ACCATTONE
****
Italy
Pier
Paolo Pasolini made this, his first film, when neo-realism was becoming
unfashionable. So, he announced that his ultimate goal was an
authenticity “beyond neo-realism.”
The gruesome squalor and harsh, mostly natural lighting will still seem
familiar to anybody who ever saw “Rome, Open City” or “Bicycle
Thieves”. But Pasolini does manage to set his picture apart from that
cycle of films in that rather than a saintly, hopelessly downtrodden
worker, his story is about an anguished, aimless pimp, who corrupts
virgins and steals from his child. In a sense, Pasolini does ultimately
achieve his goal by adding psychological realism to the otherwise
well-worn neo-realist context. He doesn’t only blame the system, but the
individual as well.
What further saves the picture from feeling redundant are the way he mixes
a Bach score with the down-and-dirty aesthetic (which back in his day was
still moderately original) as well as the little bits
of lyricism he throws in now and then, which often last for only a moment
and seem almost incidental (ordinary-looking shots often end up evolving
into majestic compositions seemingly without any interference on the part
of the makers, who want to make you believe that they’re merely following the
action as it unfolds). These also serve as a lead-in to a climactic
nightmare sequence that subscribes to the school of Luis Buñuel far more
closely than it does to that of Vittorio De Sica. It’s more flowing,
atmospheric, poignant and successfully dreamlike than just about any other
dream sequence in cinema.
Not shockingly, the cast is made up of non-actors, few of whom display any
inborn flair for drama. Tonino Delli Colli’s photography however, lends
them an earthy kind of magnetism. He brings a sensuality to their faces,
showcasing the way the light reflects on their worn, greasy skin and the
stray bits of their frizzy, uncouth hair.
dir: Pier Paolo Pasolini
wr: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sergio Citti
ph: Tonino Delli Colli
cast: Franco Citti, Franca Pasut, Silvana Corsini, Paola Guidi,
Adriana Asti, Luciano Conti, Luciano Gonini, Renato Capogna
BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S
*****
USA
A NYC writer falls for an
eccentric call girl.
The source novella is a classic and, although not necessarily faithful
to it, this film adaptation is, too. Among the most charming,
sophisticated and adorable romantic comedies of all, with an enchanting
heroine.
dir: Blake Edwards
wr: George Axelrod
ph: Franz Planer
m: Henry Mancini
cast: Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, Patricia Neal, Buddy
Ebsen, Martin Balsam, John McGiver
CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER
***½
France
A collaboration between ethnographer Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar
Morin, which is mostly made up of interviews with a selection of
contemporary Parisians about their lifestyles, theories and emotional
states. After the interviews, Rouch and Morin make the featured players
watch their confessions on-screen and debate how authentic they were and
how authentic they could possibly be when conscious that a camera is
recording them.
The picture is part verité, part
dialectic, part wankery. A few of the interviewees (among them, a
concentration camp survivor) have moving stories to tell and the vast
majority do manage to hold your interest. Rouch and Morin's use of the
newly available lightweight 16mm camera and synchronous sound equipment
(more mobile than any previous model) was pioneering.
dir: Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin
DAYS OF THRILLS AND LAUGHTER
****
USA
Probably the warmest and most consistently entertaining of the many many compilations
of classic silent comedy sequences that popped up during this period.
EL CID
USA
**
USA
Historical epic. Charlton Heston.
THE HUSTLER
***½
USA
A pool hustler goes up against
an established champion.
An overlong pool-hall melodrama, though it is atmospheric and marked by the
charismatic presence of a screen god in his signature role.
dir: Robert Rossen
cast: Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Piper Laurie, George C.
Scott, Myron McCormick
THE INNOCENTS
*****
UK
A sheltered spinster becomes governess in a secluded, possibly haunted
mansion.
This ghost story is one of cinema's most innovative and influential horror
films, even if next to no one knows about it today. An
adaptation of Henry James' Freudian "The Turn of the Screw",
it evokes a tragic back story and hints at a gallery of repressions.
Ambiguous, atmospheric, intriguing and still quite frightening.
dir: Jack Clayton
wr: William Archibald, Truman Capote
ph: Freddie Francis
m: Georges Auric
pd: Wilfrid Shingleton
cast: Deborah Kerr, Megs Jenkins, Pamela Franklin, Martin Stephens,
Michael Redgrave, Peter Wyngarde
JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG
***
USA
Nazi war criminals are held at
trial in 1948 for crimes against humanity.
Each frame is practically bathed in self-importance, but the cast keeps things
relatively watchable.
dir: Stanley Kramer
cast: Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Maximilian Schell, Marlene
Dietrich, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift,
William Shatner
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
****
France/Italy
A man meets a woman he may or
may not have fallen in love with in a town that may or may not have been
Frederiksbad.
