One ironic footnote to the following article, which ran in the March 6, 1992 issue of the Chicago Reader, is that it was itself subjected to a kind of “soft censorship”. Specifically, my editors refused to allow me to allude to having known Chevy Chase personally as a classmate at Bard College during the mid-1960s, which I thought gave some additional weight to some of my reflections about the personal nature of Memoirs of an Invisible Man. (Since I no longer have access to my initial draft, I can’t spell this out here in any detail, except to note that Chase’s jazz piano now figures in the final draft only as a parenthetical detail.) Not only did Chevy and I share a course or two, but we also bonded in various ways through our mutual interest in jazz: in a few student jam sessions, I played piano while Chevy played drums (although he also played some piano even then), and we collaborated at one point with Blythe Danner (another Bard classmate, and a jazz vocalist at the time) on a successful project to bring Bill Evans and his trio to campus to give a concert. —J.R.
THE WAGES OF FEAR
*** (A must-see)
Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
Written by Clouzot and Jerome Geronimi
With Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Vera Clouzot, Folco Lulli, Peter Van Eyck, and William Tubbs. Read more
The British Film Institute’s Roma Gibson recently contacted me about reprinting a review of Kevin Brownlow’s Winstanley (1976) that I included in my “London Journal” for Film Comment (January-February 1976) with the BFI’s forthcoming DVD release of the film. I responded by requesting that she substitute a couple of lines from my Time Out capsule review of the same period for the last couple of lines in my already somewhat hyperbolic Film Comment review, and she agreed.
I thought it might be instructive for me to reproduce that composite review and then juxtapose it here with “Time Traveler” — my April 23, 1999 Chicago Reader review of Winstanley and Brownlow’s preceding feature, It Happened Here, which explains some of the polemical context that provoked some of the hyperbole in my earlier reviews. —J.R.
There’s really not much to be said for Winstanley, except that it’s the most mysteriously beautiful English film since the best of Michael Powell (which it resembles in no other respect) and the best pre-twentieth-century historical film I can recall since The Rise of Louis XIV [Rossellini] or Straub-Huillet’s Bach film [Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach]. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but I can’t help it. Read more
The following was one of a dozen or more profusely illustrated pieces that I wrote for a London periodical in 1982 called The Movie, specifically for issue no. 117; some of these articles were later recycled into a series of coffee-table books devoted to various decades in film history, but not this one, which I’ve slightly revised for its reappearance here.
Even though this short piece is somewhat dated now, I’m reviving it to celebrate Criterion’s awesome edition of Lonesome on DVD and blu-Ray (in the best print of the film I’ve ever seen, with a superb audio commentary by Richard Koszarski), along with Fejos’s subsequent The Last Performance and Broadway on a separate disc. For me, this is unquestionably one of Criterion’s most impressive releases to date. — J.R.
LONESOME
In a large, lonely city, the daily routines of two ordinary people who do not know one another are shown in parallel development. First Mary and then Jim wakes up, dresses and has breakfast (at the same restaurant). They proceed to their separate jobs in the same plant.
It is July 3, the day before Independence Day, and after the holiday starts at noon both characters turn down invitations to join couples, and go home alone. Read more
