Tama Janowitz adapts her own collection of stories in James Ivory’s mainly studio-shot movie (1989) about the downtown art scene in Manhattan, a world of self- absorbed male artists, their girlfriends, and others struggling to promote themselves. Bernadette Peters plays the central character, and good as she’s been elsewhere as a foil to Steve Martin, she’s pretty much defeated by the studied flakiness of both her character (who often recalls the heroine of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing in her helplessness, naivete, and Woody Allen-like nebbishness) and the movie as a whole, which etches out a view of Manhattan bohemia that’s every bit as caricatured as in Funny Face (without the benefit of Fred Astaire or Audrey Hepburn). Offering a view of predators and victims that mainly winds up being too cute for words (or images, for that matter), the film tries so hard to be with it that it winds up on another planetand not a very interesting one at that. With Chris Sarandon, Mary Beth Hurt, Madeleine Potter, Adam Coleman Howard, Nick Corri, Charles McCaughan, and Mercedes Ruehl. (JR) Read more
This very agreeable and funny low-budget documentary by Tony Buba, set in a steel-mill town just outside Pittsburgh, documents the decline of the area as the mills shut down and his own 15-year activity as a local independent filmmaker. Concerned with union organizing, his temperamental and eccentric star Sweet Sal Carullo, his dwindling finances, and his own soul, Buba has a lot of interesting things to say and show, and this witty and intelligent portrait of him and his community has charm to spare (1989). (JR) Read more
At last, a teenage love story with real characters instead of cliches, poses, and attitudes (1989). The directorial debut of Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire), it follows two very different high school graduates in Seattleaspiring kickboxer Lloyd (John Cusack) and brilliant student Diane (Ione Skye), who’s just won a fellowship to study in Englandas, to everyone’s surprise, they gradually get involved. John Mahoney plays Diane’s devoted but demanding father. Produced by Polly Platt, with James L. Brooks serving as executive producer, the movie stands out mainly because its attention to detail is so precise; Cusack and Skye are especially fine, but the overall treatment of contemporary teenagers is so refreshing that it almost makes up for dozens of phony and superficial predecessors (and for once the adults aren’t viewed exclusively from the wrong end of the telescope). As in Brooks’s Broadcast News, it’s the characters and their interrelationships that make the story. 100 min. (JR) Read more
Gallons of PBS-style piety are lavished here on a trite tale about a widowed clock maker (Kurt Russell) with a little girl who settles down with an unwed mother (Kelly McGillis) in a southern mountain community in the 30s, and then becomes involved in various intrigues involving the father of her child and two feuding families. Adapted by Carol Sobieski from a novel by John Ehle and directed by Ted Kotcheff, the film has a likable performance by Lloyd Bridges as the unwed mother’s father. McGillis strives hard to be believable in what is essentially an impossible role for her, while Kurt Russell is amiably professional but predictable. The film is shot (by Francois Protat) in ‘Scope, but the effort is essentially wasted by dull center framing that makes the format superfluous (1989). (JR) Read more
The first feature directed by actor Bob Balaban (1989) brings back the late 50s in the form of a highly original comic nightmare. Mary Beth Hurt and Randy Quaid star as the parents of a disturbed little boy (Bryan Madorsky) who has bad dreams about his parents’ sex lives and carnivorous habits; Sandy Dennis does one of her best turns as the neurotic school psychologist. Some critics have compared Balaban to David Lynch, but the differences are revealing. Balaban’s sense of the awfulness of the physical and spiritual decor of the 50s is actually closer in some ways to John Waters, while his politics are virtually the reverse of Lynch’s in Blue Velvet: nostalgia for innocence and purity couldn’t be further from his agenda. The script runs out of ideas long before he does, and the film doesn’t build dramatically as much as it could. But it’s an impressive debut, full of bizarre imagination and visual flaira must for fans of offbeat horror films. R, 82 min. (JR) Read more