A unique and hypnotic cinematic puzzle without a solution or logic. A
remarkable balancing act - an
acquired taste, but a required viewing.
dir: Alain Resnais
wr: Alain Robbe-Grillet
ph: Sacha Vierny
m: Francis Seyrig
cast: Giorgio Albetrazzi, Delphine Seyrig, Sacha Pitoeff
LOLA
****½
France
Jacques
Demy’s debut, this romantic melodrama revolving around a Nantes cabaret
performer and the three men who love her is the most naïvely charming
thing to come out of the Nouvelle Vague. The visual style may be 1961 (Raoul
Coutard was a busy man around this time), but the mindset is circa 1937.
It’s utterly contrived: lovers get stranded on exotic
islands for seven years at a time, abandoned single mother strippers come
with a heart of gold and a twinkle in their eye, sailors on shore leave
fall in love and get heart-broken and fall in love again very very
quickly, and every prominent character gets a chance to coincidentally run
into or unwittingly walk past another prominent character.
But it’s open about its contrivances. Explanations and
reconciliations are dealt with very speedily and innocently. And there is
so much joy in it, so much love for movies that you can’t help but smile
and weep along.
wr/dir: Jacques Demy
ph: Raoul Coutard
m: Michel Legrand
cast: Anouk Aimée, Marc Michel, Elina Labourdette, Alan Scott,
Annie Duperoux, Jacques Harden, Margo Lion, Catherine Lutz
THE MISFITS
****½
USA
A fragile divorcée gets
involved with a trio of cowboys, who hunt down wild mustangs.
A mesmerizing hothouse melodrama in Western drag, with striking
performances. It's all the more poignant
for proving to be the final film for two of the screen's greatest legends
(as well as the final truly decent film for a couple others).
dir: John Huston
wr: Arthur Miller
cast: Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach,
Thelma Ritter
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LA
NOTTE
***
Italy/France
Michelangelo Antonioni was often able to come up with absorbing ideas and even
to articulate them quite vividly, as he did in L'Avventura (1960).
So in some way it's doubly frustrating when he veers into hollowness as he
does in this, the second picture in his celebrated trilogy of bourgeois
disenchantment. At the very least his visual style doesn't suffer - it's
as sophisticated and finely tuned as his observations on the juiceless
marriage of Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau (each exquisitely
coiffed and playing in auto-pilot) are not. After two hours of sharing in
their photogenic ennui, you become as bored and disheartened as they have.
But you can't muster up any sympathy for characters who bury their heads
up their own asses and then turn around to agonise over not having come
across a human
connection.
dir: Michelangelo Antonioni
ph: Gianni Di Venanzo
cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard
Wicki, Rosy Mazzacurati, Maria Pia Luzi
ONE-EYED JACKS
**½
USA
A Western bandit seeks revenge
on his former partner, now a sheriff.
Though the lensing is undeniably pretty, Brando's self-indulgence as
director accentuates his lack of talent for storytelling.
dir: Marlon Brando
ph: Charles Lang Jnr
cast: Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Katy Jurado, Pina Pellicer, Slim
Pickens, Ben Johnson
ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS
***½
USA
Cruella de Vil dognaps a whole
heap of dalmatians to make a new coat.
Not among the company's true classics
but wholly enjoyable. After this point, Disney animation began to
deteriorate somewhat.
dir: Wolfgang Reitherman, Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi
voices of: Betty Lou Gerson, Rod Taylor, Lisa Davis, Ben Wright, Fred
Warlock, J. Pat O'Malley
SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS
***
USA
A young small-time couple falls
victim to sexual frustration in 20s Kansas.
Presumably frank and explicit under the Hollywood code of the day, and
quite telling of social constraints both in the 20s and the 60s. As drama
however, it comes off as
bland and overwrought. For mysterious reasons, it remains popular with romantics.
dir: Elia Kazan
cast: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie,
Barbara Loden, Zohra Lampert, Sandy Dennis, William Inge, Phyllis Diller
A TASTE OF HONEY
***½
UK
A working-class teenager falls
pregnant to a black sailor.
