THE SCREEN:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
after he spoke one said it wasn't as bad as it might have not have had the drive to "fight," "hang tough," and been: no rancor, no. bitterness, no attacks on enemies, "stonewall," through...
...The people who disliked Richard Strangely, though, this isn't the effect...
...Mr...
...Out of about 25 features, only a half dozen happened so fast that their full meaning did not have a or so have premiered here the year they were made...
...vice that, besides producing a laughably melodramatic "I couldn't have hurt a fly, and yet I feel like a silent film for the mouse trap itself, it turns Chabrol's criminal-why...
...Yet in touch that passes between the two lovers, uniting them Chabrol's ending the king still dies, and what is more, at last where their passion never could, the same almost dies by his own hand, not his stepson's...
...Tentatively, almost shyly, they hold hands, alike in the very way each is put together...
...The events of Aug...
...What was needed was a strong man's honest and public ad- THE SCREEN mission of guilt...
...The point The classic revenge tragedy just won't play on the seems clear...
...In Wedding in Blood, for instance, there more ritualistic...
...Perhaps who is an instrument of revenge upon the lovers...
...He might why: as though they had abandoned him, as though never have become President...
...They come into physical contact again for affecting drama...
...After a scene summer months...
...dresses Yvan as "My son" before he dies...
...The culmination of the design in Chabrol's film is In the earlier film after Yvan's stepfather has poisoned Yvan's adoption of the mouse-trap play, which is here himself, Yvan goes to him...
...He might just have been a certain dignity...
...law almost before her husband is buried...
...in the courts and in the House action on the Judiciary It is therefore a rare treat that two Chabrol filmsCommittee's report...
...But to the surprise of both, not a play but a home movie...
...As the it would have been better had Richard Nixon made the title suggests, Ophelia is a wrinkle on Hamlet...
...The of its own, a coherence and construction, that suggests dislike had rather to do with what it takes to be an hon- similar qualities must exist from film to film in Chabrol's orable, a "successful," public man...
...we expect, once again, to watch them...
...5-9 tribution...
...Both are, like its attachment to the President it flowed, perhaps a little many other Chabrol films, stories of the eternal triangle...
...Where before they tore their clothes is an eating scene where one of the characters suddenly off and clawed at each other, now they sip champagne pours a whole glass of red wine into his soup...
...Wedding in Blood the woman's daughters betrays her to To escape detection they move their rendezvous from the police, albeit unintentionally...
...but instead he The tension this incident creates is what gives impetus sits on the bed and confesses that he has murdered his to the entire plot, and throughout that plot Chabrol is wife for her...
...The next issue will be dated Seplike this we are not surprised that their passions soon tember 20...
...She cal poetry to his new wife, Yvan comes in and pur- comes into his bedroom expecting to make love just as posely interrupts by playing pop tunes on the piano...
...The reason that was needed is like the reason Mr...
...that was not true...
...Yvan, his mother and stepfather get together...
...For that reason, and not for any vindictive or punitive Otherwise, Chabrol is slighted...
...team at Michigan, and has not needed thereafter con- Moreover, there is in each film an innocent, so to speak, tinually to prove himself a man by "winning...
...Their affair becomes for us merely the inrow where Yvan claims he saw a servant spit into the trigue of her late-night comings and goings to the house...
...But not enough...
...In Chabrol's perception the universal conscreen, and Chabrol's film is an attempt to make a dition of modern life is guilt, and it is guilt and guilt screen art out of that very impossibility...
...chance to penetrate the further reaches of Rabbi Korffs Others have been delayed two years or more, and still constituency...
...But more and more fragmented for us as time passes...
...It's an and he nibbles decadently on her toes...
...Yet even in this the films remain only at the end when they are put into a police car more significantly alike than not because they are still together...
...placing and diffusing of the blame, now here, now there, now everywhere, now another place, never on himself, that marked the whole Watergate episode...
...Kissinger, and it now in relief and In Ophelia a rich widow has married her brother-incatharsis comes flooding in to President Ford...
...Later still, when unexpectedly gross and disgusting gesture of a sort for he murders his wife so he and his mistress can meet at which Chabrol has a very acute eye in eating scenes...
...As the The key scene in this development is the one where stepfather sits in the drawing room reading some classi- the lovers meet for the first time at his house...
...Perhaps the finest film reason, it is important that there be no immunity and he has made, lust Before Nightfall (1972), still has that at last the full story of Watergate be brought out, no American distributor so far as I know...
...There was one brief reference to errors of judgment-nothing more...
...But then, we might all there had been a disagreement on policy...
...lously close to yet another variant of that Nixonian dis- And he might have been a success...
...When you consider that Seeds of Dislike these two films were made ten years apart and we have not had a chance to see much of what came between Mr...
...In a woods a man (Michel Summer Schedule Piccoli) makes love to another man's wife (Stephane In keeping with the usual practice, Commonweal Audran...
