by Dean | Feb 18, 2019 | General
Directed by Ivan Passer, Born to Win (1971) presents us with J. (George Segal), a drug addict who considers himself . . . born to win, which actually means born to get the fix he needs. Only he usually doesn’t. What he does is fall in love with Parm (Karen Black), who immediately, strangely likes him and accepts him as he is. They have a good time, but it’s without drugs and J. wants to score. There is excess in the film in that too many bad things happen to J., and yet, to be sure, BTW asks: Does the opposite of being “born to win” exist?
Another fault is that an episode of zany comedy fails to blend in with the film’s enjoyable drama. Passer and David Scott Milton, however, wrought an original screenplay, and there is a load of fine acting. Segal is at his thoughtful best, not at all miscast as a junkie. Black is superbly convincing, and Jay Fletcher does an estimable job as J.’s black junkie friend. Marcia Jean Kurtz and Robert De Niro are gratifyingly realistic. But Born to Win is a work of seriousness and certain artistry more than it is a truly good work.
by Dean | Feb 14, 2019 | General
It is after a talk with a psychoanalyst that Jill (Merle Oberon) develops an uncertain feeling about her marriage to Larry (Melvyn Douglas)—this in the film, That Uncertain Feeling (1941), by Ernst Lubitsch—and she starts pulling away from him. But Jill’s marriage is not a bad one. Soon, nevertheless, she takes up with a frowning pessimist (Burgess Meredith) who is not the man for her because he couldn’t possibly be the man for any woman. Still, a divorce is in the works.
Lubitsch’s movie, a comedy, is rather slight, and the subject of a couple’s desire for sensible reunion was funnier in 1939’s The Awful Truth. Also it could be asserted that Feeling is not entirely convincing except that Oberon and Douglas have a way somehow of making it convincing. Besides, it’s romantic comedy, as as such it is fantasy with the ring of hard truth. It isn’t one of Lubitsch’s best, but it is wry and skillfully acted.
by Dean | Feb 12, 2019 | General
Larry Peerce’s Goodbye Columbus (1969) is a Hollywood movie for adults since the Philip Roth story from which it derives is a novella for adults. It is well known that it has to do with the attitude of rich American Jews toward low-income Jews (and vice versa), but when Peerce isn’t proving what a romantic he is, he is imposing on us some ugly, very raffish, and insulting satire. Romantic? Yes, in the scenes where Neil and Brenda, falling in love, are together, and these can be pleasant. Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw enact the lovers with savvy and heart. But Goodbye Columbus is pushy and fails to adequately convey the ultimate meaning of Roth’s story (in the diaphragm sequence). It is, I think, worth seeing but just barely.
Goodbye, Columbus (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Feb 10, 2019 | General
Thanks to YouTube I was able to see a film by the French director Claude Autant-Lara other than his mediocre Sylvie and the Phantom, the film being the 1958 Love is My Profession, or—a far preferable title—In Case of Adversity.
Bit by bit corruption gathers in a domain apparently created by Georges Simenon (whose novel is the source for this picture) as a lawbreaking party girl, Yvette, fights her own poverty through a spasm of violence and is defended by Andre Gobillot, a wily, now unethical lawyer. Gobillot, though married, falls in love with Yvette, and the fornication begins. Yvette, however, can be sensitive and affectionate but not loyal.
The film is a commercial piece with little to say, although its vision of life is tough (Simenon-like) and hardly divorced from quotidian cakes and ale. It’s engaging. The music is sheer Hollywood, but Autant-Lara directed intelligently, admirably. Jean Gabin, as Gobillot, does little to own the role; he gives too many expressionless looks. He is passable, though, but no more. Edwige Feuillere is first-rate as Gobillot’s wife, but Brigitte Bardot (Yvette) needs more subtlety in her energetic performance. All the same, of course, beautiful B.B. adds a lot to the picture.
by Dean | Feb 7, 2019 | General
Lady Gaga has said to Mike Pence, “You are the worst representation of what it means to be a Christian,” and, incensed over the government shutdown, has castigated “the f–king president of the United States.”
Hey, aren’t we supposed to be living in a time of nonjudgmentalism? That’s a laugh.
These narcissistic celebrities like to talk about politics, but something tells me they haven’t read much Irving Kristol or James Burnham. Correlatively, they are as boring as they are profane.
