SCREEN

...Nevertheless, the last few minutes of the film, after all talking has ceased (and the final bit of talk is particularly absurd), seem to me pure cinema of notable, though a mite obvious, forcefulness and again raise hopes for Frankenheimer's future...

...the overshadowing of people by architecture or objects-if not exactly as here, by factories...

...From the mouths of babes...

...The sooner Antonioni's liaison with her ends, the better, I should think, for his artistic future...

...the ineffectual, shadowy men...

...A Stranger Knocks comes from Denmark via our Supreme Court, which upheld its two scenes of fully-clothed sexual intercourse...

...The lover, stodgily played by Richard Harris, is something else again...

...Now the hero of that novel says, "I am a technician and accustomed to seeing things as they are...

...It is the tale told by Giuliana about a real or imagined incident from her childhood...

...From a screenplay by the late John Whiting (though who knows what was done over his dead body) based on the memoirs of O'Casey's youth, one expected rather more...

...Peter O'Toole does another, much less interesting, Lawrence, but his blue eyes can still brim over beautifully with shattered innocence...

...John Frankenheimer, a lively enough director where images and movement are concerned, has no respect for writing...

...The rest is mediocre...

...But emptiness as protagonist becomes forceful and interesting only when it asserts itself in some dramatic way...

...This is beautifully directed and shot, but loses much through the presence of Monica Vitti...

...Then there is the scene in the quayside fog, in which people emerge, vanish, reappear, and the heroine panics...

...When she exclaims derangedly that at times she would like to assault someone, he asks what is wrong with that...

...There are long stretches that affect us, despite immeasurable esthetic and technical superiority, rather like something that crawled out from the underground cinema of the Mekases and Warhols...

...Several capable actors do their standard bits, while Eli Wallach and Daliah Lavi remain substandard...

...The third bravura scene is the already mentioned verbal bacchanal in which three couples lounge around a huge bed in a red frame hut, talk esuriently about sex, and indulge in a little arse-pinching and Platonic wife-swapping...

...The neurotic, exasperated, yet hopelessly searching heroine...

...Maggie Smith is a superlative actress, and Julie Christie a pleasure to behold, but Edith Evans is a less than likely Lady Gregory, and Michael Redgrave a bad joke as Yeats...

...How much better an actress is Lea Massari and how much more she brought to the film...

...And it is no use saying that the empty best portray emptiness...

...Young Cassidy is a well-meaning but fairly lackluster pseudo-or screen-biography out of Sean O'Casey's autobiography...

...There is one very effective scene of a street riot and its bloody suppression (which figures also in Red Roses tor Me), but the Easter Rising falls flat...

...The heroine, as we have seen, is so neurotic as to be, much of the time, close to feeble-mindedness...

...It's the same thing...

...And to diminishing returns...

...and a child accepting such eerie mysteries as unmanned ships and disembodied voices singing proto-electronic music...

...Rod Taylor is sincere but dull as a kind of O'Casey cum grana Charles Atlas, and the scenes at the Abbey Theater and the lovers' final parting reach heights of unimaginative direction and improbable writing...

...Monica Vitti, on the other hand, has no personality: It is all done with mirrors or lenses, with direction and cutting...

...The scene has resourcefulness of dialogue and staging, and a most attractive woman in Rita Renoir...

...It lacks the kind of aura that the island search in L' A vventura had in abundance...

...Nevertheless, Corrado, though an engineer, gravitates quite unscientifically around Giuliana, and, though he makes some sensible remarks about politics and the future of the world, is not much more of a stable or purposeful figure than she is...

...But this scene was done just as well on the yacht in L'A vventura, and is yet another bit of "once more.' As the child, Valerio, remarks at one point in the film, "I'm tired of this game...

...for a film about murderers, one does not recruit one's cast from Death Row...

...But the two men, husband and lover, are scarcely Promethean bringers of light, either...

...One of the positions may be new to our backwoods areas and may revolutionize their sex life...

...It is a pastoral with the incursion of enigma on the childhood idyll, but enigma that can be accepted without producing a blot on the eclogue...

...Truly, it is the same thing, a whole damned movie's worth of it...

...The people in the film are, according to Nelly Kaplan in the Mercure de France, "bound only by the astonishing force of emptiness...

...to me, she looked more like Tony Perkins in a wig in Psycho-s-no fate at all for a woman...

