Cold War and Cold Blood
Cria. Film critic David Denby writes a sensitive and intriguing analysis of this latest film by Spanish director Carlos Saurus in the Boston Phoenix that makes it sound like far and away the most interesting new movie in town. Saurus portrays the hypocrisy of a philandering, insensitive military man and the despair of his young wife who is dying of cancer through the eyes of their aloof, perceptive and frighteningly critical young daughter, Ana. At the same time, he includes scenes that give a more objective, more compassionate view of the unhappy parents. The theme of the child's view of adulthood is one that has made for some remarkable films (one thinks specifically of Truffaut), and Saurus's juxtaposition of perspectives promises to be particularly thought-provoking. Critics have been heralding soulful-eyed Ana Torrent, who plays the disillusioned daughter, as the most self-possessed child actress to come along in yeas, and Geraldine Chaplin as the lonely, dying mother is said to give her most mature and affecting performance yet.
The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming. This film will no longer seem as cathartically satirical as it did when first released in the mid-sixties, when an atmosphere of Cold-War hysteria still hung low, if somewhat less thick than in the 50's, over most of middle-America. But Alan Arkin's comic franticness in this tale about a small New England coastal village thrown into a frenzy when a Russian ship docks in its harbor and the Reds start mixing with the town-folk should still be good for some belly-laughs.
Dirty Harry. It's scary to think how many Americans, from assembly-line workers to advertising men to upwardly mobile Harvard students, are addicted to these sort of one-man vigilante, "take the law into your own hands" movies. Facile sociological comments about what Clint Eastwood's popularity tells us about Americans' repressed frustrations aside, a violence-glorifying film like Dirty Harry is incredibly dangerous. Its potential impact was dramatized just a month ago when after seeing the movie on television, two young brothers in Cleveland re-enacted a gunfight scene from the film and one accidentally shot the other dead. None of which will, or perhaps should, keep you from going; just save your unleashed hostility for the squash courts or for a few hourlies.
Jules and Jim. Truffaut's swirling, lyrical film about two best friends and the captivating, unpredictable women who comes between them but at the same time brings them closer together is a classic that you should never grow tired of seeing. With its subtle variations of pace and atmosphere, its precious moments of spontaneous joy and sudden despair, and its wondrously wise insights into the dynamics of friendship and love, Jules and Jim will always be a source of new ideas and fresh emotional responses.
Voyage to Italy. Roberto Rosselini departs from the more descriptive neorealism of his other classics to produce a troubling psychological portrait of a British couple whose marriage goes to pieces during a vacation trip to Naples. (It is more likely that the break-up between Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders is largely based on Rosselini's own ll-fated romance with Bergman.) French director Jean-Luc Godard said about it, "there are five or six films in the history of the cinema which one wants to review simply by saying 'It is the most beautiful of film,' why say more, in effect, about...Voyage to Italy?" Why, indeed.
Claire's Knee. The fifth of Eric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales" is a sort of bagatelle within a book within a film. It's a wierd sort of whymsical fiction about a diplomat on vacation who becomes hopelessly pre-occupied with the knee of a seventeen year old girl who could care less about him -- all of which Rohmer presents as a story coming to life in the mind of a real-life author who keeps considering and rearranging the events as he writes. Rohmer handles this narrative complexity light-heatedly enough to make it fun rather than pretentious.
Canal Zone. All the reviews indicate that Fred Wizeman's latest documentary may be his most disturbing -- and at a time when many Americans are failing to confront the imperialistic impulses that led us deeper and deeper into Vietnam, his most timely. Under Wizeman's cold, documentary gaze, American "Zonies" who are zealously protecting our "sovereignty" over the canal appear as a pack of super-patriotic crazies -- absurd if they didn't seem all so familiar.
Rollerball. This was made in the Nixon Era, and it shows. The word to describe this movie is hydrophobia; as Lyman Bostock, the second-leading hitter in the American League said, this film says everything there is to say about violence in American sports. James Caan is macho-competent, as usual, and the sets are something--the crowd scenes for this amalgamation of roller derby and first degree assault were filmed in the Olympic Stadium in Munich. In a way, it's a shame--in the hands of a William Friedkin, this could have been a 90-minute reminder that the future does not belong to us. Instead it's a two-and-a-half hour monstrolsity. Stay home and read The Silmarrilon this weekend.
M. King Vidor said a couple of weeks ago in the Times Sunday Magazine that he was surprised sound lasted back in 1929; after all, directors had made film into a great silent art form. Well, Vidor was wrong, of course, but Fritz Lang's 1923 murder story M. stands in tribute to the visual sweep and eloquence of silent film. Lang and Lubitsch made the German film industry in the 1920's the most technically brilliant and intellectually stimulating of any in the world; Lang's later Hollywood efforts were mostly cliched and dull. The movie stars the young Peter Lorre, not the simpering caricature of the Bogart films, but Lorre when he was young an thin, and very pale, and very convincing as a psychopath who murders children. The scene where a young girl is murdered and the camera cuts to the girl's balloons drifting aimlessly, is one of the most chilling in all film, and the crowd hysteria at the end makes you wish Lang could have directed Day of the Locust. It foreshadows the hysteria that was to come ten years later. Not to be missed, this first offering by the Quad Film Festival is the best movie around the Square this weekend.
Valentino. Ken Russell's latest turkey can be credited for furnishing an appealing showcase for Rudolf Nureyev's breathtaking prowess on an empty dance floor, but compliments come to an abrupt halt there. We see all the glamor and fame that filled the title character's moment in the spotlight, but Nureyev's Valention remains a distant figure, a romantic anachronism bursting forth with panache and charisma and little else. Russell seems to persist in the belief that audiences enjoy having their senses assaulted and will consider it entertainment; grotesques and caricatures dot the screen in Valentino, evoking some of Fellini's lesser films. The ambience of the Twenties is effectively recaptured by the film, but Valentino never gets around to addressing the ethos that prevailed in the America of that fabled epoch. And judging by this performance, Michelle Phillips would do well to try a comeback as a reconstructed Mama with any Papas she can find.
The Phiadelphia Story. The summer after my freshman year I fell ass over elbows in love with an older woman, and my ardor for her has remained constant, if unrequited. As Tracy Lord, a spoiled Main Line Socialite who is humanized by the forces of drink. Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, Katerine Hepburn turns in one of the most wonderful performances of her career. George Cukor skillfully directed this film version of the modern Midsummer Night's Dream that saved the National Theater Guild from bankruptcy. Grant is perfect in his Oberon role, masterfully elliptical and indirect. Ditto Jimmy Steward as the ingeneuous Bottom character. The supporting cast also turns in a series of virtuoso performances, making The Philadelphia Story a tour de force of romantic comedy.