On Screen

...Finally, Time magazine called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse silly, but it is hokey, and there's a difference...

...The cripples, taking advantage of an absence of authority, enter the house that has been their only source of comfort, and defile it in a nauseating, profane banquet...

...Through A Glass Darkly comes so close to being Bergman's best picture, one that even his detractors might have liked, that it is too bad to have to admit that it is ultimately a disappointment...

...they are not people at all, not even abstracted or highly stylized people...

...One may not share Bunuel's view of human life, but it is not easy to shake off the depth of that view and his ruthless depiction of it...

...I have never seen anything like the collection of lepers and cripples he has assembled, not even in Goya, where at least the malformed do not drool and paw and crawl...

...There is a common denominator in the unearthly goodness of his heroine, in the wretchedness of her uncle (who hangs himself out of remorse for his nearviolation of her), and in the cripples and beggars she supports with the money her uncle's suicide brings her...

...It was banned here because, for an instant, the private parts of a 12-year-old boy are exposed...

...Nevertheless, a lot of King of Kings is either good or well intentioned...

...This story of a selfish, popular novelist, his hopelessly schizophrenic daughter, her pleasant, ineffectual husband and neglected younger brother builds to a degree of honest drama that Bergman reached previously only in Wild Strawberries...

...As they force feed themselves, drink, fornicate and malign each other, while Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" plays on a phonograph, the action stops for an instant, freezing Bunuel's actors in the shocking attitudes of "The Last Supper...

...Like Resnais, he is doing new things within a rigid tradition...

...I liked the stress on those things which our religious leaders play down, the human aspects which support the spiritual, and without which the spiritual disintegrates into pale lore...

...Thirty years have only made these films richer and lovelier...

...But, though filmed with directness and simplicity, it never becomes seriously oppressive...

...It is full of bogus DeMille spirituality, that apocalyptical vision mixed with boxoffice smarts that makes most religious movies disgusting: plaster of Paris Judea, the Miklos Rosza hymnal, a Herod and a Pilate out of a Saturday afternoon serial, bad color, worse script, mismanaged crowds, etc...

...And as a showcase for technical cleverness Marienbad—with its camera's looming, floating and freezing, with its scenes so brief as to be subliminal, with its formal rhythms extending what Resnais has already done to combine image and sound and to recreate the processes of memory— is an advance over Hiroshima Mon Amour...

...His script has the same antiseptic precision as his novels, clinical accuracy of a kind that is almost always deadly in creation...

...Still, Resnais is one of the best directors in the medium...

...They have not been seen here since 1947...

...I would be happy if those people who thunder about "the poetry of the cinema" went to see Vigo's work so that they would at least have a rough idea of what it actually is...

...It is also directed by Vincent Minelli, who is no more capable of making a really dull movie than he is of making a really great one...

...A lot of this is the fault of Alain Robbe-Grillet...

...The first, and almost the last, thing one can say about it is that it is "interesting"— and that, surely, is the coldest word in the critic's lexicon...

...Through A Glass Darkly fails, in part, because of its very sincerity, or, rather, because its theme is so close to Bergman that the weight of it seems to have confused him...

...Yet I liked Viridiana better than Through A Glass Darkly, and, in one or two ways, better than Last Year at Marienbad...

...The Bleecker Street Cinema recently ended a run of two Jean Vigo films that are currently being exhibited in metropolitan art houses around the country...

...Before he made Viridiana, the proto-typical moment in his work was a stark, simple scene in which a mountain goat loses his footing and falls to his death...

...Every character in the picture loathes the humanity of every other character, and the mutual hatred gives Viridiana a repulsive unity and direction...

...He has produced it with great care and scrupulousness, but the one thing that might have made it successful has been left out entirely...

...Zero de Conduit and L'Atalante are as good as anything anybody ever made, and it borders on the criminal to have suppressed them...

...It is not merely that the people in the film are dull...

...One scene, already famous, will certainly replace the falling goat as a summation of all that Bunuel feels...

...But while I admire his intentions, I cannot read his novels...

...As for King of Kings, I can take it about as seriously as Nicholas Ray, who directed it, did...

...It is well written and magnificently acted, and seems totally and intensely sincere...

...Bergman skips over this and gives us some pre-packaged wisdom on the nature of Love which springs full-blown from the mouth of the novelist, who never understood the meaning of the word in his life...

...I liked, too, the Old Masters faces of so many of the actors, much of Ray's fine composition, the attempt to keep things simple in the midst of production extravagances, and, surprisingly, the inoffensiveness of Jeffery Hunter's Christ...

...It is big and phony and completely unpretentious...

...The genuine climax, toward which all of the events inevitably aim, is the daughter's horrible vision of God as an enormous black spider...

...The new picture is grim almost without relief, moving from cold alienation, hysteria and incest to the girl's final disintegration...

...The current and fashionable deprecation of his films overlooks much in him that is powerful, true and memorable...

...The youthful anarchy of Zero and the drifting, fluid lyricism of L'Atalante are memories I shall want refreshed often...

...Both Bergman and Bunuel reveal religious attitudes...

...Nothing in the novelist's life, and certainly nothing in the film, can account for such pseudo-profundity...

...Here, probably for the first time, He is convincing as God because He is believable as man...

...ON SCREEN Classics and Commercials By Mike Herr Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad is an extremely beautiful film to look at, a delicately ornate surface that glides in front of you as easily and with as much sequential order as a fever dream...

...The story of an involved seduction, carried out in an oppressively baroque resort, is suggested (not told) by scenes and images whose tenses are jumbled so violently that one never knows for sure what is happening, when it is happening, or, except for brief clues, whether' or not it is happening at all beyond the imagination of the characters...

...Resnais' idea was to make a picture that each viewer could assemble for himself, one for both the esthete and the unsophisticated...

...And the illumination this speech brings to both himself and his son is profound well beyond the point of absurdity...

...If Resnais was working for a pure film, he forgot that there is no purity in an art which isolates itself as drastically as Last Year at Marienbad does...

...Bunuel never softens the horror, never eases up on his investigation of the physical and spiritual forms that grotesqueness can take...

...Yet I regret his violent fall from critical grace...

...Zero de Conduit is still officially banned in France because it is considered a criticism of the French educational system...

...The film is a curious combination of the elementary and the complex, the traditional and the experimental...

...In fact, it is so hokey, so full of archaic melodramatics, that it is fairly enjoyable...

...In contrast to Renais, Ingmar Bergman's work is heavy, stagey and pretentious...

...There is absolutely no incentive offered the viewer for piecing together his own Marienbad...

...The inventiveness of Hiroshima, however, was backed up by a substantial drama which made it, finally, a much more moving experience than Last Year at Marienbad...

...His vision, as expressed in his pictures, is indisputably real, but it is no more true than, say, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is on the other end of the scale...

...Mike Herr regularly writes on the world of film for The New Leader...

...Bergman has rigged his movie, pointed it in a direction he could not accept and, in jerking it around so quickly, opened a flaw that must have run down its center, undetected, from the beginning...

...As the first tenets of film esthetics fall more and more into disuse, Vigo's movies seem more and more wonderful...

...But where Bergman's are still forming, passing through conflict and creative resolution, Bunuel's seems to have formed a little too quickly and perhaps a little too easily...

...I hope they are shown often from now on...

...Before, Jesus has been either an off-screen presence or an onscreen blight...

...This sort of clouded vision has never bothered Luis Bunuel...

...He is a brooder, like O'Neill and Faulkner are brooders, and prolixity coupled with a tendency to editorialize have always been part of a brooder's equipment...