The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean is a comic bit of fluff posing as a western. It's a kind of tongue-in-cheek fantasy version of the story of Judge Roy Bean – not that there are serious versions of the man's story. But John Huston's film reminded me of all of the most farcical sections of John Ford's movies. This is just a series of silly scenes intercut with the occasional sentimental scene.

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean might, however, be notable for the fact that it came out in 1972 – the same year as Deliverance – and Bill McKinney and Ned Beatty each play one of Judge Bean's deputies.

Pasolini's Canterbury Tales

Pasolini's I Racconti di Canterbury (1972) is a kind of continuation of his Decameron (1971) and prefigures his Arabian Knights (1974). I loved both of those movies, and I think part of my problem with Canterbury is that it doesn't really do anything new with the formula. Mind you, I saw Arabian Nights before I saw Canterbury Tales, and I might have felt differently about that movie if I had seen that third, but I don't think so. There's something... I don't know... disconnected about this one in comparison with the other two. We never spend enough time with any one story to really connect with the characters.

Or maybe it's the dubbing. I know this is very typical of Italian films from this period, but it's truly egregious here. Hugh Griffith and many other actors are obviously speaking English, but their voices come out speaking a decidedly disconnected Italian. Sometimes the mood of the words doesn't even match what the actors are doing on the screen. I don't know. It really bugged me.

Ninetto Davoli's appearance is a high point of the film, of course, and there are plenty of really delightful sequences, so I am not really complaining, and I liked it well enough. I just loved The Decameron and Arabian Nights so much, and this one is not as good.

The movie's final sequence, though, in which a greedy monk is led into Hell and meets the devil, who shits out other friars, is hilarious, absurd, and delightful. It's a wonderfully sacrilegious way to end the movie and a stark contrast to the beautifully sacred ending to The Decameron.

Duffer

Duffer is a fucked up movie about a young man and his fucked up relationship with an older man. The older man, Louis-Jack, is psychotic, and he consistently harms and toys with the young man (who is called Duffer). We get all of this in narration, although we also see a great deal of it. But there is no diegetic sound in the movie itself; the entirety of the film's sound information is in voiceover. This is disorienting and strange, especially because sounds loop around or repeat incessantly. 

Duffer tells us what he's doing, what he does with his friend, a prostitute he calls Your Gracie, and what he does with Louis-Jack. Things are weird – in a British, 1960s theatre sort of way, I guess – but then Louis-Jack decides he wants to get Duffer pregnant and things take quite a gruesome turn.

This movie was never released in the U.S., and it's difficult to tell when it was released in the UK – 1971? 1972? Who's to say?

The Hot Rock (1972)

I watched The Hot Rock tonight because George Segal just died and this movie was on the Criterion Channel. Honestly this crime caper–comedy is a delight from start to finish. Redford and Segal are great together, and the whole thing is hilarious. RIP George Segal.

Man of La Mancha (1972)

This is abysmally bad. 

 See, the only good thing about Man of La Mancha, which is, frankly, a terrible and terribly confusing musical, is the song "The Impossible Dream". (It has a one or two other ok songs.) 

But when you cast Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren – both big stars without good singing voices – you might find yourself with a well-acted film, but well acted in service of what? 

Man of La Mancha is just kinda stupid, so you have these excellent actors speaking insipid dialogue. And then you cast James Coco as Sancho Panza??? Coco is a broadly funny clown. He would work onstage in the role but not with these two leads. This movie is just awful.

The Getaway (1972)

The Getaway is typical, enjoyable Peckinpah. McQueen and McGraw are exactly what you'd expect – the kind of action stars who are great at action but whose acting is so good that you forget that their real purpose is to shoot people or plot heists. The script for The Getaway is great, and it's a kind of unconventional heist film in that the heist takes place early on and the rest of the film is the getaway – styled, in other words, along the line of The Thomas Crown Affair. It's a totally serviceable genre picture.

La Madriguera (1969)

Honeycomb – as La Madriguera was called in English – is a Buñuelian satire of absurdity that skewers bourgeois marriage and role-playing. There are sequences that feel like the Genet of Les Bonnes and Saura's film is also quite obviously indebted to Buñuel and to surrealism more generally. It's a weird movie about the dissolution of a marriage, and I can't say I really enjoyed it, although it's always great to see Geraldine Chaplin, and Per Oscarsson is very good too. But... I think Saura's later film Mama Cumplé 100 Años is much funnier.

