Brudnoy's Film Index

...Eureka: Charles Bronson to the rescue—mustache, muscles, sneer, and a helicopter do the trick...

...Think what you will of them, they are genuine Americana...

...The Human Factor: George Kennedy playing a Bronson-like avenger in a sanguinary story of a political murder most foul...

...His pals are moronic, his job is boring, his girl's a chippie, and into his life there comes a lovely lass, who, inexplicably, falls for him and then, inexplicably, deserts him...

...Maybe, indeed, to know all is to forgive all, but to know all one's own vices is not necessarily to be able to forgive oneself, whereupon the sadomasochistic Charles (Michel Bouquet), who has, murdered his best friend's wife, and confessed both to his own wife (Stephane Audran) and to his best friend, can bear it no longer...

...The Hiding Place: The Billy Graham folks bring you Julie Harris, among others, in a heart-rending tale of Dutch Christians resisting the Nazis, ostensibly to hide Jews, but actually to make an endless number of points about the vast superiority of Christianity over all other faiths...

...0 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1976 31...

...Just Before Nightfall (Juste Avant la Nuit): Claude Chabrol's most icy and repellant film, a story of guilt and expiation, of murder and suicide, of hypocrisy and lust, of the intertwining of bourgeois Catholic pieties and chic avant-garde understanding...

...Your gut cheers on this man pursuing the killers of his wife and children...

...Nurse Ratched, the great tranquilizer and tyrant, is wonderfully delineated by Louise Fletcher...

...your brain, one hopes, pauses to ponder the implications of vigilantism in our day, and your sense of movie style recoils from its cloddishness...

...Falsely advertised everywhere as "the best English-language thriller since Psycho," it is instead a badly-dubbed badly conceived French film with all the predictability of tomorrow's tirade from Idi Amin and all the ingenuity of a thousand Bondian rip-offs...

...And so his highstrung wife ( Jill Ireland) racks her brain for A Way Out...

...Infant-level psycho-sexuality, dumb-bunny kinkiness, dialogue of unspeakable affectedness, and lots of rape of the "oh, oh, it hurts, oh please sir, it hurts" variety...

...Burns is remarkably authentic, Matthau isn't, Richard Benjamin as the go-between is an embarrassment, and this much-touted film falls flat as a failed souffl...

...Set in an insane asylum where society's malcontents are tucked neatly away, Cuckoo's Nest unfolds an endless series of questions for our contemplation...

...Along the way they romp in the waves, giggle and snuggle, and look soulfully at each other...

...Macabre, vicious, stupid...

...Which breaks the spell...

...What is most painful is the realization that even an A-plus performance like Burns' is so easily swallowed up by an overblown script, buried under unfunny yuk-yuks, pickled in bathos...

...The Magic Flute: Mozart's ingratiating opera lovingly filmed by Ingmar Bergman...

...among them, the obvious—who's crazy in a crazy world?—and the more subtle, like: when does help become hindrance...

...Mr...

...Not even dumb children will like it...

...Salvation, the movie makes abundantly clear, is possible only through faith in Christ, which is an evangelical substratum for a film that starts out as a thriller about Jews escaping Nazi persecution...

...Quilp: Perhaps the most hideous "musical comedy" in decades, this grotesque perversion of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop stars Anthony Newley as the repugnant Daniel Quilp, with Anthony Newley's unmelodious, instantly forgettable music suffocating a deathly script...

...A satire with a vengeance, Smile parts the waters of deception and drowns us in the shockwaves...

...No one will judge him—note the play on the French title word "juste" —no one will condemn him, everyone is so understanding, he'd rather die than go on...

...Smile: Who can forget Bert Parks grinning moronically and warbling...

...A truly devastating slap at an important part of America: the nauseating emphasis on surface beauty and the downright sham underlying much of our popular culture...

...Smile takes the phenomenon and does a juicy number on it, peeking behind the teeth and tonsils to show the tensions, hypocrisies, boosterism, pettiness, foolishness, and viciousness of such affairs...

...Hurry Up Or I'll Be Thirty: The least likely hero since Ernest Borgnine's Marty, that's our Georgie—pudgy, homely, dull, but sincere...

...Breakout breaks down in the second reel, becoming an unintended comedy...

...Little Nell passes to her reward in a flash, and dullards won't even know she's croaked, so treacly is the film, so stupid the interpretation, so cynical the use to which a great classic is put...

...The preview audience cheered every bit of rebelliousness and every instance of the "loonies' " triumph over authority: it is the eternal combat between freedom and order...

...A magic film even for persons who don't love opera, a magic opera for everyone who ever believed in love and virtue's triumph over evil...

...The whites all look (and act) like the redneck sheriff in the TV car commercial, the Negroes range from noble and oppressed to tawdry and depressed, and the dichotomies are strictly black and white...

...One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Ken Kesey's 1962 novel imaginatively filmed, with much of the cloddish heavy symbolism stripped away, directed by Milos Forman and starring Jack Nicholson in (thus far) his most brilliantly realized role...

...He does...

...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 retained, and perfectly splendid acting and singing, not • the least of which comes from the three lovely boy genii who spur things along in their wonderful Deus ex machina, an eighteenth-century machine-driven balloon...

...Bruce Dern plays Big Bob, the biggest optimist boob of them all, and his supporting players do well with the vapid contestants, lobotomized onlookers, and cynical promoters of a tasteless Young American Miss contest...

...Here She Comes, Miss A-mer-rica...

...but the music is beautiful, the story is (more or less) as it happened, and the acting, if larger than life, is powerful...

...it is a film to treasure...

...The Story of 0: A modern classic of soft-core porn, silly in its pretentious artiness, absurdly degrading even of willingly degraded women, incomparably wasteful of the fleshly talents of some of the most exquisite females ever marched across the silver screen...

...The Night Caller: Jean-Paul Belmondo rescuing Paris from a deranged sickie (Adalberto-Maria Merli), 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...

...0. ^ The Sunshine Boys: Neil Simon's Broadway smash lumpishly screened, with Walter Matthau and George Burns as two old vaudevillians brought back for a tv special, hating each other, loving their act, spoiling for a fight...

...All the zanies, without exception, are superb, and Nicholson's Randle McMurphy, revolutionary of the spirit, is outstanding, a sure-fire award winner...

...Or the mzzzerable vultures of Women's Lib shrieking that those Miss Whatever contests are "sexist," et cetera ad nauseam...

...Leadbelly' The life and truly hard times of blues artist Huddie Ledbetter, from sharecropper's farm to whore house to jail, and out and back to jail again, and again...

...The Jews get lost in the shuffle, and when you've wiped away the tears, sloshed through the treacle, blown away the goody-goody pap, and subjected this remarkably propagandistic film to close scrutiny, you discover that—and I say these things rarely and not reflexively—the movie is insidiously anti-semitic, the underside of the Graham message brought blazingly home...

...David Brudnay Brudnoy's Film Index A • ^ Breakout: There is this dreadful jail down Mexico way, and this perfectly innocent chap (Robert Duvall) rots therein, courtesy his wicked uncle ( John Huston) and, for no apparent reason, the CIA...