On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon Transition or Entropy? Strange things are happening to form in films. Thrillers don't thrill any more, romance does not seem very romantic, tear-jerkers don't jerk a...
...One is left with two very sad bad tastes in the mind...
...I kept watching the audience...
...This slick film uses plot devices like a fancy bank robbery and technical devices like a vastly subdivided screen with multiple images repeating, augmenting, or clashing with one another...
...But no, she goes to precarious and absurd lengths to perform grotesque executions—at least one of which strikes me as physically impossible, and two others as extremely improbable, presupposing well-nigh impossible conditions...
...But, alas, Almond's writing goes pretentious: From straight ghost story, toward the end and without warning, we get an ultra-Jamesian turn of the script, and, like the heroine's father and brother in the Gaspe Bay, the film drowns in a squall of bogus depth psychology...
...Based on a trashy mystery novel by William Irish, it tells of a girl on the verge of suicide because her childhood sweetheart was sniped down on the church steps just after their wedding...
...this, coupled with his Teutonic accent and somehow adventitious intensity, makes for a mannered, anaphrodisiac performance...
...The other sadness concerns Jeanne Moreau...
...I am not sure whether the old forms are no longer viable, or whether the current crop of film-makers have simply lost their understanding and love of these forms, without, however, coming up with anything better...
...A thriller, perhaps even a psychological thriller, without thrills and without psychology...
...Julie's love for David is shown in one brief and rather inept flashback, and in one quite prosaic affirmation of it by Julie herself later on...
...Then, neither Truffaut nor his co-scenarist Jean-Louis Richard qualifies as a psychic deep-sea diver...
...Moreover, the mode of killing would have to make sense: If she finds that poison works easily, as it does with the second victim, she would stick to that...
...The movies constantly sprout these constant nymphs...
...Unless what all this means is that the old can no longer be depended on...
...The fact that she is willing to kill for that love still does not make it a tangible presence to be empathized with...
...Truffaut has called the film a love story...
...I am all for finding the new, but not at the cost of making hash of the old and dependable...
...Now take Interlude, the initial effort of a young Britisher, Kevin Billington...
...The first pertains to Truffaut: He is clearly not a sophisticated, discriminating, broadly intelligent person on the evidence of bis last three films shown here...
...If this were a study of sexual pathology, of a virgin getting her kicks from what seems to be a holy crusade but is in fact profane, prurient killing, the film might have its impact and meaning...
...As the aristocratic, suffering wife, Virginia Maskell looks halfway between Virginia Woolf and a horse...
...What do we get, then...
...The problem is that in order to milk the lushness of the emotional embroglio—love versus duty, or lust versus successful insurance detective's bonus, or cat and mouse with the roles and sexes continually reversed—all plausibility, to say nothing of construction, is abandoned...
...All we get is the improbable adventures of a blank, two-dimensional avenger dressed always in black or white?whether for symbolism or for mere color contrast hardly matters...
...The two women are no better...
...To begin with, casting Jeanne Mo-reau as a virgin is about as convincing as casting Lassie as a vegetarian...
...the maiden and the married maestro is an infallible tear-jerker, complete with that highly satisfying Freudian symbol, the baton...
...There you have it: Film after film goes bad on us trying to be more or less or other than it was cut out to be...
...the Gaspe peninsula, in Georges Dufaux's exciting color photography, picturesque to a fault...
...at a relatively early age, she already looks ravaged and utterly spent...
...This lands Truffaut in equivocations, all the more so since each victim is allowed only about 15 minutes on screen, or less than enough for complexities to reach beyond the sophomoric...
...If the film were a real mystery, we would have to follow Julie as she tracks down the five men...
...It may be added that Truffaut does display, here and there, a directorial nicety, and that Raoul Cou-tard continues to be one of the world's finest cinematographers?too good for this film as he is too good for Godard...
...And she is on a sacred, death-dealing mission...
...Where the film falls down completely is in the casting and acting...
...Werner carefully pitches every utterance an octave higher or lower than appropriate...
...It may be a period of transition, but it feels more like entropy...
...And Gerry Fisher's color photography—or it is just a bad print—makes England's greenswards look like layers of bluish-green roach powder...
...Among the performers, the lovely Alexandra Stewart is wasted on a non-part, but the subtle Michel Bouquet suggests a hotbed of petty convolutions with his portrayal of an aging and impoverished provincial swain...
