Books, Movies and a Film

...Spirits of the Dead is a trilogy of tales from Poe...

...Still, the photography is, under adverse conditions, so powerful, and the sights so grippingly grisly, that we cannot but show some indulgence even here...

...From time to time, he is haunted by a little girl playing with a large ball, who, as we later discover, is the Devil...

...One is The American Movie Reference Book: The Sound Era...

...Having come to the end of the road with her early phase, the totem-pole school of acting (one horrible face on top of another...

...She wants to make it with Arlo because "someday he may be an album...

...Wexler, anticipating trouble, wrote a loose story outline that he then adapted to and fused with his documentary footage...

...Meanwhile, if you possibly can, go see this extremely interesting film so that we can have, two weeks from now, a more meaningful critical dialogue...

...His orgiasts have sawdust in their heads, veins and glands, and Vadim, for all his sexual shadowboxing...

...Also around is Brigitte Bardot, voice dubbed, face daubed, and, although playing a woman of the world, looking more like a spirit of the dead than anything else in the movie...

...Putney Swope is a movie with which the underground film-maker Robert Downey comes up for air...

...The three major mistakes are the beginning, in which the callousness of a tv cameraman and sound recorder team on the site of a fatal auto accident is exaggerated...

...But, similarly, the charming young groupie, sniffling from a bad cold yet ready and stripping, her adolescent body unhampered by a rheum at the top, is equally tainted...

...True Grit is an amusing, unassuming western, antiheroic with a vengeance...

...In addition, at judiciously spaced intervals all stops are pulled from the vocal cords and facial muscles, and, once again, the art of the tremolo and the palpitating lip storms the very heavens...

...Penn's direction is spotty: The funeral scene, despite the lovely singing of Joni Mitchell's penetrating "Songs of Aging Children," is staged with the ultimate of deadly artifice...

...The other scenarist, Venable Herndon, might have something to do with it...

...But mostly there is that typical Fellini bustle: people being whisked about in cars or buttonholed and harangued by busybodies...

...Though his name makes him sound like a medieval English theologian, he has in fact none of the "sweet lovable personality" The Cambridge History of English Literature finds in the Venerable Bede...

...cannot even rise to that nadir of eroticism, dishonest titillation...

...and, near the end, the heroine's search for her missing son...

...Alice's Restaurant is a film afflicted with a lack of attitude...

...The scene is Chicago, just before and during the 1968 Democratic convention...

...And that is as indicative as anything of the movie's central schizophrenia: the hero of a swinging world, a chaste Galahad...

...In Alice's Restaurant, perhaps because of an inchoate difference between the two scenarists, a strange ambivalence obtains: The free-swinging sexuality of Alice and her consort, Ray, is contrasted with the chastity and monogyny of Arlo Guthrie...

...Under Henry Hathaway's leisurely direction, the story and dialogue (screenplay by Marguerite Roberts from the novel of Charles Portis) gallop along briskly or bumblingly, as the case may be, and achieve, along with the acting, a style best described as realistic caricature...

...It is fascinating to follow Macdonald's evolution from a serious, scholarly, politically committed writer on film into a witty, irreverent, incisive film critic whose primary commitment is to genuine art—which, to my mind, he assesses with remarkable astuteness, despite his occasional falling for such pumpkins posing as casabas as Birth of a Nation, Last Year at Marienbad, and 8V2...

...Yet from a fairly consistently funny start, Putney Swope goes on to a middle so shaky as to make you seasick just watching it, and to a dreary ending that isn't really an ending and really is dreary...

...made in British Columbia, was about as pretentious, loathsome and stupid as a film can get...

...in the hands of a very great artist, which Penn emphatically is not, the two might perhaps coexist...

...but neither the air nor Downey does much for the other...

...talking at cross-purposes and stifling amid various forms of jaded opulence that always manages to include members of the clergy and the film industry...

...Robert Duvall heads a good group of supporting players, and John Wayne and Kim Derby do very nicely at acting at acting (sic...

...Again there is disappointing color photography by a fine cinema-tographer, Tonino delli Colli...

...The other book is Dwight Mac-donald on Movies, a generous selection from 40 years of film criticism by one of our best critics, indeed by one of our pitifully few critics who deserve that appellation...

...But I agree that Miss Stanwyck deserves an award for every year in which she refrains from appearing...

...The name of the ailment is cinematic dotage, but Fellini is not old enough for a second childhood...

...But a universal sympathy is different from galloping indecision...

