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
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
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
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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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
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
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
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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