Of "Paradise' and Parasites

...And more Falls of the Roman Empire, and the decline of practically everything...

...Again...

...Barrault in his heyday was unmatched at portraying a naive, laughable, unworldly and sublime adoration...

...Was Il Bell' Antonio...

...This, then, ladies and gentlemen, is, I fear, your fault alone...

...There seems to be greater confusion in the minds of the reviewers, who find it progressively harder, in an era of proliferating pseudo-avant-gardes, to distinguish the fine from the fashionable, the far-out from the outof-the-question...

...Arletty's Garance, a little past à point but not yet faisandé, inundates the screen with mischievous, headlong, seering femininity: exquisitely languid when not aroused, icy when not even tickled, but when fully awakened, torrential, transcending all dimensions, pure alkahest...

...And it is the sort of film which, today, despite its first uncut showing, drew no crowds and was soon gone...

...And did Paths of Glory make any money...

...The film is both frantic and derivative...

...But the thinking and writing in Disorder are almost unmitigated triviality and sensationalism, and faded sensationalism at that...

...Was God Needs Men a hit...

...It goes at it as if there were no tomorrow and, what is worse, as if there had been no yesterday...

...Film, which has captured the spirit of our age on screen and the attention of our audience in front of that screen, may well be losing both...

...There are a few good performances, notably Georges Wilson's, and a few routine ones...

...or about To Bed or Not to Bed—with its wonderful Alberto Sordi, stunning Swedish women, a few funny moments, and an idea that, though interesting, is handled much too sloppily...

...There are too many so-called art houses and they have to offer something, consequently much trashy pseudo-art is shown...

...There are several recent films of some slight merit, to be sure, that I have not even reported on...

...But at least there did not seem to be such wholesale discrimination against quality: Bandits of Orgosolo would not have disappeared after one measly week without even a follow-up run in one of the livelier neighborhoods...

...how, in the agonies of rejection and anger, its ugliness remains human...

...First-run movie theatres have become too expensive...

...or about The Servant—moodily suggestive, well acted, but petering out into a trickle of repetitious, unmeaningful nastiness...

...There is the worsening of taste, possibly caused by TV fare...

...Brasseur: a one-man compendium and epitome of the theater—tinsel as good as gold...

...How that plain face of hers can become transfigured with the humblest happiness...

...So I did not write about Becket—handsome, respectable and boring...

...Pierre Renoir as the embodiment of true evil which is miserliness, hypocrisy and mortal envy cf other people's happiness...

...Etienne Decroux as Debureau, Sr...

...and the rise of an appalling cinematic pop art which subverts the younger and more enthusiastic movie audiences...

...I can name you some excellent flops or near-flops from almost any period...

...this makes many people lose faith in all films and resist even the good ones...

...Was The Game of Love (I mean Colette's Le Blé en herbe, not that ridiculous The Love Game...

...One of the most intelligent women I know told me recently that the only time she is really happy is at the movies, watching people doing things...

...And what of those two great untimely dead actors, Louis Salou, as the Count, and Marcel Herrand, as Lacenaire the murderer...

...Or non-goers...

...In his novel, Le grand Écart, Cocteau says of Germaine, "Her beauty hovered over ugliness, but like an acrobat over death...

...It is the sort of film that, no sooner ended, you want to see all over again...

...Perhaps it is the fault of the moviegoers...

...Only Polanski's film had something of a run, but did it get a fraction of the acclaim given to that perfect piece of pseudo-artistic mediocrity, Tom Jones...

...The typical pseudo-art film of today is something like Disorder, by a new Italian writer-director, Franco Brusati...

...and so many barely glimpsed others are wholly memorable...

...It was a way of stirring you...

...And Marcel Herrand's foiled dramatist turned to the fine art of murder (as well as that occasional potboiler, larceny), investing it with spine-freezing mellifluence and bloodcurdling finesse, glittering hate shot through with sensuously sardonic epigrammatism...

...love, hatred, generosity, raillery, death-defying courage, all for effect, until effect becomes flesh and larger than life-size to boot...

