BAREFOOT IN THE PARK
***˝
USA
Young newlyweds move into a New
York flat low on luxury.
An entertaining and telling account of early marriage that never quite overcomes its stage play feel, despite
some elegant New York exteriors.
dir: Gene Saks
cast: Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Mildred Natwick,
Charles Boyer
BELLE DE JOUR
*****
France/Italy
A rich housewife spends her
days working in a brothel.
A haunting, ambiguous journey into the mind of a repressed woman, where
fantasy blurs into reality to the point where it is impossible to tell one
from the other. Immaculately crafted, compulsive viewing.
dir: Luis Buńuel
wr: Luis Buńuel, Jean-Claude Carričre
ph: Sacha Vierny
cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Michel
Piccoli, Genevieve Page
BONNIE AND CLYDE
*****
USA
The lives of the notorious 30s
couple of outlaws.
A landmark gangster picture that was adored and reviled by mass
numbers of both
critics and filmgoers upon release. Haunting in its evocation of the Depression era,
the picture relies on things like fake snapshots and newspaper articles to
ground its story in fact, even though it's very much based on myth and its
whole point seems to be reinforcing the myth.
It's as telling of the era in which it was made as it is of the era it depicts.
The way it shifts in tone, jumps
across genres and relies on showy techniques is strongly influenced
by the French New Wave. It proved greatly influential itself, pushing all
boundaries to do with the depiction of violence on film. All of the
blood-letting seems realistic and unfussy - it's very direct in its
impact - but combined with the larger-than-life personas, it ends up glamourising all the same.
dir: Arthur Penn
wr: David Newman, Robert Benton
ph: Burnett Guffey
ed: Dede Allen
cast: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway, Michael J.
Pollard, Gene Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Denver Pyle, Gene
Wilder, Evans Evans
LA
COLLECTIONNEUSE
***˝
France
The
third in Eric Rohmer’s early cycle of ‘Moral Tales’ and the first to
be feature length. A prize-winner at the Berlin Film Festival in 1967, it
still didn’t secure an American release until 1971, after "My Night at
Maud’s" and "Claire's Knee" turned out to be unexpected
hits.
The picture revolves around a sexpot whose hobby is sleeping
around and two intellectual men who end up sharing a summer villa with
her. It’s narrated from the point of view of the less impulsive of the
men. His voice-over is very prominent and novelistic in nature. It’s a
little hard to take initially, but you get used to it in time and grow to
appreciate the wit – and the wit is the writer’s not the narrator’s.
In fact the joke revolves around the latter’s very dry, deeply
rationalised reasoning that the sexpot is determined to seduce him, while
she shows no such inclinations, and he is determined to resist
her, while everything he does hints at the opposite.
There is very little plot or narrative to speak of - it's
mostly just talk, yes - but whatever there is is entirely built around and
propelled by the way the characters respond to one another (as well as the
subtext to their responses). The approach, as you'd expect from Rohmer (in
retrospect, anyway), is very subtle. There is no music or any kind of
elbow-nudging to form a context around the characters' actions. He doesn't
openly push you into a particular position from which to judge the trio.
You're meant to make your own decisions and draw your own conclusions
about who to believe and side with. The fact that this takes some getting
used to (and that this renders Rohmer 'an acquired taste') is actually
quite unsettling when you think about it.
The three principal actors all contributed towards the very
literate (i.e. clever-sounding) dialogue, though their performances aren't
as unaffected as the best in Rohmer's filmography.
Watch out for the opening 'prologues.' They are very funny.
And they're notable in that this is about as pointed as Rohmer's humour
gets (which isn't very much).
dir: Eric Rohmer
wr: Eric Rohmer, Patrick Bauchau, Haydée Politoff, Daniel
Pommerulle
ph: Nestor Almendros
cast: Patrick Bauchau, Haydée Politoff, Daniel Pommerulle, Eugene
Archer, Mijanou Bardot,
Annik
Morice
COOL HAND LUKE
****
USA
A loner is sent to the chain
gang for two years.
