Brudnoy's Film Index
Brudnoy, David
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. Only Brando wouldn't play...
...He's a hairdresser, a heterosexual hairdresser no less, and his service is, well, verrry personal...
...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...
...Macho with a hotcomb, and except for the fact that the flick goes nowhere, it is great fun...
...There's one absolutely delicious scene on election night '68, and a few campy numbers elsewhere, but that's about it...
...It is on a par with last year's remarkable Lacombe, Lucien, both in theme and in mastery of the material...
...It is in this respect that GF-II is fundamentally different from the original Godfather...
...Faye Dunaway excels as the evil Milady, with Charlton Heston's Richelieu and Christopher Lee's Rochefort rounding out the baddie brigade...
...This is a morality tale, a massive putdown of fashionable religious cults, a tale of love unrequited too...
...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...
...It showed people with some verve and personality that we couldadmire...
...Next, Funny Grandma...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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 showed murderous people who were killing for motives we could understand, even if we did not share them...
...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...
...Most of GF-II shows already rich and powerful people killing and torturing other people more or less just for the hell of it...
...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...
...Unimaginably powerful—if you like rock music...
...Shampoo: He's gonna wash them gals right into his bed...
...She lives again here, in a first-rate documentary incorporating much of her music and not too much of her inane interviews...
...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...
...Even that, however, could have been presented interestingly, and it wasn't...
...The Great Waldo Pepper: An adventure film with heart, depth, insight, and caring...
...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...
...It is the sixties resurrected, a touch of history, and a wealth of talent and, yes, offbeat grace...
...It shows us a society beyond hope of redemption—thoroughly rotten and deserving of destruction...
...A mighty bomb...
...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...
...But GF-II shows us people who are essentially no more than subhuman automatons, who kill because it is part of their nature...
...Biceps on a spree...
...Tommy: The Who's rock opera magnificently filmed by the bizarre Ken Russell...
...A clunky old-timey "comedy" dying by the minute...
...Much confusion with his various affairs, hopping from spitcurl to blow-dry to bed, and getting out just in the nick of time...
...For the Academy Award for the Emperor's New Clothes—Francis Ford Coppola...
...And he—George (Warren Beatty)—sure does...
...The ladies—Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, and Lee Grant—are lovely, Beatty is Mr...
...The film would be much less of a loss if it actually glorified crime...
...her fleeting romance with a dreamy young idealist...
...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...
...jack Warden plays the urbane fellow whose wife, daughter, and mistress all get a piece of George's action...
...her resignation to the fates...
...Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Frank Finlay buckle their swashes with the best of them in this delightful sequel...
...But unfortunately, the loving shots of murder are the high points of the film...
...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...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 29...
...Florinda Bolkan is a delight to see, but the story is very old hat, and the viewer's mind wanders...
...Les Violons Du Bal: French director Michael Drach's reminiscence of the Nazi occupation of France, with Marie-Josee Nat and Jean-Louis Trintignant...
...The fundamental nature of men and women in GF-II is so murky and evil that no amelioration of the human condition is possible...
...Janis: Joplin, called Pearl by her pals, the Texas kid, died young...
...An explosive, devastating, sometimes brilliant musical extravaganza, the very epitome of contemporary music properly transformed to a sustained film...
...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...
...What a lovely party this is...
...Comedy, tragedy, frolic, and some of the finest aerial scenes in the movies...
...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...
...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