...But I wonder whether it was the artistic value of the first postwar Rossellini films, or of Bicycle Thief, or Devil in the Flesh, or, more recently, The 400 Blows, that guaranteed them an audience, aristocratic or otherwise...

...Or, nearer home, wasn't the one almost honest movie Billy Wilder ever made, Ace in the Hole, his one flop...

...There are not enough Oscars in Hollywood or in Heaven to reward such performances...

...Maria Casarès as the desperate wife: Who else could have made nagging, choking, marathon jealousy look so touching, lovable, even heroic...

...mendacious charm more beautiful than truth, and truer too...

...What is there to be happy about at The Pink Panther, or What a Way to Go!, or Weekend, or The Empty Canvas, or The World of Henry Orient, or any number of other films now being shown...

...and outstanding editing by Ruggero Mastroianni...

...And the acting...

...Substitute "sentimentality" for "ugliness" and you have the beauty of Prévert's writing...

...Perhaps it is not the fault of the movies...

...Even those bits contributed by Gaston Modot as an all-seeing blind man...

...Could you have sold the early and best Fellini films except on the success of the later, less pure and less good ones...

...Orient, for instance, was our official entry at the Cannes Festival, and after you get over the shock of that, try to think of something much better they could have sent in its place, and after an hour of racking your brain you will really be shocked...

...It is the sort of film after which your wife or husband looks as beautiful as on the day you fell in love...

...Not even changing its name to the more box-officy The Big Carnival made it smell sweeter where only success smells sweet...

...Then one sees again The Children of Paradise, this time complete, with the superb Frederick Lemaitre episodes at last included and displaying Pierre Brasseur at his best, which is nothing less than genius...

...There is the assumption that it can all soon be seen, cheaper and nearer, as a re-run—or even on television—and unawareness that a poor first run may effectively prevent there ever being any second runs...

...Granted, Marcel Carné's direction is nothing more than sound commercial work...

...and one must say, no matter how unbearably the platitude hurts one, "They don't make movies like that any more...

...Jacques Castelot as the Count's crassly effete henchman...

...Try not to feel the paroxysms of this lover, having without possessing, trembling with frustrated humanity under the impeccable sneer...

...I could go on, but need I? Let us concede that things were not necessarily good in the past...

...And if you don't mend your ways, you'll get more and more Yesterday, Today and Tomorrows—Joseph Levine, the producer, has already announced such an annual LorenMastroianni delight around Christmas for at least five years to come, so put that into your stockings and smoke it...

...And that voice, midway between a mountain stream and a gin-soaked parrot...

...and the sweetness, transparence, limitlessness of his love for Garance is equaled in masterly depiction by the unconscious, innocent cruelty with which he treats the wife he does not love...

...here and there a cogently directed scene...

...Or whether it was not something superficially new, superficially different, and—most superficial of all—something highly publicized that did the trick...

...This is, for once, not even the fault of the critics, who tended to do justice to those films—except to The Fire Within, which the higher-brow reviewers were blind and deaf to...

...One press agent blames it on there being no longer a hardcore art-house audience: a discriminating and dependable aristocracy among movie-goers, now superseded by a great, heterogeneous democracy hostile to excellence...

...Consider some of the best films of recent times: Ermanno Olmi's artistically daring and humanly simple A Sound of Trumpets and The Fiancés, Malle's The Fire Within, Polanski's Knife in the Water, and, most recently, Vittorio de Seta's heartbreakingly persuasive Bandits of Orgosolo— how many of them were still there after one, two, or at best, three weeks...

...And then where will we be...

...On the screen," I asked, "or in the seats around you...

...What could be some realistic reasons for such large-scale audience delinquency...

...How contemptible this snobbish, humorless, maniacally possessive, superhumanly fatuous aristocrat, and yet try, if you can, despising him...

...But Jacques Prevert's story and dialogue are marvels: neo-Romanticism pushed to the limit beyond which there is only sentimentality, yet exhilaratingly cognizant of just where to stop and become hardheaded, funny, even matter-of-fact...

...This is what worries me...

...there is a genuine albeit second-hand cinematic sense...

...It is precisely the slightness of the merit that makes them dull to write about: damning with faint praise or praising with faint damns is not a very inspiriting business...