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ANNE AND MURIEL
***½
France
Aside from “Jules and Jim”, the only other book that Henri-Pierre Roché wrote
was its obverse: a period piece where this time one man – a young writer -
falls in love with two women – sisters, from England. Truffaut’s second Roché
adaptation, although generally rather lovely, isn’t as intoxicating as his
first. Jean-Pierre Léaud does his usual, reliable mix of naivety and
narcissism, but the two Englishwomen portraying his mercurial objects of
desire – each essentially a repressed, virginal variation on Jeanne Moreau’s
Catherine – fail to register.
It is the photography, as fine-tuned by Nestor Almendros,
that conjures up a dreamy, nostalgic romanticism that compensates for
the two puffy vacuums at the centre of the piece.
dir: François Truffaut
wr: François Truffaut, Jean Gruault
ph: Nestor Almendros
cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Kika Markham, Stacey Tendeter, Sylvia Marriott,
Marie Mansart, Philippe Léotard
BANANAS
***½
USA
A neurotic New-Yorker becomes president of a turbulent South American
country.
A loose, broad, bold and brutal hit-and-miss affair that owes a
lot to the Marx Bros.
dir: Woody Allen
wr: Woody Allen, Mickey Rose
cast: Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Carlos Montalban
THE
BEGUILED
****
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
***
USA
The sex-lives of two male friends from their college years through to their
middle age crises.
A fashionably risqué dramedy about sex as a self-destructive
impulse. Time has made its pretence, as well as its lack of any real insight,
all the more obvious. The actors are the main reason it still holds some
interest.
dir: Mike Nichols
wr: Jules Feiffer
cast: Jack Nicholson, Arthur Garfunkel, Candice Bergen, Ann-Margret, Rita
Moreno
CLAIRE'S KNEE
****
France
A soon-to-be-married diplomat is attracted to two teenage sisters.
The fifth of Rohmer's wonderful moral tales and possibly the
most celebrated. Witty, layered and perceptive it is, and astoundingly
beautiful to look at.
wr/dir: Eric Rohmer
ph: Nestor Almendros
cast: Jean-Claude Brialy, Aurora Cornu, Béatrice Romande, Laurence de
Moaghan, Michèle Montel
A CLOCKWORK
ORANGE
***
UK
A brutal young hoodlum is sent to pay for his crimes.
The narrative is not strong enough to sustain the drawn-out pace
nor the effect the passing of time has had on things
that were once shocking. But in terms of style and visual composition, it
still impresses.
wr/dir: Stanley Kubrick
cast: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates, Warren
Clarke
DEATH IN VENICE
****
Italy
A widowed German composer in Venice is infatuated with a young boy.
An elegant, atmospheric, beautifully shot adaptation of Thomas
Mann's novella.
dir: Luchino Visconti
ph: Pasqualino De Santis
cast: Dirk Bogarde, Bjorn Andresen, Silvana Mangano, Marisa Berenson,
Mark Burns
DEEP
END
*****
UK/West Germany
A coming-of-age tale, a postmortem of swinging London, and a disconcertingly
relatable psychosexual nightmare, all in one. It starts off on a clever, if light-hearted,
upstart note, then builds into something unexpectedly disturbing and resonant.
The young, fresh-faced leads' shocking acuity and sensitivity match the
director's.
dir: Jerzy Skolimowski
wr: Jerzy Skolimowski, Jerzy Gruza, Boleslaw Sulik
cast: John Moulder-Brown, Jane Asher, Karl Michael Vogler,
Christopher Sandford, Louise Martini, Diana Dors, Erica Beer, Anita
Lochner, Anne-Marie Kuster
THE DEVILS
**½
UK
Sexual frustration leads to mass exorcism in and around a 17th century French
convent.
An ambitious but mainly grotesque and hysterical adaptation
of a play. It remains fascinating for being based on fact, but director Ken
Russell doesn't bring any discernible hints of feeling or insight of his own.
dir: Ken Russell
cast: Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave, Dudley Sutton, Max Adrian, Gemma
Jones, Murray Melvin
DIAMONDS ARE
FOREVER
**½
Connery
only came back for the money. He looks tired.
DIRTY HARRY
***
USA
A violent San Francisco cop pursues an insane sniper.
This revenge thiller was a sensation in its day and is still
highly regarded by many. But despite some skill, it ultimately boils down to
little more than a pilot for a semi-fascist crime serial, with
unintentionally funny dialogue and acting.
dir: Don Siegel
cast: Clint Eastwood, Harry Guardino, Reni Santoni, John Vernon, Andy
Robinson, John Larch, John Mitchum
DUEL
***½
USA
This was Steven Spielberg's debut feature and you can tell this from the way
he has expressly designed every shot and every cut (in the fashion of the
best of the B-filmmakers of the 40s and 50s) to impress as many
impressionable people as possible, and to secure a bigger budget for his next
feature. The trick worked. The picture was originally made for TV but it
impressed enough people to eventually make its way into cinemas. And in time,
Spielberg got access to many much bigger budgets.
