No Thanks

...Gradually she wins him over to these noble activities...

...in it, the customary action sequences alternate with the obligatory repartee, to which Vidal is merely able to add a touch of feyness, as when a surrendering German officer observes that he will at last have time to read War and Peace...

...and pretentious direction that insists on rubbing our noses in the messes it has perpetrated, and all combine to make a worthy sequel to Dassin's unfortunately unforgettable Phaedra...

...Set free, his talents are promiscuously dispersed...

...Of sympathy for anyone there can be no question, least of all for Polanski, who co-authored this script with Gerard Brach, his collaborator on Repulsion...

...but more often, as here, he is given no chance at all...

...The bulkiest disappointment of the month, however, is Ren?© Cl?©ment's Is Paris Burning...

...dissolving almost imperceptibly from the hero's sleepless face into the heroine's equally sleepless one...

...Finally, both Clarisse and Montag, who has been turned in by his own wife, escape to the woods, where the Book People lead a kind of aboriginal life...

...Clarisse becomes The Memoirs of Saint-Simon, which Julie Christie mouthes in execrable French, and Montag turns into Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which Oskar Werner mangles with his awkward English...

...Too bad those who made this film didn't...

...Saddening, too, is the score by Maurice Jarre, who is rapidly becoming the most schizophrenic composer in the cinema...

...These books and names they pass on to their children, until some day culture and decency return...

...machine-made cynicism...

...Wilder's goody-goody endings would be sticky in any context...

...But it is less the visual improbabilities than the aural and intellectual impossibilities that matter...

...Typical is a sequence in which the dipsomaniac wife is seen in close-up with the Morandiesque shadow of a bottle looming on the wall behind her...

...Their survival is not made at all convincing...

...A script by Dassin and Marguerite Duras based on one of her anti-novels-two others, This Angry Age and Moderato Cantabile have already yielded rich flops-is bad enough...

...His wife, Linda, is typical of the new anesthetized society, in which most people are happy with comic strips and wall-sized TV into which viewers can become incorporated...

...Already in his previous film, Repulsion, it was hard to recognize the master of Knife in the Water and two or three brilliant shorts, all made in Poland...

...I have, incidentally, serious doubts about Poe and Saint-Simon being able, as the film implies, to live together happily ever after...

...As another gangster, Jack MacGowran is pretty good imitation Guinness, but that is what Sir Alec is these days even more convincingly...

...Instead, Is Paris Burning?, like its protagonist, never catches fire, and merely follows in the mammoth footsteps of The Longest Day or Battle of the Bulge...

...and a cop-out as big and factitious as all Movieland...

...The performers work competently, except for the plainly sleep-walking Werner...

...it's a fatigue that comes from way back, made up of everything...

...these are deemed inflammatory by the State and are still inflammable...

...The fact remains that Bradbury's vision is not on the level of those gloriously dangerous books, but on that of the state-promulgated comic strips...

...The script, chiefly the work of Gore Vidal, though three other scenarists are variously credited, was hardly worth Vidal's fight for top billing...

...Whenever given half a chance, he turns in a performance of Brancusi-like streamlining and simplicity...

...or, another one in a Madrid flamenco joint where technicolor is used to film people rigorously clad in black and white, except for one red flower pinned to a dress that becomes the bloody center of a zebraed whirligig...

...It lacks both clarity and suspense, and features the usual stars in bit parts for which, trading on their glamor, they do less than bit players would...

...and Bernard Herrmann's score, though ostentatious, is preferable to the dialogue...

...Nick Roeg's photography achieves some tricky coloris-tic effects...

...blacking out half the screen to hem in a harassed victim...

...From behind the obvious and unpleasant dubbing, as through ill-fitting dentures, two performances come close to registering: Gert Fr?¶be's General von Choltitz and Pierre Vaneck's liaison man from the FFI to the Allies-but, then, these are the only parts whose bare bones display anything like a speck of meat...

...These good folk commit a book apiece to memory, and are named after their books: Machiavelli's The Prince, Stevenson's Weir of Hermis-ton, or Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles (Western civilization, it seems, has some pretty slender underpinnings...

...others even harbor books, considered to be the root of evil untogetherness...

...Riding home on the monorail, Montag meets Clarisse, a young woman who still reads and feels...

...Had the budget been bigger, the set and costume design could at least have avoided the clumsy coupling of the futuristic with the contemporary, sometimes almost as ludicrous as in Alphaville...

