Quintet in Three Flats

...The point is that opera is not so exclusively aural an art form as purists might wish and myopics imagine...

...some of du* scenes in the cell block reminded me of Shoeshine...

...In short, that there is not one kind of film that is art and another that isn't...

...and to fill in with narration whatever is not recorded on film...

...it is disturbing when the reputedly enchanting Mirella Freni, as Mimi, looks merely like a somewhat younger Leontyne Price, and looks it not from the safe distance of the stage, but from the mercilessly telltale proximity of the screen...

...The more epic, eccentric, or exotic the opera, the more it is likely to find a moderately comfortable temporary home on screen...

...Still, these are minor matters...

...Some of the paroxystic starkness of this protest against the military mentality may be due to the influence of that corrosive play, TJie Brig...

...The performances, however, are strong and fiavorsome, and Sean Connery somehow manages to hold his own among a band of genuine professionals...

...The shifts are stirring: from famous people to anonymous ones, from events ensconced in history books to others denied any memorial...

...This is a story of the unvarying degree of brutality to which prisoners of different degrees of culpability are subjected in a British military prison in Africa during World War II...

...The others were fair to slightly overcast, but Rolando Panerai's Marcello, though vocally acceptable, was all ham...

...But as a horror story, a genre for which I have little use, it seems to me entirely successful, because Polanski, the maker of Knife in the Water and some excellent shorts, is not the usual hack who turns out such films, but an artist gone slumming...

...There is, however, one, and only one, more serious shortcoming...

...Again, it is unnerving when the starving artists in a garret are revealed in the most perfectly porcine rotundity...

...But La Boheme, now filmed in the Karajan-Zeffirelli-La Scala production, is, of all things, a realistic opera—that is, if a certain amount of verismo in the setting and a surfeit of pathos in the story can be said to constitute realism...

...Yet the Spanish Civil War was a supreme example of both...

...only that there are good films and bad films...

...The commentary, I gather, has proved too laconic for some who have already forgotten or never learned about this War...

...to adhere, as much as possible, to a rhythm and variety that mitigate the monotony of utter gloom...

...A film that raises one of those d o g g e d l y h a u n t i n g questions— should an artist produce mere entertainments?— is Roman Polanski's Repulsion...

...The artist must find a way of bringing these two, if not inimical at least alien, concepts into a temporary liaison, lasting, let us say, the length of a film...

...That seems to me inevitable and, in this case, right...

...the operas I can best visualize on film are things like The Huguenots on the one hand, or Aniara on the other...

...At times, there is no escaping the feeling of dejd vu, and still less that of dejd entendu, but, on the whole, The Hill commands our interest and respect, though not, I suppose, our love...

...There is none for his taking it seriously...

...Nevertheless, the moment that the real-looking snow that is supposed to aggravate a very real lung condition proceeds to be non-melting and inducive only of coughs carefully spaced for the dramatic punctuation of an aria, we are reduced to an equally non-melting state...

...By this I do not mean that, despite a valiant determination to be fair to both sides, the sympathies of the filmmakers win out...

...OPERA on film is, at best, a frugal blessing...

...As an entertainment of a macabre sort, though, Repulsion succeeds handily, if one overlooks a sort of melange des genres, which turns the unreal into the surreal...

...It is indicative of the high merit of this movie that the additional footage— views of the Spanish land, many of them exquisitely evocative silhouettes—and the restrainedly mourning guitar score by Maurice Jarre achieve the same tragic intensity and control as the rest of the work...

...It is to the immense credit of Frederic Rossif that he has come as close to the all but impossible union as it is given to anyone approaching it not on the wings of fiction but on the feet of factual evidence...

...Seventeen years after the fact, we were served up Visconti's early neo-realist triumph, La terra trema, about the exploitation and disintegration of a family of Sicilian fishermen...

...In the case of To Die in Madrid, the dilemma was whether to try to tell every last ugly political and human truth, and have a shattering documentary but not a work of art...

...This is an intelligently made horror film about a psychotic girl whose fear of sex and hatred of men (to whom, however, she is irresistible) drive her into committing two murders before becoming engulfed by raving madness...

