Brudnoy's Film Index
Brudnoy, David
"Brudnoy's Film Index" Amarcord: Fellini's magnificent reminiscence of his 1930s boyhood. A lusty, loving, wry, and tender ramble through the four seasons and the many conditions of humankind. No sloppy sentimentality,...
...Hardly, but a perceptive analysis of a marriage in shreds, with Ellen Geer, Will Geer, and Rosemarie...
...Everything turned upside down, every convention shattered, all connective tissue severed, until at the end, suddenly, one realizes that—one doesn't understand a bit of it...
...No sloppy sentimentality, but much sentiment...
...Husband-wife team Delores Taylor and Tom Laughlin milk every drop of bathos from the ludicrous adventures of our hero...
...Claustrophobic photography, sophisticated and chilling dialogue, a phenomenally fine work...
...Lenny is only part of the real Bruce, and that not the least attractive, though it is unattractive enough...
...Plus an added delight: the destruction of Los Angeles...
...One saving grace: Bob Fosse as the snake, undulating, vamping, hissing his way right into your heart...
...let 'em be...
...Klansman tries to compress every outrage against Negroes into two hours...
...The Memory of Us: "The most important picture ever;'' the ads instruct us...
...Either you dig the macabre done up as camp, or you don't...
...Amazing Grace: A mournfully awful farce starring the irrepressible Moms Mabley, whose wicked charms are utterly buried in this embarrassment...
...Here transformed into a musical so bombastic that the poor tyke is buried beneath it...
...Some of the material is remarkably well transposed directly from Bruce's routines to this movie, though much of it is too chopped up to have much power...
...Lacombe, Lucien: An absolute triumph from Louis 'Malle, the story of a young French peasant who becomes a collaborator in 1944, finds happiness doing the Nazis' dirty work and more happiness with a Jewish girl, then...
...It does add a dimension to the old Bela Lugosi part...
...The rest goes to your stomach, like a bad matzo ball...
...A Woman Under the Influence: The finest American film of the year, without a doubt...
...Hoffman is superb, as is Valerine Perrine playing his wife, Honey...
...The Little Prince: Antoine de SaintExupery's joyfilled tale of adult awareness of realities as seen through the eyes of a child...
...A joy throughout...
...Earthquake: This month's disaster film, full of the most outrageous effects and a cast of zillions...
...The Trial of Billy Jack: Installment #3 in the profitable exploitation series on the modern saint, half-breed Billy, and his gal friend and her freedom school...
...Beautifully done, non-preachy, powerfully communicating its message by example, subtly, brilliantly...
...It is to the American film of the '70s as Bergman's Scenes from a Afarrthj46, is to the Swedish: the rule breaker, the pathfinder, the new standard of honesty...
...Not to be missed...
...Not for those whose marriages are on the rocks...
...Serves 'em right, too...
...Andy Warhol's Dracula: From the folks who brought you Andy Varhol's Frankenstein, and with virtually the same cast, the same overdose of blood-letting, and the same "humor...
...Lenny: Dustin Hoffman as the liberals' scourge, Lenny Bruce, here transformed into a liberal saint...
...Somewhere, deep within, there's an important message: don't stifle your eccentrics...
...lirThe Phantom of Liberty: Another extended dig at the bourgeoisie, from Luis Bunuel...
...John Cassavetes' unnerving, devastating examination of a woman distraught beyond repair, with Peter Falk ("Colombo") as Nick Longhetti and the absolutely fabulous Gena Rowlands as his wife Mabel...
...It comes in "sensurround," a sort of feelie technique that should please Aldous Huxley's ghost, so expect to jostle a bit in your seat...
...The Klansman: Richard Burton, Churchill's friend, as friend of the blacks in a town which, seemingly, has written the book on bigotry...
...The acting is as heavy as the falling buildings, but the buildings falling are the real stars...
...But every Bunuel film is an extended dig at the bourgeoisie, this must be too...
...No holds barred, yet without the excesses of retrospective of his most recent film before this, Roma...
...But the film buries Lenny under the weight of its own reverence, shows us only a bit of the Lenny who skewered every convention, who made fun of everybody and everything, who rewrote the score on bad taste...
...Scenes from a Marriage: Ingmar Bergman's investigation of a modern alliance gone sour, distilled from a lengthy six-part TV series into a massively jarring mvoie starring Liv Ullmann...
Vol. 8 • February 1975 • No. 5
