A Fair Fourth

...But the relationships between the soldier and his captain, between the soldier and his buddies, and, indeed, the interaction of various military and civilian persons, are portrayed with such quietly respectful sympathy...

...If Ichikawa had done nothing more than capture this elusive theme with such lyrical finese, he would already deserve our thanks...

...The Yugoslav film, Three, offers a trio of diverse but equally harrowing episodes from World War II...

...If it is not to be released, the loss will be immeasurable...

...now an overgenerous dose of ordinariness gets the better of a nice touch here, a moving insight there...

...Just three large faces, joining, separating, evolving: the two radiant ones now obscuring the third, now parting to reveal it in its full agony...

...But the gloom and sordidness of the film are so unrelieved, the pride of its hero is so monotonously fanatical, that first the mind, and gradually even the heart, ceased to be engaged...

...One is aware throughout of horror being faced squarely without hysteria and even-a much greater achievement-without allowing righteous indignation to get out of hand...

...If the screenplay could have lived up to the rest of the film, Almost a Man would have been a triumph...

...I have heard a critic I respect compare this film to the Joe Pasternak sentimental outpourings of the '40's, and there are two scenes that are a bit sticky, largely because they are overlong...

...Whatever the reason, there were fewer absolute nullities among the feature films, and there was a decent proportion of pictures that could be watched with interest...

...The cataclysm is seen chiefly from the point of view of a part of Kent on which, accidentally, an atom bomb is dropped by the enemy...

...The first sequence relates an incident during the initial panic of the German invasion: a man is killed as a fifth columnist by ignorant soldiers abetted by the mob merely because he cannot pronounce his r's correctly...

...The intimate role a musical instrument can play in the psychic development of a man, and how this can extend even to his fellow-soldiers, is delicately apprehended...

...Milos Forman was represented by Loves of a Blonde, likewise in the tradition of recent Czech films: small people, everyday incidents, and sympathetic scrutiny not untinged by a sense of the absurd...

...and, in a gentler way, of the saint himself...

...Here, however, the oppressive lighting, the expressive face of that flawless actor, Jacques Perrin, and the impressive camera angles merge to make the conventional motif a profound experience...

...Mikl??s Jancs??'s film is jerkily told, full of obscurities and loose ends as well as sheer improbability, but there are good scenes in it and also a feeling for composition and the use of sets nicely learned from Antonioni...

...The BBC sponsored this film, then refused to televise it...

...Several rungs lower was Hungary's The Roundup, a study of 19th-century police brutality, both psychological and physical...

...the manner in which a page of manuscript is being belabored by a thick, severely excising pencil until almost all traces of writing are obliterated...

...It can honestly be said that de Seta and his cinematographer, Dario di Palma, have succeeded in making a film of which every frame is worthy of framing, a film you would prefer to see, not on a theatre screen, but hanging, image by image, on your wall...

...A splicing together of three unrelated but equally ineffectual documentaries, The Scene, was boring, as was Bernardo Bertolucci's maiden effort, The Grim Reaper (preferable, at that, to his later, fulsomely overpraised Before the Revolution...

...The provocative Italian novelist and film-maker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, was represented by two films...

...Or there is a series of shots in which the hero is losing a girl to his brother now dancing with her...

...a view, suddenly, of the writer's face from below, through the typewriter keys, which are now projected, like some horrible rash, onto that grappling face...

...There was Kon Ichikawa's dignifiedly humane war film, The Burmese Harp (made 10 years ago), about a young Japanese soldier upon whom, at war's end, the dreadfulness of it all weighs so heavily that he becomes a monk in Burma, goes about interring the unburied dead and lets his regiment return without him...

...and a nocturnal drinking bout for the two friends in which bumbling conviviality and melancholy longings for the greenness in the other man's yard blend into the very texture of human confusion...

...it is discontinuous, lackadaisical, sometimes improbable, almost always superficial...

...Perhaps it is that in the earlier work Forman brought out more mischievously the surreal inherent in reality...

...Success and failure, riches and poverty, confront each other with all the poignance of the contrast, but without lapses into sentimentality or clich...

...An all-Scandinavian co-production brought to the screen Knut Hamsun's Hunger, and Henning Carlsen's film did have a good period atmosphere, pleasing performances, and one job of pure bravura by Per Oscarsson as the autobiographical hero...

...There is the sheer voluptuous brutality with which the rabbits are exterminated (clearly, the poor beasts are symbols for the populace...

...The four go rabbit-hunting together on land belonging to one of them...

