Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the Chicago Reader (March 1, 1992). — J.R.

In Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 suspense classic, four out-of-work Europeans (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli, Peter Van Eyck), trapped in a squalid South American village that’s exploited by a U.S. oil company, agree to drive two truckloads of nitroglycerine over 300 miles of primitive roads in exchange for $2,000 eachif they survive. When this existentialist shocker opened in the U.S., 43 minutes had been hacked away, but the gripping adventure elements left intact were still enough to turn the film into a hit. (This restored and at least semicomplete version of the film, 148 minutes long, was released in the early 90s.) A significant influence on Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, this grueling pile driver of a movie will keep you on the edge of your seat, though it reeks of French 50s attitude, which includes misogyny, snobbishness, and borderline racism. It’s also clearly a love story between two men (Montand and Vanel). In French with subtitles. (JR)

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From the Chicago Reader (June 1, 2000). — J.R.

A failure, but an endlessly fascinating one. Between making his only SF film (The Damned) and his first successful art movie (The Servant), blacklisted expatriate Joseph Losey directed this 1962 film, adapted by Hugo Butler and Evan Jones from a James Hadley Chase novel, about a washed-up Welsh novelist of working-class origins (Stanley Baker) who unsuccessfully pursues a high-class hooker (Jeanne Moreau) while effectively driving his wife (Virna Lisi) to suicide. The film is pretentious and plainly derivative; I’ve always regarded as unwarranted and philistine Pauline Kael’s ridicule of Antonioni, Resnais, and Fellini in an article of the period called “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties”, but she might well have included Losey’s film, with its clear debt to all three. It’s a painful testament of sorts (Losey himself can be glimpsed in a bar during a pan that also introduces the hero, showing his personal stake in the proceedings from the outset), though it makes wonderful use of locations in Venice and Rome and features an excellent jazz score by Michel Legrand (with a pivotal use of three Billie Holiday cuts). A decadent period piece and a sadomasochistic view of sexual relations, this singular, resonant, and at times even inspiring mannerist mess is far more interesting than a good many modest successes. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (November 4, 1994). — J.R.

A powerful, provocative, and highly disturbing Austrian film by Michael Haneke that focuses on the collective suicide of a young and seemingly “normal” family (1989). Prompted by Austria’s high suicide rate and various news stories, the film’s agenda is not immediately apparent; it focuses at first on the family’s highly repetitive life-style, taking its time establishing the daily patterns of the characters. The roles of television and money in their lives are crucial to what this film is about, but the absence of any obvious motives for the family’s ultimate despair is part of what gives this film its devastating impact. Its tact and intelligence, and also its reticence and detachment, make it a shocking and potent statement about our times — to my mind a work much superior to the two other films in Haneke’s trilogy about contemporary, affectless violence, Benny’s Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. With Birgit Doll, Dieter Berner, Leni Tanzer, and Udo Samel. Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, Friday and Saturday, November 4 and 5, 7:00 and 9:00; Sunday, November 6, 5:30 and 7:30; and Monday through Thursday, November 7 through 10, 7:00 and 9:00; 281-4114. Read more

From the July 1, 1998 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

An uncharacteristically somber and mainly straightforward 1997 drama by prolific Chilean-born French postsurrealist Raul Ruiz (Three Lives and Only One Death). Catherine Deneuve plays a defense lawyer whose young client (Ruiz standby Melvil Poupaud) has murdered his aunt. (The aunt had belonged to a psychoanalytic group that believed criminal tendencies form by the age of five, an issue prominently debated throughout the film.) Over time the young man begins to associate the defense lawyer with his dead aunt while she identifies him with her dead son –a relationship that grows even stranger once the two become lovers. The film has strong perfomrmances by Deneuve and Poupaud as well as by Monique Melinand (as the lawyer’s mother), Michel Piccoli (as the head of a psychoanalytic group), and Bernadette Lafont. Beautifully shot and relatively concentrated for Ruiz — who usually prefers to ramble, constructing baroque visual tangents to his fictions — it delivers the sting of a sharp novella. (JR)

