The Talkies
Stein, Benjamin
standing in the middle of the highway leading from the town, trying in vain to warn the passing motorists, who naturally take him to be insane. The producers, however, insisted upon adding a framing...
...The Four Musketeers: They're back, the kid with his undersized britches and his busy sword, this time rounding out the Dumas classic with much less humor and more seriousness than The Three Musketeers of last year...
...Florinda Bolkan is a delight to see, but the story is very old hat, and the viewer's mind wanders...
...This is a morality tale, a massive putdown of fashionable religious cults, a tale of love unrequited too...
...But GF-II shows us people who are essentially no more than subhuman automatons, who kill because it is part of their nature...
...but he never questions his unstated premise that culture is—or ought to be—"user"-determined, as if cultural needs were nothing more than a kind of collective itch, to be "stroked" through the proper marketing techniques...
...It is simple-minded, boring, pretentious, and dull...
...You are...
...If you don't see it, it is hard to believe that a camera could linger so lovingly on one man putting a pistol in another's mouth and pulling the trigger...
...What could the "Other Medium" have been...
...What a lovely party this is...
...The Talkies by Benjamin Stein) Do you think you have a lot of willpower...
...The Wilby Conspiracy: A perfectly witless, utterly improbable story of racism in today's South Africa, with Sidney Poitier as the noble black and Michael Caine as his reluctant—but of course noble—white accomplice...
...There's one absolutely delicious scene on election night '68, and a few campy numbers elsewhere, but that's about it...
...Are you willing to be considered a nonconformist...
...The ladies—Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, and Lee Grant—are lovely, Beatty is Mr...
...Roth slices up the cake, thus slicing up the map of Cuba, and gives pieces of it to the racketeers...
...Occasionally he whispers and sometimes he shouts...
...But unfortunately, the loving shots of murder are the high points of the film...
...It showed murderous people who were killing for motives we could understand, even if we did not share them...
...Some of the song and dance shticks are marvelous, the comedy routines are wonderful, the sets are splendid, but the tear-jerking goes on and on, Sharif s dreamy-eyed routine palls, and Caan is ghastly as the brilliant impresario and mini-bully, Billy...
...He is playing the role as if he were on Chlorpromazine...
...But popular culture also has some peculiar weaknesses—perhaps the greatest is its susceptibility to the kind of cynical or insensitive tampering which spoiled much of what was best in The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers...
...People all over the theatre are nudging their neighbors and asking, "What's going on...
...Janis: Joplin, called Pearl by her pals, the Texas kid, died young...
...So that you won't feel too bad about missing it, here is one of its more memorable moments: The Godfather, a vicious, brooding, sulking slimeball of a man, is told by his lovely Nordic wife ("Kay") that she had an abortion rather than have his child...
...But what popular culture needs is less fellow-travelling, and more critical understanding...
...Robert Redford in his best role in years, portraying a 1920s flying ace trying desperately to hold onto the old way of flying as derring-do, at a time when the airplane's promoters were pushing to make it a safe, reliable mode of transportation...
...Gruel...
...Shampoo: He's gonna wash them gals right into his bed...
...When he is threatening someone he says, "If you do not do this, I will be very...disappointed," Pacino was nominated for Best Actor...
...The producers, however, insisted upon adding a framing sequence with an ending which showed the hero finally convincing The Authorities of the danger—in one of those artificial coincidences which movie-makers too often substitute for authentic suspense, his story is confirmed by an automobile collision involving a truck which is transporting more pods from the town for distribution throughout the state...
...It is the sixties resurrected, a touch of history, and a wealth of talent and, yes, offbeat grace...
...At almost all times when the GF appears, he is in a darkened room...
...Gans' main criticism of the Nielsen system is that it isn't sophisticated enough...
...Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose—she said, and she lived that life, and American pop music is the poorer for her absence...
...When I finally went to see GF-II, as its fans call it, two teenage girls in front of me were mixing screwdrivers while the show went on...
