This review of Night Moves appeared in the May 1975 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. [September 11, 2009 postscript: Having just reseen Night Moves for the first time since it came out, I think it holds up remarkably well, in terms of its script and direction and almost uniformly fine performances. There’s also some additional interest now in seeing Melanie Griffith in her first credited performance and James Woods, less impressive, in one of his earliest after Elia Kazan discovered him for The Visitors. As for Alan Sharp, it would appear that his filmography (which also includes The Hired Hand and Ulzana’s Raid) warrants further investigation — as does Jennifer Warren’s.] — J.R.
Night Moves
U.S.A., 1975 Director: Arthur Penn
Cert—X. dist—Columbia-Warner. p.c—Hiller Productions/Layton. p—Robert M. Sherman. assoc. p—Gene Lasko. p. manager—Thomas J. Schmidt. asst. d—Jack Roe, Patrick H. Kehoe. sc—Alan Sharp. ph—Bruce Surtees. col—Technicolor. underwater ph—Jordan Klein. ed—Dede Allen, Stephen A. Rotter. p. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 28, 1990). This is the first time I wrote at length about what is still my favorite Eastwood film; the second time was many years later, and that piece can be found here. — J.R.
WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Peter Viertel, James Bridges, and Burt Kennedy
With Clint Eastwood, Jeff Fahey, George Dzundza, Alun Armstrong, Marisa Berenson, Timothy Spall, and Mel Martin.
I can’t say that I’ve been one of Clint Eastwood’s partisans. He was amusing as the Man With No Name — the mean, laconic hombre whose supercoolness suggested a hip Gary Cooper — in Sergio Leone’s mid-60s western trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), and fun in Coogan’s Bluff and Two Mules for Sister Sara shortly afterward. But for me the joke of this ornery, poker-faced, string-bean dude was already running thin as early as Dirty Harry (1971), a right-wing remake of High Noon that amplified Eastwood’s relation to Cooper and marked the point at which he was moving commercially into high gear. (To my mind, the gothic excesses and male hysteria of The Beguiled, made the same year — a Civil War tale in which Eastwood was seduced and unmanned by a bevy of females in a girls’ school — were much more interesting.) Read more
As much as I revere some of the Belgian films of Chantal Akerman, if I had to choose only one Belgian film to take with me to a desert island, I’d have a pretty rough time forsaking this 1971 masterpiece by André Delvaux, which I seriously, even spectacularly, underrated when I reviewed it for the Monthly Film Bulletin (in their April 1976 issue, vol. 43, no. 507) — although paradoxically I seemed pretty well attuned to its special enchantments even when I kept finding ways to undervalue them, perhaps because I couldn’t find adequate ways to account for them. Happily, I’ve been able to rediscover this film thanks to a sublime Belgian box set that I reviewed some time ago. — J.R.
Rendez-vous à Bray (Rendezvous at Bray)
France/Belgium/West Germany, 1971
Director: André Delvaux
Cert—A. dist—Essential Cinema. p.c—Parc Films/ORTF (Paris)/Studios Arthur Mathonet/Ciné Vog (Brussels)/Taurus Film (Munich). p—Mag Bodard. assoc. p—Philippe Dussart, Pierre Gout. asst. d—Charlotte Fraisse, Michel Rey. sc–André Delvaux. Based on the story Le Roi Cophétua by Julien Gracq. ph—Ghislain Cloquet. col—Eastman Color. ed—Nicole Berckmans. a.d—Claude Pignot. m—Frédéric Devreese; excerpts from the works of Brahms (including Intermezzos Nos. Read more
