Brudnoy's Film Index
"Brudnoy's Film Index" American Graffiti: 1962 hot-rods, the hop, rock 'n roll, four boys, their girls, a time of testing for all: the best nostalgia flick in a long time. For over- thirties, a...
...The ensuing jamboree lasted over two months, and kept the University of Wisconsin in a pother from the beginning of the school year...
...They are the most egregious species of pecksniff...
...This autumn, just as foliage festivals were being celebrated in all the backwaters of Podunk, the movement held its fall convention, and no intelligent lib- eral will ever take them seriously again...
...Brother Kuntsler set up his soap box on street corners, church steps, and wher- ever a gullible crowd would have him...
...Stately, languid, superlative beyond words, The New Land (along with The Emigrants) ranks with the very finest films ever made...
...The Madison convention is the kind of sham that only native American conven-tioneers could carry out without a blush...
...A must see...
...Brilliantly drawn, viciously objectionable...
...Well...
...But they hoodwink only featherbrains, and one did not have to be in Madison this fall to note their hypocrisy...
...Your average teenage cellist cure basketball player and his beautiful first girl, hold- ing hands and more in a spotlessly clean New York...
...They require you always to bow and scrape toward one side, and always to kick the other side (which happens to be the one that feeds you...
...Jeremy: Young love and sex...
...Jean-Pierre l.~aud, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jac- queline Bisset, nice naughty Nice, and Truffaut himself make this satin-smooth...
...There, on that Main Street of American Radicalism, it became eminently clear that beneath every peace and freedom button beats the heart of a Shriner...
...The writer of course is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a man whose cause is un-fathomable to Jane Fonda...
...Over five hours, beth halves, detailing a Swedish family's re- move to America in the 1850s...
...But while they frolicked with philosophy and paraded against repression in America, Solzhenitsyn and the other victims of the Russian Bill of Rights were making a last stand against the KGB, which now was taking advantage of the spirit of d6tente to crush Russian dissi-dence, and no one in Madison betrayed any evidence that he cared...
...Vincent Gardenia as the manager, and all other supporting cast members, in- cluding Tom Ligon as a hippy ball-player, contribute to a fine cinema expe- rience...
...movie- maker's struck his gold...
...Oh well, it is A Happening and worth seeing at least so that you can join in the dishing when your friends bemoan their five badly- spent bucks...
...Old troopers like Howard Zinn, Richard Falk, and Tom Hay- den were in attendance as were eight full- blooded veterans of Vietnam...
...Jane Fonda officiously flitted in and out of town like the busy little beaver of virtue that she is...
...quarters, grousing about the grievous state of repression in America...
...Those heavy-lidded dark eyes flashing, those green green glens shin- ing bright, those lessons in Life...
...Forsaking their prior claim of Brother Armstrong's innocence, they began urging that it had been his constitutional right and sacred duty to wreak mayhem and your Bambi and Dumbo crowd...
...The Berrigans were in a fever, saving souls and leading processions...
...The celebrities shuffled in and out of Madison for two months, and were it not for the historic tumult in Washington and the Middle East, I have no doubt that half the nation's news media would have taken up residence in Madison this autumn...
...It was a memorable spectacle in every way, and if the saintly Brother Armstrong is going to have to cool his heels in the cala- boose for twenty-seven years, fie...
...There were marches, lectures, rallies, theater skits, and other forms of traditional highjinks...
...Hot-shot young first-year student (Timothy Bottoms) seeking success and boodie, matching wits with his contracts prof (John House- man, who gets all the best lines) and gropes with his prof's daughter (Lindsay Wagner, who is luscious but a cipher...
...These are not serious de- fenders of peace, freedom, and justice, but Rotarians, Elks, and American joiners...
...Siddhartha: A lesser work by Her- man Hesse (1922) comes to the screen in gorgeens maxi-color...
...For over- thirties, a must...
...It is perfectly proper to protest if there is no danger to life, if the opponent is likely to back down and if you don't risk being denounced by the left (in fact, it is always better to pro- test together with the left...
...On September 22 Brother Karlten Arm-strong pleaded guilty to the secend-degree murder of a University of Wisconsin grad- uate student and to a spree of bombings throughout southern Wisconsin, all on be- half of world peace, freedom, justice, green grass, etc., before hightailing it across the border back in 1970...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...It was a high-minded assembly in the great American style...
...Paris, Paris, as of old...
...Never- theless the movement did have the oppor- tunity to get together, reminisce, smoke a little cannabis, and roar about peace, free- dom, and justice...
...There we have the whole hypocrisy of many Western protests...
...None of these illustrious American freedom fighters has yet to burn a Russian flag, picket a Russian Embassy, or show the jackbooted bureaucrats the least glimmer of their vaunted audacity...
...Stunning performances by Max yon Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Eddie Axberg, and Minnesota...
...Brudnoy's Film Index American Graffiti: 1962 hot-rods, the hop, rock 'n roll, four boys, their girls, a time of testing for all: the best nostalgia flick in a long time...
...Big, brassy, arrogant, but it bowled your servant over...
...Last Tango in Paris: Ha-cha, ha- cha, Brando bold...
...Michael Moriarty and Robert De Nire are splen- did as Henry and his hopeless pal Bruce...
...The fact that Brother Armstrong had admitted to the bombings and to murder did not douse the conven-tioneers' enthusiasm in the least, for when the worthies of the movement talk about peace and freedom, they speak in lapidary phrases of ritual much the way Rotarians invoke their rote incantations to "service...
...sock 'era, knock 'era tale ill-teld...
...For months the im- presarios of the movement had been plan- ning to make the trial of this American Gandhi an occasion by holding one of their peace, freedom, and justice conventions, and by September they were not about to cancel it...
...the young Buddha (sorta) discovering himself, you should pardon the expression, in long- ago India...
...The Alternative January 1974 26...
...Heavy Tr~c: Cartoon full-length feature: vulgar, cruel, cheeky, not for EDITORIAL L (continued from page 3) ) ideals than their recent hollow get-together in Madison, Wisconsin...
...They let American POWs waste away in North Vietnam and they will allow the Russian Jews and intelligentsia to suf- fer in the glorious Soviet Republic...
...Day for Night: Truffaut's song to the cinema, an intricate but easy ramble through the ironies of movie-making within the well-made movie...
...Jesus Christ Superstar: Nobody loves it but The People...
...Neither fantasy nor quite reality, it is warming;, inconsequential, yes, but it feels good...
...Relevant...
...To this moment the movement has yet to direct one imprecation against the Soviet government that compares with its mere benign references to America...
...The New Land: Conclusion to Jan Troel's two-part epic (first part: 1972's The Emigrants...
...The same applies to the various forms of Meutrality' and 'nonalignment' that have become so widespread...
...The Paper Chase: Love Story at Harvard I_aw School...
...While Solzhenitsyn stood in the shadows of secret police and torture chambers, declaring his people's right to freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom to exit an inhospitable country, the well-heeled and widely-cele-brated American peace movement issued press releases from its Holiday Inn head- great European folk migration to the United States in the nineteenth century...
...No center, no point, but the classroom scenes are delights...
...And the reason is very simple...
...Incompa- rably the finest epic treatment of the destruction...
...A self-indulgent little film destined to make more money than it's worth...
...From far away and without the benefit of television, radio, or the great American publishing houses, the world's greatest living writer has precisely analyzed their contribution to the struggle for freedom in the world...
...for infants, teenie-bop- pers, and sub-thirty smartasses----eat your hearts out...
...Bang the Drum Slowly: Friend-ship between two ballplayers, one goofy and dying, the other a star...
Vol. 7 • January 1974 • No. 4