...Montag, an exemplary fireman, is tireless at unearthing and destroying books that rebellious spirits have ingeniously concealed...

...for spectacles, he erects musical towers of Babel...

...Add to this ostentatious sexual display, faisand?© photography, bathetic dialogue ("I think I can fight against everything except this fatigue...

...Donald Pleasence merely repeats his customary performance, which, like the Reverend Chasuble's sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness can be adapted to almost any occasion, joyful, or, as in the present case, distressing...

...Walter Matthau, an actor who looks like a half-melted rubber bulldog, delivers the wisecracks for whatever they are worth...

...As for the actors Fran?§oise Dorl?©ac continues to strike me as a shrunken head bordered on one side by a waterfall of hair, on the other by an undulating landscape of body, and on none by talent...

...A more painful letdown is Roman Polanski's Cul-de-sac...

...As the oafish Cinderella of the title, Lynn Redgrave (a girl who carries unattractiveness to heroic proportions) gives a performance that is so artfully natural, cloyingly tomboyish, and aggressively charmless that it could not fail to elicit the enthusiasm of most reviewers...

...The trouble is that Truffaut clearly likes the novel: though 1984 has already been turned into an inferior film, other tales of future fascism were still available-Huxley's Brave New World, for example, or Henry Green's Concluding, both more accomplished and rewarding...

...Ray Bradbury's book was a shaky basis for a work of art, but I had hoped that, by ignoring Bradbury's dialogue and other weaknesses, the film might come to something...

...following on the pseudo-toughness that goes before, they are the essence of nausea...

...the paltry Romy Schneider has increased her stature only in the area of the bosom, which has grown noticeably since its last exposure in Boccaccio 70...

...here, except for some clever nasti-ness, generally quite gratuitous, no artistry survives...

...But Peter Finch deserves a tribute and a lament...

...showing the hero simultaneously in close-up and medium shot with slightly different expressions...

...Some few people still play with their breasts or fur collars to maintain some semblance of feeling...

...Krzysztof Komeda's bitingly suggestive jazz score is probably the only salvageable feature, and, significantly, Komeda is the only other Pole creatively involved in this English-made film...

...As for The Fortune Cookie, it conforms to the by now firmly established Billy Wilder formula: sophomoric misanthropy...

...Poland was a blessing for the Paris-born Polanski: the constraints of socialist realism were the bars of a cage through which he performed dazzling escapes...

...The maker of that masterpiece, Forbidden Games, and of the excellent Bataille du rail, has been steadily declining of late, but I hoped that he might here do for World War II what David Lean did for Lawrence's desert warfare, or Kubrick for Spartacus' uprising...

...For small films he is capable of composing or arranging pointedly imaginative scores...

...gags, gags, and more gags (two or three of them funny, the rest tripping over their own floor-length beards...

...In vain does Truffaut come up with impressive devices: closing in, with tiny jump-cuts, on a terrified face...

...Fahrenheit 451 tells of a future Fire Brigade whose job, houses being fireproof, is to burn books...

...his conversion is accelerated by witnessing an older woman's choosing to be burned alive with her books...

...The cinematography of Gabriel Pogany strives determinedly to equal Goya or, at least, the Picasso of the blue period, and thus achieves a hammy impact or two...

...Melina Mercouri would have to get away from Dassin before we could tell whether she can still act (once, very long ago, she seemed able to...

...Georgy Girl is an attempt to blend the romantic realism of Room at the Top with the lowbrow avant-gardism of Beatles farce, and the result is a hodge-podge of the spuriously sentimental, the simple-mindedly absurdist, and the genuinely tasteless...

...A film in which all characters are perverted or feeble-minded or both is possible if it adds up to an oblique comment on something: Here almost all behavior is unmotivated or pointless, neither really funny nor exciting, only mildly distasteful, with whatever shock value mild distastefulness has...

...This intelligent, elegant, and, above all, clean actor-he is the most eloquent underplayer since Ralph Richardson, and far less studied-has been consistently undervalued and maltreated by the movies...

...But the worst current shock is Fran?§ois Truffaut's latest, Fahrenheit 451...

...I shall spare you the idiocies of the plot...

...Lionel Stander plays a serio-comic thug in much the same way he always has, and various others manage to be as undistinguished as the script will allow, which is plenty...