On Screen

...Just because Godard repeats his pretentious inanities, I see no need for me to repeat myself...

...A more serious grievance concerns the exhibiting of the film: I doubt that so vacillating a product should be turned into a road show...

...Let us give credit where credit is due: Godard's vision is of a piece, insofar as total chaos can be said to be of a piece...

...David Watkin's color photography knows exactly how to coddle or jolt the eye, and the marvelous background music of John Addison often surpasses the foreground...

...By "watch-able" I mean something that steadily holds your interest, nourishes your eye, and does not insult your brain...

...Only a crazy auteur theorist (if that is not sheer redundancy) could persist hereafter in respecting Losey—so solidly are the film's flat feet planted on the rock bottom of taste...

...If it is a woman's picture, it is the new woman's, and Stewart Stern's screenplay has not only the ring of authenticity but also the gift of modulating tones with considerable finesse...

...Was he greater than Daddy Gustav...

...etc., etc...

...That should be worn on a day when it rains like piss—I was having tea with the Duchess when she used the selfsame expression...

...Basing the movie on a prize-winning story by an Argentinian postal clerk, Losey has come up with the prize specimen of his own genre: a cross between pseudopsychological grand guignol and pseudostylish tragicomedy of manners...

...One of the apter aspects of the film, besides Danilo Donati's convincing costumes and the generally sound art direction, is the editing bv Reginald Mills...

...This consists almost entirely of blue-penciling, though not quite...

...She drifts from one fruitless experience to another: masturbation, religious revivals, a fellow teacher's lesbian advances, a prosperous undertaker's lifeless attentions, frustrated attempts at mother love toward her pupils and ghastly daughter love toward an exasperating mother...

...but only ripe humanity, a sense of really meaning the poetry (not Shakespeare's greatest), can make them tragic...

...You bet your shiny arse...

...Most impressive among the newer comers are Don Gordon, who plays the eponymous detective lieutenant's sidekick with a loyal doggedness that always remains just this side of stolidity, and Jacqueline Bisset, who brings to the stock part of the hero's girl friend, complete with embarrassingly noble platitudes, insuperable loveliness and intelligence...

...In the last two months [I've had] a masseuse, two faculty wives, a toney little black lady majoring in political science...

...The only episode approaching true wit is one in which the cosmos-trotting heroine is to be tortured to death inside a pleasure machine, an orgasm-organ...

...in all these Yates displays sensitivity to details and a fundamental affection for the grainy texture of life...

...Nevertheless, he has conjured up here, with help from others, somt remarkably faithful period atmosphere, so that even what has drawn most criticism—the cartoon sequences and the emphasis on glaring social contrasts—is truly Victorian, and worthy of corresponding passages in Dickens...

...She was so proud of her breasts, those fantastic, opulent, mother-of-pearly globes...

...Only Robert Vaughn makes a scheming politician a bit too obvious, but then so do our politicians...

...Tony Richardson resembles Zeffirelli in more ways than I care to mention, except that he is more derivative...

...Gayne Rescher's color photography is poor, but Jerome Moross' score has a nice American folk quality, even if it is a bit of a steal from his own music for that delicious stage musical, The Golden Apple, of which someone could make a smashing film...

...But with a difference: It is more real, more restrained, more literate...

...Certainly it is their youthful innocence that makes these lovers lyrical...

...Finally she goes off, with her mother trailing along, to a new job in Oregon...

...Only Estelle Parsons is a bore, giving the same bovinely giddy performance she now dispenses in every part on stage or screen...

...I discount the frightened mumblings of "No...

...Examples: "I couldn't rape a randy elephant...

...I am not overfond of crime pictures, but Bullitt strikes me as a good one, and the most watchable movie in some time...

...As superproductions go, The Charge of the Light Brigade is preferable...

...He is a kind of earthy Cary Grant, but you can find in him succulent bits of Gable, Cooper, and Spencer Tracy as well—besides what is uniquely his own...

...The supporting parts are ably handled, with Kate Harrington outstanding as the usurping yet pitiable mother...

...The stuff is plainly that of women's magazines and women's pictures...

...It is regrettable to have both leading ladies in such a dashing film seemingly vie with each other for this year's Homeliness Award, just as it is misguided to entrust the gallantly swashbuckling lead to David Hem-mings, who, besides being a mediocre actor, looks in long shots like something out of Planet of the Apes...

...Rachel is a 35-year-old school-marm who, at the exact middle of her life, finds herself in the selva oscura of a boring provincial town, without love and exploited by a dreary mother...

...But factitiousness, whichever way and however thin you slice it, remains factitiousness...