...Thus Rochester's Nothing is appetitive, all-devouring: "The great man's gratitude to his best friend...

...Once again he has settled for a script written by hacks, and what might have been taut and mordant dialogue yields platitudes and osten tatious emptinesses...

...It also takes place among red walls (a red desert...

...This was obviously meant to be a virile, alive human being, but, alas, a technologist...

...Or he tells Giuliana, "You say, what should you look at...

...Now he is doing them merely to a return...

...There are three scenes in Red Desert that, I daresay, will be remembered...

...the dubbing of the foreign performers is, as always, grating...

...But verbiage takes over the screenplay, and the action becomes drawn-out, repetitious and predictable...

...From where or whom is this full human life to come...

...The husband is portrayed as a well-meaning but somewhat unmasculine man, not particularly alive to either work or play, except for a fit of verbalized sensuality during a peculiarly sexless orgy, about which more later...

...Carlo Chionetti does succeed in making him an amiable nonentity, and that, I suppose, is the best that can be made of a character who never says or does anything particularly wise, foolish or different...

...which are, Kauffmann says, "painted a shade of red, off which, so to speak, the talk can rebound"-as if it could not rebound off cobalt blue or pale heliotrope...

...According to Kauffmann, she is "one of those happy occurrences in the performing arts when the advent of the right executant evokes the best work of a creator...

...Lord jim is a large, expensive movie with nice backgrounds and fine photography by Fred Young, and a contrived script and routine direction by Richard Brooks...

...To me, Miss Vitti is an actress with a strictly limited repertoire, further limited by the fact that what she can do, she cannot do particularly well...

...the glimpses of simpler and happier people-but can we be like them?-all these things Antonioni has done to a turn in his three previous films...

...I say, how should I live...

...One of them seems to me quite false...

...the life of the cinema is certainly set back by the film a good 40 years...

...Some excellent performers, like Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau and Michel Simon, are seen to poor advantage...

...Where some fragment of the Conrad novel survives, it rattles around uneasily in the alien and tinny context...

...He, too, after all He laments, "There are times when r feel I have no right to be where I am,' and demonstrably suffers from dromomania...

...He can always bequeath her to the Actors Studio...

...His bedside book, one may notice, is Max Frisch's Homo faber...

...the listless non-orgies...

...r see the moon over the desert of Tamaulipasclearer than ever, let's say, but a calculable mass, which revolves around our planet, a matter of gravitation, interesting, but why an adventure...

...The Train begins auspiciously, and the earlier parts in which action- trains, aerial attacks on them, sabotage, collisions-predominates are properly gripping...

...The trouble with it is that the mystery is conceived, staged and photographed merely as something contrary to the normal or understandable...

...Stanley Kauffmann managed to see in Antonioni's new film "the prospect of full human life in the midst of whirling changes...

...Kings' promises, whores' vows, towards thee they bend.y' Flow swiftly into thee, and in thee ever end.' But the Nothing in Red Desert subsists on a much meagerer diet than Rochester's "Primitive Nothing"-it has become sophisticated, sated and jaded, and what flows into it is nowhere near so juicy as a king's promise or a whore's vow...

...Already in L'Avventura her poker-facedness alternating with studied grimacing was trying enough...

...Several reviewers found that, in Red Desert, Miss Vitti looked like Barbra Streisand -a dreadful fate for a woman...

...We all need help," Corrado says, and says it not only to calm Giuliana...

...If there is anything this film is not," writes Stanley Kauffmann, "it is not 'once more' of anything...

...But Jack Cardiff, the photographer turned director, has merely blended the Struggling Writer Story with the Brawling Irish Story and wrapped it in gentle color photography...

...Some of the blame may have to fall on O'Casey himself, who was less than the great writer the middlebrows try to make of him...

...It does introduce a pink beach (a fellow-traveler of the red desert of the title...

...the wispy love affairs that leave one nauseated and still hungry...

...But what, except for the marvelous and somewhat scene-stealing color, is new here or different from what Antonioni has already given us in his Trilogy...

...while not so good ones, like Burt Lancaster, are seen too much...

...Again, in La Notte, critics who traced the weakness of that film to Antonioni's changing his heroine were wrong: At least when Jeanne Moreau acts bored, neglected and wasting away, one feels that a real woman is going to pot, and the actress elicits sympathy even where the character does not...