Reviews

Not a single negative comment yet and this movie deserves worse. The first half has some interest, like the good cop bad cop routine of the Nazis, but scenes and characters are not much developed. Scenes are schematic, simply making plot points and moving on. As the movie goes on it gets worse. What exactly is happening, for example, when they infiltrate Holland? There's no clear idea of the mission, or what's at stake. Motives are standard, acting OK but nothing outstanding. War movie clichés stitched awkwardly together. Toward the end a Nazi--one of the original group of students who went wrong--is walking along a blasted road eating a biscuit and a starving boy asks him for food. Smirking, he throws the biscuit into a pool of black liquid in a ditch and walks on smiling. The boy picks up the biscuit, throws it down, and pulls a grenade from under his coat. Walks behind the outhouse where the Nazi is taking a crap and tosses the grenade in. Boom. If you go for that this is your movie. I call it writing without imagination. The Nazis were monstrous, yes, but for a better movie along these lines see Europa Europa, or Lucie Aubrac. Even better, Forbidden Games.

Richard Widmark's character is not easy to like and harder to respect. Why would Gene Tierney be so in love with him? That's a big problem, as is understanding exactly what's going on in the wrestling plot--and caring about it is hard, even with the admirable Gregorius. The son-father relationship of Gregorius with his son and with Widmark are both simply written by the writer, not made credible. On the whole, a rather artificial film, with some nice London atmosphere. You feel like in the world around these characters there might be something interesting going on, but it's not happening at the center of the film. So far, I've seen two good Dassin films, Thieves' Highway and the classic Rififi. Naked City, which some prefer to Thieves' Highway, seems to me thoroughly dated, while TH, despite its faults, remains a pleasure.

Otto Preminger Sirking it up on the Riviera. The sets and photography are beautiful, and someone might have taken the general idea and made a good movie. The black-and-white Paris contrast is interesting, especially with the transition from dancing in the nightclub (where the title song is the best thing in the film), with fragments of color fading in and out until a full transition. But Preminger is only a poor man's Sirk. He's an imitator, not an original.

The script depends on a French sensibility that doesn't quite translate. The lines often read like badly translated French. The conflict is between the loose and fun but decadent and empty French hedonism and the English prude (Deborah Kerr, ostensibly a top fashion designer) who wants to turn it around, to the point of insisting Seberg break up with her boyfriend and spend her days studying philosophy. The incest theme is toyed with, uncomfortably and unconvincingly. David Niven is a canny old pro who gives some life to a character essentially empty, and Kerr carries her weight, but Seberg's acting is so bad it makes me cringe. If only her face could have been transplanted to a real actor. Though the film has its points, on the whole it's dead on arrival.

This is elegant sixties modernism with a subtle socialist thrust. With a bit too much technique, concentration on beautiful, striking shots and fragmented narration studded with flashbacks, the story and characters, though interesting, don't have quite enough weight to involve the viewer. The modernist love of the cryptic goes a little overboard, though in an intriguing way, as for example in the long opening sequence in a dance hall as people gather for the dance and you take a while to figure out what's going on. The man takes a career opportunity to move up from welding by going to work at a distant, isolated plant. The plant and its environs represent industrial capitalism and the city overspreading the countryside. Arresting moments, like the dog straying into the church, or the young boy working very fast in the restaurant, as well as the individuality of a variety of people glimpsed in passing, give the movie a mysterious and moving charm. Yet telling so much of the story without dialog weakens our sense of the characters. It draws you in slowly but a bit too much is withheld. Il Posto stays closer to the characters and feels warmer, though the ending of Fidanzati has magic.

After all the positive comments here I was shocked by how bad this was. The dialog is labored, the pacing extremely slow, the situations lack plausibility or interest. A sad comedown for the actors and director. The underlying impulse seems to be anti-Nixon, or more generally anti-uptight Republican types. I could sympathize with that message but not in this ham-handed form. Also an age thing happening: the old guy outwits the young guns--except the young guns have no heft at all so who cares? It's not seriously involving and not funny enough to be a parody. Hard to believe this is a Criterion DVD. I felt almost as let down as when I saw the excruciating A New Leaf. If you want a good Matthau movie try Charley Varrick.

How anyone could enjoy this crap is beyond me. The dialog is extremely dull, the jokes unfunny and the plot has all the tension of a wet noodle. A nefarious art expert trying to cover up some Rembrandt misattributions mixes weirdly with pseudo-Hitchcockian killers on a train. The badness of the writing is matched by the slackness of the direction. I suspect a few too many joints share the blame.

