy enough experience if you divorce it in your mind
from the context of The 400 Blows, and there are poignant bits for
those eager to seek them out.
dir: François Truffaut
cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claude Jade, Hiroko Berghauer, Daniel
Ceccaldi, Claire Duhamel, Barbara Laage
LE BOUCHER
****
France
As the new butcher romances the
local schoolmistress, a small town is hounded by the brutal serial
killings of women.
An odd, confounding mix of thriller and romance, balancing the study of a
disturbed mind with a recreation of the French countryside. Elements of each
absorb in turns, even though Chabrol doesn't probe all that deeply into either.
dir: Claude Chabrol
cast: Stéphane Audran, Jean
Yanne, Antonio Passalia
THE BOYS IN THE BAND
***
USA
A group of gay men gather for a
birthday party.
A garish, claustrophobic film version of a controversial play, tackling
the issue of gay self-hatred with cheap jokes and a collection of
stereotypes, each clutching on to the one same irritating note, and increasing volume on
cue. For its day, remarkably brave, yes. But not very skilful.
dir: William Friedkin
cast: Kenneth Nelson, Frederick Combs, Leonard Frey, Cliff
Gorman, Peter White, Laurence Luckinbill, Keith Prentice, Reuben Greene,
Robert LaTourneaux
A
CASE FOR THE YOUNG HANGMAN
***
Czechoslovakia
A competent, moderately absorbing one in a wave of obscure, heavily
symbolic Czechoslovakian allegories of Communist oppression (i.e. they
don't make any sense, so they must be allegories of Communist oppression).
It's notable more for the lovely visuals and stunning locations than it is
for the points it makes (or doesn't).
Reportedly writer-director Pavel Jurácek structured the
story around Swift's Gulliver's Travels (e.g. the hero's name is
Gulliver), though it has more in common with Kafka.
wr/dir: Pavel Jurácek
cast: Lubomír Kostelka, Klára Jerneková, Milena Zahrynowska,
Radovan Lukawský, Jirí Janda
LES CHOSES DE LA VIE
***½
France
An unfussy (read: French yet non-New Wave)
study of one self-involved man's mid-life crisis as he struggles with the
woes of balancing a hot ex-wife with an even hotter mistress just before
he is critically injured in a random car crash. There's a prissiness to
the picture that's particularly obvious in the first half as, in the
absence of a plot, it tries to establish the characters' solemn
middle-class torments. (There's also a few minor stylistic
flourishes packed in and they don't work either.) But the actors manage to
keep their focus and dignity and as Sautet gradually delves deeper into
his hero's mind he does glean a few interesting observations. So, somehow,
in the end, it all becomes almost moving. (These days however, the picture
is probably most famous for being the basis for an awful Hollywood remake
called "Intersection", starring Richard Gere and
Sharon Stone, no less.)
dir: Claude Sautet
wr: Paul Guimard, Claude Sautet, Jean-Loup Dabadie
cast: Michel Piccoli, Romy Schneider, Léa Massari, Gérard
Lartigau, Jean Bouise
THE CONFORMIST
*****
France/Italy/West Germany
Bernardo Bertolucci's hypnotic, indelible study of a conflicted Mussolini
collaborator, whose aggressive, self-suffocating efforts to blend in and
remain inconspicuous repeatedly and inevitably get him mixed up in
gaudily, conspicuously stylised setpieces. It's a tour de force in silky
visuals (probably the pinnacle of colour cinematography) and wintry,
intoxicating atmosphere.
wr/dir: Bernardo Bertolucci
ph: Vittorio Storaro
ed: Franco Arcalli
m: Georges Delerue
pd: Ferdinando Scarfiotti
cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli,
Gastone Moschin, Dominique Sanda, Enzo Tarascio, José Quaglio,
Milly, Yvonne Sanson, Pierre Clémenti, Giuseppe Addobbati
THE
EAR
****
Czech Republic
It's only logical that Karel Kachyna's biting, claustrophobic assault on
political surveillance in Communist Czechoslovakia was banned in the
country for however many decades. It's a hothouse marriage melodrama
crossbred with the daily terror of living in a police state. Not only is
it stuffed with incendiary information, it's startlingly vivid too.
dir: Karel Kachyna
wr: Karel Kachyna, Jan Procházka, Ladislav Winkelhöfer
ph: Josef Illík
cast: Radoslav Brzobohatý, Jirina Bohdalová, Borivoj
Navrátil, Jirí Císler, Miroslav Holub, Milica Kolofiková, Karel Vlcek,
Karel Vasicek
FIVE EASY PIECES
*****
USA
In his first - and, very possibly, still strongest - lead, Jack
Nicholson at first appears to be playing a moody blue collar worker
itching to ditch a dumb girlfriend he doesn't love. Through terse yet
textured, consistently ingenious vignettes, you gradually get to glean an
unwieldy personal history and an equally unwieldy mind that has
contributed towards his unsteady handle on things like responsibility and
contentment.