Images (1972)

Images is a pretty crazy picture by early 1970s standards, but it really is a movie in line with, say, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy and Polanski's Repulsion. That is to say, it's a psychological horror movie about a descent into madness or certain ways of coping with madness. There would be more of these movies to come in the '70s, but this one is interesting for Susannah York's performance and for the film's various obsessions – with cameras, with taxidermied animals, with chimes, smoke, and unicorns.

Mi Querida Señorita

Mi Querida Señorita is a really strange romantic comedy in which a 43-year-old señora finds out that she is actually a man. It's honestly and surprisingly really funny and charming. Its trans politics are (obviously) 45 years old, but I quite enjoyed this.

As far as I can tell, Mi Querida Señorita was never released in the U.S. It was released in Spain in 1972.

The Candidate (1972)

The Candidate, as it turns out, is a satire. This should be obvious from the film's poster, but it was a surprise to me as I watched this movie, because the first two-thirds of the movie are played fairly straight.

The last third of this movie is actually laugh-out-loud funny, but the first two acts? I found the whole thing just puzzling. It's played like a serious drama, where we're watching an honest man get swallowed up by the political machine.

Now that it's over, I can see that the whole thing was supposed to be funny – at least three scenes are played in men's rooms, and there's this totally weird bit where the candidate gets accosted by a man who just wants to talk about his dog – but the filmmaking just isn't letting us know we can laugh a this until we get to the end of the picture. I think perhaps it is also hampered by Redford's portrayal, which doesn't leave any room for laughter, but even more, I think with Redford as the star, the film needs to focus on him, whereas what it should be focusing on (for laughs) is the electoral circus that it is supposed to be skewering.

Or maybe it's me. Maybe making fun of federal politics in the U.S. just isn't funny to me anymore.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

Moshé Mizrahi's movie I Love You Rosa (אני אוהב אותך רוזה) is no great shakes, but it is charming in its way. Like Mizrahi's subsequent film The House on Chelouche Street, I Love You Rosa focuses on a small boy. In fact, this purports to be a kind of feminist tale about freedom and liberty, in which a young woman decides to choose for herself and convinces the man in her life to let her choose, whereupon she chooses (and this is never in doubt) precisely the thing everyone wishes for her to choose. I found all of this to be a bit of a red herring. And the film is much much more interested in the young man than it is in Rosa herself, no matter how much it claims to love her. The film is also bookended by a completely superfluous framing device. Still, it's a likable picture.
(Apparently this movie is available on DVD in a dubbed version. But I watched it in Hebrew on an ancient VHS copy with English subtitles.)

The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

I have been trying to watch Jan Troell's Utvandrarna or The Emigrants for years. This Swedish film is not on DVD, but if you're lucky you can find it in a dubbed, pan-and-scan version on VHS. That's the best anyone can do, and even this is hard to come by. I finally got to watch most of it yesterday and the end of it today. It's a long, difficult film that focuses on the troubles of living in nineteenth-century Sweden (chief among these problems: the class struggle). Troell's film is about leaving Europe, the difficulties of deciding to leave, and the long, brutal journey to the New World. What's extraordinary about Utvandrarna is the time Troell spends watching the emigrants travel. As far as I can tell, no one has made a film quite like this – most skip the travel section of such narratives and go directly toward settling in and building a home in the U.S. Not Troell: this film lives with the emigrants as they cross the Atlantic, watches them try to learn English on the boat, deal with sickness, nearly starve to death, and bury those who couldn't make it. By the end of the journey, I was completely sold on the film: it's a long, hard ride, but it is very rewarding.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

Catsplay is a strange, strange movie. It is a kind of memory-piece told in fits and starts. A kind of meditation on the way the past sort of never leaves, how the past is always still a part of the present. So far so good, but there is rather too much about cats in Catsplay for my taste. As far as I can tell, this Hungarian movie was never released in the United States, and IMDb dates this movie as 1974, but that is plainly an impossibility. But it is an intriguing little picture about an old woman in love with a faded but persistent opera singer, as well as the memories the woman shares with her (uptight and pretentious) older sister.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

Pete 'n' Tillie is 1972 Oscar bait. Weird stuff, really. Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett are a strange couple who just sort of end up together. They have chemistry, but the whole thing is odd. And this is not primarily a comedy, despite the cute little n in the title. The film does pick up whenever Geraldine Page is on screen, and this does give it some delightful comic elements, but mostly this is a movie about a difficult marriage with rather a lot of "acting". There's a reason this movie is hard to get ahold of these days. I'm calling it Oscar bait because Matthau and Burnett, as comedians, are asked to be serious and deal with some family issues and real trouble, in what seemed to me a awards-season ploy to note the versatility of the performers. I'm not sure either is really up to the task here.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

