From Sight and Sound (Spring 1975); I’ve mainly followed the editorial changes (mostly trims) used in the version that appears in my collection Essential Cinema….My apologies for the format problems with this piece, only some of which I’ve managed to resolve satisfactorily. — J.R.
[. . .] Unless it is claimed that a pianist’s hands move haphazardly up and down the keyboard — and no one would be willing to claim this seriously — it must be admitted that there exists a guiding thought, conscious or subconscious, behind the succession of organized sound patterns . . . Of course, it does happen, and not too infrequently, that an instrumentalist’s fingers ‘recite’ a lesson they have learned; but in such cases there is no reason to talk about creation.
— André Hodeir, Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence
I can never think and play at the same time. It’s emotionally impossible.
— Lennie Tristano, circa 1962
CHARLIE (Elliott Gould): This is the truth. You’re an animal lover, right?/ SUSAN (Gwen Welles): Yeah./CHARLIE: Okay, well: the great blue whale, right? You know about a great blue whale?/ SUSAN (semi-audible): . . . got that wrestling guy, hunh? /CHARLIE: No, it’s a big fish, a big fish, there’s only two or three left in the world. Read more
From Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1975, Vol. 42, No. 499. — J.R.
Jacqueline Susann’s Once is Not Enough
U. S.A., 1974Director: Guy Green
Cert--AA. dist–CIC. p.c–Paramount Pictures. In association with
Sujac Productions and Aries Films. exec. p–Irving Mansfield. p–Howard
W. Koch. p. manager–Howard W. Koch Jnr. asst. d–Howard W. Koch
Jnr., Lee Rafner. sc–Julius J. Epstein. Based on the novel Once Is Not
Enough by Jacqueline Susann. ph–John A. Alonzo. Panavision. col—
Movielab. ed–Rita Roland. p. designer--John DeCuir. a.d–David
Marshall. setdec–Ruby Levitt. m–Henry Mancini. songs—“Once Is
Not Enough” by Henry Mancini, Larry Kusik, sung by–The Mancni
Singers; “All the wav” by Sammy Cahn, James van Heusen, sung by
Frank Sinatra. titles–Dan Perri. sd. ed–Robert Cornett. sd. rec–Larry
Jost. sd. re-rec–Doc Wilkinson. l.p–Kirk Douglas (Mike Wayne),
Alexis Smith (Deidre Milford Granger), David Janssen (Tom Colt),
George Hamilton (David Milford), Melina Mercouri (Karla), Gary
Conway (Hugh Robertson), Brenda Vaccaro (Linda Riggs), Deborah
Raffin, (January Wayne), Lillian Randolph (Mabel), Renata Vanni (Maria),
Mark Roberts (Rhinegold), John Roper (Franco), Leonard Sachs (Dr. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (October 29, 1987). — J.R.
I. Good Things About the Chicago Film Festival
1. Quite apart from aesthetic considerations, any film festival that can boast films from 35 countries and encompass 70 years of filmmaking is performing an invaluable cultural service. The xenophobic and antihistorical cast of most pop culture in this country is such that the more the media expand, the narrower our sense of reality generally becomes, and any institution that can allow us glimpses of cultures and eras other than our own is bound to teach us something more than the average TV news broadcast. (The sharp moral distinction that we usually make between news and fiction–designating the first as “serious” and the second as “entertainment”–overlooks the fact that both are usually designed as narrative entertainment, offering consumable, hence disposable, stories with larger-than-life characters.)
2. Out of the 20 films in the festival that I’ve so far managed to see, more than half are eminently worth seeing, and roughly a third qualify as first-rate. If that’s a somewhat lower batting average than either Facets or the Film Center, it’s still a much higher one than what is achieved by the usual run of commercial mainstream releases. Read more
