On Screen

...Then there is The Swimmer, another work bearing the unmistakable signature of Eleanor Perry (writer) and Frank Perry (director...

...This is nonsense, but serves two purposes: It makes the movie more "adult," and the Catholic extremists happy?a bad marriage perpetuated is better than divorce...

...I would urge Robert Johnson ("Dear Editor," nl, June 3), to read the current issue of Film Heritage where I discuss my dislike of La Chinoise in greater detail...

...I further insist that La Chinoise tells us next to nothing about recent events in France...

...Instead, I prefer to answer briefly two interesting reader letters...

...The principals are as banal as their supposedly inferior spouses, mistresses, and friends, and we are left to derive our satisfaction from the nervous, attenuated cleverness of the script, editing, and direction...

...Boom is more of a mystery than a horror, though it is that too...

...it's a whole camp unto itself...

...Accordingly, Our Sunday Visitor (which sounds like the title of a film by Stanley Kramer, but is a Catholic publication) has already declared Petulia one of the year's ten best...

...it features Janice Rule, who contributes the only spirited performance...

...Briefly, this is a question of tone...

...If there were any indication that these characters are specially sensitive beings unjustly put-upon, all right...

...Petulia had anywhere upward of two strikes against it for being based on a book by John Haase, another of whose potboilers, The Fun Couple, I have had the misfortune to read...

...When he made his first, Repulsion, there were rumors that it was all this gifted director could raise money for...

...Just as some of the bosomy nude shots of Mia Farrow must have been faked in, whoever directed this picture must have been the brilliant Polanski's dopey Doppelganger, if not indeed his Hollywood stand-in...

...I myself get involved in the comeliness or ghastli-ness of the actresses partly because femininity affects me, partly because I think that one of the minor functions of the screen is to supply vicarious delights—esthetic, sensual, or both...

...There is enough interplay of real and unreal in this slice of imitation-life to equip a couple of plays by Pirandello?though, of course, without their art...

...rather, he loves and basically endorses these appalling mutants—as indeed Pauline Kael, whom Johnson cites with approval, also contends...

...Joseph Losey, the director, strains desperately to inject a note of art, but keeps missing the vein, if this dressmaker's dummy of a film can be said to have one...

...Among the judges of the beauty contest, by the way, one recognizes such eminent connoisseurs of trans-vestitedom as Larry Rivers and Terry Southern...

...Nothing about this film suggests the talent that once gave us Knife in the Water and Two Men and a Wardrobe...

...Penelope Gilliatt, in the New Yorker, defends this nonsense, along with the hero's implacably smart-aleck superiority, as "two ironic lifestyles devised by the two central characters" to deny the existence of all the pain and injury around them...

...When he made Cul-de-sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers, there were rumors that the producers had cut or re-edited, and seriously damaged the films...

...Godard's tone toward Francis Jeanson seems to me, "How nice, but how passe...

...The one scene that works even remotely was (we read) reshot later on by another director...

...Why cast Elizabeth Taylor as a dying old bitch (any other kind, yes), Burton as a delicate young man in his 20s, the dwarf Michael Dunn as a giant bodyguard, the pretty Joanna Shimkus if you are going to shoot her as unflatter-ingly as possible lest she steal the star's thunder, or Noel Coward at all...

...I plead guilty, but with extenuating circumstances...

...But that is absurd: How dare these shallow, well-heeled inhabitants of charmingly, exhilaratingly frolicsome San Francisco pretend that life for them is so dreadful only clowns' masks and emotional shell games can make it livable...

...In some cases, the critic cannot help focusing on some marginal detail...

...but this is either not implied, or worse yet, meant to be taken for granted...

...Having already reviewed the superb The Fifth Horseman Is Fear and the provocative Fist in His Pocket when they were seen here at festivals, what am I left with...

...As in David and Lisa, here again is the mixture of pretentiousness and naivete, of cliches waved about as if they were victory flags, of directorial artinesses so hoary and puffing that they look like a vintage motorcar race...

...The single remarkable thing here is the luxurious villa Richard MacDon-ald designed for the top of a Corsi-can cliff...