Why do Jill Clayburgh and Gene Wilder fall instantly in love? Because the screenwriter says they do. Some vapid lines are traded and they fall into bed, where ponderous double-entendres about gardening substitute for both sexiness and humor. "Son of a bitch!" is a favorite way of expressing emotion. As for the acting, only Richard Pryor shows a spark of charm. Jill Clayburgh looks like she's sleepwalking. I get tired just thinking about it, but having read all the good comments here I had to try to warn at least a few who might be looking for a real movie.

My first Tarkovsky and likely my last. Yes the images are beautiful, mysterious, hypnotic. Any sample 30 seconds would make me want to see the movie. But put them all together, in a story fragmented to the point of disintegration, and my question became, Will this ever end? I've recently seen two other movies where each shot was beautiful but the story was washed out, schematic and abstract: Maborosi and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring. These pictures are like photography exhibits. They think they're deep, but as far as I can see the depth amounts to portentous platitudes with no narrative flesh on the bones. Someone should tell them that storytelling is art--difficult art. Then they might try it. But they would fail. I think they do this kind of movie because they can't tell stories or create characters. I love Rohmer, whose movies many find slow and storyless. But it isn't true. With Tarkovsky, it is. There's no good reason for this degree of unintelligibility. The characters have human moments, interesting moments. But the cryptological impulse drains them of context and therefore of real feeling.

The crowd of French stars and directors scattered through this movie makes it that much more fun for those who know them, but the movie goes beyond in jokes and star-spotting. A tour manager hired to shepherd a Georgian male singing group falls slowly and sweetly in love with their accompanying young Russian translator, a fanatic film fan. In a restaurant the men spontaneously sing a beautiful song and another customer joins in. Turns out he's a former (?) film actor. Looking at the guide, he says "Gascogne's son". Gascogne, now dead, turns out to be a nearly mythical figure from the 60s who knew everyone and did everything. The guide has never known his father and is sensitive and angry about it: he both wants and doesn't want to believe. Through this actor he meets another, and through him a whole society of film people who instantly open their doors to the "son of Gascogne." The Russian girl is more entranced with the stars than the boy, but both retain an innocence that flowers amid the strange and sometimes dangerous film world crossed with the musical tour. A chase after Gascogne's long lost final film (perhaps hidden in the boy's attic?) gives the movie a nice little thread of plot, tied to the old actor (now a chauffeur) trying with some charm to turn the lost film into cash. The mystery of Gascogne, as father and film maker, and the travails of the would-be lovers thrust into a glamorous, fast-traveling society, provide a dual focus, mixing memory and desire with odd and intriguing story, characters and atmosphere. Nostalgic, charming and fun.

The reputation of this movie is amazing. Yes, it has some arresting desert scenes--though far too many. But otherwise it is in almost every way a very bad film. There's an interesting story behind it, but that story is barely suggested by a thin and wooden script.

Mainly it's about the British superman, Lawrence, who out-Arabs the Arabs with his ability to endure pain. Beyond that it's a gay fantasy, in which Lawrence gets to parade around in flowing robes, with a phallic dagger at his waist, exchanging soulful words and glances with Omar Sharif, accompanied by his adored young boys, and even get sodomized by a Turk. The gay man triumphs over the manly army types, so he's a double superman.

Since this love can't speak its name it comes out in the unexplored, weirdly incoherent suggestions of inner conflict in Lawrence. He kills and says he likes it. Why? Who knows. The whole movie is a set of dots too far apart to connect. A few map shots might have helped understand the military situation, but all we get is names. That desert is too hot to cross, so they cross it. They trudge and trudge. Then they get there. The episodes, and the dialog, seem to float in the ether, without adequate context for understanding or emotional involvement. While Lean's camera caresses O'Tooles swishy sashaying, ice-blue eyes and golden hair, O'Toole emotes with a scenery-chewing extremity unseen since the silents. I think Valentino was more subtle. Alec Guinness contends for honors in the overacting contest, with his blue-eyed, over-enunciating sheik. Only Jack Hawkins gives a decently restrained performance.

Jarre's music is jarring. Too loud and poured over all like syrup. The movie screams EPIC with its big shots and cast of hundreds, and apparently a lot of people buy it. But this emperor is naked, and after all these years, badly sunburned.

Characters and story dreamed up by an auteur without imagination. Fake to the bone. No relation to life. Dialog pretentiously abstract, meant to be funny but isn't. Caricatured characters can sometimes be fun--see Dr. Strangelove--but the caricature has to grow from a sense of life. This is so airless, so film-schooly, watching it is like trying to breathe in a vacuum. An ex-nun nymphomaniac, so she says, who has not had sex because "I'm choosy", and a porn star, some gangsters, etc., adds up to a labored, dead, badly acted pseudo movie. I watched it because of all the good comments, so I'm warning those with ears to hear.

