While it isn’t nearly as inventive as the Disney features that preceded and followed it (Dumbo and Saludos Amigos respectively), this animated feature based on Felix Salten’s book about the coming of age of a fawn and his various forest friends (including the beloved Thumper) does convey some of the primal emotional power of Disney’s features during this period. The handling of patriarchal authority here has some queasy echoes of Leni Riefenstahl’s treatment of Nazi officials in Triumph of the Will, reminding one that Disney was the only Hollywood figure to befriend Riefenstahl when she visited in the 30s; but the adroit mixture of pantheism and sentimentality continues to be sufficiently timeless to allow Disney’s heirs to recycle this picture endlessly (1942). (JR) Read more
Basil Dearden’s neglected 1961 British film tells the story of Othello in jazz terms. Richard Attenborough plays a wealthy jazz buff who throws an all-night party at a warehouse in London’s East End to celebrate the wedding anniversary of jazz player Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris) and his wife, a white singer. Among the musical highlights is a rare duet by Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck; among the other musicians are John Dankworth and Tubby Hayes. A rare treat for jazz buffs. 95 min. (JR) Read more
Hugh Leonard’s adaptation of his autobiographical play of the same title, partially based in turn on his book Home Before Night, offers a charming mix of childhood memoir and speculative wish fulfillment. An Irish playwright living in New York (Martin Sheen) returns to Ireland to attend the funeral of his father (Barnard Hughes), and then proceeds to have lengthy conversations with the old codger, with his younger self (Karl Hayden), his mother (Doreen Hepburn), and a former employer (William Hickey) all becoming a part of the discussion. As touching as most of this is, one’s tolerance for good-natured, sentimental blarney is occasionally stretched–as in some of John Ford’s depictions of Irish life, such as The Quiet Man–but the actors and director Matt Clark manage to keep most of it fluid and likable. (Fine Arts) Read more
The idea must have seemed like a natural to producer Don Boyd: invite ten filmmakers to select an operatic aria and make a short film interpreting the music independent of the opera’s original story line. The results are decidedly mixed, but the best segments are worth waiting for. To take them in ascending order of preference: Bill Bryden provides an uninteresting “wraparound” using Leoncavallo that links the various segments; Nicolas Roeg’s use of Verdi in depicting a plot to assassinate King Zog of Albania in Vienna in 1931 (with Theresa Russell as Zog) is disappointingly pointless, and Bruce Beresford’s matching of a “love duet” and Korngold seems equally thin. Robert Altman’s view of the audience at the opening night of Paris’s Ranelagh Theater in 1734 (where a Rameau opera was premiering) is ambitious but sluggish, and Franc Roddam’s version of a young couple’s suicide pact in Las Vegas to the strains of Wagner is thoughtful but corny. More experimental sections by Charles Sturridge (lyrical black-and-white shots of children playing hooky, used with Verdi) and Derek Jarman (an elderly opera singer on stage in 35-millimeter recalls her romantic childhood in Super-8, all to a Charpentier aria) are arresting but rather unsatisfying. Ken Russell’s surreal depiction of a car-crash victim’s fantasies of her wounds becoming jewels in a lush ritual done to Puccini, seems to benefit from Russell’s previous experience in matching music to action. Read more
