The Man in the Glass Booth (1975)

I gotta tell you... I don't get it. Now listen, I love Maximilian Schell, but this was stagey, and the emotions and dialogue feel like very overblown theatre at all times. For me this did not work.

Why did I watch this? Good question. It was a part of a series in the 1970s of plays made into films that played a very limited run in theatres. But Schell was nominated for an Oscar for this (in the same year Glenda Jackson was nominated for her performance in Hedda and James Whitmore was nominated for his performance in Give 'Em Hell Harry! – both of which are also plays and neither of which I've seen) so I'm getting started on watching these 1975 performances, especially now since The Man in the Glass Booth, after being unavailable for many years, appeared on YouTube recently.

The Deadly Affair (1967)

Decided to watch another British spy movie scored by Quincy Jones, since I liked A Dandy in Aspic so much and the Criterion Channel had a whole selection of movies scored by Jones. The Deadly Affair was directed by Sidney Lumet from a novel by John le Carré and starred James Mason, Maximilian Schell (great as always), and Simone Signoret.

The Deadly Affair got a bit of a slow start, but it ended up being quite good. I won't spoil the mystery by talking about it, but this is definitely a film worth watching. The main takeaway here is that Simone Signoret – and we already knew this, so I guess it was no surprise – is a genius. She gives an incredible performance. She's sensitive and hard at the same time, vulnerable and vicious, brokenhearted and steel. It's really a perfect portrayal. She has four scenes, and she's just terrific.

Also, for some reason there is an extended sequence at the theatre, where we watch the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of none other than Edward II directed by Sir Peter Hall. We are, of course, treated to the sequence in which the young king is sodomized by a red-hot poker. I rolled my eyes. The show, for the record, looks awful. The set is really hideous. Why this is in the film is beyond me, but it is there all the same.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

Tonight, I accomplished an odd sort of task I had set for myself in 2011. For some reason, after Oscar season ended in March of that year I started watching all of the films that had been nominated for Oscars in 1973. Of those I hadn't seen there were something like 12. These were strange films, most of them, now mostly neglected, and it was very hard to get ahold of many of them. Most of them are now just curiosities, and watching them all was a bizarre experience of movie history. (I've been playing a similar game with myself for the year 1970, but these remaining films are proving even harder to track down.) In any case, The Pedestrian (Der Fussgänger) is an odd little movie. A kind of memory piece (these were popular in the 1970s) told from two perspectives. An old man who is responsible for having killed many many women and children in Greece during the second world war remembers his crimes. And a group of tabloid journalists working on a story that attempts to expose him. It's an intriguing film with several fascinating formal devices, including a bizarre conversation between eight or nine old women about men and violence, and a television interview that frankly discusses the ethics of the film's subject matter. Totally worth watching but now available only on VHS. For other films nominated for the year 1973 you can click on the tag.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1970

I actually don't understand how this was nominated for Best Foreign Language Picture. Wikipedia and IMDb both say that First Love is a German-language film. But that is definitely not true of the English-language print I watched. With the actors John Moulder-Brown (British), Maximilian Schell (Austrian), and Valentina Cortese (Italian), English rather than German seems a more common language here, as well. In any case, First Love is a beautiful picture, and this is mostly due to its exquisite direction (also by Schell). It is Chekhovian and wise and visually interesting. The film is marred by a 1970s musical soundtrack that now seems dated and silly, but otherwise this is gorgeous stuff.