...It shows us a society beyond hope of redemption—thoroughly rotten and deserving of destruction...
...It is on a par with last year's remarkable Lacombe, Lucien, both in theme and in mastery of the material...
...In case all this subtlety gets to be too much and the audience gets confused or loses interest, Coppola has a brilliant way of keeping our curiosity alive...
...Biceps on a spree...
...A mighty bomb...
...Then don't see The Godfather-Part II...
...Then, when people start getting strangled and cut up, we don't know how come...
...For about the first two hours of the film, Coppola has the GF mumble whenever he is talking to his henchmen, so that we can't hear what he is saying to them...
...subtlety...
...Funny Lady: La Streisand returns as Fanny Brice, still mooning over the nauseating Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif) but now marrying Billy Rose (James Caan), who in real life was about 3'4" but in Caan's exuberant incarnation is Mr...
...The Godfather-Part II cuts back and forth between the story of the new God28 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 father, Al Pacino, and the stuff he is doing in 1958, and that of the original, GF-II's father, who was brought lovingly to life by Marlon Brando in the original Godfather...
...I wasn't as lucky...
...2) determining the publics which are currently poorly served with cultural content meeting their standards...
...Just then, because it is Roth's birthday, a waiter comes out with a big birthday cake with a map of Cuba on it...
...Popular culture has some peculiar strengths—not the least of them is the very resiliency which always has seemed to obviate the need for an intellectual defense: for the most part, the millions of fans who went to see Airport or The Exorcist did not care what the critics thought of their choices...
...You would do better to contemplate murder for three and a half hours than to see GF-II...
...A Brief Vacation: Vittorio De Sica's last film, a languid, often insipid peek into the life and hard times of a woman convalescing in an Italian sanitarium: her dawning awareness of the oppression of men and factory life...
...jack Warden plays the urbane fellow whose wife, daughter, and mistress all get a piece of George's action...
...So the pod-people are alive and well, in this latest reincarnation of the Cultural Commissars...
...Now here's a part for those of you who like...
...A clunky old-timey "comedy" dying by the minute...
...In this case, by ensuring that the movie pod-people would lose, the real-life pod-people—the studio executives—won...
...She lives again here, in a first-rate documentary incorporating much of her music and not too much of her inane interviews...
...Only Brando wouldn't play in the sequel, so we get to see the young original GF being traumatized in his native Sicily, fleeing to America, and becoming a killer and a racketeer, circa 1918...
...Tommy: The Who's rock opera magnificently filmed by the bizarre Ken Russell...
...With Ann-Margret and Oliver Reed as the parents, Roger Daltrey as Tommy, and Elton John, Jack Nicholson, the divine Tina Turner, and many others in supporting roles that positively blast off the screen...
...The fundamental nature of men and women in GF-II is so murky and evil that no amelioration of the human condition is possible...
...Unimaginably powerful—if you like rock music...
...That's director Francis Ford Coppola's understated way of telling us how the gringos were carving up Cuba and exploiting it before Castro...
...everyone curious about whether any of those mumbles has anything to do with the killings...
...Once (when he is told about the abortion), his lower lip quivers...
...It showed people with some verve and personality that we couldadmire...
...Most of GF-II shows already rich and powerful people killing and torturing other people more or less just for the hell of it...
...Indeed the movie is a virtual paradigm of nihilismconditions in a social organization so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility...
...GF-II was nominated for an Academy Award for Best ScreenThe Godfather-Part II play Adapted from Another Medium...
...They kept it up through the whole three and a half hours, and I think they really got something out of the time...
...Comedy, tragedy, frolic, and some of the finest aerial scenes in the movies...
...He's a hairdresser, a heterosexual hairdresser no less, and his service is, well, verrry personal...
...Even that, however, could have been presented interestingly, and it wasn't...
...love, lust, and hijinks among the well-to-do and would-be riches, and some lovely art deco sets to redeem it from utter worthlessness...
...Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Frank Finlay buckle their swashes with the best of them in this delightful sequel...