...To all this, Elizabeth Taylor bequeaths every kind of bad acting and a willingness to wallow in swinishness of every sort that looks more and more like a predilection...

...Was he stupendous, stupendously gentle and also brutal...

...At last a man comes along, takes her and leaves her pregnant...

...In his staging of the play for the Old Vic, Franco Zeffirelli at least had an idea: to convert Shakespeare into a precursor of Arthur Laurents and give us a kind of West Side Story minus the music...

...George Tabori, one of our leading pretentious hacks, has written a script exclusively made up of arrogant cutenesses, supposedly daring vulgarisms, and arrant pseudo-poetics...

...But at least Miss Fonda, even if approximately clothed, remains omnipresent, lending grace, suavity, and a jocund toothsomeness to a foolish comic strip that emerges, in the movie version, a foolish comic strip...

...Rota established himself as one of the great film composers with his work for early and middle-period Fellini films, as well as other brilliant scores, e.g., for Visconti's Rocco and Clement's This Angry Age...

...here, moreover, the sur-really imbecile dialogue uncomfortably clashes with the visual verismo...

...Thus Juliet's two important soliloquies are omitted, "Gallop apace" and the potion-drinking speech, as is the moving final exchange with Romeo, "O God, I have an ill-divining soul...

...Another master of the phony ("who has the advantage of coming from the land of boloney) has now emitted his film version of Romeo and Juliet...

...Typical of Southern and of Roger Vadim, the director and Miss Fonda's husband, is the submersion of some vaguely funny lines and situations in masses of spurious chic and gutless parlor sadism...

...True, the film tends to verge on dulness...

...but for such prices the public is at least entitled to a larger screen than that of the Fine Arts Theatre, and a projectionist who will not add his own vacillations to those of the film...

...We are asked to believe that an insane young heiress (Mia Farrow) finds a whore (Miss Taylor) to be the exact look-alike of her dead mother and that, apparently believing her to be mom, she installs her in that role in the fabulous, vast Edwardian mansion she inhabits absolutely alone...

...Granted, almost any film that starts with Jane Fonda in the nude is doomed to going downhill from there...

...For one thing, the story—or whatever one should call the haphazard incidents serving as pedestal to the Crimean episodes—is insignificant and un-compelling...

...Was Daddy Albert a great lover...

...Connoisseurs and would-be connoisseurs of chaos are urged to see The Secret Ceremony, in which Joseph Losey, George Tabori and Elizabeth Taylor combine their considerable lacks of talent and good sense to produce a film that, worse than bad, is mili-tantly loathsome...

...For three acts that worked quite well...

...I wonder how much each of the trio was paid for writing one-and-one-third words into Shakespeare...

...Pseudomother and 22-year-old backward nymphet enter into a sadomasochistic and paralesbian relationship, with mom warding off shrikish female relatives and daughter carrying on a taunting quasi-affair (perhaps even consummated—the film makes nothing clear) with her worthless and lecherous stepfather, an Anglified American college professor, for which part Robert Mitchum is ideally unsuited...

...All the same, despite excellent bits, The Charge of the Light Brigade is not a satisfying film...

...The acting is appealing, not the least so because of the large number of new or newish faces...

...A kind of love-hate also develops between Mitchum and Miss Taylor, and, aside from three-way sadism, we are treated to various forms of exhibitionism and voyeurism, a demented false pregnancy, suicide and murder...

...Terry Southern is the northernmost among some eight, mostly French or Italian, perpetrators of this science-fiction grotesque, a kind of Candy in the sky with zircons...

...There is a gulf between the words and the faces, between unmarked, unmarred bodies and speeches lined with wisdom and puckered with wit—a gulf of audiovisual dissociation of sensibility...

...The girl may be nominally under 14, yet she represents, along with youthfulness, that fruition of the feminine principle that takes years of acting experience on top of years of experience in living to manifest itself...

...As might be expected from Zeffirelli, he unleashes a great deal of centrifugality—some of it effective, much of it distracting—and a minimum of respect for the text...

...Another slight disappointment is Nino Rota's music...

...perhaps Horace Greeley's advice holds good for a not-so-young woman as well...

...but that is a brazen plagiarism and vulgarization of a superb invention in Alfred Jarry's Le Surmale...

...The color cinematography of Pasquale de Santis is merely adequate, and Zeffirelli does not help much with such hoarv tricks as framing Friar Laurence's head during most of the potion-preparing scene with a retort curving hammily around the edges of the shot...

...San Francisco, made to look ludicrous in Petulia, here reasserts itself as one of the world's most photogenic cities, and William A. Frakes has color-photographed it with tasteful understatement, though he excels with interiors where such materials as wood become almost preternaturally substantial...