The subject matter - the oppressive bourgeoisie pushing one
of its own into uncertain drifterhood - is very much tied to the early 70s
zeitgeist. But the film's timelessness comes from the maturity and
complexity with which it is explored. It remains a strong influence on
today's moody independent filmmakers, conscious or otherwise.
dir: Bob Rafelson
wr: Adrien Joyce, Bob Rafelson
ph: Laszlo Kovacs
ed: Gerald Shepard, Christopher Holmes
cast: Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Billy Green Bush,
Susan Anspach, Fannie Flagg, Lois Smith, William Challee, Lorna Thayer,
Helena Kallianiotes
THE GARDEN
OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS
****½
GIMME SHELTER
****
USA
A documentary account of the Rolling Stones and the Altamont Speedway free
concert.
The first half is a technically unremarkable record of a Stones concern
in New York City. In the second half, the picture grows gradually
chilling, as junkies and Hell's Angels are shown getting out of control at
Altamont, culminating in the profoundly distressing and haunting record of
the notorious stabbing of an audience member.
dir: David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin
THE
GO-BETWEEN
***
HI, MOM!
**
USA
The low-budget adventures of an
amateur filmmaker.
A muddled, self-conscious, experimental and generally tedious satire, where anything goes except
actual humour.
dir: Brian de Palma
cast: Robert de Niro, Jennifer Salt, Allen Garfield,
Gerrit Graham, Charles Durning
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THE HONEYMOON KILLERS
****
USA
A 200-pound spinster falls for
a suave Spanish immigrant and helps him con widows, and eventually murder
them.
A cheap, ludicrous fictionalisation of the Lonelyhearts murders, with effective
bursts of violence and an irresistible cult sensibility.
dir: Leonard Kastle
cast: Shirley Stoler, Tony Lo Bianco
LANDSCAPE
AFTER BATTLE
***
LITTLE BIG MAN
***
USA
A 121-year-old man thinks back
on his colorful life in the old West.
A long, convoluted yet consistently engrossing tragi-comic melodrama.
It's at
its best during the light stretches, before the heavy moralizing and
massacres get going.
dir: Arthur Penn
cast: Dustin Hoffman, Martin Balsam, Faye Dunaway, Chief
Dan George
M*A*S*H*
***½
USA
An unlikely comedy that
charts the misadventures of the affably disillusioned personnel of a
Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit during wartime. The heroes exchange
wisecracks with their hands lodged half-way into an assortment of oozing aortas and arteries.
Although ostensibly set in Korea 1951, it's hard to imagine
the picture would have looked or sounded any different had it been set in
Vietnam some years later. Robert Altman's first major success, it
established his now instantly recognisable style based on overlapping,
improvised-sounding dialogue, where you're likely to appreciate certain
jokes purely for being audible.
The film doesn't really end up going anywhere in
particular. The boys have fun with the more prudish among their
colleagues, they cause mayhem in a Japanese surgery ward, they play some
golf, then some football - and all of these things are morbidly funny in
themselves. But they end up feeling monotonous when piled one after the
other across a nearly two-hour stretch. In the end it's possible that the
material was better suited to a series of thirty-minute TV episodes with
ad-breaks.
dir: Robert Altman
wr: Ring Lardner Jr.
ed: Danford B. Greene
cast: Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally
Kellerman, Robert Duvall, Jo Ann Pflug, René Auberjonois
PATTON
**½
USA
The life of George S. Patton
Jr.
The nationalism is rampant and the length oppressive. George C. Scott
however, is tremendous.
dir: Franklin Schaffner
cast: George C. Scott, Karl Malden
PERFORMANCE
***
UK
As a gangster on the lam about to embark on an identity crisis, James Fox
tells Mick Jagger: "You'll look funny when you're fifty." Jagger
already looks very funny and, nearly forty years on, so does this incense-drenched
psych-out.
