Brudnoy's Film Index
Brudnoy, David
"Brudnoy's Film Index" Abby: The Exorcist in blackface. Poor sweet Abby gets possessed, and is she a terror when she's on. Rest easy: the black preacher man saves her from the nasty demon and we all go home happy, all...
...Tepid Bond, with Moore taking on the appearance by now of a plaster cast of himself...
...The Front Page: The odd couple—Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon—at it again, this time in a watery version of the splendid 1928 stage play about the tough life of a newspaper...
...The Godfather, Part II: Surpasses the original by a mile, with Al Pacino as the young Don, and Robert De Niro in flashback in the Brando role as Big Daddy on the way up...
...Stardust: A tremendously moving film detailing a rock group's rise, stardom, and decline, with David Essex as the lead, and some excellent pop music from the '60s and '70s, plus an original score for the fictional "Stray Cats" group...
...Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Ellen Burstyn (the mother in Exorcist) is marvelous in this tragicomedy about a woman suddenly widowed, attempting to structure a new life for herself and her twelve-year-old terror of a son...
...Marvin Hamlisch music and some clever double-takes can't really save this...
...Report to the Commissioner: This year's Serpico—the honest, idealistic cop confronting, ho-hum, the entrenched System...
...Troublesome in its simplism, but taut, in spots...
...Most of the sparkle has worn away...
...Whodunnit...
...The Internecine Project: A crumbly thriller all about multiple double-crosses, with James Coburn as head cad...
...For once, a sequel to treasure...
...Not overplayed or moralistic or antagonistic, just a splendid bloodletting-cum-social commentary...
...A giddy romp, and a train so lovely that you'll know what we've lost in rail transportation since the 1930s...
...Over three hours long, but worth it: possibly the best examination of syndicate crime in the contemporary film...
...The Man with the Golden Gun: Roger Moore once more as 007...
...The Memory of Us: A cloying excursion into, yes, yet again, the woman seeking liberation...
...This one is strictly for the handkerchief set...
...Paperback Hero: Well, they make films in Canada too...
...For Bond groupies only...
...With Lauren Bacall as Mrs...
...James Bond is now after both one Scaramanga, fastest gun on earth—who comes complete with his own tight little island and a midget valet—and a device to solve the energy problem...
...Hard-hitting dialogue, no softsoaping of the woman's still active sexuality, and some tremendous bits from Alfred Lutter as the kid, plus some nice moments from Kris Kristofferson as the better man in Alice's wide-ranging life...
...This one wanders all over the macho landscape, makes a fetish out of plaintalk, and utterly wastes the talents of Keir Dullea and Elizabeth Ashley as the hero and his barmaid groupie...
...The Prisoner of Second Avenue: Neil Simon's hit play transposed to the screen in a fitfully funny but generally tepid version starring Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft as urbanites under the influence of urbanity...
...Rest easy: the black preacher man saves her from the nasty demon and we all go home happy, all of us except people who like movies done well...
...American Chatterbox, Richard Widmark as the corpse, Tony Perkins as a flaky secretary, Wendy Hiller as a superannuated Russian princess, and on and on...
...With Jean-Paul Belmondo as the charming bounder, and Charles Boyer as the ever-dapper Baron Raoul...
...Stavisky: Alain Resnais' languid, soporific retelling of the true story of an early twentieth-century con man in France, and his frightening influence on 1930s international relations...
...The victim dies of multiple stab wounds, but his train compartment is locked from within...
...It isn't broad enough to be funny, but it's too broad to be wry...
...Blaxploitation and Exorcistexcess and the most dreadful special effects...
...But dull...
...Along the way, two harrowing chases, some unusually frank racial talk—a wise Negro cop instructs our innocent hero in the realities of black street crime—and idiosyncratic performances by Michael Moriarty (who thinks he's the young Brando, with marbles in his jaw), and Yaphet Kotto as the Afro-American pig...
...Jolly...
...The best scenes are at the village hockey game, and they're dull too...
...So predictable you'll doze off midway through...
...Some nice location shots in London—one almost-saving grace...
...Anti-Semitism, elitism, snobbism, the works...
...what's left is a diamond in the rough, very rough...
...Amtrak indeed...
...With Ellen Geer, Will Geer, and some of the shiftiest gears in town...
...You'll never guess...
...Murder on _ the Orient Express: A superlative Agatha Christie thriller now magnificently filmed, starring everybody including Ingrid Bergman cast against type as a drab Swedish religious fanatic and Albert Finney as the irrepressible Belgian detective, Poirot...
Vol. 8 • May 1975 • No. 8
