Daily Archives: May 19, 2022

LOVIN’ MOLLY (1975 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1975 (Vol. 42, No. 496). Blythe Danner was a classmate of mine at Bard College, where I had the privilege of seeing what a gifted actress she already was (I remember especially her performance of one of the lead roles in Jean Genet’s The Maids) and the pleasure of accompanying her once or twice on the piano when she performed as a jazz singer (in particular, on “‘Round Midnight”). — J.R.

Lovin’ Molly

 

U.SA., 1973Director: Sidney Lumet

Bastrop, Texas. The lives of three characters, narrated by each in

turn. 1925, Gid (Anthony Perkins): Gid and Johnny (Beau Bridges)

are friends whocompete for the favors of Molly (Blythe Danner),

who likes themboth. When Gidproposes to Molly, she replies

that she’d rather have sex with him for its own sake, not as part

of a marriage contract, and invites himto join her in a nude swim,

but he refuses. She goes to a dance with Eddie (Conrad Fowkes),

another local boy, and Johnny picks a fight with him. Gid sleeps

with her for the first time, and is shocked to discover she isn’t a

virgin. On a train to the Panhandle to sell his father’s cattle, Gid

attacks Johnny for sleeping with Molly and not proposing to her, but

then discovers that Eddie slept with her first. Read more

Holy Smoke

From the Chicago Reader (January 25, 2000). — J.R.

HS

Holy-Smoke

Jane Campion still has a remarkable eye for framing and imagining, but on the sad evidence of this scrambled free-for-all (1999), written with her sister Anna Campion, she’s taken leave of about half her senses. The setup is promising: a young Australian woman (Kate Winslet) becomes smitten with an Indian guru, and her bourgeois family, after luring her back home with a lie that her father is dying, hires an American specialist (Harvey Keitel) to deprogram her in the outback. Naturally the two of them get involved, and naturally this becomes a monumental battle of wills and sexes. As in Campion’s The Piano there’s a lot of wildness qualifying as a kind of politically correct porn, decked out on this occasion with dazzling visual effects that begin with the title written in smoke. But all sorts of questions go unanswered, and there’s little of the density found in Campion’s early work; this is mainly smoke, not fire. R, 114 min. (JR)

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