...The radical French students proved themselves both more hardheadedly purposive, and more judiciously restrained...

...though even if he had read my New Leader review more carefully, he could not have made his charges—at least not in his particular form...

...And this atmosphere prevails in the film Petulia, whose heroine proclaims, enshrines, and zealously cultivates her "kooki-ness"—a kind of premeditated devil-may-care spontaneity that should turn the most solidly anchored stomachs...

...Under the circumstances, all three would have to be a damned sight cleverer and more dependable...

...Though made out of paper and held together with spittle, it is the most gorgeous piece of neo-Renaissance Moroccan ever dreamed of...

...the few vaguely suspenseful moments could have been made by any reasonably competent hack...

...But one does get quite a sense of the precariousness, factitiousness, illusoriness of the world one lives in —so much so that emerging into the street one eyes every passing female with a shiver of suspicion...

...still others embark on autobiography or quoting overheard remarks, both of which have the disadvantage of being usually even more boring than the film...

...Well, there is Petulia, Richard Lester's first film with an American setting...

...Some critics at this point drag in an ad hoc sociology...

...I insist that Godard is not being "gently satirical" (itself a contradiction in terms) about his characters...

...In a very urbane letter ("Dear Editor," nl, June 17), Eugene Leeds rebukes me—ever so graciously—for the space and vehemence I devote to actresses whose looks please or displease me...

...Haase, a male Cali-fornian Rona Jaffe, is a specialist in rancid archness...

...Unfortunately, matters of tone are particularly hard to debate, especially when one of the debaters must be tone-deaf...

...But it is also a soulless, arbitrary, attitudinizing piece of claptrap, for all its occasional twitchings into an undeniably funny grimace...

...What makes the film fascinating is (a) how much like women these persons are, (b) how much like men these persons are, and (c) how much like neither they really are...

...The film would have been better if the backgrounds of these men (some very close to girlishness, others squat and balding) had been examined in greater detail, and if the quality of the photography were better—though there are fairly cogent explanations for both these lacks...

...This is a clever movie, the first commercial adaptation here of Resnais' technique of fragmentation, with flashbacks, flash-forwards, and just plain flash-aways...

...An hour-long documentary, The Queen, is not without interest...

...otherwise, his sanity would be in serious danger...

...The lone authentic bit of horror in the film is Ruth Gordon's performance: a sort of self-serving, nonstop tuneless singsong issuing from a decrepit butterfly that thinks itself the Empress Theodora, it is easily one of the most offensive spectacles of any year and does make Rosemary's Baby, whenever it is on view, perhaps not horrifying but certainly disgusting...

...others have invented something they call mise en scene, an almost wholly fictitious quiddity but always good for a synthetic disquisition...

...With Rosemary's Baby there are no more mitigating rumors: Polanski likes to make trashy films, and he makes them as routinely as anyone else...

...The once delightful Coward is now a mincing senior citizen of Leprechaunia, still aiming for rapid-fire repartee with one foot in his mausoleum and the other in his overdentured mouth...

...It's more than a palazzo...

...Rosemary's Baby is yet another Roman Polanski horror film...

...The kids in the film are ineffectual poseurs, fluctuating between grotesque violence and maudlin introspection...

...There is a totally unconvincing unhappy ending: Petulia abandons the hard-working surgeon who loves her and whom she seems to love, too, and goes back to her homosexual playboyish husband who, in a benign mood, breaks her ribs, and, in a less benign one, beats her to a bloody pulp...

...with the quick, fidgety pace we think of as peculiarly of our time...

...The examples he has so assiduously amassed are all from mediocre pictures or worse...

...It shows the on-stage action during the 1967 Miss All-American (a drag-queen) contest at Town Hall as well as the behind-the-scenes preparations, titivations, flirtations and tantrums...

...Why would anyone have wanted to make a film out of a Tennessee Williams play that dropped dead twice on Broadway besides falling flat in San Francisco...

...Icould go on for paragraphs on end about the trivial and wretched films of the day, some with an isolated redeeming feature (such as the photography in Hagbard and Signe), some without any (like The Long Day's Dying...