by Dean | Dec 4, 2016 | General
Cover of Save the Tiger
The star of the film Save the Tiger (1973), Jack Lemmon plays Harry Stoner, a Los Angeles clothing manufacturer who, in financial dire straits, plots to have one of his factories set on fire for the insurance money. . . As it happens, Harry prefers the past to his depraved self in the 1970s present. In the Forties, after all, he was an American soldier at Anzio. But Harry also prefers the past to the moral condition of present-day America, with, for example, its deep incivility. A parking attendant snaps at him, a cab driver is angrily sarcastic to him.
What’s wrong with the film is that not only does Harry romanticize the past, so does Steve Shagan‘s script. Harry says there used to be rules but not anymore—which is why such things as pornography and a lack of patriotism exist in our culture—and the movie seems to accept this. Well, as objectionable as pornography, etc. are, and despite the collapse of so many traditional Western values, it is of course false that there are no rules. What is true is that many otherwise decent or likable people keep pushing against the rules, often for the sake of an agenda.
Save the Tiger avoids self-righteousness and condescension—toward, for instance, the hippie girl (Laurie Heineman) whom Harry beds even though he is married. Directed by John Avildsen, it is largely intelligent, but problematic. Indeed, Avildsen should have known that the bright big-band song at the end of the film was inappropriate in light of the very dark incidents that Tiger was setting in motion.
by Dean | Dec 1, 2016 | General
Cover of Nothing Sacred
Was there ever a time when American cities gave great adulation to young women dying of something like radium poisoning? I don’t know, but in the comic (and funny) Nothing Sacred (1937), the Big Apple does so for Vermont girl Hazel—without knowing that Hazel is shamelessly faking. It is not even known by the newspaper reporter (Frederic March) who wants the scoop and all the crazy hoopla it leads to.
Pauline Kael wrote that “What are generally sentimentalized as ‘the little people’ are the targets” of this film. So is Hazel, played by a grounded and never-strident Carole Lombard. Nothing Sacred is short but filler-free, and peppery. It’s the Billy Wilder pic that Wilder never made; William Wellman—and writer Ben Hecht—did.
by Dean | Nov 29, 2016 | General
On Monday night’s Jane the Virgin, a woman tells Rogelio, Jane’s father, she would like to have a baby with him since the two have much in common. For one thing, the woman asserts, they’re both “aging narcissists.” What other response would Rogelio make than to say something along the lines of “How dare you say that I’m aging!”?
Yeah, the episode gave us that and a whole lot of other things too, even some Hitchcock parody. Take-baby-to-church Sunday rolled around (Mateo’s first time at Mass) after Alba admonished Jane to see to Mateo’s spiritual development. The kid is too young for church, however, and—well, though I feared the episode would finally express some kind of banal, fatuous, secular-minded sentiment about religion, it pleasantly did not.
No Petra or Luisa this time. Instead, pretty Justina Machado showed up, enacting a love dealer (i.e. a matchmaker), a new factor named Darcy Factor.
by Dean | Nov 27, 2016 | General
Cover of The Sugarland Express
Is The Sugarland Express (1974) a stupid movie, or is it just that the people in it are stupid? Well, a ton of human stupidity obtains, but when it comes down to brass tacks, it’s The Sugarland Express that’s stupid. The lower class woman played by Goldie Hawn is nothing but a cretin about whom we care very little if at all. It’s an underwritten role and Hawn, withal, fails to make her sympathetic.
Steven Spielberg has a full supply of moviemaking talent, but his film, though based on a true story, has no good reason to exist. At least Duel and the finally unsatisfactory Jaws are entertaining. Sugarland can be entertaining too, but is so trivial the entertainment value seems as though it’s always on the periphery.
by Dean | Nov 20, 2016 | General
Cover of Marnie
Is Marnie (1964) one of Alfred Hitchcock‘s artistic entertainments, like the majority of his films? For the most part it is, for it is consistently powerful and pictorially fine. Consider the brunette female thief washing the dye out of her hair to reveal a blonde Tippi Hedron. But all the mise en scene, all the engaging sights, do not keep away the rising shabbiness. One wishes Hitchcock had known psychological nonsense when he saw it in a script or a novel. Marnie is usually watchable, but The Birds, not this flick, is the genuinely good Tippi Hedron movie.
