by Dean | Dec 9, 2018 | General
Australia’s Bruce Beresford did a perfect job of filming Don’s Party (1976), a play by David Williamson, and of guiding his actors to a sound representation of a message—that marriage and hedonism do not mix.
An Australian political race between the liberal Labor Party and the conservative Liberal Party is coming to an end, and a party of drink and naughtiness is taking place. Don (John Hargreaves), the married host, and the other men here hold on to politics as their “intellectual” pursuit and sex as their toy and refuge. The former will stimulate them for a while—and most of them are unthinking Labor voters—but it’s the latter that REALLY stimulates them. (Another message: Australians are morally unworthy of their democracy.) And how vulgar they are! Indeed, how vulgar—and hedonistic—the women can be!
Rated a hard R, the film is frank and rueful and humorous and harsh toward its characters. It ain’t Claude Goretta. Such actors as Ray Barrett (Mal), Pat Bishop (Jenny) and Clare Binney (Susan) understand the satire and have wonderful instincts. But then all the actors are natural and knowing. Bravo!
by Dean | Dec 5, 2018 | General
I liked Lina Wertmuller’s Love and Anarchy and Swept Away, two Italian films from the Seventies, but her Seven Beauties (1975) I consider an almost unwatchable dud. The premise is good: a little Naples coxcomb who is a gangster at heart inadvertently kills a well-to-do pimp. Later he is forced to join the army (during WWII) and ends up in a German concentration camp where human evil, somewhat like his own, is magnified on a scale he has naturally never seen before; and he will do virtually anything to survive. The film is a nightmare farce that begins with a voiceover litany about the conduct of mankind, a litany as irreligious as it is cynical and assuredly not as clever as Wertmuller thinks it is. That which is clever in the movie fails to be rewarding owing to SB‘s frequent clunkiness. There are too many extreme closeups and too much inadequate pacing. The film stumbles along with its pretensions.
P.S. I recently re-watched both Love and Anarchy and Swept Away and had to change my opinion of them. I did not enjoy them.
Cover via Amazon
by Dean | Dec 4, 2018 | General
Serving up the French Revolution as an adventure story, Anthony Mann‘s The Black Book (1949), also called Reign of Terror, centers on a beastly Robespierre (Richard Basehart) and his missing death list.
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Here, the brute never defends himself against the charge of wanting a dictatorship, as the real Robespierre did. No, he makes it plain that this is what he’s after, and the good guys in the film steadfastly oppose him. One of them is Charles d’Aubigny, played by Robert Cummings, who has neither the look nor the voice of an 18th century spy. Another is Arlene Dahl‘s Madelon, with Dahl as undistinguished as Cummings but lovely. Mann directed supplely and knowingly a script imparting that where there is the desire for dictatorship, there is also scorched earth violence. Oh, wretched Jacobins!
by Dean | Nov 27, 2018 | General
David in the 1951 Biblical movie David and Bathsheba, by Henry King, is not a man of much religious fervor, as the real David must have been.
The film is more serious about grief and sin and doubt than other old Hollywood movies, but it needs a major jolt of energy. It’s rather wan and slow-moving, and neither Gregory Peck nor Susan Hayward is particularly interesting in the title roles. It is a sure thing that Hollywood’s Biblical flicks provided an excuse for injecting sensuality into American film, so some of that is certainly here, courtesy of a dancing Gwen Verdon (uncredited) and to a lesser extent of Hayward. Verdon, however, is part of the padding we frequently get from this movie.
by Dean | Nov 25, 2018 | General
I like that Jenny Offill’s novel, Dept. of Speculation (2014), is short and has short paragraphs. Sans a plot, it concerns the marriage and motherhood of an unnamed woman writer, and although I lack interest in what it, or any other contemporary novel, has to say about writers, the mother-and-child stuff is clever and incisive. Even better is what James Wood has observed about the book: “If it is a distressed account of a marriage in distress, it is also a poem in praise of the married state.”
The woman’s husband has an affair and so, yes, there is distress, but a positive ending occurs as well.
“Why doesn’t she throw the bum out?” some people might ask. I don’t know; this is a novel and novels are about how human beings think and behave, and women often don’t throw the bum out, even if they should.
