Based on the personal memories of Yugoslavian writer-director Joven Acin and executive producers George Zecevic and Petar Jankovic, this nostalgic account of growing up in Belgrade in the early 50s centers on a mystery: Miriana (Gala Videnovic), the beautiful mascot of an inseparable male rowing team, becomes pregnant, and the four loyal youths, all of whom love her, row her illegally across the border to her father in Italy, but jointly refuse to declare who the father of the child is. In the course of solving this mystery through an extended flashback, the film offers a fresh and evocative look at the political and cultural tensions of the period, when American incursions like black-market blue jeans and jazz were vying against the lingering Soviet presence. Two movies of the period figure significantly in this conflict: Bathing Beauty, an Esther Williams musical that furnishes the five friends with their theme song and Miriana with her nickname, Esther; and One Summer of Happiness, a soft-core Swedish art film (mislabeled She Only Danced One Summer by the English subtitler), which plays a role in Miriana’s eventual pregnancy. Like The Last Picture Show, Hey Babu Riba is sentimental, saccharine in spots, and affectinga bit simplistic in some of its moral shadings, but a heartfelt account of a time, place, and friendship nonetheless. Read more
Jacques Doillon’s first feature, adapted by political cartoonist Gebe from his own cartoon book, departs from a favorite French fantasy that grew out of the events of May 1968: going back to zero and starting the world over again from scratch. Developed episodically, with intermixed documentary and staged footage, this lighthearted comedy even makes room for brief sequences done by Alain Resnais and Jean Rouch that show the effects of the world revolution on Wall Street and Africa, respectively. I haven’t seen this black-and-white movie since it opened in Paris in 1973, but at the time it was sprightly fun; there’s also an opportunity to see Gerard Depardieu and Miou-Miou at the beginning of their screen careers. (JR) Read more
The ages of the five principal actors in Lindsay Anderson’s featureLillian Gish, Bette Davis, Vincent Price, Ann Sothern, and Harry Carey Jr.added up to just under four centuries, and this fact alone tended to tower over all the other particulars in this film. Adapted by David Berry from his own slender play about growing old gracefully, the film is set on an island off the coast of Maine where two sisters, Sarah (Gish) and Libby (Davis), have spent the past 60 summers. Very little happens, and the issue of whether the blind and cantankerous Libby is willing to spend the money to install a picture window becomes a major pivot in the plot. Obviously, Anderson jumped at the opportunity to use these two distinguished actresses, but unfortunately what he gives them to work with is so flimsy and sentimental that not even the awesome power of Gish (here in her early 90s) can transform the material. What seems missing, paradoxically, is a sufficiently developed sense of history; Anderson’s idolatry of John Ford, reflected in his use of Harry Carey Jr. (at 66, the youngest in the bunch), doesn’t emulate any of Ford’s power to evoke the past, and apart from Mike Fash’s pretty location photography, the story is so threadbare that it doesn’t even seem lived in. Read more
Originally released in the U.S. in a much-shortened version entitled The Immortal Battalion, this 1944 semidocumentary war film, directed by Carol Reed, will be shown in a nearly complete version. Scripted by Eric Ambler and Peter Ustinov, the film stars David Niven, Stanley Holloway, William Hartnell, and, in smaller parts, such stalwart regulars as Leo Genn, Trevor Howard, and Ustinov himself. Concerning a group of disparate civilians who learn to fight together in North Africa, this feature was originally intended as a training film, and has been much praised for its humor, spirit, and charm. Read more