Well-made treacle (1989), adapted by writer-director Phil Alden Robinson from W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe. A fledgling farmer (Kevin Costner) hears a voice in an Iowa cornfield and has a vision that convinces him that if he builds a baseball diamond in his field, Shoeless Joe Jackson, of the notorious 1919 White Sox, will turn up to play there. Other messages and signs follow, leading the hero to meet a former novelist in hiding (James Earl Jones) and a deceased ballplayer who ended his life as a doctor (Burt Lancaster). The strange mixture of nostalgia, poetry, pop mysticism, and innocence suggests both Ray Bradbury and Steven Spielberg, at their best as well as their worst; the conception is sentimental, but the storytelling remains assured and effective. With Amy Madigan as the hero’s sympathetic wife, Gaby Hoffmann as their daughter, and Ray Liotta as Shoeless Joe. PG, 106 min. (JR) Read more
Perhaps the most interesting element of John Fowles’s novel is its alternation between two narrators — the shy and eccentric butterfly collector who kidnaps a young woman to add to his collection, and the woman herself. By jettisoning this structure, this 1965 film has precious little to hold one’s interest, apart from Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar as the leads; Stanley Mann and John Kohn’s script adaptation is relatively flat-footed, and William Wyler’s direction is as academic as ever. 119 min. (JR) Read more
Clint Eastwood plays a skip-tracer cop with a taste for impersonations who’s assigned to track down a woman (Bernadette Peters) on the lam with her eight-month-old baby. The wife of an ex-con (Timothy Carhart) who’s linked to a group of white supremacists (a band of misfits and speed freaks that the movie has great fun ridiculing), she jumps bail after being arrested for passing counterfeit money; Eastwood follows her to Reno and then finds himself gradually shifting his loyalties. Buddy Van Horn (The Dead Pool) directed from a John Eskow script, but in fact this is very much an Eastwood movie, full of his cranky personality and quirky intelligence, and brimming with ideas. Not all of these ideas are successfully dramatized, and you may have trouble believing in most of the characters, but as a deeply personal work about free-floating existential identities, this 1989 film has the kind of grit and feeling that few action comedies can muster, with Eastwood and Peters interesting and unpredictable throughout. With John Dennis Johnston and Michael Des Barres. 122 min. (JR) Read more
In his first American picture (1987) Scottish director Bill Forsyth adapts Marilynne Robinson’s much-acclaimed novel about two orphaned sisters (played by Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill) who share their ramshackle house with their eccentric aunt (Christine Lahti). The setting is the Pacific northwest in the 1950s, and Forsyth does a remarkable job with period detail and the beautiful natural settings, assisted by his own UK crew of cinematographer Michael Coulter, production designer Adrienne Atkinson, costume designer Mary-Jane Reyner, and editor Michael Ellis. But the most impressive thing about this haunting fable is Forsyth’s fluidity and grace as a storyteller, which gives this understated tale some of the resonance one associates with Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven. The story suggests a kind of feminist version of Huckleberry Finn, with the sisters playing Huck and Tom to their aunt’s Jim; the performances by all three actresses are impeccable. A film to be savored rather than gulped. (JR) Read more
This essay — commissioned originally in the mid-1990s by Alexander Horwath for a collection in German published by the Viennale, and later published in 2004 by the Amsterdam University Press as The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema of the 1970s, coedited by Thomas Elsaesser, Alexander Horwath, and Noel King — overlaps with various other pieces of mine, and is obviously out of date in some of its details, but it seems worth reprinting for some of the arguments it draws together. And it’s been fun hunting up illustrations for it on the Internet. — J.R.
