Brudnoy's Film Index
Brudnoy, David
"Brudnoy's Film Index" Animal Crackers: The Four Marx Brothers in their second film, written, like their greats, by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind. But this 1930 dud is static, stagey, dull for great stretches. An...
...One winning episode: the Injuns, led by a Yiddish Sitting Blintz (Mel Brooks) circle in on the settlers, ready for the kill...
...Harold and Maude: An offbeat and totally winning comedy about an 80-year-old wacky lady much loved by a 19-year-old wierdo...
...Roscoe Lee Browne as a pompous, conniving congressman (of which, in real life, there are 535), and many more...
...A triumph for everyone concerned, and many cuts above the "Executive Action" type of cinema crap...
...Harry Belafonte as a high yellow Godfather...
...Blazing Saddles: And the band plays on...
...Uptown Saturday Night: A funky Negro comedy with Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby as two average Joes hot on the trail of a lost winning lottery ticket...
...But of course...
...Flip Wilson as da preacher...
...Hints of racialism, an irritating quality of unsureness about whether this is a comedy or drama, but redeemed by some perceptive looks at the many faces of Hebrew life in that most anti-Semitic part of North America, then as well as now...
...Slices of Afro-American life, good-natured, and just plain fun...
...An occasional gem, like this, which is better than a half-century of child psychology, from Groucho: "This would be a better world for children if parents had to eat the spinach...
...But they spare the colored family (the son of which grows up to be Black Bart, sheriff extraordinaire) because the red Chief's never seen white folks darker than he...
...The shticks fall flat, Streisand is piggish, and poor Michael Sarrazin, as her hubby, looks ripe for desertion...
...There's this kid, see, and his britches are really too small for him, and his sword's rusting just lying around, so off he swaggers to join the other kids in saving fair damsels in distress and shaking up the neighborhood...
...Some moments are sidesplitting...
...Not likely...
...The Sting: Light, lovable, vastly over-rated, but undeniably pleasing, especially the musical score...
...The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz: Montreal in the 1940s, A young Jewish go-getter getting going on making it big...
...The Mad Adventures of "Rabbi" Jacob: The funniest import (from France, this time) in years, a cleverly constructed farce about mistaken identities, bigotries, revolution, and the bourgeoisie, haut and otherwise...
...in any case, it is tender, wry, and wicked, all at once...
...The Parallax View: Political assassination, conspiracy, and split-second timing, with Warren Beatty as an investigative reporter who goes too far...
...Winner recently of the prestigious Leon S. Rhodes Award for Cinema Excellene...
...A Very Natural Thing: The first attempt at a serious homosexual film, it emerges instead as an unintentional comedy, provoking the question: is the ultimate end of gay lib the insistence that homosexual romance is but another version of the most vapid and sterile heterosexual marriage...
...The Bank Shot: George C. Scott lisping and growling through a marvelously funny bank heist—and I mean a heist of the bank, not just the bread...
...Daisy Miller: Henry James's piquant novella deliciously filmed by Peter Bogdanovich, with Cybill Shepherd as the innocent abroad, confronting bitchy grande dames, a restrained American chap, a crude Italian, and the Roman fever, ^ The Exorcist: Still going strong and scaring you half to death...
...One regrets that justice wins in the end...
...Embarrassing, with too many slow-motion romps and too little inner humor...
...The Three Musketeers: Will it ever close...
...Set in Los Angeles and involving murder, incest, and political malfeasance, this is one of the brightest spots in the current theater circuit...
...This promises to become a cult classic...
...Louis de Funes as the "Rabbi" has the world's most plastic face and is an absolute delight in this, his first film to make it big in America...
...For Pete's Sake: A nearly witless Streisand comedy about a gal who'll do just about anything for her husband...
...Chinatown: Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, with John Huston, in a film directed by Roman Polanski, evoking 1930s crime dramas...
...Still a fantastic 'hit, albeit composed of disparate scenes rather than much of a plot...
Vol. 8 • October 1974 • No. 1