An entertaining and unexpectedly moving prison drama, with an effortlessly
magnetic central performance. You may have heard that it's supposed
to be a Jesus allegory, but it's best you forget about this if you plan to
enjoy it.
dir: Stuart Rosenberg
cast: Paul Newman, George Kennedy, Jo Van
Fleet, J. D. Cannon
DANCE
OF THE VAMPIRES
****
USA/UK
Or 'The Fearless Vampire Killers'. Or 'Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My
Neck'. It's hard to tell what possessed Polanski (between directing two
notably sophisticated psychological horrors) to embark upon this bizarre
spoof on Hammer Studios vampire lore, in which he himself plays the dim-witted
apprentice to a bumbling professor. It's rough and shaggy, but also warm
and moody. Though several of the gags fall flat, it's the rich textures
and inspired bits of lunacy that you remember, as well as the playful way
it has of making you jump.
dir: Roman Polanski
wr: Gérard Brach, Roman Polanski
ph: Douglas Slocombe
cast: Jack MacGowran, Roman Polanski, Alfie Bass, Sharon
Tate, Jessie Robins, Ferdy Mayne, Iain Quarrier, Terry Downes
DR. DOLITTLE
*˝
USA
A musical about a veterinarian who
has the ability to talk to animals.
Just indescribably horrible. And in this year of "Belle de
Jour" and "In Cold Blood", it
was deemed worthy of a Best Picture nomination. Apt, really.
dir: Richard Fleischer
cast: Rex Harrison, Samantha Eggar, Anthony Newley,
Richard Attenborough
THE FIREMEN'S BALL
****˝
Czechoslovakia
Making a social commentary picture with non-professional actors is nothing
new, but making a comedy with common folk you gathered from a village is a
valiant conceit. It isn’t difficult to make local downtrodden workers look
like local downtrodden workers, but it is all but impossible to make them look
like local downtrodden workers and have them master comic delivery. Miloš
Forman doesn’t completely succeed with the latter but he’s so sweet
for trying and so good at everything else he does in this picture that it
doesn’t really matter in the end.
The action revolves
around a firemen’s ball in a small Czech village where everything that
can go wrong, does. This includes a beauty pageant, a raffle, a fire
brigade operation and a ceremony in honour of the retired chief. Events
take on an increasingly surreal nature as the picture goes on.
Forman crosscuts a
little in the early stages in an effort to try and give shape to the
actors’ very shapeless delivery. But the picture only really picks up as the
beauty pageant comes around and Forman lets it organically descend into a
joyous chaos. His major strength is his feel for little details like the
pushy father who hovers outside the door of the pageant’s selection
committee to make sure his daughter gets in, or the teenager who convinces
the selectors they want her in the pageant and runs home to fetch her swim
suit.
Forman thoroughly
understands and even seems grudgingly fond of the mentality he’s dealing
with. Much as you may object to the system that prizes pomp and
circumstance above constructive things, you never hold these naively
idealistic simple folk responsible for it. If anything, you feel
protective towards them (and maybe a little condescending, but don’t
tell anyone). Along the same lines, you can see why the picture was deemed
to be an incendiary political allegory upon release (and you’re able to
appreciate its cleverness), but it’s the peasants’ warmth and
irrepressible nature that you most respond to.
dir: Miloš Forman
wr: Miloš Forman, Jaroslav Papousek, Ivan Passer
cast: Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebanek, Josef Valnoha, Frantisek
Debelka, Josef Kolb, Jan Stöckl
THE GRADUATE
*****
USA
A naive college graduate is
seduced by a middle-aged family friend, then falls for her daughter.
The sort of film that defines a decade. A sharp, witty, clever and
incisive satire of 1960s suburban malaise. The first half is so
consistently brilliant, you're ready to forgive the slightly muted impact
of the second.
dir: Mike Nichols
wr: Calder Willingham, Buck Henry
cast: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine
Ross, William Daniels, Murray Hamilton
GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER
**˝
USA
A mixed-race couple announces their marriage plans to their stunned
parents.
Dispensing with words like 'negro' and 'colored,' the young bride-to-be
sounds like an old man trying to be topical and 'with-it'. The elderly
Catholic priest is revealed to be shockingly liberal, while the
liberal-minded parents and civil-right-seeking negroes come of as
shockingly reactionary.
The plot speeds through every imaginable obstacle
at a mechanical rate. The characters don't stand for people, they stand
for ideas and the ideas are painfully simplistic. The majority of the
actors attack their parts with great heart and conviction, but the
material they have to work with is as fake as the scenic cardboard backdrops that
surround them.
dir: Stanley Kramer
cast: Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier, Katharine
Hepburn, Katharine Houghton, Cecil Kellaway, Beah Richards, Roy Glenn,
Isabel Sanford, Virginia Christine, Alexandra Hay
I AM CURIOUS - YELLOW
****˝
Sweden
The political aspirations,
sexual experimentations and general misadventures of a young Swedish
woman.