Fat City refers to a kind of dream; the term is the equivalent of easy street. But Fat City is a movie about a boxer starring Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges (in 1972! so cute). I am not calling this a boxing movie, because it isn't really that. This is much more a movie about poverty, about living in Northern California and trying to find work and drinking a lot. Keach goes back to boxing because he loves it, but physically it costs him dearly, and if he doesn't win he doesn't win much money. Almost all of the victories here (and there aren't even many of those) feel hollow. This isn't a very pleasurable picture. But the pleasures that are here a related to Susan Tyrrell, as Keach's hard-drinking girlfriend – part of my difficulty with the film is the amount of screaming the two do at one another, but her performance is really great – and Jeff Bridges. Tracking this man's professional trajectory would be totally fascinating. At this point in his career, Bridges was playing hopeful, slightly feckless young men, and this is another of those. Fat City is definitely worth watching, but not a lot of fun.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

The main title for this film is Neil Simon's The Heartbreak Kid. I didn't really realize that this was a thing, where the writer got billing like this. (I know this happens on Paddy Chayefsky's Network, but that still seems quite unusual to me.) Neil Simon did not write the novel on which The Heartbreak Kid is based, and Elaine May directed the film. The Heartbreak Kid is a really funny farcical piece, and I quite enjoyed myself. Eddie Albert is hilarious, but I think what I don't really get is Charles Grodin. I've just never understood Charles Grodin. Maybe it's from seeing Beethoven as a kid and hating him, but he is young and cute in this... and still looks as one-note and uncomfortable as ever. I will say, though, that The Heartbreak Kid is a kind of comedic version of the 1970s lonely man à la The Conversation or Save the Tiger. The ending, funny though it is, is a beautiful portrait of this emptiness. I thought this was pretty great.

Three with Goldie Hawn

I don't know what's been happening, but I've recently been catching a movie with an actor and then, without really intending to, watching a second (or third) movie with that actor.

Butterflies Are Free is mostly a silly little drama, and is obviously adapted (and not very much) from a play by the same name. There isn't much to say about this film except that Goldie Hawn is a delightful little nymph in it, the main actor (Edward Albert) is very attractive, and Eileen Heckart is pretty well near brilliant as the young man's mother. I should note, too, that the main character is blind, but that this disability is mainly understood through the (typical and tiresome) lens of metaphor. His blindness is a way of talking about living in the world on our own, without the supervision of parents, lovers, etc. Can you make it on your own? Yes. Yes, you can. As long as you don't freak out too much, and as long as you find a very cute white girl to love you. I am being dismissive. But it is easy to be dismissive about something so slight. In any case, if there is a reason to watch Butterflies Are Free, Eileen Heckart is that reason. Her performance is beautifully nuanced. She is initially a kind of stuffy, Helen Mirren type, who Heckart humanizes into a fascinatingly strong, compassionate character. It's enchanting to watch.

Best Friends is a rom-com with Hawn and Burt Reynolds that is completely and totally enjoyable. This comedy was written by Barry Levinson & Valerie Curtin and directed by Norman Jewison. I basically loved it, and in the processed remembered how much I love both of these actors. Reynolds gets a lot of flack for his off-screen behavior – frankly, I am taking him to task for a couple of things in my book manuscript – but as a performer, I just love him. He is so much fun, and plays the frustrated, exasperated straight man figure just perfectly, with a careful eye on how silly he knows he looks. He's delightful. This comedy, too, is really funny. A couple of Hollywood screenwriters, who have a great relationship, decide to get married and then to visit each of their parents' families in turn. Both interactions are hilarious, and as you can imagine, the relationship is tested by this return home to the nonsense from which each of them originally came. This is a complete farce, with a few sentimental messages about marriage and commitment thrown in, but it's never preachy, and even the girlfriend-with-the-baby character (who usually preaches wisdom and freaks the heroine out in these kinds of movies) gets drunk in the afternoon with Hawn's character and gives wise counsel rather than inciting terror.

