Ridiculous and Sublime

...and there are the very considerable talents of Jean Servais and Simone Renant, totally wasted...

...Situated at the antipodes from satire is The Organizer, a socialist tragicomedy full of bittersweet sentiment and humor...

...There are no obtrusions of other, non-satirical forms of humor...

...Unfortunately, the most memorable thing about The Troublemaker is the brief appearance of China Lee in briefer costume even than the leporine one she was wont to wear at the New York Playboy Club, which still concealed certain key parts, at least from ordinary key-holders...

...No matter how seemingly free-floating a work like Candide or Gulliver's Travels may be, there is a discipline underlying it...

...The Troublemaker concerns itself ostensibly with the efforts of a well-meaning, brave but naive, hayseed to start a coffee shop in Greenwich Village without greasing the palms of everybody from the corner policeman to the four graftsmen of this apocalypse, the Inspectors of Fire, Electricity, Building and Sanitation...

...Suddenly, we see shots of the misty landscape from the speeding train...

...Film needs a much bigger immediate audience than literature, and large, far-flung audiences are apt to break down into groups with parochial frames of reference...

...What can be disposed of with a few well-sharpened words does not require an elaborate and expensive two-hour color film to puncture it...

...These preliminary hardships are exacerbated for the film satirist...

...Here the sudden apparition of a child determinedly trudging to a sweatshop, the disappearance of the child's head diagonally through the lower right corner of the image, a few seconds of gloomily empty background, then, abruptly, "The End," produce such an impeccable parabola and rhythm of surprise, pathos, beauty of movement, sense of loss and void, that what might be tear-jerking fills the eye not with dimming tears but widening vision...

...Georges Delerue's score is cajolingly atmospheric...

...The mixture of pride and clumsiness, of politeness and puzzlement in the characters, the unlingering offhandedness with which the camera observes this, the wistfully bantering dialogue—all these leave the viewer suspended between amusement and heartache in a state of intensified sensibility...

...This is a forthright tale of factory workers in Turin at the turn of the century...

...e.g., Mickey Spillane's most recent abortion, or the flimflam Flemings, or such nouvelle-vague hyper-Bogartisms as J.-P...

...Then comes the encounter of the workers: violent, comic, absurd and, finally, tragic...

...the over-all structure is not lost sight of...

...It is plain enough why a film satirist would pick such a subject: Movie audiences all over the world can be assumed to have at least this one thing in common—going to the movies...

...Most of all...

...It maintains that when a genre becomes as palpably preposterous as the contemporary thriller, it is its own best satire...

...In Hollywood, it is the formula that is supposed to pay off...

...how the bosses oppose them bitterly and cunningly...

...It observes people with affectionate tough-mindedness...

...Annie Girardot, the scene is on the verge of a sentimental commonplace...

...But sensing them is not enough...

...There are a few truly effervescent moments in That Man from Rio, granted, and Jean-Paul Belmondo has a real paprika-and-cucumber charm...

...The Premise, a New York cabaret which has always seemed to me likable but undistinguished, has now contrived a film featuring all of its original members and written by two of them...

...Hence a take-off on movies cannot fall on uncomprehending eyes and ears...

...Satire, moreover, appeals to a sophisticated intelligentsia whose suffrage the movies have not yet fully obtained...

...It is slightly simplistic, somewhat oldhat, and utterly expert, moving and lovable...

...But in the midst of all that jagged chaos, this interlude of crazy, lyrical scenery—a fleeting efflorescence of saxicolous beauty...

...but the only film of which That Man from Rio reminded me strongly enough at times is Black Orpheus, fatuous claptrap but hardly a thriller...

...One can watch long stretches of the film without feeling that it is reducing anything to absurdity, and there is nothing that it will have laughed out of existence...

...The satirist must have an accurate experience of the society's quirks, tics, pipe-dreams, platitudes—its unspoken thoughts and unthought inklings—before he can ridicule them distinctly and devastatingly...

...That Man from Rio is the latest film of Philippe de Broca, the lavishly overrated confectioner of The Love Game, The Joker and The Five-Day Lover...

...Almost every point of the film is equidistant from tears, laughter and awakening awareness...

...Edmond Sechan's color photography almost improves on the already perfectly sensuous or striking Brazilian backgrounds...

...A general sort of impression is easily enough acquired: conformity, fear, sexual frustrations, spiritual impoverishment—such social ailments can readily be sensed...