...Two further complaints...

...In his film, Zeffirelli has no clear-cut idea, except perhaps to give us a Romeo and Juliet for teeny-boppers and pederasts...

...Though this score is better than what he did for Zeffirelli's Shrew, its simplistic main theme falls as short of Prokofiev (with whom, alas, it must compete) as Zeffirelli does of Shakespeare...

...Lately, however, he has declined...

...But I do want to disagree with those who consider the first half of the film superior to the second...

...There are still some nice small movies left, our stars be thanked, even in America...

...The two chief assets of Bullitt, however, are its star and director...

...When the director cannot divert our attention by avalanches of movement, he resorts to cutting...

...but something always saves it...

...the "Come vial" soliloquy, which goes on for some 45 lines, has been rewritten bv the scenarists in four words: "Love, give me strength...

...Worst of all, Losey insists on treating this garbage as mystic ritual, a sumptuous moral parable, the unveiling of existential enigmas...

...The careful viewer of Weekend will find all the Godardian hollow ostentation equally present throughout, with this difference only: The focus is closer, the field of vision narrower in the beginning, so that we are confronted with what might seem merely mini-megalomania...

...But three other cutters set an unusual tribute: Franco Brusati, Masolino D'Amico, and Zeffirelli himself are credited with something called "screenplay...

...Olivia Hussey (despite a supererogatory layer or two of actual puppy fat) and Leonard Whiting are attractive youngsters, but even if they were much better actors than they now are, they could not make us believe their intenser gestures and expressions, their more piercing utterances...

...McQueen improves with every picture, and has by now perfected his charmingly paradoxical gift for making extroversion look like something very introverted and profound...

...For once, Richardson succeeds in eliciting fine performances that resist the pull toward caricature...

...the pregnancy comforts her until it, too, turns out to be no more than an operable tumor...

...For another, Charles Wood's dialogue verges on the unfortunate hvperboles of military stupidity he piled up in How I Won the War...

...For this (or any other) film of his, Vadim deserves that Miss Fonda leave his bed and boredom, not to mention his cameras...

...in fact, considering the lucid book on which it is largely based, it is almost as inexcusably muddled as the British commanders at Balaclava...

...Most importantly, the final section of the film is impossible to follow...

...He turns Lieutenant Bullitt, a fairly sketchy and schematic figure, into something fully rounded, by inconspicuously pouring his own humanity into the crevices of the script...

...A much less tolerable entertainment is Barbarella...

...There is a reason for the theatrical adage that no one under 40 can play Juliet properly...

...The stars in the case of Rachel, Rachel are Paul Newman, who proves himself an adroit director with this his maiden effort, and his wife, Joanne Woodward, as always a matchless portrayer of the effortful maiden...

...Steve McQueen is just about the only young Hollywood actor with incontrovertible charisma...

...Often it is Miss Woodward: She is one of those rare actresses who can put a basic lack of charm to good advantage by playing it off against a certain pathos which, coming from someone so rough-and-tumble, becomes moving rather than coy...

...This young actress from England is the best thing to have hit Hollywood in many a paper moon...

...By the latter I mean a flaccid, jaded appeal to our baser appetites, always liberally doused with essence of cop-out, resulting in an elucubrated, anemic pornography...

...John Gielgud as Raglan and Trevor Howard as Cardigan are particularly persuasive...

...There are some interesting props and actors (in that order) involved, but they are put to flabby and self-indulgent use...

...I mean performers and scenery that are sightly, dialogue that can hold its own against rice crispies, and a plot that has a working minimum of plausibility...

...For the delight of the former, we get a pair of lovers so young that their delivery of verse sags with puppv fat, and for the delectation of the latter we get fondly lingering shots of Romeo's bare bottom, and a relationship between the stripling Romeo and the older Mercutio (creepily played by John McEnery) that rivals in intimacy and tenderness the puppy love of Romeo and Juliet...

...Richardson was trying to say something about unduly heroic liberals being no less at fault than the finky old fogeys, but the intention gets lost in the battle scenes whose turmoil is partly splendid and partly a mistake...

...Equally valuable is the British director Peter Yates...

...His two climactic chases are stupendous yet believable, and he is no less good with low-key passages that merely establish character or mood...

...Bullitt meets all these requirements handsomely...

...bv various bvstanders during the dueling scenes—surely Brusati, D'Amico and Zeffirelli generously threw those in gratis...

...Cut, too, are such effective scenes as the wedding feast that turns into a funeral, and the important slaying of Paris, which alone justifies Friar Laurence's abandoning the revived Juliet in the tomb...