An intermittently involving slice-of-life drama from the period's stark kitchen-sink cycle, refreshingly
non-self-conscious in its approach to taboo themes like teen pregnancy,
interracial romance, sub-standard mothering and homosexuality.
dir: Tony Richardson
wr: Shelagh Delaney, Tony Richardson
ph: Walter Lassally
cast: Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan, Murray Melvin, Robert
Stephens, Paul Danquah
THROUGH
A GLASS DARKLY
***½
Sweden
The first chapter in a trilogy on godlessness, this deceptively
serene-looking chamber piece proved a turning point in Ingmar Bergman's
filmography. He abandoned his stark, bracing expressionism and took up the
spare, subtle visual style that favoured natural-looking light and would
go on to dominate his future work. And here he also began to finetune and
concentrate on his uncanny, relentless knack for sneaking up and closing
in on the nastier things gnawing at the heart of the human condition. Very
soon after he would become much better at this sort of thing and he would
shake off the clumsiness and artificiality that pop up to mar this
examination of a writer who exploits his daughter's mental instability for
material. But even though it lacks the innate tension and careful probing
of Bergman's later, better work, there's enough here worth digesting; the
performances are peerless and the compositions absorbing throughout.
wr/dir: Ingmar Bergman
ph: Sven Nykvist
cast: Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Max Von Sydow,
Lars Passgard
VICTIM
***½
UK
An esteemed lawyer pursues a
blackmailer, who threatens to reveal his homosexuality.
A daring thriller that was sympathetically seeking to reinvent on-screen
homosexuality (previously portrayed as a form of fungus) into a wretched
affliction that warrants pity for its victims. Badly dated now, but
the call for tolerance - obviously quite progressive in its day - does
contain bravery and an element of
fascination.
dir: Basil Dearden
wr: Janet Green, John McCormick
cast: Dirk Bogarde, Sylvia Syms, Dennis Price, Anthony Nicholls,
Peter Copley, Norman Bird, Peter McEnery
VIRIDIANA
*****
Spain
A novice nun is forced to live
with her kinky uncle.
A fierce, haunting attack on religion and just about all kinds of
idealism, filled with witty and blasphemous imagery, blessed by the maker's
Surrealist roots.
dir: Luis Buñuel
wr: Luis Buñuel, Julio Alajandro
cast: Silvia Pinal, Francisco Rabal, Fernando Rey, José
Calvo, Margarita Lozano, José Manuel Martín, Victoria Zinny
WEST SIDE STORY
***½
USA
Gang wars get in the way of
young love.
Just another teen musical with wooden acting, except also with ten Oscars.
That it's still quite absorbing has nothing to do with the creaky Romeo
and Juliet melodramatics and everything to do with the thrilling, justly
celebrated production numbers.
dir: Robert Wise, Jerome Robbins
cast: Richard Beymer, Natalie Wood, Russ Tamblyn, Rita Moreno, George
Chakiris
A WOMAN IS A WOMAN
****
France
Whoever
felt Godard was pushing it with “Breathless” in 1960 would have felt
he was completely obliterating it with this, his second-released picture, one year
later.
There is a slim plot - about a stripper whose boyfriend refuses to get her
pregnant and who, instead, turns her attentions to his best friend – but
it’s of little consequence. Godard’s principal interest here lies in
toying with the (largely Hollywood-ordained) classical conventions and
particularly screwing with his audience’s implicit willingness to
suspend disbelief. He jumps at every chance to expose his picture’s
reality as something that spectators are generally encouraged to forget it
is: constructed.
When a stripper is performing a number and you assume that the music is
coming from inside the room, Godard removes the backing track and reveals
his actress singing and dancing to silence. He even removes the background
atmos-track half way through a later scene only to start it up again
seconds later. When Anna Karina screws up a line, he has her start over
without cutting. When Jean-Paul Belmondo (playing a character not
coincidentally named Lubitsch) repeats a line from “Breathless” he has
him turn to the camera with a goofy grin. He even has him announce at one
point that he has to hurry home because “Breathless” is playing on TV.
For the first twenty minutes, this kind of
winking at the camera is incessant and you even grow impatient with Godard
for a moment, before you settle into it and sense the joy and exuberance
that is driving his picture at its core. There are several irresistibly
cute bits such as the one where Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy stomp around
with a lampshade over their head and communicate with each other via book
titles.
wr/dir:
Jean-Luc Godard
ph: Raoul Coutard
ed: Agnès Guillemot, Lila Herman
m: Michel Legrand
cast: Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Nicole
Paquin, Marie Dubois, Marion Sarraut, Jeanne Moreau
YOJIMBO
****
Japan
Of Kurosawa's empty pictures this might be the best. It concerns a Samurai
drifter who arrives at
a town ruled by two rival gangs and chooses to take both sides. It's the
prime source of inspiration for Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of
Dollars" (1964) and many others. An Eastern Western that becomes a superbly crafted black
comedy where everybody kills everybody.
dir: Akira Kurosawa
ph: Kazuo Miyagawa
cast: Toshiro Mifune, Eijiro Tono, Seizaburo Kawazu, Isuzu
Yamada
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