With his previous film, Playtime, Jacques Tati hoped to bid farewell to his character Monsieur Hulot by proving that the capacity to be funny belonged to everyone. But the financial disaster of Tati’s supreme masterpiece forced him to rethink this strategy. In order to get another film financed, Tati brought back Hulot one more time to star in this satirical 1971 comedy about a journey from Paris to Amsterdam to attend an auto show. Despite the compromise, and the few reflections of the bitterness that accompanies it, Traffic is a masterpiece in its own rightnot only for the sharp picture of the frenetic and gimmick-crazy civilization that worships cars, but also for many remarkable formal qualities: an extraordinary use of sound (always one of Tati’s strong points), a complex interplay of chance and control in the observations of everyday behavior, and, in some spots, a development of the use of multiple focal points to articulate some of the funniest gags. There’s also an elaborate highway accident choreographed like a graceful ballet, and a sweet contrast throughout between the unhurried touristic pleasures enjoyed and propagated by Hulot and a Dutch garage mechanic and the more blinkered and neurotic hyperactivity of some of Hulot’s associates. Read more
Like most of the films directed by Garson Kanin, this 1940 melodrama, adapted by Robert Ardrey from Sidney Howard’s play, is a mixed bag. The performances of Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard keep it interesting, however, despite the fact that they hated each other and are both somewhat miscast. (It was Laughton and Lombard’s second teamingthe first was in the 1933 White Womanand also the third filming of Howard’s play, after 1928’s The Secret Love, with Pola Negri, and 1930’s A Lady in Love, with Edward G. Robinson.) The plot concerns an Italian who owns a vineyard in California and marries a waitress he meets through the mail; the secondary cast includes Harry Carey and a rather fey Frank Fay. (JR) Read more
They hate you! . . . And each one of them has a good reason! screamed one of the original ads (1957). Caged boy-hungry wildcats gone mad! shrieked another. Ed Kookie Byrnes takes Gloria Castillo on a joyride in a stolen car, and she gets framed when a pedestrian is killed; Luana Anders, another girlfriend, gets turned in for car stripping, and believes that Castillo is to blame. Other confined ladies participating in or watching the cat fights include Diana Darrin, Yvette Vickers, Donna Jo Gribble, and a very young Sally Kellerman; Edward Bernds (Return of the Fly, The Three Stooges in Orbit) directed. (JR) Read more
One could have plenty of quarrels with this as an adaptation of the Herman Melville novel, but it’s still one of the better John Huston films of the 50s. Ray Bradbury collaborated with Huston on the script, and some of the poetry of the original is retained; Orson Welles is a strong Father Mapple, and his sermon about Jonah is one of the film’s high points; Richard Basehart makes a plausible Ishmael. But Gregory Peck’s Ahab, made up to resemble the head of a penny, is problematic, and the filmmakers’ notion of turning him into a Christ figure seems especially misguided. Oswald Morris’s cinematography gets some fine atmospheric effects out of muted colors. The range of the novel is (to say the least) shortchanged, but if one can accept a Classics Illustrated version this has its moments. With Leo Genn, Friedrich Ledebur, Royal Dano, James Robertson Justice, and Harry Andrews (1956). 116 min. (JR) Read more
Perhaps the most neglected of John Boorman’s films, and certainly one of the strangest, this 1969 feature stars Marcello Mastroianni as a withdrawn Italian aristocrat who has a voyeuristic relationship with the residents of the black London ghetto where he lives, until he eventually emerges from his cocoon. Written by Boorman and William Stair, the film also features Billie Whitelaw and Calvin Lockhart. Steeped in the syntax of the swinging 60s even more than Boorman’s previous Having a Wild Weekend and Point Blank, the film looks dated today, but interestingly and revealingly; and it shows a kind of originality and verve that has been Boorman’s stock-in-trade from the beginning. (JR) Read more
Nagisa Oshima’s depiction of the obsessive lovemaking between a prostitute and the husband of a brothel keeper, which leads ultimately to the death of the man (with his own consent), is one of the most powerful erotic films ever made, but it certainly isn’t for every taste. Based on a true story that originally made headlines in Japan in the 30s, which turned the woman into a tragic public heroine, the film concentrates on the sex so exclusively that a rare period shotthe man observing a troop of soldiers marching pastregisters like a brief awakening from a long dream. This 1976 feature is unusually straightforward for Oshima, and those who are put off are likely to be disturbed more by the content than by the style. But the film is unforgettable for its ritualistic (if fatalistic) fascination with sex as a total commitment. With Tatsuya Fuji and Eiko Matsuda as the couple, and Aio Nakajima as the brothel keeper. In Japanese with subtitles. 105 min. (JR) Read more