...I have never before been impressed by this director's attempts to impress me, the moviegoer, with his artistic effects or significant statements, but much about The Hill comes off...

...It is unfortunate that, toward the end of the film, the rebellion of the Negro soldier, though gargantuanly comic, must strain the credulity of even the most credulous...

...We are told also that Repulsion was the only kind of film for which Polanski could raise the money...

...Into his 85-minute documentary, Rossif has striven to compress not all that needs to be said about the Spanish Civil War—for that would take either very much more time, or very much less—but all that can be said within the span of a remote spectator's endurance...

...There are a few moving passages in this very long film, clumsily written and cumbersomely acted by a cast of full-fledged nonprofessionals...

...it is a film to be memorized...

...Still, under Polanski's leisurely but sure direction, even Catherine Deneuve gives something not unlike a performance, and the very garden of a convent adjoining the site of the crimes manages to take on a cunningly pseudosymbolic significance...

...Not that I have a particular wish to see either...

...Now, as a serious study of the causes of aberration, the film does not rise above the level of barbershop Freudianizing...

...We leave the theatre with the frightening awareness that we live in a world, in a history, without justice...

...This screen version of La Boheme can compete neither with a superior stage production, nor with a felicitous recording...

...or whether to edit and editorialize, select and simplify in such a way as to have an eloquent elegy, beautiful but not the whole bloody and bloodying truth...

...But even musically speaking, I found my enjoyment continually encroached on by the electronics: The sound was unnaturally loud, excessively harsh, and often did not correspond in volume or provenance to the position of the singer in the image, the filming and sound recording having been done separately and in different places— an opera house and a studio...

...Karajan's tempi seemed faster at times than necessary, cramping some of the vocal climaxes...

...To Die in Madrid is not merely a film to be seen...

...And as if that were not enough for Rossif to cope with, there was the additional burden of having to depend on available film footage, a limitation no Hemingway or Malraux had to contend with...

...In that case, there is some excuse for his making it...

...As for Franco Zefiirelli's staging (it is unclear whether he also directed the filming), it was adequately operatic but insufficiently filmic...

...What is not right is that the hideous infighting among the various Leftist factions and the sinister role of Moscow are not given their ghastly due...

...But much here is Lumetfs own, and relatively free from the artsiness and heavyhandedness of his previous endeavors...

...In fact, it reduces the opera to the level of its libretto, and that is pretty dreadful...

...Though La terra trema is superior to Visconti's later, stiflingly chic, vacuities, I agree with the remark of an actor friend: "Visconti has managed to pass from artlessness to artifice without ever touching art...

...I was also a little troubled by cuts in the film, or in the English translation: the moving passages in the French text about Antonio Machado and his mother, and about the death of that other remarkable poet, Miguel Hernandez, were omitted...

...The photography has its unassuming merits, but it is not helped by the ugliness of Sicilian faces surpassed only by the garishness of Sicilian speech...

...What Rossif and his text-writer, Madeleine Chapsal, have done is to look for the emblematic, the typical, the suggestive...

...but that is the fault of human nature, not of Rossif and Chapsal...

...The Hill, also about war, marks a considerable step ahead in the development of Sidney Lumet...

...Polanski has stated publicly that to him a film is a film, and that its subject or category cannot make it more or less desirable to him...

...it was the rare case of a war in which right and wrong were clearly defined, yet in which, no less clearly, one could see the frequent wrongness of right as well as the occasional rightness of wrong...

...This, alas, is the same blunted argument that one hears being resharpened for Simenon or Lenny Bruce, for Pop artists or jazz musicians, meant to prove that they are first-rate artistic creators...

...This last often proves a virtue born of necessity: Where specific images have to stand in for larger verities, or where generalized views of landscapes, faces, fighting have to comment on a particular place, person or deed, the double focus, tactfully managed, produces not blurring but breadth...

...even as a portrait of a cracking mind, Repulsion is superficial—say, on the level of Darling s investigation of the psyche of a cocotte...

...All this is particularly sad since Mirella Freni is, deducibly, an excellent singer, and, visibly, a fine actress, and Gianni Raimondi's Rodolfo was only a tone's throw from her Mimi...

...And at one sitting we can take only so much horror, only so much heroism...