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A mild, romantic comedy-thriller, set in Austin, Texas, in 1954. If only the actors — Kim Basinger, Jeff Bridges, Rip Torn, and Gwen Verdon — had more to sink their teeth into, they could have had a field day; but writer-director Robert Benton gives them so little nourishment or stimulus that even a pro like Bridges seems somewhat bemused by the lack of material, while Rip Torn looks so bored with his own cardboard villain that he might as well be phoning in the part. Neither the setting nor the period is made distinctive, and apart from a few minor Hitchcockian jolts, the overall strategy seems to be banking everything on the behavioral cuteness of the two leads, who do the best they can with their condescendingly sketched-in southern working-class characters. Not even cinematography by Nestor Almendros can juice up the proceedings; the movie chugs along, but barely. Although Benton went to school in nearby Austin in the 50s, he seems to remember the movies he saw there better than the region, which is scaled down to sitcom proportions. (JR)

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While lack of feeling is ascribed more often to Stanley Kubrick, Brian De Palma qualifies more as a detached formalist. Here the relative absence of directorial emotion works hand in glove with the slickness and cynicism (as well as craft) of this big-scale 1987 adaptation by David Mamet of the 60s TV series, shellacked with a grandiloquent Ennio Morricone score. The results are watchable enough, with a particularly adept use of Sean Connery, Chicago locations, and period details. But De Palma’s vulgar habit of copying and thereby reducing sequences from better directors is even more offensive when he turns to Eisenstein instead of the usual Hitchcock; his Odessa Steps hommage to Potemkin is the worst kind of kitschy student exercise. There’s much more of Kevin Costner (as Eliot Ness) here than there is of Robert De Niro (as Al Capone), though Costner is quite effective in setting the Reaganite law-and-order tone. Still, it’s a pity to have Charles Martin Smith eliminated so early in the proceedings. 119 min. (JR) Read more

It’s almost impossible to imagine an uninteresting film about Chuck Berry, but Taylor Hackford’s overextended and poorly edited documentary (1987) makes a stab at being one. There are, to be sure, some very enjoyable sequences — in particular some excerpts from a three-way conversation between Berry, Bo Diddley, and the volatile Little Richard — but a good deal of this film is devoted to a 60th birthday celebration concert for Berry that pairs him with Linda Ronstadt, Julian Lennon, Etta James, and others and tends to reduce him to a show-biz icon, the George Jessel of rock. What one misses most of all are some glimpses of the earlier Chuck Berry, as seen in the black-and-white rock movies of the 50s, when the intensity of his music and his jackrabbit moves had more satanic majesty. Berry is still a dynamite performer when he wants to be, but he’s done the same tunes so many times that he knows he can get away with relatively little, and too much of this film shows him at half-throttle. The film also skimps on certain portions of his career — most noticeably his brushes with the lawt — that are treated in fuller detail in his autobiography. Read more

Set mainly in and around an establishment called the Blue Water Grill in Texas, this is a small film, but within its own terms a delightful and virtually perfect one. The charactersthe dreamy grill owner (Gene Hackman), who compulsively watches home movies of his long-vanished wife; his grumpy yet serene father-in-law (Burgess Meredith); a slightly retarded handyman (Elias Kotias); and a bus driver (Teri Garr) who has her sights set on the grill owner — all seem to come out of Erskine Caldwell and Tennessee Williams, but Bill Bozzone’s capable script, Peter Masterson’s deft direction, and Fred Murphy’s handsome photography all show them off to best advantage, and the movie’s playlike story moves effortlessly. Funny and appealing, this is the kind of quiet and assured Hollywood movie that used to be more common in the 50s; the local flavor is caught perfectly, and every member of the cast shines. (JR) Read more

Despite the apparent havoc wreaked on this film by David Begelman–who eliminated 29 minutes from Michael Cimino’s cut and reedited the remainder more for action than for the meditative rhythms the director (who reportedly used Visconti’s The Leopard as a model) had in mind–this is one of Cimino’s best films, with a fine sense of spectacle and landscape, following the bloody career of Salvatore Giuliano (effectively played by Christopher Lambert), the violent and idealistic Robin Hood of the Sicilian peasantry in the 40s. The rhetorical self-importance of Cimino’s films makes them resemble Stalinist epics, and the nonstop wallpaper music of David Mansfield certainly doesn’t help this one. But the uncredited dialogue of Gore Vidal has a cynical, bantering polish that helps to keep things in perspective, and the film’s visual sweep commands respect even when it becomes hyperbolic, which is fairly often. (Steve Shagan receives sole credit for the script, adapted from Mario Puzo’s novel.) What emerges might be described as great moments from Michael Cimino’s The Sicilian. With Terence Stamp, Joss Ackland, John Turturro, Richard Bauer, and Barbara Sukowa in her first English-speaking role. (JR) Read more