Brudnoy's Film Index
Brudnoy, David
David Brudnoy Brudnoy's Film Index • The Best of 1975... ^ The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother: Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Madeline,Kahn, and the ghost of Conan Doyle do nifty...
...A clunky "comedy" dying by the minute...
...0. ^ The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 35...
...It doesn't work...
...This movie explores the eternal combat between freedom and order...
...1111 Barry Lyndon: A puzzle, actually, as it is breathtakingly beautiful, wonderfully photographed, and exquisitely edited...
...Everyone is gorgeous: Ryan O'Neal is gorgeous...
...Billy Dee Williams is the Negro stud our Mahogany really loves, but Perkins represents glamour, so...
...Sigerson Holmes (Wilder) may not really be smarter, but he has blood running in his veins unlike the ice water in his sibling's, and with gay, abandon he pursues the baddies and rescues the damsel, for what that's worth...
...The Hindenburg: The most recent disaster flick, starring George C. Scott as a German detective, of sorts, given to uttering such profundities as: "I have an uncomfortable sense of impending doom," with fellow-travelers giving out magnificent lines like "Next time, let's take the Titanic...
...and the worst of 1975...
...movie...
...Late in the game, but at least he winds up where the movie belongs...
...Stanley Kubrick is to be commended for his sense of what is beautiful, but he seems to have forgotten what the cinema is all about...
...It is offbeat, funny, sad, tender, wry, wholly winning...
...his latest film puts him in the front rank of those who would liberate us from our pomposities by puncturing them with laughter...
...One Frew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Ken Kesey's 1962 novel imaginatively filmed, with much of the cloddish symbolism stripped away...
...The Kipling story makes for a thrilling spectacular, with acting kept to the human dimension...
...Set in an insane asylum where society's malcontents are tucked neatly away, the film unfolds an endless series of questions about the nature of our society...
...Hustle: Burt Reynolds and Catharine Deneuve walk like zombies through a particularly hideous cops-and-baddies number having something vaguely to do with call girls, slick pornographers, and furious fathers...
...Badly dubbed, badly conceived, tiresome beyond description...
...The movie goes up in a puff of smoke...
...it's a story for the ages, on the surface level an adventure tale, a bit deeper down a mild pondering of the meaning of colonialism...
...The dirigible goes up in flame with great panache...
...The Story of Adele H: The true story of Victor Hugo's daughter, who ran away from home to pursue a reluctant lover to Nova Scotia and the Caribbean, growing deranged as the man spurns her...
...the eighteenth century is gorgeous...
...The Maltese Falcon returns, more or less, as do a crew of baddies as unbelievable as an Arab peace overture...
...hate is gorgeous—it's that sort of film...
...The clash of native wit and imperial pretension works wonderfully...
...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...
...Woody's a film anarchist: his tool to destroy convention is withering satire...
...The Night Caller: Jean-Paul Belmondo rescuing Paris from a deranged sickle whose misapplied morality and frustrated sexuality lead him, glass eye and evil sneer and breathless telephone voice and all, to butcher young ladies who've been messing around...
...Jack Nicholson in (thus far) his most brilliantly conceived role...
...This is Truffaut's latest to reach our shores, though it was screened in France two years ago, and it introduces Isabelle Adjani, a remarkable young actress, to American audiences...
...Louise Fletcher is excellent as the great tranquilizer and tyrant, Nurse Ratched...
...war is gorgeous...
...The Magic Flute: Mozart's most ingratiating opera lovingly filmed by Ingmar Bergman...
...But it is a crashing bore made more tiresome by its exhausting length...
...Marisa Berenson is gorgeous...
...Tracy, played by Diana Ross, who can sing but doesn't here, transmogrifies into,Mahogany, the fashion model star of the hour, under the inspired tutelage of Anthony Perkins, master of the high fag twitch...
...Disturbing in its biting savagery, glorious in its acting, unforgettable...
...Clothes make the woman, and the movie is breaking all box office records in New York and other centers of advanced culture...
...Nashville: Robert Altman's greatly moving examination of one major slice of Americana...
...Swept Away By An Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August: Lina Wertmtiller checks in with her latest, a wonderfully parodic romance between a rich bitch and a Communist sailor, who, rather implausibly, fall madly into love following a switch of roles, she from haughty grande dame to sniveling servant, he from outraged servant to outrageous lord and master...
...Only Shelley Winters is absent, but Anne Bancroft's on board to lend a touch of class...
...his nebbish puss and bloated belief in his sexual allure are the perfect putdown of our standard romanticized myths...
...death is gorgeous...
...An unpromising beginning sweeps eventually to a most ingratiating climax...
...The robbery flops, abysmally, but the characterizations are wonderfully delineated...
...By and large Truffaut shoots it straight, with a clear narrative sweep only occasionally enhanced by moments of flash...
...The Man Who Would Be King: John Huston's best movie in many years, with a perfectly cast Sean Connery and Michael Caine as two wretched little adventurers trying to establish themselves as rulers of remotest KafiristAn...
...Bogart fans are already, and with good reason, apoplectic...
...The only redeeming feature is that Reynolds gets it in the end...
...There is no point of view, no attitude, no rhyme or reason to supposed plot "developments," really nothing but the most beautiful picture postcard ever stretched to three-plus hours...
...Walleyed Feldman, as usual, makes the most of his bizarre gifts, including this time "phbtographic hear- ing...
...A breakthrough in cinematic technique, sure to be considered a milestone in American filmmaking, a film that has aroused enormous controversy Owing to the effectiveness of its portrayal of Middle America...
...The Story of 0: A modern classic novel of soft-core porn, silly in its pretentious artiness, becomes even sillier on screen, and absurdly degrading even of willingly degraded women, incomparably wasteful of the fleshy talents of some of the most exquisite females ever marched across the silver screen...
...Even the lovely art deco sets are unable to save it from utter disaster...
...The Black Bird: An atrocious attempt to revive Sam Spade, here in the guise of George Segal as Spade's son, a detective working out of Papa's old office, now in a Negro neighborhood—which of course produces the expectable puns...
...love is gorgeous...
...Boris the pacifist hates war, loves to philosophize, and joins Sonja's plot to kill Napoleon...
...a tale of Boris and Sonja, newlyweds too poor to eat more than snow for dinner and sleet for dessert...
...The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother: Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Madeline,Kahn, and the ghost of Conan Doyle do nifty swifty damage to the legend in a robust and gutsy send-up...
...Mahogany: At last, a soap opera for Afro-Americans, encompassing every iota of treacle imaginable...
...Dog Day Afternoon: Al Pacino is splendid as the desperate fellow who, in 1972, held up a Brooklyn bank to get money for his boyfriend's sex change operation...
...For once, a successful wedding of the two media, with all the baroque stage artifice showing boldly, most of the Masonic mumbo-jumbo of the libretto deleted, and splendid acting and singing...
...Infant-level psychosexuality, dumb-bunny kinkiness, dialogue of unspeakable affectedness, and lots of rape of the "oh, oh, it hurts, oh please sir, it hurts" variety...
...The movie milks every conceivable sacred cow for chuckles...
...A magic movie even for those who don't love opera, a magic opera for everyone who ever believed- in love and virtue's triumph over evil...
...Love and Death: Woody Allen's finest...
Vol. 9 • March 1976 • No. 6