The plot here - a man driving down an isolated road gets
terrorised by an insane truck driver - is barely enough to support thirty
minutes of screen time. It becomes necessary for Spielberg to stretch out
every setpiece - which leads to our hero regularly pondering things in
voiceover for an inordinate amount of time - and repeat it as much as
possible. But every time he does this, he is clever enough to introduce
things like a busload of schoolchildren or a swarm of rattlesnakes into the
mix. As a result, the nerve-wracking feels fresh every ten minutes.
dir: Steven Spielberg
ph: Jack A. Marta
ed: Frank Morriss
cast: Dennis Weaver, Jacqueline Scott, Eddie Firestone, Lou Frizzell
FIDDLER ON THE
ROOF
***
USA
A Jewish milk-man in a Russian village protects his family and heritage in a
pre-revolutionary Russian village.
An adaptation of the beloved stage musical that is too
cheerful to be unlikable, but when everything gets repeated for the third
time, it becomes tiring.
dir: Norman Jewison
cast: Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon
THE FRENCH
CONNECTION
****
USA
A ruthless New York cop investigates an international drug smuggling.
A fact-based crime thriller, almost documentary in its detail,
it also boasts a compulsive central performance and a legendary car chase.
dir: William Friedkin
ph: Owen Roizman
ed: Jerry Greenberg
cast: Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider, Fernanro Rey, Tony Lo Bianco
THE
GOALKEEPER'S FEAR OF THE PENALTY KICK
****½
HAROLD AND MAUDE
***
USA
A suicidal youth befriends and ends up romancing a life-loving 79-year-old.
When the premise is played straight and Ashby gives his characters room to
breathe, the picture becomes bizarrely resonant. But when played for
caricature - as it is through most of the first half - it's
grating.
dir: Hal Ashby
ph: John Alonzo
cast: Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, Vivian Pickles
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THE
HOSPITAL
****½
KLUTE
***½
USA
A private detective gets involved with a self-destructive call-girl.
A lurid, melodramatic study of an intriguing character, with
poorly timed thriller bits but enough other elements to keep you absorbed.
dir: Alan J. Pakula
ph: Gordon Willis
cast: Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi, Roy Scheider
THE LAST PICTURE
SHOW
*****
USA
Peter
Bogdanovich’s adaptation of a Larry McMurtry novel set in the lonely, barren
town of Anarene, Texas, 1951, centred around the local bored teenagers and
their yearning for a sense of fulfillment (mostly sex) as they cross the
threshold into a bored adulthood and its yearning for the past. The film is
shot in a soft, melancholy monochrome, its
soundtrack is speckled with crackle and subtle echo effects, and further
strewn with a plethora of early 50’s radio hits (many of them by Hank Williams
and all of them gems). Like several of the key figures in it, it’s suffused
in nostalgia – not cheap, wholesome nostalgia, but the pained, paralysing
kind that builds with years of disappointment and torpid regret. It’s an
elegant, elegiac, intensely moving portrait of a steadily decaying mid-West.
And with its relaxed depiction of budding sexuality and frustration, in some
sense it plays like the de-chastened underside of the sunny rites-of-passage
movies of the 50s – but done with subtlety and sensitivity, and no
unnecessary fanfare.
dir: Peter Bogdanovich
wr: Peter Bogdanovich, Larry McMurtry
ph: Robert L. Surtees
ed: Donn Cambern
pd: Polly Platt
cast: Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson,
Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, Sam Bottoms, Randy Quaid
MACBETH
***½
UK
Shakespeare's tragedy of Macbeth's destruction by greed and ambition.
A grim, bloody, downbeat Shakespeare adaptation, bordering
on re-interpretation with moments of bold brilliance and an eerily effective
twist ending.
dir: Roman Polanski
ph: Gilbert Taylor
cast: Jon Finch, Francesca Annis, Martin Shaw, Nicholas Selby
THE MERCHANT OF
FOUR SEASONS
***
Germany
A fruit-seller is continually rejected and psychologically tortured by his
wife and middle-class family.
A cold, austere tale of arthouse misery. Certain scenes pull you
in savagely, but it all becomes alienating and tiring by the time it
finishes.
wr/dir: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
cast: Hans Hirschmuller, Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, Andrea Schober,
Gusti Kreissl
McCABE & MRS.
