New Outlook on the Contemporary Film World
MURRAY, WILLIAM
On SCREEN By William Murray New Outlook on the Contemporary Film World It's been almost two years since I last reviewed movies in these columns, and I have to admit that I was glad to stop....
...a lack of clarity in the girl's motivations toward the end—but they don't get seriously in the way...
...There simply is no getting around the fact that Broadway and Hollywood at their best are better than the best of Off-Broadway and Europe...
...some abrupt cutting...
...The phenomenon of Las Vegas, which is where Ocean's 11 was filmed, and the society that produced it are contemporary realities and they are worth our attention, even if we are forced to view them through the distorted lens provided by Frank Sinatra and his merry little crew of Hollywood hoodlums...
...Two years ago, I was still living in the illusion that the theater, even the Broadway theater, was a more adult and provocative art form than the screen...
...Camino Real on Broadway, for instance, was a better play than Camino Real Off-Broadway, just as The Asphalt Jungle was a better movie than Rififi...
...In this world nothing matters but one's own small pleasures, one's own feelings, one's own ideas...
...If meretriciousness is to be the rule, then one can rejoice not only in the large exceptions but also in the sharp, oblique glimpses of truth such movies as Ocean's 11 provide in spite of themselves...
...Here he tells the very simple story of a brief, barren affair between a casual young Parisian criminal and his equally casual young American mistress, but somehow he succeeds in conveying an exact, devastating portrait of an entire generation that has become detached, uncommitted and self-centered to the point of moral suicide...
...It can become pretty discouraging and my instinct, which I indulged, was to flee...
...This, I now realize, was extremely naive of me and I admit it with considerable embarrassment...
...Joan...
...After you've seen 10 or 12 bad movies in succession, you begin to wonder whether you can afford to fritter so much time away on trivialities...
...Money also produces movies like Oceans 11 which, despite its slackness, its overall sleaziness, its imbecile view of love, is nevertheless far more pertinent as a contemporary work of art than the much more artistically pretentious Never on Sunday...
...The only sensible approach to both drama and film criticism is an open-eyed recognition of this simple basic fact...
...There are rough spots— an overdrawn, melodramatic death scene...
...Let's make a stand for pertinence and allow aestheticism to take care of itself...
...Even when you pick and choose your screenings, doing your best to sniff out and avoid the worst of them, you inevitably find yourself trapped periodically in front of some dismal, pretentious hash like Twelve Angry Men or Preminger's St...
...Perhaps the message is familiar, but Godard never overstates it and his camera captures every nuance of the relationship between the lovers...
...Jean-Paul Belmondo is superb as the young thug and Jean Seberg, free of Preminger at last, is just right as the cute, silly, spoiled little bitch you can meet any night in the Village...
...Most plays, like most movies, are subject to the same pressures and are utterly meretricious...
...If the impulse that produces a work of art is truly creative, it can't help but benefit from such purely commercial virtues as technical polish, a virtue only money can buy...
...Jean-Luc Godard, who wrote and directed the film, is riding the crest of the New Wave and is evidently a man to be watched...
...Having indulged in this longwinded pitch for an acceptance of commercial realities, let me now confuse the issue a bit by stating that the best movie I've seen since I began attending them again with a critical eye is Breathless, a French import currently on view in the art houses...
...It then becomes possible to write about plays and movies without the sense of outrage provoked by the feeling that one is being constantly insulted and conned...
...And it avoids the necessity for the total flight from reality indulged in by the serious-minded people who will only attend an OffBroadway play or a particular European movie...
...A play, to my mind, could always speak a mature, direct language forbidden to the film, which was ever at the mercy of a star, a bank, a pressure group, a dullminded mass audience...
...The movie may never become a classic, but it surely ought to be seen...
...Nothing has any real significance, not even death...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 13