“New Hollywood” and the 60s Melting Pot
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Let me begin with a few printed artifacts, all of them from New York in the early 60s: two successive issues of the NY Film Bulletin published in early 1962, special numbers devoted to Last Year at Marienbad and François Truffaut; and three successive issues of Film Culture, dated winter 1962, winter 1962-63, and spring 1963. Cheaply printed but copiously illustrated, the two special numbers of the NY Film Bulletin are the 43rd and 44th issues of a monthly, respectively twenty and twenty-eight pages in length. The Last Year at Marienbad issue consists exclusively of interviews with Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and editor Henri Colpi, all translated from French magazines, and a briefly annotated Resnais filmography. Read more
The main problem with Jacques Doillon’s 1987 filmdevoted exclusively to the problems encountered by a couple when the woman starts to imagine the man’s previous affairs in his country houseis that the script doesn’t offer us or the actors more to work with. Jane Birkin and Alain Souchon both attack the premise gamely, but the fact remains that two-actor films are notoriously difficult to sustain, even with the best talent available: The Four Poster, Sleuth, and even Carl Dreyer’s seldom seen Two People all have related difficulties, and it doesn’t seem coincidental that all three are adaptations of plays. Comedy! was written for the screen, but nevertheless seems just as stagy as the others. Still, for those interested in following Doillon’s development, it remains an instructive and occasionally enjoyable experiment. (JR) Read more
Writer-director-producer James L. Brooks’s romantic comedy, his first film after Terms of Endearment, takes on the world of network news in one of the best entertainments of 1987. Holly Hunter plays a gifted and idealistic producer, and her performance is something of a revelation: her short, feisty, socially gauche, aggressive-compulsive character may be the most intricately layered portrait of a career woman that contemporary Hollywood has given us. Albert Brooks as a bright, caustic behind-the-scenes reporter and her best friend, who hankers after something more in both departments, gives the performance of his career. Completing the triumvirate and romantic triangle is William Hurt, also at his best, as a rapidly rising anchorman who lacks the creativity and intelligence of his two colleagues, but beats them hands down in public charisma. The movie is at its finest when it shows all three working together to produce the evening newsan exciting and instructive look into the processes involvedand at its worst when it saddles them with a pat prologue and epilogue showing the characters years before and after the film’s main events. Shot entirely in Washington, D.C., the film is full of relevant insights into the kinds of compromises, trade-offs, and combinations of skills and personalities that produce media, and the personal stories are deftly integrated. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (May 6, 2002). — J.R.
Man Hunt
*** (A must-see)
Directed by Fritz Lang
Written by Dudley Nichols
With Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders, John Carradine, Roddy McDowall, Heather Thatcher, and Frederick Worlock.
A sparkling new 35-millimeter print of Fritz Lang’s 1941 Man Hunt is running at the Gene Siskel Film Center all this week, and I can recommend it without reservation. It’s not quite a masterpiece, but it’s considerably more entertaining than any new thrillers I’m aware of.
Man Hunt‘s status within Lang’s body of work is somewhat ambiguous and contested. Ten years ago one of France’s major film historians, Bernard Eisenschitz, wrote a 270-page book on the film in which he pored over many of the production materials as if they were holy writ. Yet Tom Gunning’s authoritative recent critical study, the 528-page The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity, scarcely deals with the film at all, apart from mentioning that it “would reward close analysis” and contending that it, like Lang’s three other anti-Nazi films — Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944), and Cloak and Dagger (1946) — is limited by its propagandistic qualities.
I only half agree with Gunning. Read more
The first four letters say it all. Nostalgie de la boueliterally, nostalgia for mudtends to motivate Barbet Schroeder’s fiction films, which have focused on heroin addicts (More), hippies (The Valley Obscured by Clouds), masochists (Maitresse), and gamblers (Tricheurs). This 1987 treatment of flophouse drunks, his first American film, is no less voyeuristic. Working from an original and autobiographical screenplay by Charles Bukowski, Schroeder amasses a lot of talent to yield what is essentially a tourist’s-eye view of the lower depths, defended from within as a way of life. An unshaven Mickey Rourke delivers his lines like W.C. Fields and swaggers like a gutter prince, Faye Dunaway as a fellow alcoholic seems even more authentically disassembled, and Robby M Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 5, 1997). — J.R.
Contempt
Rating **** Masterpiece
Directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard
With Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, Giorgia Moll, and Godard.
Almost exactly 33 years ago, in October 1964, the critical reception of Jean-Luc Godard’s widest American release of his career and his most expensive picture to date was overwhelmingly negative. But now that Contempt, showing this week at the Music Box, is being rereleased as an art film — in a brand-new print that’s three minutes longer — the critical responses have been almost as overwhelmingly positive. It’s tempting to say in explanation that we’re more sophisticated in 1997 than we were in 1964 — that we’ve absorbed or at least caught up with some of Godard’s innovations — but I don’t think this adequately or even correctly accounts for the difference in critical response. Despite all the current reviews that treat Le mépris as if it were some form of serene classical art, it’s every bit as transgressive now as it was when it first appeared, and maybe more so. But because it’s being packaged as an art movie rather than a mainstream release — because Godard is a venerable master of 66 rather than an unruly upstart of 33 — we have different expectations. Read more