A rambling, indulgent document of a restless period that succeeds
because of its flaws almost as much as it does in spite of them. Naďvely,
uncompromisingly challenging the viewer to embrace its excesses, it
carries its own breezy and unique sensibility that is completely
infectious and will forever remain fresh.
dir: Vilgot Sjöman
cast: Lena Nyman, Vilgot Sjöman, Börje Ahlstedt, Peter
Lindgren
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IN COLD BLOOD
*****
USA
In 1959, two ex-convicts
slaughter an innocent family and go on the run from the law.
Moody, hypnotic, understated yet vivid, searing, thought-provoking and
profoundly unsettling. An impeccably written, directed and photographed account of two essentially motiveless real-life
murderers, with passages of a haunting and almost unbearable intensity. A unique
masterpiece that takes in the terror of society, of neurotic crime and alienation.
wr/dir: Richard Brooks
ph: Conrad Hall
ed: Peter Zinner
cast: Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe,
Paul Stewart, Gerald S. O'Loughlin
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT
***˝
USA
A black detective is sent to
help out a racist white cop in solving a murder case in a small Southern
town.
Daring in its day and still quite relevant as a study of racial relations,
but much of it amounts to just a routine cop thriller.
dir: Norman Jewison
cast: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates,
Quentin Dean
THE JUNGLE BOOK
***
USA
A boy grows up with animals but
then decides to go and meet his own species.
Despite some skilled voice-work, this is a second-rate Disney feature, with the
studio now well into its lengthy decline.
dir: Wolfgang Reitherman
voices of: Bruce Reitherman, George Sanders, Phil Harris,
Sebastian Cabot, Louis Prima, Sterling Holloway
LOVE AFFAIR; OR THE CASE OF THE
MISSING SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR
*****
Yugoslavia
An arresting, absorbing,
morbidly witty
bricolage.
Politically aware and very evocative of its time and place, in the vein of
the same year's "I Am Curious - Yellow", and arguably
even more valuable for providing a free-thinking, impulsive perspective on
a sheltered Communist government from within (rather than Sjoman's endearingly
naive posturing). Most of it involves a sweet, unorthodox and ultimately tragic
romance in Belgrade between a free-spirited switchboard operator of
Hungarian descent and a sensitive rat exterminator of Turkish ethnicity. Then
there's also monologues by a criminologist and an elderly sexologist, a
brutal poem about a rat, an autopsy and footage from Esther Shub's "The
Fall of the Romanov Dynasty" (1927). Non-Serbo-Croatian speakers
might struggle with the white-on-white subtitles. And they may never
understand the untranslatable macabre wit behind the original title.
dir: Dusan Makavejev
cast: Eva Ras, Slobodan Aligrudic, Ruzica Sokic, Miodrag
Andric, Dragan Obradovic, Aleksander Kostic, Zivojin Aleksic
MARAT/SADE
***˝
UK
Few people claim to understand the motivation or exactly what's happening
at the core of Peter Weiss' play about the Marquis de Sade and Charenton
Asylum inmates' staging of a play about the assassination of Jean-Paul
Marat. As directed for the British stage by Peter Brook however, it caused
a sensation and sold truckloads of tickets on the path towards Broadway
and a Tony.
Brook's movie adaptation is presumably faithful, since the
stark stage setting is retained, the performances (by the original Royal
Shakespeare Company players) are pitched for the back row and the dense,
elliptical dialogue doesn't betray a whiff of a movie producer. Brook
doesn't 'open up' the play in traditional - and traditionally catastrophic
- terms, but he does adopt a loose, bracing visual style that justifies it
as a worthwhile work of cinema. Between the stylish visuals, committed
players and the unhinged, arresting nature of the play itself, there's
plenty to absorb here. But you don't shake the feeling that you're missing
out on the much more intense experience of seeing it on stage.
dir: Peter Brook
ph: David Watkin
cast: Patrick Magee, Michael Williams, Ian Richardson, Glenda
Jackson, Clifford Rose, Freddie Jones, Hugh Sullivan, John Hussey
MARKETA LAZAROVA
****
Czechoslovakia
The first time many people heard
of this picture was when it was surprisingly voted the greatest Czech film
of all time in a national critics' poll. It's a bleak, opaque episodic
saga about a feud between a pagan and a Christian clan in the 13th century
and a sexy-virginal convent girl caught in between. Or something like
that. A lot of the time it's very difficult to figure out what exactly is
happening and what the consequences turn out to be. There's a lot of
unannounced flashbacks and flashforwards. Poetry plays a big role and so
does symbolism, probably. I barely picked up on any of it, but I was still
transfixed. Its international appeal essentially lies in the evocative use
of period detail and the strange, stark, haunting visual style.
