Reviews

OK, French Postcards is my guilty pleasure film of all time. It doesn't try hard to achieve anything (dare I say even European, in its approach), which makes the film a delight to watch compared to most coming of age/college comedies. Plus, anything with the beautiful Valérie Quennessen (sadly no longer with us) is worth watching. Maybe way past its sell-by date today (hell, so is Diva), but if you were born in the Sixties, just the ticket to wax nostalgia about that year abroad (even if you never did it).

Vintage bad-girl Barbara during Tinseltown's infamous four years (1930-1934) of almost anything goes, before William H Mays and other do-gooders stepped in and made the studios clean up their act. I highly recommend this film and others from the period: a fascinating, if somewhat warped peek at American attitudes about sexuality, which were subsequently put away for 30 or so years.

I don't know why people expect Altman to be any more reverential to Raymond Chandler than he was to Raymond Carver with Short-Cuts. But in updating both, in a kooky California kind of way, I think he's true to the spirit of the work(s). There are plenty of text examples of Marlowe being incredibly whimsical and, at times, a bit of a sap (albeit a self-aware one). Altman and Brackett have just brought that out. As for the controversial ending - it may not have been in the book, but it's the one moment in the film where Marlowe's "code" shines through, where he finally says: "That's not OK with me."

A minor cult classic for fans of 70s films. Joe Don Baker is outstanding. I highly recommend it, if you see it in the late-night TV listing.

If you write screenplays, don't miss Catherine Burns's "speech" about her mother in Last Summer - a more powerful, evocative use of single-character dialogue in a film probably doesn't exist. While I enjoyed the rest of the film, it couldn't match this moment, and it's easy to see why CB was nominated for an Oscar.