A very good film, with a star who seems impossibly beautiful for her character, yet why not? She's archetypal torn between the handsome logger, the solid but dull farmer, and the town dandy, whose characters are interesting and realistic enough to keep them from being stereotypes. She's embedded in this hard farming life in the far north, with a strong father and mother and some lively and interesting younger siblings. The tiny town and its characters figure too, especially the strict but humane priest, trying like all of them to save what seems a doomed, isolated town whose children will inevitably move away.

Life is serious on this frontier, awesomely primal. The darkness of the houses contributes to the sense of harshness, yet the common bond of family, work and survival intensifies the relationships, and the moments of beauty and humor. Gathering blueberries on a warm summer day, wandering off to Maria's favorite spot by a waterfall, a manual gramophone playing The Blue Danube. The logger's neglect of Maria--his failure to write her from his outpost--seems a gap in the story. It at least serves to show her faith in him. The tension over whom she will marry gets turned up. She holds out against advice and temptation. Surprise ending gives food for thought. A beautiful elegy for a dying way of life.

I can hardly begin to describe the charm of this film, though there's far more to it than charm. It's about young love, a couple in post-war Paris, threatened by jealousy and a sexual predator. But nothing dire. It's about the beauty of their love, and especially of the wife, and about how they live in this little community of work and neighborhood. A simple life, but the emotional temperature is raised by things like a bike accident (cf Bicycle Thief) and a missing lottery ticket (cf Le Million). The simple plot creates tension that balances between serious and comic, while the variety of characters whirl in a subtle and intricate dance. Apparently irrelevant moments give a wonderful texture. As when the bride, playing the piano at her wedding, hears her new husband say something that disappoints her, and we feel the sadness of their future life. Or the tiny tour-de-force of Gaston Modot and his partner at the lottery office. Or the scene at the bar at the wedding--an emotional roller coaster! The direction and editing are very sophisticated, elegant and unobtrusive. I love this movie.

I watched this after reading all the positive comments here. They were all wrong. It has the feel of a film-school movie. The characters have no interest. The story is simple, though a little time-twisted. It feels less archetypal, or mythic, than simply schematic: assembled by a writer without much imagination. Some nice, though very drawn out shots of the landscape. Very slow. No chemistry between the main man and woman. Extraneous scenes of her and her husband (she's having an affair). A killing in a restaurant that also means nothing. Best scenes are early shots of the monastery. Too many closeups of the main actor, who doesn't do much acting. The question of why it's all happening is raised and dropped. In real life it's a terrible situation, and I feel for the real people. But this is a movie, and a bad one.

Watching this sludgy, portentous tripe was torture. Any relation between these characters and real human beings is purely coincidental. Example: the main character is supposedly in love with a woman who works in the office, though he's been too shy to do anything about it. At the beach with friends, he meets her by chance. She invites him to her cabana, where, shockingly, there's another man, never seen before. She introduces them. Lover boy is so angry he leaves, and then won't speak to her at the office. He never asks about the other man, she never tells him anything, and the other man is never seen again. Later she marries someone else. His mother says, "you let her get away, you're an ass." Best line in the film.

The film at least sparked a good discussion afterwards. We came to see that it's a pro-capitalist, or anti-welfare state, allegory. Both the father and the mother, in their ways, torment the son, and in the end we learn it was all done out of love, tough love: to make him tough. Only then can he inherit the money. The father is a monstrously unbending bailiff, charged with defending property rights by repossession and eviction of those deadbeat lower classes. The kid shows grit and ambition by pursuing legal studies and paying off all his debts. One slight softening: he learns, one time, to accept a gift. Otherwise it's straight Ayn Rand: capitalism is tough to keep society tough. Rely on yourself, don't get soft, climb the ladder and pay your debts, and you'll reap your reward.

The style is copied from Steven Spielberg. Same kinds of shots, rhythm, shoving the obvious in your face, lack of interest in real character. Standard Hollywood period piece photography: subdued hazy brown-gray-blue. Excuse me, I have to run to the video store to rent an Eric Rohmer.

Some interesting shots strung together with a pretentious, artsy narration that mimics profundity in a familiar jejeune style. Assumptions include that the east is superior to the west, television is bad, capitalism evil, etc. Sample insight: "Pac-man puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment." With a different narration it could be a much better film. One key to its superficiality: the people are only seen, never heard. The narrator's voice covers all, like ketchup. Marker has a good eye, a good feel for faces and gestures, but a mushy brain. If you're a young aspiring artist in an MFA program who's attracted to "theory" the humorless self-importance of this film may appeal to you.