dir: Frantisek Vlácil
ph: Bedrich Batka
ed: Miroslav Hájek
m: Zdenek Liska
cast: Josef Kemr, Magda Vásáryová, Nada Hejna,
Jaroslav Moucka, Frantisek Velecký, Karel Vasicek
THE
RED AND THE WHITE
***
Hungary/Soviet Union
Miklós Jancsó's spare, chilly account of the 1919 struggles between
Communist and Tzarist forces on the Soviet border consists of a series of
mass cold-blood killings committed interchangably by the Reds and the
Whites. There are few close-ups and no one is allowed to show any emotion.
It's markedly difficult to tell apart the Reds from the Whites. Thirty
minutes in, the message grows manifest - war is senseless, war is futile -
but there is still a full, desolate hour to go, during which Jancsó
doesn't necessarily develop any further points.
dir: Miklós Jancsó
cast: Jószef Madaras, Tibor Molnár, András Kozák, Tatyana
Konyukhova, Krystyna Mikolajewska
LE SAMOURAĎ
****
France/Italy
A hitman falls for a cabaret
singer who witnessed one of his killings.
Probably the most successful of Melville's attempts at a neo-noir. Still
emotionally alienating, but moody, atmospheric and strikingly
photographed.
wr/dir: Jean-Pierre Melville
ph: Henri Decaë
cast: Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon,
Cathy Rosier
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
***˝
USA
Petruchio is appointed to tame shrewish Kate into husband-serving obedience.
Among the better teamings of its star couple and among the more
entertaining Shakespeare adaptations.
dir: Franco Zeffirelli
cast: Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael York,
Michael Hordern, Cyril Cusack
TWO FOR THE ROAD
****
USA
A quarrelling couple reminisces
over their twelve years of marriage.
An
expertly assembled and deeply affecting study of love and marriage. More
endearing than perceptive, its strengths are the unwavering romanticism at
its core and the superb lead performances.
dir: Stanley Donen
wr: Frederic Raphael
ph: Christopher Challis
cast: Albert Finney, Audrey Hepburn, Eleanor Bron,
William Daniels, Claude Dauphin
TWO OR
THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT HER
***˝
France
The 'Her' of the title at once refers to the city of Paris, the
protagonist and the lead actress. Jean Luc-Godard's cine-roman - about,
among other things, consumerism, urbanisation, the state of the world and
Paris' housing problem - has no real plot. Mostly it just follows a
day in the life of a middle-class wife and mother, who spends afternoons
prostituting herself to make ends meet. There are plenty of digressive
monologues - including several delivered by Godard himself in an
irritating, whispered voice-over - which range from the masturbatory to
the genuinely intriguing.
Godard tries to present Paris as a bland, industrialised,
depersonalised wasteland. In this he fails, and the picture is all the
better for it. It's hard to call them pretty, but the visuals do carry a
certain glossy appeal.
wr/dir: Jean-Luc Godard
ph: Raoul Coutard
cast: Marina Vlady, Roger Montsoret, Jean Narboni, Anny Duperey, Raoul
Lévy, Joseph Gehrard
WAIT UNTIL DARK
****
USA
A blind woman is terrorized by
criminals searching for drugs that have been unwittingly planted in her
home.
A remarkably involving little thriller. No matter how improbable the plot
is, the actors aren't lacking in conviction and the tension never lets up.
dir: Terence Young
cast: Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna
WEEKEND
*****
France/Italy
A rich Parisian couple goes on
a weekend trip but gets stuck in an elaborate traffic jam.
A bold, savage, surreal allegory - probably cinema's most mesmerizing vision of
the apocalypse. Obviously it's far from pleasant to watch but also
impossible not to admire. The traffic jam sequence is among cinema's most ingenious and
brilliantly sustained. Arguably Godard's greatest work.
wr/dir: Jean-Luc Godard
ed: Agnčs Guillermot
cast: Mireille Darc, Jean Yanne, Jean-Pierre Kalfon,
Valerie Lagrange, Jean-Pierre Léaud
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE
***˝
UK
An utterly entertaining, utterly forgettable (and therefore, even upon
repeated viewings, utterly enjoyable) Bond episode.
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