...One after the other, these boys, physically relatively unharmed but their blotted-out facial expressions bespeaking a deeper marring, answer the single question, "What do you want to be when you grow up...

...Lastly, there is the contempt or envy with which the three supposed friends regard one another, until, no longer containable, the feelings erupt into massacre...

...So, too, is a pheasant hunt, made unbearable in its sad cruelty through striking use of repetition, yet again, by ingenious camera work, auditory effects, and montage, turned into nightmarish beauty...

...there may, after all, be truth in the old German saying that four eyes see more than two...

...The host, an homme moyen sensuel, lives with his amiably dumpy wife, two small children, and two charmingly eccentric parents...

...Perhaps also this was a better, or less bad, year for film...

...It is, however, true of this as of many another Japanese film that it has a beginning, a middle, and at least three endings...

...There are unforgettable lines, as when, after the friends have listened to a symphony of snores from various rustic sleepers, the guest leads the host to the door of the bedroom where his mistress is sleeping, and asks with a mixture of Candaules-like pride, amusement, mild resentment (she is a rather childish creature), and even a trace of cosmic sadness, "Have you ever heard a lovely woman snore...

...Bunuel, Saura's apparent mentor, was represented by a fine short film, Simon of the Desert...

...It is an extension of neo-realism to essentially obnoxious, or, at least, opprobrious characters, mostly pimps and whores...

...It is based on short stories by a notable experimental fictionist, Antonije Isakovic, who collaborated on the script with Aleksandar Petrovic, the director...

...France's The Shameless Old Lady, based on a Brecht short story and showing the strain of drawing out a vignette to feature size, tells of an old woman who, widowed, suddenly changes from drudge to Sybarite, much to her family's dismay and her own satisfaction...

...The rest was disappointing or downright bad...

...But there is a gratuitous ending, possibly tacked on to get the film over with quickly when financing ran out, which leaves us with a bad taste in the mind...

...Ivan Passer's film tells of a small-town music teacher's entertaining for a couple of days a former fellow-student from the Prague Conservatory...

...The episode in which the crow transmutes its human traveling companions into two monks around St...

...While this 44minute satire makes fun of the church and the laity as they importune the stylite in their various ways...

...Bresson's Balthazar carries that film-maker's perverse aridity and maniacal pseudo-mysticism a depressing step farther, and Agnes Varda's Les Cr?©atures is the last word in distastefully pointless, pretentious mumbo-jumbo...

...and he re-enacts actual statements by government officials, scientists and clerics in all their grueling fatuity...

...Best of all are a much-interrupted string-quartet session, where a little night music results in much funny mutual scraping on nerves...

...The Hunt, from Spain, is a remarkably courageous and intelligent work-if only it could have had commensurate artistry...

...A Czech episodic film, and a Russian and a Belgian entry might as well be passed over in silence, as should campy revivals of old Garbo and De Mille claptrap...

...The friend is to be guest soloist with the local orchestra, and he brings with him a pretty and playful mistress...

...Watkins further examines, by intelligent intercutting, the ignorance of the public before the event, as it answers questions with pathetic unawareness...

...All this is told patiently, painstakingly, with a nice sense of detail and atmosphere...

...But acting, direction and photography combine to make Almost a Man visually commanding from start to finish...

...Perhaps the most shattering scene of all, one in which the documentary transcends itself into art, shows an interview with a group of post-bombardment school children...

...A more upsetting, but still highly imposing, miscalculation is Vittorio de Seta's Almost a Man...

...The last sequence, about the execution of an attractive girl collaborationist and its effect on a sensitive Partisan officer, is rather primitively written and filmed...

...Ren?© Allio's film is quite amateurish, but that superb actress, Sylvie, invests the protagonist with a sly vitality that makes one oblivious to the surrounding ricketiness...

...Francis of Assisi, whom the saint orders to convert the hawks and the sparrows, is beautifully conceived, written, directed and photographed...

...there is such reverence for the ultimate mysteries of motivation- which does not mean that, as in Godard and Bresson, the highly improbable becomes the order of the day...

...There is, parallelly, the genteel, patronizing inhumanity with which the overseer of the land, his mother and daughter, are all treated by the older huntsmen...

...It may be that this is due to the infusion of new blood into the selection committee, whose numbers were raised from two to four...

...Some (but only some) of the incidents have genuine bite reminiscent of Bunuel's, and the dialogue has its moments, too, as when the youth asks, upon hearing his elders mention the war that raged in this area, "Which war...