...Ford, a commentator noted, made the football Blood a woman and her lover murder her husband...
...fish everyone is eating...
...Ophelia and Wedding in Blood-should suddenly turn up for the first time together...
...The work of a Nixon's public performance had no comparable dislike director of Chabrol's caliber has to it a certain organic for Robert Taft, William Knowland, Barry Goldwater, quality, an irreducible unity, that allows us to start with and now most especially Gerald Ford, all of whom are almost any film and sense at once the relationship it or were more conservative, more Republican, and per- must bear to all the others...
...Wed- then so fear being suspected that the only relations they ding in Blood is about passion, while Ophelia is about can permit each other are a walk she takes by his winart, about the potential that modem life has, or lacks, dow each day...
...the woods to a museum, a restored chateau where they Even certain details, little vignettes recognizable from sneak after closing...
...Chabrol's films are sure to get prompt was hounded out of office by that standard list of his commercial attention only when they can be sold to enemies...
...That is the only gaily pessimistic view of human experience persists in way a modern protagonist can die tragically...
...Kissinger did, by a kind of com- though made in 1962, relates to Wedding in Blood, pensatory principle in public esteem: blocked off from which was done only two years ago...
...Kissinger said we needed a Distribution of Claude Chabrol's films has been so slow, masked, "honorable" withdrawal from Vietnam: skimpy and random in this country that it would be in order that one not leave a festering wound in the more correct to call it their withholding than their dispsyche of the silent majority...
...bitterness, no attacks on enemies, "stonewall," through his career...
...after he spoke one said it wasn't as bad as it might have not have had the drive to "fight," "hang tough," and been: no rancor, no...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...GUILT COMPLEXITIES And the next morning in his maudlin farewell in the White House, and his campaign speech in Orange 0 0 0 0 0 0 0. 0 0 0 0 0 9 County, he marred the dignity of his departure...
...In and restrain it...
...The force of the scene is in the wildness and is again appearing on alternate weeks during the physical abandon with which they do so...
...Each film has an integrity haps even more un-Eastern than Richard Nixon...
...his house, Chabrol ceases to show their physical conIt also his its counterpart in Ophelia in a dinner-table tact at all...
...He said that his sup- the football coach, and debate coach, at Whittier College, port in Congress had "eroded," without a suggestion of teaching some American history on the side...
...dinarily like that which we see at the end of Ophelia...
...In a modem alone which is capable of binding us together...
...excessively, to Mr...
...But as always publishing schedule...
...end of Wedding in Blood a decade later, in that shy The ghost is illusory and the king innocent...
...Chabrol's work...
...We will then resume our normal weekly drive them to deception and murder...
...As befits this move indoors, into a other Chabrol films as well, crop up almost predictably civilized setting, their lovemaking becomes less animal, in these films...
...Taking first team at Whittier...
...It is from this point that we quit seeing at every turn experimenting with the ways in which them in physical contact with one another, and the net modern sensibilities, and modem arts jar on classical result is to show us human nature in an aspect extraorconceptions...
...This means to "catch the Yvan can take no satisfaction in the man's suffering, conscience of the king" is so stagy and contrived a de- and his stepfather feels no bitterness towards him...
...Ford is now receiving the highest marks, as earlier Some ways are readily apparent in which Ophelia, in a different way Mr...
...In Ophelia and their touch is gentle for the first time, more like Chabrol tells us what is on his mind the first time that the first touching of lovers than the last...
...career as a whole...
...Nixon here at all...
...asks the dying man, and in the first own movie into a burlesque, a melodrama, in ways that tenderness anyone has shown in the entire film, he adChabrol's direction playfully acknowledges and exploits...
...Nixon believed we opposed him because he was them, it seems that Chabrol's career is only becoming a Republican, a Conservative, and not an Easterner...
...That might have meant he would his cues from Shakespeare's hero, the dead man's son 6 September 1974: 478 in the film, Yvan (Andre Jocelyn), suspects his new for in the act of pursuing this passion the lovers dilute stepfather and becomes obsessed with exposing him...
...Chabrol's view of life is a rather jaundiced, ironical one, Commonweal: 479...
...There is the danger that the myth will grow, others, between five and ten, have never been shown and be a part of tomorrow's politics, that Mr...
...What happened to Congressmen Wiggins and the public for their sensationalism (Landru, 1963), sex Dennis and Sandman may not be known or remembered...
...He came peri- thereby have been better off, including Richard Nixon...
...Nixon, and Mr...
...In Wedding in Mr...
...Wedding in Blood similarly begins with a scene that establishes Chabrol's concerns-an action that is to be theme for the entire film...
...Les Biches, 1968) or stars (Ten Days Wonder, 1971...
...For them it finally becomes even less than that, once Despite such similarities of plot, in a fundamental they have murdered her husband as well, because they sense these two films are about different things...
...At the setting, Hamlet is ultimately crazy and Ophelia sane...
Vol. 100 • September 1974 • No. 20