...But there is a subplot involving a would-be helpful but crooked lawyer and his fantastical mistress whom our hero wins over by his quixotic guilelessness, and though some attempt is made to treat this, too, satirically, a flavor of Golden Boy-Born Yesterday sentimentality syrups up the issue...

...Even before the satirist can get to the difficulties inherent in his art, he faces three liminal obstacles...

...And what does the brain do...

...But in an insecure age satire is not going to be, or appear to be, a lucrative formula—assuming that it is reducible to one, in the first place...

...The brain further objects that a folly as minor as this is hardly worthy of satire...

...besides, on that costly and glossy a scale, you cannot tell the punctures from the panegyrics...

...So far, so good...

...There is also a heroine, Francoise Dorleac, who can look ravishing in one shot and like a death's-head in the next...

...The Italians are past masters of the difficult art of blending pathos and humor, and this is precisely what The Organizer manages with acrobatic skill...

...and how, with the help of an eccentric, proscribed ex-high-school teacher, they manage to win what seems like a partial victory...

...Rotunno gives us images that have overtones of Turner, Monet, even Nicolas de Staël: landscapes reduced to hazy semi-abstractions, dissolving forms, harmonies in grey...

...since the great scores of Nino Rota...

...Teas), lengthy and not particularly funny chases—a variety of not so comic irrelevancies or irrelevant kinds of comedy...

...It seems to be a living organism covered with pores exuding the sweat of humanity—one part stench and two parts glory...

...Melville's The Finger-Man (released here redundantly as Doulos the Finger-Man, doalos being the French for finger-man...

...This is meant to be a satire on adventure films, more particularly on the current crop of sex-and-sadism spectacles, the killer-chiller-thriller-dillers...

...It may oversimplify now and then, but it does not lie...

...If Marcello Mastroianni, as the former teacher, persecuted and starving, is being treated to a square meal by the obligatory aureate-hearted prostitute...

...In Avantgardia, it is the filmmaker's individuality that is particularly prized...

...Again, there is a scene in which the scabs whom the bosses have imported are arriving on a train as the strikers await them at the station, to remonstrate with them or, if necessary, fight them off...

...Unlike a musical extravaganza, however, satire is meant not only for eyes and ears but also for what is behind them: the brain...

...What is lacking is a satirical technique, an understanding of how satire functions...

...But cinematheque navel-gazers tend to have little individual experience of the great universal problems out there in the world...

...It is lovingly acted, and has the best musical score, by Carlo Rusticelli...

...There is the difficulty of finding a subject big enough to warrant a broadside...

...The main drawback, though, is the intrusion of various kinds of slapdash irrelevance, like hands getting stuck in abstract statuary, semi-nude girls lounging about for the sheer nylon hell of it (shades not of the immortal Candide but of The Immoral Mr...

...Why, for instance, that batch of old, forced, extraneous psychiatric jokes...

...Lastly, for such juniorsize satire—pastiche—to be efficacious, it must score bull's-eyes on identifiable targets...

...there is the problem of finding a large enough audience that will understand one's references...

...But Mastroianni tells Girardot he has a picture of his wife and children somewhere and fishes up several scraps of a snapshot which she pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle and mutters a polite phrase about, whereupon he stuffs the pieces back into his pocket...

...of how they manage to work up the courage to strike for a 13-hour workday, accident insurance, and a few fringe benefits...

...Mario Monicelli has directed the film from a screenplay on which he collaborated with Age and Scarpelli, and this extremely able director, together with the brilliant cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno and the superb editor Ruggiero Mastroianni, has created a work in which technical perfection triumphantly curbs the onslaughts of brute emotional appeal...

...film industries and even individual film-makers tend to be hidebound, or, more precisely, celluloid-bound...

...a consistency of character, however quizzical, is maintained...

...I wish I could describe in detail the last scene of the film with its split-second editing, not one frame too many or too few...

...By technique, I do not mean cinematography: Gayne Rescher's photography, though not very remarkable or original, is better than what we usually get in such minor independent ventures...

...and there is the matter of exact timing: a premature attack alienates, an overdue one bores...

...It is a somewhat foggy day, and the moment is pregnant with melodrama...

...The Troublemaker has the opposite troubles from those of That Man from Rio: This American satirette is over-stuffed with ambition and undernourished in technique...

...Film, to them, is more real than life...