Paul Newman aspires to make this film version of Tennessee Williams’s first play, one of the great works of the American theater, as definitive as Sidney Lumet’s 1962 film adaptation of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but it’s seriously marred by some unfortunate decisions. Starring John Malkovich as Tom, Joanne Woodward as Amanda, Karen Allen as Laura, and James Naughton as the Gentleman Caller, the film is powerfully acted, but problematically rendered in film terms. Perhaps the biggest problem is that, despite claims that The Glass Menagerie is Williams’s most filmable play, it’s one of the most stagebound in overall conceptionone needs to see Amanda and Laura while Tom is delivering his monologues, not wait to rediscover them in flashbacks. Translating its essential textures into film requires a bolder stylistic approach and a more precise feeling of place (and space) than anything Newman has attempted, despite some rather adventurous and successful uses of camera movement in the second half. Another problem is the way Newman directs Woodward and Malkovich, which seems predicated on what might be termed the Meryl Streep Fallacy: encouraging or allowing the sort of showboating that draws more attention to the actors than to the characters they play. Read more
One of the best films of Robert Aldrich’s middle period (1966). Aldrich takes a fairly standard adventure-plot departure pointa plane crash in the desert, and the survivors struggle to rebuild itand has a field day with all the character tensions that ensue. The movie is unusually long (147 minutes), but it keeps moving and stays suspenseful thanks to an able all-star cast: James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Hardy Kruger, Ernest Borgnine, Ian Bannen, Ronald Fraser, Christian Marquand, Dan Duryea, and George Kennedy. (JR) Read more
A 1937 British thriller involving a family of counterfeiters in an Austrian mountain resort, this rare feature was directed by Bernard Vorhaus, a visual stylist whose handling of conventional genre material in the U.S. and England has made him the focus of several retrospectives in Europe. Starring Jane Baxter, Ronald Squire, and Margaret Rutherford, the film features impressive mountain scenery and some exciting cliff-hangers. (JR) Read more
Richard Attenborough’s epic 1987 account of South African journalist Donald Woods (Kevin Kline) and his friendship with black activist and martyr Steve Biko (Denzel Washington) infuriatingly devotes most of its 158 minutes to the former rather than the latter, and what begins as a stirring mainstream account of the meaning of Biko’s politics and legacy eventually becomes a protracted tale of Woods and his family’s escape from South Africa, in order that he might tell the truth about Biko’s death at the hands of the police. Giving Biko the Gandhi treatment may have its educational uses, and the first half of the film builds up an effective sense of outrage about apartheid in general and the persecution of Biko in particular. But turning this story into yet another version of the nobility of the White Man’s Burden effectively undercuts the radical importance of Biko’s movement for the sake of flattering the liberal white audience’s sympathies; the results are watchable, but ultimately specious. With Penelope Wilton as Woods’s wife; screenplay by John Briley, adapted from Woods’s books Biko and Asking for Trouble. (JR) Read more
It’s rare that two actors are expected to carry an entire picture, but this winsome lark with Martin Short and Annette O’Toole is predicated on just that, and succeeds delightfully. The encounter is both archetypal and very contemporary: it’s their third date, each of them has high hopes, and both have things to conceal from each other. Armyan Bernstein, who wrote One From the Heart, collaborated on the script with Gail Parent and directed, and Lawrence Kasdan, of all people, produced, but it’s Short and O’Toole who carry the show throughout; all but a few of the movie’s 96 minutes are devoted to the date, and they keep it fresh, sexy, and unpredictable. It’s a nice demonstration that the most overworked of comic formulas can still work if sparked with the right insights and personalities. (JR) Read more