And then there's Swing Shift, which is a Kurt Russell / Goldie Hawn feature about the Rosie-the-Riveter types who went to work during the Second World War. The film is a nostalgic piece of fluff for the most part, presenting the past in a kind of Barry Levinson-esque candied haze. But this film, too, has things to recommend it. Aside from the obvious hotness of Russell (as well as the sexy Ed Harris), this is a movie about cheating on your husband that doesn't spend a lot of time moralizing about how awful the cheating wife is. The cheating wife in this case (Hawn) figures out who she is by herself while her husband is away, and the film is much more interested in this discovery of subjectivity itself than it is in punishing or scolding the woman for her discoveries. Swing Shift was directed by Jonathan Demme, and it also possesses the particular brand of quirkiness that Demme was working on in the 1980s. I'm thinking of films like Married to the Mob and Melvin and Howard, that take a humorous perspective on human nature, while also understanding the difficulties and violences that daily life entails. Swing Shift is one of these 1980s Demme films that makes fun of its characters in a gentle, empathetic way, while also spending just a little more time than it knows it should focusing on how silly everything is. His films from this time period focus almost guiltily on the pleasure everyone is experiencing, even though they are well aware that we are talking about serious things. This makes the director's movies into the quirky, seemingly disjointed narratives that they are. But his movies are not disjointed at all. His films are of a piece, in fact. This quirky, nostalgic style runs through all of Demme's movies in the 1980s.

Two Musical Biographies

My favorite thing about Igor Talankin's Tchaikovsky (Чайковский) was the stunning costume design by Lyudmila Kusakova. Otherwise, it is standard, late-1960s biographical fare – it was released in the U.S. in 1972. It also omits all mention of homosexual affairs, if there were any. (Were there any? Inquiring minds want to know.) I recently also watched a biographical film about Frédéric Chopin called A Song to Remember from 1945 that is a more poorly made film than Tchaikovsky. In a lot of ways, though, Charles Vidor's A Song to Remember is a more interesting film than Tchaikovsky because it is such blatant nationalist propaganda for World War II.

Both Chopin and Tchaikovsky had guarded, mysterious personal lives, and neither of them felt the need to share whatever demons they possessed with the rest of the world. But Tchaikovsky treats those secret demons as a mystery, presenting the things we don't know simply and without comment – without attempting to understand them, really: Here they are. Pyotr Ilyich had night terrors. He was tormented. He couldn't figure out how to be happy. And this is how it must be to be a genius. And in its way, this mode of treating the mysterious emptiness at the center of this man whom the film does not understand is simply a way of giving up. It reminds me a bit of the way that Clint Eastwood so boringly treated the life of J. Edgar Hoover (surely a fascinating man, in fact). Tchaikovsky is sumptuously filmed – the costumes, I am telling you, are phenomenal (unfortunately, Google Images is being decidedly unhelpful as I try to search for examples) – but the film has nothing to say about the mysteries at the heart of this man.

This isn't to say that I think all biographies ought to be along the lines of Ray or Walk the Line, films that purport to explain an entire man's life through access to some particularly traumatic or marking incident in the man's childhood. But a perspective of some kind is welcome. A Song to Remember, while being totally silly and '40s and (therefore) part of the big studio propaganda machine, still makes some propositions about Chopin's life and work and his mysteries. To be sure, it explains Chopin's life as one torn between Polish nationalism and the love of an (ahem) evil, pants-wearing woman – Merle Oberon at her iciest – but it is at least some kind of explanation or perspective. It is at least a theory. I think I will always prefer those kind of risky explanations to the "just the facts ma'am" way that so many people think biography ought to be done these days.

The Dawns Here Are Quiet

I am staying on the campus of Sweet Briar College for the next week or so, and I am in staying in the house of a guy who studies Russian literature and culture – at least it would appear so from the large number of books on Kazakhstan and Russia that are in the house.

There is also a large collection of DVDs here, a decidedly odd collection, in fact – two seasons of Dark Angel, Lucky Number Slevin, The Lives of Others, Donnie Darko, 28 Days Later, and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events – it is very strange. But there are a lot of great Russian films on DVD here too. He has Mongol and Prisoner of the Mountains, and an unopened copy of Dersu Uzala and one of Mikhail Kalatozov's Letter Never Sent, and a whole bunch of others, some of which I can't identify because I read Cyrillic poorly.

But, I found a copy of The Dawns Here are Quiet and I watched it last night. It's not available via Netflix, so I was really excited to find this 3-hour film here, and wonder of wonders, it's great.

The Dawns starts off as a comedy, a silly little film about women soldiers moving into a small provincial district of the Soviet Union (near Finland, I gathered) in World War II. Also, I had seen the beginning of this film – something like the first 10 minutes – and I was really confused when I started it. Not sure where or when I saw these first 10 minutes, but I'm sure I had. In any case, the movie moves from being a comedy into being a poignant standoff films of soldiers in the middle of the forest fighting Nazis. Great stuff, and quite suspenseful. I pretty much loved it.

This film isn't on DVD, so I can't actually recommend it to anyone, but I wanted to jot down some thoughts on it. I watched a couple of old Soviet films last year at Dartmouth, and hopefully I'll be able to raid their film library a bit more this coming year.