This film is an interesting touchstone. When people think it's good, I learn something about them I want to know. It is not good, it is bad. So why are so many so wrong? First, Bill Murray is a magically charming man. He seems to be improvising most of the material and sometimes it's funny. Bill Murray is an unusual comedian, who can play serious in a way that Steve Martin, say, can't. He fell in love with Andie Macdowell in the terrific Groundhog Day, where she was merely sweet. Here Scarlett Johanson looks good, has some of that sweetness, but otherwise no character at all. She's there to laugh at Bill Murray's jokes. Her only attraction is her youth and beauty. This is simply a sexless, therefore melancholy, middle-aged man's unliveable fantasy. Many middle-aged reviewers no doubt saw themselves in the mirror. Resisting sex gives it a (much degenerated) Casablanca feel of renunciation and lost opportunity. Aside from Murray the humor is slack, storytelling and characters non-existent. I'm sure Murray knows how bad it is, but if the Academy likes him, why not go with the flow?

Valerie tells her boyfriend she's pregnant, he's not sure what he wants. She's mad, but hoping he'll somehow turn around. The unsettled uncertain back and forth is very real. She seems better than the boyfriend, but doesn't quite know it.

Then off to work at a new job in a hotel. Rhythm varies with the headlong speedy movement of work and occasional moments grabbed for a nap or a smoke. Tensions with staff and guests make you worry about this young girl: any situation could explode. She seems calm outwardly, but you gradually get a sense of the roiling interior. Will she crack under the pressure? Mysteries--why is she so cold to the black co-worker? Racism? Worry? You're not quite sure. At moments things loosen up, the girl shows attitude to the point you think she might get fired. Can she be that tough, that self-confident? In a way, yes. She turns out to be an amazing character who almost thinks she's ordinary, though she knows the men are after her like a pack of wolves. She's young, you worry for her, but she can take care of herself. In the end she seems awesomely, unfathomably self-sufficient.

This movie seems to be about female power. A good pairing would be with Sautet's A Simple Story, about an older woman also outwardly ordinary (though beautiful) but with amazing contained power, a kind of integrity beyond any men she encounters.

This movie must have been at its best at the concept stage. It seems to be a patriotic attempt to remake Lester's Three Musketeers as a French film. The actors are good, and Sophie Marceau is lovely, but Tavernier has no clue how to make an action film. The story rambles incoherently, the pacing is awful, even the action scenes lack tension, and the jokes fall flat. In this genre, DeBroca's Le Bossu is far superior. For a good film with Sophie Marceau, see Police.

An interesting story about two men and their wives gets started, then events rush on in an ever more dreamlike way, until the characters lose focus and the story trails off into a mystifying combination of reality and dream, fantasy, hallucination. You get the idea that something strange is happening, that a puzzle is being set up, but the events themselves, even the oblique sex, become dull because so disconnected. Wondering what's happening interferes with your involvement. Some events, like the would-be samurai succeeding, being idolized by his men, and stopping at the brothel where his wife is now working as a prostitute, seem implausible though real. Implausibility and hallucination both detach the viewer from the characters. You can't enter into their point of view very intensely because the filmmaker is playing this game and because the story moment by moment loses its orginally involving reality. The peasant suddenly loved by the aristocratic beauty can be a powerful line, as in, say, A Midsummer Night's Dream. But here it was too schematic to have much punch. An overrated film.

I loved this film. It's not really for kids. To appreciate it fully I think you have to be older. It's about the last moment of youth on the edge of the passage into middle age. It's about getting a sense of who you and the people around you really are.

Romy Schneider is beautiful and seems to incarnate this quiet but strong woman. In a way this is a woman's picture. It concentrates mainly on the women. The men are weaker, on the whole, but not in the programmatic way of bad "feminist" films. In one scene the women are cooking together, getting into a serious argument, then somebody spills something and they suddenly unite in cleaning it up. That might be an emblem of the movie. Tough things happen, but life goes on.

One of the remarkable qualities of this film is the thick sense of reality it gives--of a world of co-workers and friends which you never fully encompass. You're seeing a slice of life, and you feel there's much more life extending out in all directions.

The direction is subtle, understated but beautiful compositions and a lovely way of starting with a shot and then moving to another without a cut. Many frames are filled with people, and a sense, again, of thick life surrounding this story. Either I missed it when it came out, or didn't get it and forgot, but this time it was a revelation to me.