...It is in this respect that GF-II is fundamentally different from the original Godfather...
...But why should he believe that sociologists, armed with the latest in computer hardware and methodology, will come up with anything different from what we already have, courtesy of the Nielsen people—a spinoff of "All in the Family" for every combination and permutation ofethnic, political, and sexual categories...
...Never in the whole history of Hollywood movies which glorify killing and crime have murder and crime been so glorified as when we see the original GF start his climb to gangster top dog...
...Al Pacino, who plays GF, spends most of the movie staring at the ground with a burning Camel cigarette in his hand...
...her resignation to the fates...
...The Great Waldo Pepper: An adventure film with heart, depth, insight, and caring...
...An explosive, devastating, sometimes brilliant musical extravaganza, the very epitome of contemporary music properly transformed to a sustained film...
...There are about two hours of darkness in the film so the message gets across...
...Another clever, subtle moment: the GF is sitting on the sundeck of a pre-Castro Havana hotel (acutely uncomfortable in the sun) with a number of other hoods...
...Les Violons Du Bal: French director Michael Drach's reminiscence of the Nazi occupation of France, with Marie-Josee Nat and Jean-Louis Trintignant...
...and (3) creating the needed culture...
...The sinister made silly, the worthy made weird, the complexities of contemporary race relations dwindled down to a precious few black-white good-bad simplisms...
...It was an abortion," she says...
...Just like our marriage is an abortion, an evil, unholy, dirty thing...
...And although he concedes that "in real life, culture is not, cannot, and should not be created by such systematic planning procedures," and even goes so far as to admit that "novelty and surprise are essential qualities of all art and entertainment, both for creators and audiences, and research cannot provide them," there is little reason to believe that Gans thought that he was wasting his time in utopian fantasy by writing a book which asserts both the possibility and the desirability of such "programming...
...And he—George (Warren Beatty)—sure does...
...Brudnoy's Film Index • • ^ At Long Last Love: At long last schmaltz, the dead-weighting of 16 wonderful old Cole Porter songs, as mauled by Burt Reynolds, Cybill Shepherd, and Madeline Kahn, among the major perpetrators...
...Next, Funny Grandma...
...Although Gans does not specify who will do the "programming"—a term which he admits that he appropriated from the mass media industry—it seems evident that it will be the members of his academic field...
...But Gans' policy recommendations suggest an even more sophisticated kind of meddling: The business of "implementing subcultural programming" involves "(1) identifying all relevant taste publics and cultures and their aesthetic standards...
...For the Academy Award for the Emperor's New Clothes—Francis Ford Coppola...
...Faye Dunaway excels as the evil Milady, with Charlton Heston's Richelieu and Christopher Lee's Rochefort rounding out the baddie brigade...
...He doesn't like the light, see, and all that darkness is supposed to show how he operates sort of out of the power of darkness and fear...
...The real losers, of course, were the movie audiences—and anyone who appreciates a piece of fine craftsmanship...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 29...
...Much confusion with his various affairs, hopping from spitcurl to blow-dry to bed, and getting out just in the nick of time...
...The film would be much less of a loss if it actually glorified crime...
...her fleeting romance with a dreamy young idealist...
...Macho with a hotcomb, and except for the fact that the flick goes nowhere, it is great fun...
...Sometimes he even speaks Italian...
...An intelligent, controlled, biting movie about the will to survive, smoothly examining both the Jewish struggle to escape the Germans, and the French compliance and occasional resistance to their oppressors...
...They are talking with a leading gamblinghood named Hyman Roth (obviously patterned after Meyer Lansky) about dividing up the gambling casinos in Cuba...
...The movie is the biggest fraud since Homestake Oil Drilling, and a hell of a lot more money and people are involved...
...Are you willing to be considered a freak even...
...The latter, a lengthy soap opera of crime, at least gave some credit for toughness and initiative...
...After all, there can be a certain bravery involved in crime, a daring and ambition which propel men from rags to riches...
Vol. 8 • June 1975 • No. 9
