Brudnoy's Film Index
Brudnoy, David
David Brudnoy Brudnoy's Film Index •• ^ The Apple Dumpling Gang: The ,atest Disney, this one stars Bill Bixby, )on Knotts, Susan Clark, some oh-sodorable wee darling kids, Tim Conway, bout...
...Breakout: There's this perfectly dreadful jail down Mexico way, and this perfectly innocent chap (Robert Duvall) is rotting in it, courtesy his wicked uncle (John Huston) and, ho hum, and for no apparent reason, the CIA...
...I Beyond the Door: Son of Rosemary's aby Meets the Exorcist's Nemesis' isciple, in one of the less haunting of the 'cent scare-'em-uppers of the silvery Teen...
...Violence subsumes the movie, and yet the characterizations are wonderfully strong and believable...
...Two twitchy little plots intertwine neatly in a grand finale that perfectly sums up an older, yet viable, conception of how to make a detective story work...
...Enough mixups and false leads and plots within plots for three movies...
...Hackman's performance is like a cat chasing its tail: there's dynamism and motion and grace, but no purpose...
...The Land That Time Forgot: Doug McClure as an American nautical whiz, and a pile of World War I limeys and Germans, plus, natch, a nubile lass, make common cause when, for plot reasons too complicated to withstand brief repeating, they wind up in a—surprise!—land that time forgot...
...Come dinosaur, come bubbatsoris, come diddhowhatsis, come cave man, come lava flow, come one and all, because it is just the movie your kids will love: full of blood and gore and envy and spite and misdirection and implausibility—all the juvenile virtues...
...It misses by inches, and in this genre a miss is as sad as a mile...
...CORE has responded with a feverish censorship campaign, completely misunderstanding the film's purpose, which is not to savage Negroes, but to savage the whites who create the Amerikkka the Negroes live in...
...A bit of nicely contrived stuff about the Northern Ireland troubles, starring Rod Steiger as a chap whose personal losses of wife and daughter unhinge him, such that he flies to London to blow up the Queen—and Parliament...
...zzzzzz...
...It is a cold barren world this film portrays, at times hauntingly so...
...Hennessey: Guy Fawkes revisited...
...Coonskin: Ralph Bakshi, perpetrator of Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic, again inflicts his poison-pen caricatures on audiences dying to see the Br'er Rabbit tales translated into 1970s "ghetto" parables...
...This one has no cohesiveness, no otivation, no terror, no acting, no diague ever spoken on this continent by is (human) race, no fun, no irony, no ought...
...Night Moves: The invariably estimable Gene Hackman stars in an awkwardly pointless thriller by the usually skillful Arthur Penn...
...The film alternates drear with the giggle...
...Undercovers Hero: Peter Sellers as Hitler, an octogenarian French general, a Gestapo fanatic, a Nipponese prince, the President of France, and a British spy, rewriting history in a witless story of why the Nazis didn't burn Paris...
...Which breaks the spell...
...It is the essence of prurience, and it shows that even a master comedian like Sellers is the prisoner of his material...
...Charles Bronson to the rescue—mustache, muscles, sneer, and a helicopter do the trick...
...so his high-strung wife (Jill Ireland) racks her brain for a Way Out...
...It also has some more of that technicolor vomit, saving the audience from producing its own...
...The animation is splendid, the live acting interspersed with it is O.K., the motivation is surely one of humanitarian concern for the underdog, the realization is squalid and obsessed, but somehow, despite everything working against it, the film is provocative, disturbing, and in some ways it is persuasive...
...Mitchum again shows his undiminished low-key skills, and Rampling, fresh from her disaster role in Night Porter, recoups her losses...
...Everyone but Brel falls a bit flat, but (here it comes) Brel is alive and well and showing a nice turn at slapstick...
...David Brudnoy Brudnoy's Film Index •• ^ The Apple Dumpling Gang: The ,atest Disney, this one stars Bill Bixby, )on Knotts, Susan Clark, some oh-sodorable wee darling kids, Tim Conway, bout six stereotypical situations, and an verdose of cutesy-poo...
...Both the IRA and Scotland Yard are desperate to catch him before he can ignite the bomb that would be heard 'round the world, the IRA for purely tactical motives...
...Lee Remick does a nice turn as Hennessy's island of safety in London, and Steiger gives a coolly restrained, unusually unmannered performance...
...Breakout breaks down in the second reel, and thereafter it's unintended comedy...
...Kamouraska: A film out of French Canada starring the exquisite Genevieve Bujold as a nineteenth century chick whose husband is a dolt and whose lover is an expatriate Yankee who'll stop at nothing to have her...
...The tale has omething to do with a huge gold nugget, ome unpleasant robbers and some pleasnt robbers, adult love, child affection, nd...
...Farewell, My Lovely: Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, and Charlotte Rampling as a wicked lady, bring splenle Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975 35 did acting and appeal to this lovingly constructed evocation of 1930s crime thrillers (Raymond Chandler variety...
...It does have Juliet Mills, and she's hideous...
...Eureka...
...too much for one...
...36 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1975...
...A Pain in the A--: Jacques Brel not, alas, singing, is the pain in the a-- (the dashes are in the title, as translated for mah fellow Merkins, courtesy the distributor), whose well-meant gaucheries upset a rifle-toting hit man something fierce...
Vol. 9 • November 1975 • No. 2