...Of course, in art as in life, good intentions are only good for paving stones on the most ominous of speedways, but Haskell Wexler's film has much more than that to recommend it...

...Toby bets the Devil his head that he can ride his Ferrari across the chasm...

...Instead, he is almost as much of an oversimplified flat line drawing as are the more obviously caricatured neo-Keystone Kops of Officer Obie...

...His is a megalomaniacal interior decorator's world inhabited by campy marionettes...

...If there is anything worse than Alain Delon in a starring role, it is Alain Delon in a dual role, even though two Delons together don't add up to one performance...

...Wexler, who has done very fine cinematography for several otherwise inconsiderable films, functioned here as scriptwriter, director, cinema-tographer, co-producer, and almost brought off this minor miracle-major, when you add that he also had to contend with the powers at Paramount Pictures...

...The fact that Wexler is an artist more than a polemist is demonstrated by his having shot hours and hours' worth of riot footage, but included only a chaste minimum, as severely pared down as if Aristotle had been looking over his shoulder at the movieola...

...Played by an extremely pretty, fashion-modelish Oriental girl (Tina Chen), she is supposed to be some little lotus flower that just happens to be employed in a Stockbridge pottery workshop...

...For Medium Cool is not just one of your '30s politically oriented dramas, which meant your politics Left and your esthetics left behind...

...Yet there is something uncomfortably arbitrary about a young mother in a canary yellow dress wandering in and out of gray-green melees and mayhem looking for a boy whose disappearance whispers "Device...

...The first episode...

...But the basic idea is sound, and individual scenes work very well, one or two of them brilliantly...

...There is some wild humor here, mostly one-liners...

...Or take the character of Shelly, the prototypical motorcycle and heroin addict, who, if anyone, should personify the pathos of the wilting flower children...

...this one, made in Britain, is none of those things-it is careful, inconsequential and plodding...

...The plot concerns the awakening of a hardboiled, monomaniacal tv cameraman to the facts, rather than the photographs, of life...

...It concerns an ad agency that falls into the hands of black militants—minimal militants, though, less engaged in putting up a fight than in putting the honk-ies on...

...Through most of the picture Miss Dennis sports the expression of a fly trying to be stoical about having been caught in amber, but there are muted undercurrents of the old tics, twitches, and congested sinuses...

...Arthur Penn, the director and co-scenarist, apparently cannot make up his mind whether he laughs with or laughs at the hippies and their world...

...There is a slight, consistent heightening or lowering into absurdity, but there is also a strong feeling for the unvarnished preposterousness of everyday existence...

...The award dinner, Fellini's umpteenth go at a bacchanalian gathering of the international beau and demi monde, comes across as a neon-lit stereotype...

...But a Sandy Dennis picture is always in a category by itself: an excuse for displaying the persona of Sandy Dennis, which is inexcusable...

...The blending does not jell so smoothly as in I Am Curious, and the plot sometimes looks like a slightly smudgy glass case for the display of the cinema-verite...

...It is a Lucullian feast for any temperament you may harbor for Hollywood: sanguine, choleric, or melancholy-and even the phlegmatic may get a wry laugh out of some of the pictures, or from learning, for example, that the 1961 Photoplay Gold Medal Awards for acting went to Troy Donahue and Connie Stevens...

...The breath is pummeled out of the spectator, and the meaning out of the film...

...The car makes it, but Toby's head is neatly sliced off by the wire...

...into your ear...

...making little further comment necessary...

...The sinister little girl picks it up and proceeds to use it as a new ball...

...the end, where another such accident, this time involving the film's principals, is dragged in by that hyphen linking cinema to verite, so as to round off the film and all too neatly match the national tragedy with a personal one...

...But he also appreciates good bad movies, and good unpretentious comedies, and about all of them he writes with what might be called irrepressible high spirits if he showed the slightest urge to repress them...

...Miss Dennis now affects the minimalist mode: an all-purpose budding sensitivity arrested in mid-development...

...I shall have more to say about this and various other aspects of Medium Cool next time...

...And the very idea of the Devil as an impudent little girl seems to be cribbed from Bunuel's Simon of the Desert...

...Particularly disheartening is the indifferent cinematography by the great Claude Renoir...

...Dede Allen was, once again, Penn's imaginative film editor...

...Thank You All Very Much is the latest Sandy Dennis film, and would that it were the last...