...Barbara Ferris as the sweet young thing is neither very sweet nor very young, and certainly not very attractive...
...But in that highly stylized masterpiece, where landscape and architecture must correspond to human moods rather than to topography and actuality, such license is justified...
...Consider Francois Truffaut's latest, The Bride Wore Black...
...Indeed, there is a clumsy step in that direction: Julie seems to be falling for the painter who is her penultimate target (she shoots him with the bow and arrow with which she poses for him as the chaste huntress, Diana—but, of course, not until she has posed for him for a good, long time...
...It seems that there was a group of five men involved in the sniping...
...Ice has been melting in many a film about the North yearning for spring, but never with such understated jubilance and in such emotionally charged extreme closeups as here...
...Any supposedly intricate situation that could be resolved as simply as having a small tape recorder hidden in one of Miss Dunaway's excess bits of clothing while McQueen charmingly (and repeatedly) confesses his guilt, lacks that minimum of credibility without which a film of suspense becomes a film of self-indulgence...
...In what sense, conversely, could Bride be a love story...
...Thrillers don't thrill any more, romance does not seem very romantic, tear-jerkers don't jerk a single tear...
...Furthermore, there is never any suspense: Everything proceeds so effortlessly for Julie, and there is such an aura of (unconscious) camp about it all, that we never doubt she will polish off her five little Indians...
...Yet a possibility does present itself...
...So these killings are there mostly for their unfunctional, estheticizing weirdness, suitable to Edgar Poe but not to the efficient, modern mystery...
...not an eye was moist...
...we shall call this the Artemis artifice...
...Truffaut intends Julie to be, as he said in an interview, the "absolutely chaste woman...
...and the nature, Quebec towrrfolk, and goose-pimple scenes, under Paul Almond's direction, apt and artistic...
...It doesn't work...
...as it is, we do not even find out how she unearthed their identities—after the shooting, they split up and discontinued all contact among themselves—let alone how she managed to discover their whereabouts...
...Dimly aware of the moral void—a Julie killing five people of whom only one can be truly guilty?Truffaut tries to make each victim somewhat irrelevantly blameworthy (a playboy, a satyr, a bit of a fascist) but not too much so lest we lose sympathy for him...
...Here it merely looks arbitrary, finicky, unsugges-tive...
...one by one she seeks them out, makes them fall for her, and kills them each more bizarrely than the one before...
...In fact, it is neither...
...Finally, Truffaut has tried to create an imaginary landscape: He has shot scenes pell-mell around Paris, in various parts of the South of France, and even in England...
...His first three were quite wonderful, but patently or latently fed on personal experience...
...but underneath all that it is only interested in one thing...
...The situation is piquant, the mise en scene lavish (though not always in the best taste: Faye Dunaway's gowns, coiffures and, above all, hats become progressively more insufferable), and Steve McQueen has undeniable charm, even if not exactly of the Beacon Hill variety...
...Besides, both women are afflioted with hairdos out to sabotage their faces...
...I recall offhand Elisabeth Bergner, Katharine Hepburn, Susan Peters, and Joan Fontaine yearning to make beautiful music with the man who elicits it so beautifully...
...But this script by Leo Langley and Hugh Leonard is utter balderdash, wallowing in a stream of platitudes and unredeemed by any directorial invention—even the borrowed plumage was already moth-eaten...
...It's about a sweet young thing's ultimately hopeless love for a great conductor...
...Damn it, it is my youth, too, that she is prematurely dragging down with her...
...First it is an affair, then a love affair...
...and all the time the gorgeous sleuth is trying (especially in bed) to get the goods on her plush lover...
...Instead of killing herself, though, Julie decides to avenge David's death...
...Or take Isabel, a ghost story from Canada, in which Genevieve Bujold is delightful...
...Once this was used up—disaster...
...If Oskar Werner ever was a heartthrob (as he certainly was an actor), he is now an aging Bill Buckley: the same faded blond boyishness, rabbity smile, paranoid stare, and curious vocal gymnastics...
...The idea stems from Vavventura, where a somewhat imaginary, mythic Sicily was created...
...others have taken it as a tribute to his master, a Hitchcockian thriller...
...Equally unsatisfactory is Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair...
...It wants to exploit a luxurious Boston millionaire setting, against which a sexy, bank-robbing nabob is hounded by a beautiful, beddable insurance detective...
...it is a piece of junk...
Vol. 51 • August 1968 • No. 15