...the final explosive gesture with which everything is swept to the floor, the camera hurtling along-all this is cinematographic art of the first order...

...Three is structurally and otherwise indebted to Faisan, though it lacks the power of Rossellini's film...

...The episode effectively evokes the forlornness of a small nation caught in a huge war, and the petty meanness of crowds in the grip of fear...

...The script is a rather ordinary psychiatric case history, undistinguished in the writing, and finally commonplace and unilluminating...

...There are several scenes that are gems of spontaneous, offhanded, rather microscopic humor, none the less fraught with total humane sympathy...

...The outstanding event of the Festival was Peter Watkins' The War Game, a 47-minute proto-documentary of what atomic warfare would be like if it hit Great Britain...

...But in the second half of the film the satire becomes either slapstick or so far-fetched as to seem pointless, and though an occasional comic touch still registers effectively, the sophomorically desperate straining to get in a potshot at everything, as well as the obtrusion of effects for effects' sake, manage to undo much of the good of the first half...

...Even so, Saura's film is considerable in itself and promising for its maker's future...

...Thus the film contains elements of black humor as well as tragic blackness...

...But this film seemed to me less pleasing than Forman's previous Black Peter, for reasons that are hard to pin down...

...It has, so far, found no distributor in this country...

...that if I am reminded of anything by The Burmese Harp, it is of Renoir's The Grand Illusion...

...For example, a writer struggling for inspiration at his typewriter has become a filmic platitude...

...Several pictures can be classed as meritorious near misses...

...with the same blankly intoned, "I don't want to be nothing when I grow up...

...It is a fantasy, mixing in equal measure frivolity and satire, and for the first half it works well enough or better...

...Carlos Saura's film concerns three friends who once fought with Franco and are now big businessmen of varying degrees of success, and a fourth, a young man, the son of another old ex-Falangist friend of theirs...

...it is Bufiuel at his best: stylite and stylist face each other from their respective pedestals...

...Of Resnais' La Guerre Est Finie I shall probably write when it opens commercially...

...The action moves on three planes...

...In the course of what starts out to be a carefree hunting party under a hot sun, old rivalries and resentments, exacerbated by new feudalism and materialism, reach such a pitch of fulminant hatred, that the three older men kill one another off to the helpless consternation of the younger one...

...Far from contenting itself with recording superlatively the biological horrors entailed, the film also probes the far-reaching social, political and moral consequences that sinisterly mushroom from this disaster...

...perhaps also of Godard's two new, and customarily offensive, films, Pierrot le Fou and Masculine Feminine...

...The vintage 1961 Accattone (for some reason, it was nowhere made clear that the title means "beggar") now seems fairly uninteresting...

...Loves of a Blonde accentuates Forman's tendency to stretch slenderness beyond the breaking point...

...I have never seen triple close-ups, two happy faces and one wretched one, maneuvered with such choreographic imaginativeness across the screen...

...A man and his son undertake a symbolic journey to the city, and are joined by a Communist crow...

...But a word must be emphatically said about Torre Nilsson's latest compilation of bogus psychology and politics with pretentious frissons thrown in, The Eavesdropper...

...But the recording of subtly mounting violence needs consistently good dialogue, better pacing (the rhythm here is too slow for too long, then suddenly too fast -a deliberate device, but unsuccessful), and, probably, more ingenious cinematography...

...The way in which the white sheet in the typewriter creeps up between us and the hero's face, obliterating more and more of it, and then, with a shift of the carriage, starts its unholy march over again...

...The second episode is a more or less conventional hunt of a Partisan and a regular Army man by Nazi soldiers, dogs and planes, but the relationship between the two men, one absolutely brave, the other slowly emerging from cowardice, is not unmoving, though portrayed somewhat sketchily...

...The word is: Desist...

...Much can be said, too, for an insinuating little charmer from Czechoslovakia, Intimate Lighting...

...That is one of those ultimate statements in which (to emend myself) even art transcends itself into self-effacement before the ineffable...

...as if it could be something from the days of Napoleon or Ferdinand and Isabella...

...Also worth a pat is Wholly Communion, a 47-minute record of American beat and British quasi-beat poets disporting themselves amusingly before a scarcely less amusing audience in London's Albert Hall...

...of the devil as he tempts the saint in sundry, mostly feminine, disguises...

...But Pasolini's new film, The Hawks and the Sparrows, is something else again...

...De Seta, who made that overwhelming film unjustly condemned to speedy disappearance, Bandits of Orgosolo, here examines the circumstances that turned an intelligent young man into an unhappy, self-destructive voyeur...