It's a kind of companion to Blow Up - its phantasmagoric
obverse: a swinging dive into late 60s hedonism and half-suppressed ennui,
built on a style of excess, baroque decay and sensory assault. It's
strained and oppressive, but it comes alive in spurts, particularly in the
closing third. And the soundtrack's terrific.
dir: Nicholas Roeg, Donald Cammell
cast: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallnberg, Michelle
Bréton, Ann Sidney, John Burdon, Stanley Meadows
THE PRIVATE
LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
***
THE RED CIRCLE
***
France
Upon release from prison, a
thief runs into an escaped murderer and the two are involved in an
elaborate jewel heist.
A cool, laconic, superbly photographed but gruesomely
drawn out neo-noir caper.
dir: Jean-Pierre Melville
cast: Alain Delon, André Bourvil, Gian Maria Volonté,
Yves Montand
LA RUPTURE
****½
France/Belgium/Italy
Claude Chabrol makes lurid thrillers out of the strangest things. This one
is nominally about a battle between an uneducated ex-stripper (played by
Mrs. Claude Chabrol herself, Stéphane Audran) and her LSD-addicted
bourgeois husband for the custody of their four-year-old son. It’s an
exploration of a contemporary class conflict as well as many other things.
Chabrol opens the picture with a particularly dire case of domestic
violence (in which the four-year-old sustains a cranial injury) and he
underscores the scene with a tongue-in-cheek, knowingly ominous Bernard-Herrman-derived
theme. You’re caught off-guard. Is this an ‘issue’ picture, or a
divorce melodrama, or a Hitchcockian thriller, or a macabre arthouse
comedy? By the end, it turns out be all these things, and as it shifts
from one to the other, you learn to shift your mindset accordingly.
There are a couple of scenes where you could (and should) question
Chabrol’s methods – in particular, one where a dim-witted girl is
molested – but you don’t quite get the chance: his cutting is so
swift, his plot so convoluted and his confidence so intimidating.
You assume that Audran realises that her natural grace and elegance
aren’t what the role of a much put-upon former hussy necessarily calls
for. She assumes that you’ll get past this – which you do. When she
narrates her failed family life to her lawyer (in a tram scene that may
bring you memories of F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise”) she delivers her
lines so gently and unaffectedly that you can’t help but be won over by
her. She is the emotional, recognisably human crux of the picture and
it’s necessary for at least her to be believable. The other characters -
including the wealthy, morally corrupt father-in-law, the lecher he hires
to spy on and defame Audran, a boarding house lady who keeps men and women
in separate quarters, as well as a Shakespearean trio of tarot-playing
hags – aren’t meant to amount to anything more than colourful
caricatures.
wr/dir: Claude Chabrol
ph: Jean Rabier
m: Pierre Jansen
cast: Stéphane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Michel Bouquet,
Annie Cordy, Jean-Claude Drouot, Mario Beccara, Serge Bento, Jean Carmet,
Marguerite Cassan
THE SPIDER'S STRATAGEM
***½
Italy
A son goes back to his father's
hometown to research the latter's assassination.
Elegant, intriguing, but far too slow and heavy-going a mystery with
hollow characters.
dir: Bernardo Bertolucci
cast: Giulio Brogi, Alida Valli, Tino Scotti, Pippo
Campanini TRISTANA
*****
France/Spain
A beautiful young woman loses
her parents and goes to live with her aristocratic uncle.
Yet again, Buñuel abuses the hypocrisy of the church and (particularly) the aristocracy as he charts the destructive power shift in
one very unorthodox relationship. This one isn't necessarily as revered as some
of his
other masterworks, perhaps because it's more subdued than most of them.
However, few - if any - characters in his oeuvre are as fascinatingly fleshed out
as Tristana, the innocent, tragically corrupted heroine, and Don Lope, the
liberal-minded aristocrat (with striking parallels to Buñuel himself) who
can't manage to practise what he preaches.
dir: Luis Buñuel
wr: Luis Buñuel, Julio Alejandro
cast: Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Franco Nero
THE TWELVE CHAIRS
***
WANDA
****
THE WILD CHILD
***½
France
In 1797, a scientist discovers
and aspires to civilise a boy discovered in the woods, where he had been
abandoned as an infant and matured as a savage.
A mostly faithful reconstruction of a fascinating real-life case.
Truffaut charts the events with a kind of scientific detachment. Although
elegant, it probably would
have proven more effective within a documentary format, where the
impact would also have been more immediate.
dir: François Truffaut
wr: François Truffaut, Jean Gruault
ph: Nestor Almendros
m: Vivaldi
cast: Jean-Pierre Cargol, François Truffaut, Françoise Seigner, Jean
Dasté
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