Brudnoy's Film Index
Brudnoy, David
David Brudnoy Brudnoy's Film Index • • • The Bad News Bears: Kids should be seen referably playing baseball—and never, ever heard. That might be Butter-maker's (Walter Matthau's) philosophy,...
...Not to mention Alfred Lutter and Jackie Earle Haley, two of the sharpest kid actors at work today, plus some exceedingly rare cinema chemistry combining good, clean fun and fine performances with the Americano's ingrained love for baseball and presumed affection for children...
...A movie for those who crave their topsies turvy...
...That might be Butter-maker's (Walter Matthau's) philosophy, infusing Michael Ritchie's splendid comedy about a washed-up ballplayer coaching a superlatively inept gang of urchins...
...Face to Face: Ingmar Bergman scores once more, bringing the invariably incomparable Liv Ullmann on to enact a nervous breakdown of majestic conviction...
...Tatum O'Neal to the rescue...
...Virility: Carlo Ponti's latest, a funny and furious look at an absurd predicament: is a man better off when his friends think his son's a homosexual or when he knows that his son is making it with his (the father's) wife...
...A Sicilian answer, of course, gives rise to the special charms of this occasionally charming movie...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 35...
...Get it...
...Salut L'Artiste!: Marcello Mastroianni at his peak, playing a hack actor barely able to distinguish his essence from his roles...
...So, twenty years after they first romped in Sherwood Forest, Robin and Little John return home, scoop up Marian, and again engage that dreadful old sheriff in feats of derring-do...
...Nureyev's agitated force, as always, is thrilling...
...Mahler: Yet another of Ken Russell's excruciatingly arty, blitheringly incom petent "historical" desecrations, this on( commencing, just to rub it in, with a rail road scene showing Thomas Mann's Tad 34 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1971 zio and his closet-case lover coyly flirting...
...Don Quixote: Maybe a bit too much Nureyev, though it's hard to get too much Nureyev in a ballet, but the old warhorse makes a generally graceful transition to the screen, a usually awkward transition...
...Mann supposedly had Mahler in mind for Death in Venice...
...If, that is, her bratty, brainy son and his gang of juvenile Nietzschians don't get to him first...
...torney out of Clarence Darrow crossec with F. Lee Bailey, evoke less sympathy than embarrassment...
...Man Friday: A "liberated" retelling of Defoe's hoary classic, with the savage lording it over and exerting himself fitfully to tame the refined Englishman...
...Robin and Marian: They've aged, she's entered a nunnery, and he's tired of crusading for addled old Richard Lion-heart...
...Peter O'Toole, master of the pregnant sigh, hasn't looked so uncomfortable since he was buggered in Lawrence of Arabia...
...Goldie and Segal took the money and ran...
...Lovely to look at, fitfully worthy of serious reflection...
...But the bush-league performances by everyone except Anne Bancroft, as the feminist at...
...Come to think...
...The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox: One more George Segal bomb like this, and Segal can pack up his grin and vamoose, permanently...
...Director Yves Robert yanks fine performances out of his first-rate cast, especially Francoise Fabian as the actor's mistress, and Mastroianni...
...A tender tale of a man quite literally beside himself...
...Once past that bit of tinselly nonsense the movie takes a slow, symbol-laden ride to nowhere...
...The scenery is outstanding, the leads and the young monsters are uniformly fine, and Mishima' s theme of perfection intruded upon by human frailty comes off with nary a hitch...
...Even Goldie Hawn, as the hooker with (uh huh) the heart of tinfoil, fails to rescue what may be the unfunniest comedy this year...
...Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, supported neatly by Robert Shaw as the sheriff, Richard Harris as King Richard, Nicol Williamson as John, and Denholm Elliott as Will, beautifully create the mythic figures in an old age the legend never allowed for...
...The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea: One of Mishima Yukio's most unpretentious stories works beautifully removed to England, with Sarah Miles as the widow and Kris Kristofferson as the American seaman whom she beds and would wed...
...With Erland Josephson, her co-star in Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, Ullmann takes this latter-day terror story and carries it to the rarefled atmosphere of outstanding cinema art ^ Lipstick: Margaux Hemingway is certainly the tallest actress on view, if "actress" properly describes her atrocious play-acting, and her plight—raped and humiliated thereafter by a jury unwilling to convict her boy-next-door-type rapist (Chris Sarandon)—might in other hands have produced an intriguing film...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