MILLER
****½
USA
At the turn of the century, a gambler sets up a whorehouse and a new town
around it.
An influentially squalid anti-Western. Moody and textured, it
broke many sacred codes and conventions and - like so many of Altman's films
- was much lambasted upon its original release but built up its reputation in
time.
dir: Robert Altman
wr: Robert Altman, Brian McKay
ph: Vilmos Zsigmond
m: Leonard Cohen
cast: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, René Auberjonois, Shelley Duvall,
John Schuck, Keith Carradine
MURMUR OF THE
HEART
****
France/Germany/Italy
A 15-year-old boy from an unorthodox bourgeois family is learning about sex.
A breezy, nonchalantly eccentric take on bourgeois adolescence,
and presumably a very personal one, even though the director's - or any
outside - touch is hardly felt throughout. We meet the Chevaliers, watch them smoke cigars and commit incest, all with the minimum
of fuss.
wr/dir: Louis Malle
cast: Benoit Ferreux, Léa Massari, Daniel Gelin, Michel Lonsdale,
Ave Ninchi, Gila von Weitershausen
PINK NARCISSUS
*½
USA
Softcore gay porn which has received moderate though nevertheless confounding
respect from certain critics.
STRAW
DOGS
***
SUNDAY, BLOODY
SUNDAY
***½
UK
A handsome designer carries on parallel affairs with a male Jewish doctor and
a divorced businesswoman.
A brave, adult-oriented, thorough exploration of emotional
unfulfilment. It grows distancing though, in its insistence on civility and
underplaying.
dir: John Schlesinger
wr: Penelope Gilliatt
cast: Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch, Murray Head, Peggy Ashcroft,
Maurice Denham, Vivian Pickles
SWEET SWEETBACK'S
BAADASSSSS SONG
***
USA
The ode to all the "brothers and sisters who have had enough of the Man"
that was "rated X by an all-white jury" and opened in two theatres
to a torrent of violent reviews before earning $15m and breaking several
barriers for black and antiestablishment cinema. Beyond its social and
historical context, it's mostly unwatchable, though
writer-director-producer-star-composer-editor Van Peebles does come up with
some arresting visuals - particularly in the closing third.
wr/dir/ed/m: Melvin Van Peebles
ph: Bob Maxwell
cast: Melvin Van Peebles, Simon Chuckster, Hubert Scales, John
Dullaghan, Rhetta Hughes, West Gale, Mario Van Peebles, John Amos
TWO-LANE
BLACKTOP
***½
W.R.: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM
****½
Yugoslavia/West Germany
"Comrade-lovers, for your health's sake, fuck freely!"
Probably the most fervent cinematic avowal of the 'make love not
war' credo as well as the best film to ever showcase hardcore sex scenes, a
lecture on Wilhelm Reich, documentary footage of the cult he has spawned in
rural America, a Communist manifesto, Nazi footage of electroshock therapy,
an ode to Stalin and close-ups of a large erect penis set to be reproduced
into a dildo.
Psychedelic doesn't begin to describe it. But this Dušan
Makavejev
quote maybe does: "[it's] a black comedy, a political circus, a fantasy
on the fascism and communism of human bodies, the political life of human
genitals, a proclamation of the pornographic essence of any system of
authority and power over others." The zeal and dizziness with which
Makevejev attacks ideals held sacred by the two world powers - namely
Communism and consumerism - puts him in a delicate and pretty delightful
position.
The subtle, telling details of day-to-day life in Yugoslavia
that marked Makavejev's earlier masterpieces are sadly missing here, but all
the same, it's one of the key works of 1970s counterculture and arguably of
cinema in general.
wr/dir: Dušan Makavejev
cast: Milena Dravić,
Ivica Vidović, Jagoda Kaloper, Tuli Kupferberg, Zoran Radmilović,
Jackie Curtis, Miodrag Andrić, Živka Matić, Dragoljub Ivkov, Nikola Milić,
Milan Jelić
WAKE
IN FRIGHT
****
WALKABOUT
***
Australia
Two children are left in the Australian outback and meet an Aborigine boy.
One of the first arthouse clash-of-cultures tales to be
disdainful of the civilized world. It's aggressive and deeply pretentious,
but the photography lends it atmosphere.
dir: Nicolas Roeg
ph: Nicolar Roeg
m: John Barry
cast: Jenny Agutter, Lucien John, David Gulpilil
WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
***
USA
An odd musical adaptation of the famous Roald Dahl story. Oddness ought to be
a given - and an ideal - with any Dahl adaptation, but here it feels forced.
dir: Mel Stuart
cast: Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson, Peter Ostrum, Michael Bollner,
Urusula Reit, Denise Nickerson, Leonard Stone, Julie Dawn Cole
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