With a Capital A

...Jesus has a girl friend who is a prostitute, but they love each other with a sweet, Annabel-Leeish love...

...The directors of the Spanish film, Dialogos de la paz, also made use of this technique, and here, too, an eclectic and borrowed look manifested itself, even though Font Espina and Feliti made the device a little more their own by fusing it with other techniques...

...It is all terribly Tennysonian, a little too long and a little too sweet...

...The Pawnbroker begins with a sun-drenched idyll that is only a memory...

...A middle-aged female social worker appears on the scene, and attempts to befriend Sol...

...Edouard Molinaro has directed this race toward and away from the zero hour of marriage (and sometimes both toward and away) with self-renewing vitality and inventiveness, and Michel Audiard's dialogue is consistently witty, even if the subtitles can cope with it only intermittently Il Successo is a kind of secondary cousin to The Easy Life...

...Male Hunt is a frothy, febrile comedy in which some of France's most attractive actors and actresses—as well as some who can really act—are put through intricate and diverting, through not exactly unfamiliar, routines...

...Alain Resnais invented them in Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and put them (whatever shortcomings the film may have) to thorough and impressive use...

...the husband died horribly, and she is now Sol's mirthless mistress...

...On the other hand, Rodriguez has threatened to kill him as soon as he starts enjoying life again, and, now that he is suffering so satisfyingly, his number may be up The questionable aspects of the plot need no further examination, but specimens of artistic insufficiency are in order...

...Her bare proffered bosom takes Nazerman back to when he was forced to watch the Nazis raping his wife...

...Lumet's originality is again brought into question with the vignettes of the clients confronting Nazerman...

...Customers come before Sol with their little heart-breaks, little absurdities, little greedinesses...

...Along with their portable radios and wristwatches, they bring cuteness and sentimentality...

...It is all simplistic, hard-edge painting...

...in the film, they are not...

...Intentions, underlining, and casting...

...But Sol's relationship with the racketeer Rodriguez, for whose operations the pawnshop is a front, is rather less convincing, more tritely melodramatic...

...But the boy makes no more effect on this armor-plated psyche than does the widow of Sol's best friend...

...Now, all of a sudden and for no very good reason, Jesus is shocked by a callous remark of Sol's...

...he is trying to learn the business from the saturnine Sol, and half admires, half resents him...

...Why did it take him till now to comprehend their evil...

...To indicate that this is not so, I lustily recommend two films that cannot be accused either of being dull or of being art...

...none of that commingling and shading of colors with which life and its true painters—a Fellini, an Olmi—would work...

...So far, so good...

...In this sort of emblematic detail one can say all and still leave much to the imagination—rather than saying a little and leaving the rest to erotic fantasizing...

...By this time we have been initiated into the flashback technique which tells—first in extremely short, quasi-subliminal, seemingly disconnected snatches, then in longer and clearer sequences —of Nazerman's dreadful past experiences In the shop, a young Puerto Rican ex-hoodlum, Jesus Ortiz, is Sol's assistant...

...not quite so resourceful, not quite so ebullient, but still to be watched with purring contentment...

...It may be that in Edward Lewis Wallant's novel these things are sufficiently explained...

...We know that it is only a memory because it's shot in slow motion...

...Here he seems to be copying partly the scene in The 400 Blows where the boy is being interviewed by an invisible psychologist, and partly the bravura letter-monologue of Ingrid Thulin in Winter Light...

...The frightened prostitute begs Nazerman not to tell Rodriguez, who, Sol realizes, owns him, too...

...Anouk Aimee is outstandingly restrained as this ultra-gogetter's wife, and the script is solid and by no means mindless entertainment, except for a rather too moralizing conclusion...

...Jesus' girl offers herself to Nazerman for some free-lance money that she wouldn't have to turn over to her boss but could contribute toward Jesus' going into business...

...Why, however, did he get involved with the gang in the first place...

...but if it is only a device, a personal idiom or idiosyncrasy, anyone else using it becomes an imitator, an epigone or plagiarist...

...He rebuffs her...

...She and her husband were in the same camp with Sol...

...Next, he is off to the brass balls of the Harlem pawnshop he operates, making his living off human misery...

...Sol at last experiences true pain, though he has to confirm this by perforating his hand melodramatically—or, worse yet, symbolically (Nazerman—Nazarene, a veritable inflation in Christ symbols)—with a paper spindle...

...We see him first in suburbia, at the brassy bosom of the American branch of his family: a setting and group enough to depress even the staunchest survivor...

...Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker is no exception: Its intentions are good, it earns our sympathy, but it serves mainly to illustrate how awesome the distance is between intent and achievement...

...Meanwhile the flashbacks have proliferated, sometimes effectively, as when a subway car turns into a hideous, jammed catde-car transporting victims to the camps...

...He emits over Jesus' body a silent howl worthy of Laocoon, and is now able to suffer fully and, I suppose, life-givingly...

...Still, it is excellent non-art, and superior to any amount of pseudo-art...

...However, Lumet's limitations can best be illustrated with what is perhaps the finest sequence of the film...

...Now, if this device is a mode of telling a story, it is, of course, at everyone's disposal...

...This traveling shot of marriages, of very identities, being unmade on a production "line, conveys far more piercingly the despoliation and rape of the victims than the inevitably unconvincing rape sequences can...

...Children with flying hair are running in slow motion, a happy young parental couple gazes after them in slow motion, nice old Jewish grandparents are picnicking in slow motion, and a butterfly hovers in slow motion...

...Many of the performances in this overlong and overstated film are just right...

...I myself feel that this type of flashback is a brilliant but one-time-only (or, at the utmost, one-man-only) invention of Resnais', and that whoever adopts it becomes ipso facto an echo...

...It may be that this could be so, but it is not made convincing...

...I find myself frequently accused of not appreciating film as an entertainment, only as art...

...Sol Nazerman is a survivor of a Nazi death-camp in which his wife and children perished...

...He now tries to throw off the yoke of Rodriguez, but fails and gets beaten up by the henchmen...

...The clash of light and shadow is dazzling but also a trifle exaggerated, the butterfly gets caught—we are in for Art with a capital A. Yet art is something that should never be capitalized or capitalized on...

...What is Lumet good at...

...Hands, scores of hands, are extended over a sinister wire fence, and are being, one after another, stripped of their rings...

...So the boy rejoins his band of hoodlums and leads a raid on the pawnshop, but when, against his stipulations, one of the punks pulls a gun, our Christ figure ends up by taking a bullet destined for Sol and dying for him—a rather capricious, not to say jejune, Jesus...

...But Lumet spoils even this bit by making most of the hands beautiful: sensitive, lyrical, ravished hands...

...This, alas, rings a whole concerto's worth of false notes: There is even a shot of her holding out a shyly compassionate hand to Sol...

...The subliminal, surprise flashbacks, for example, are a problem...

...They should be ordinary, shopworn and raped...

...Vittorio Gassman again displays the select and enviable talent of being both comedian and actor in one: a funny man who is also very much, and very seriously, a man...

...Again, Boris Kaufman's photography, though striking and incisive, resorts to certain cliche effects—and these, too, depend in part on the director—as when lights of the city start as a blur and gradually come into focus...

...he does not take it, but the damage is done—we have been tumbled into the David and Lisa pseudo-world...

...Each customer is a tidy vignette, clearly labeled: "Pathos," "Comic Relief," "Sordidness...