...Even such a scene as Toby's maniacal night drive, where, as in some other sequences, Fellini tries for expressionistic or surreal effects, fails to achieve the desired excitement...

...He is willing mostly because he has been promised a fabulous sports car as part of the deal...

...Medium Cool impresses me as a landmark in the new American cinema—more for its intentions than for its achievement, yet in a field so technically hypertro-phied and artistically backward as the American film, Medium Cool deserves credit for striking out, at long last, in the right direction...

...Herndon's best-known play, Until the Monkey Comes, though by no means untalented, is one of the nastiest dissections of modern youth...

...In which case you'd be greatly mistaken...

...The whole thing is a controlled joke, but one that you are more inclined to believe than most ramrod-straight tales of how the West was won...

...Arlo, like the gallant troubadour he is, rejects Reenie (deliciously embodied by Shelley Plimpton), just as he later rejects Alice...

...the exaltation of a commune living in a deconsecrated church is contrasted with the pathetic outcome of the experiment, which, even so, is viewed much more favorably than the other world of adult squares...

...He runs from the dinner, jumps into his new sports car, races madly through sleeping villages, and comes up against a fallen bridge...

...A wire is strung across the road to keep motorists away...

...he then shocks them all with an embarrassing confession of how he ruined his life...

...Fellini has stumbled into the same pitfall that is already crawling with our novice cineastes: swirling, aimless movement mistaken for the pinnacle of filmic expressiveness...

...Everybody here, villain or justicer, is at best fallible, and at worst inspiredly erratic...

...Occasionally, the dialogue has some bite to it, and there is one scene in a television studio where Toby is being interviewed that is genuinely funny and knowingly directed...

...Here, the warring attitudes produce fragmentation and nervous dishevel-ment...

...Not bruddy rikery...

...There may be worse film-makers than Vadim, but no one can surpass him in spiritual rottenness...

...Giuseppe Rotunno, another excellent cameraman, comes to grief with a series of heightened color-istic effects that refuse to coalesce into a world of a different color...

...But the Army physical, although by now a bit of a comic commonplace, is managed skilfully and emerges, except for an obvious travesty of a tough noncom, filled with fresh and humane humor...

...Fellini's segment is considerably superior to the others, but vastly inferior to the old good Fellini, who, it seems, will never come back...

...His criticism brims with shrewd common sense and his style is so appealingly forthright that you could take it for the easiest thing in the world to do...

...Either attitude is possible...

...The film is not much better than this outline...

...Later, he finds conventional happiness with Mari-chan, the film's most improbable character...

...But the real disappointment is the third episode, Fellini's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head...

...Indeed, even a seemingly kindly, idealistic landlady, an old friend of Woody's from "the Movement," proves to be a harpy: in exchange for a loan, she would extract from Arlo a pound of fleshly love...

...And Photoplay's top actress award for both 1966 and 1967 went to Barbara Stanwyck, even though the last movie listed in her filmography is The Night Walker, 1965...

...equally inept...

...In this freely updated tale, Toby Dammit, a bibulous, played-out English movie star (well acted by Terence Stamp, whose presence may account for jocular allusions to Pas-olini, though there are in-jokes of every kind) comes to Rome to do a western that is to be an allegory of the Christ story...

...Let us clarify: Art is not expected to—is, in some circles, expected not to —have preconceived notions about life...

...That last scene is crucial and necessary: It provides the unifying thread on which all the documentary shots are strung...

...There is an award dinner in Dam-mit's honor at which the usual decadent Fellini revelers watch Toby make a drunken fool of himself as he garbles a speech from Shakespeare...

...Here, at best, one can get a laugh out of Jacques Fonteray's costumes, the ultimate in Folies-Bergere medievalism: We are treated to sheer medieval nightgowns, see-through medieval bodices, bared medieval midriffs, and any number of interesting fashions to be burned at the stake for...

...Metzengerstein," was directed by Roger Vadim...

...The penultimate one, A Cold Day in the Park...

...And the frightening thing about it all is that it probably prefigures quite accurately the further boring orgiastic bustle to which we shall be subjected in Fellini's Satyricon...

...A few movies should be succinctly noted...

...William Wilson," the second episode, directed by Louis Malle, is equally remote from Poe's story, equally lurid, and, sad to say...

...accosting or being accosted by mysterious women to no particular avail...

...The chief frisson is that Jane Fonda's love interest is played by her brother, Peter, but since he cares more for his horse than for Jane, and perishes before either passion could be consummated, no new frontiers are conquered...