HOLLYWOOD JUNK AND INSPIRED IMPORTS
Talbot, Daniel
ten (or twenty) years was crude and amateurish. Except for the ending— huge blasts of mawkish peace-propaganda—this film has a lot of first-rate camera work, some decent acting, a fine sense of...
...The climax to this primal intuition is surely one of the great moments of film making...
...The first 35 minutes of The Lovers is, technically speaking, almost perfect movie-making—in story, acting, pacing, and shot-framing...
...The plaintive Indian musical score is used perfectly and the photography has that apocalyptic quality of catching trees, rooms, people as we configurate them in their most vital forms...
...He quits his job, grows a beard, wanders throughout India with his novel in a rucksack, which he eventually throws away, a man hopelessly destroyed, a Van Gogh in density of depression...
...There, amid the ritual splendor of a comfortable Hindu family preparing for the marriage ceremony, he lies on the grass by a river, napping, dreaming, drinking in the sunset and river people at work and play...
...He is a humanist, a poet, a realist, unsentimental but majestically romantic...
...And now for Satyajit Ray's new film, The World of Apu, which is nothing less than a masterpiece...
...A Girl in The Mist is charming— similar in handling to some of the Pagnol films...
...Some of the background shots of disturbed concrete walls reminded me of the street poetry of Aaron Siskind's photography...
...Black Orpheus has gorgeous color, a nutty adaptation of the Orpheus legend, and all the footage you would happily want to see on those exciting Brazilian Negroes...
...I was unable to see the first two films of which The World of Apu comprises a trilogy and so I comment on this film slightly out of context...
...Every inch of celluloid is the work of an inspired man...
...No amount of cajoling convinces the boy, although he finds himself constantly casing Apu...
...Carmen Comes Home is crudely made, but there is enough shrewd humor in it to satisfy the most humorless person...
...He is less interested in his novel now...
...I wish Eric Johnston would see this film—along with Tom, Dick, Harry (or Mary Jane...
...Sweden sends us an Ingmar Bergman film, A Lesson in Love, and this is the maddest Bergman I've yet seen...
...England sends us Sapphire, an engrossing, competent murder melodrama with a race angle...
...if you admire Bergman, this film will serve as a comic pastiche of some of his other films...
...Except for the ending— huge blasts of mawkish peace-propaganda—this film has a lot of first-rate camera work, some decent acting, a fine sense of human warmth, and a partially convincing story...
...The story concerns a young Indian, Apu, living in poverty in a seedy cell of a room in Calcutta...
...This sounds like a psychotic's dream in our world today but as Ray portrays this beautiful Indian it comes through as real as you can possibly imagine...
...His wife goes to her parents when she becomes pregnant and then dies in childbirth, leaving behind a son...
...One day his best friend invites him to the country to attend a wedding...
...I am sure that any artistically intentioned American film maker seeing these films will walk out of the movie house with heartburn, a migraine headache, and funny stomach noises—not, mind you, the result of disliking them but because he cannot be making similar films under similar conditions in the United States...
...It has some humorous footage of Jamaican Negroes in London making fun of John Law which reminded me of the desperadoes in Isaac Babel's short stories, Benya Krik and The Gangster...
...The 400 Blows is by far the best of the four, an inspiring documentary-like film of a young boy whose view of the world, when we meet him, has already been jaundiced by malice, stupidity, apathy, and institutional cruelty...
...The Cousins, too, is well made...
...The news of her death, in a scene of this kind of tragic revelation that need never be done again on the screen, shatters Apu...
...he prefers the luxury of this new experience...
...With this film Satijyat Ray emerges, in my opinion, as the outstanding film artist of the new generation...
...Apu leaves a handful of jewels behind to pay for boarding the boy out, and as he walks off the child follows him...
...The picture is Flaubert vulgarized and, contrary to the general opinion that the big love scene was delicately and tastefully handled, I think it suffered from not being more pornographic...
...Even so, I haven't been moved by a film so profoundly since Bicycle Thief...
...The finale of this story centers around how Apu tries to convince his child that he is the father, that he loves him, and that he wishes to take him back to Calcutta...
...His best friend seeks him out and urges him to return to his son, who, fatherless, has been growing up a demon child, unhappy, violent, poorly tended by his grandparents...
...I particularly enjoyed Vasily Merkuryev in the role of an authentic pater familias, a sight I have not seen anywhere in a long time...
...For no really explainable reason he decides to do so, at the risk of losing his freedom and his novel...
...Apu gets a job as a typist...
...I particularly liked the catlike, profoundly sensual performance of Juliette Mayniel...
...It has some great leg-pulling scenes of body-banging, head-bopping, and furniture-breaking...
...Five years later we see him toiling in a mine in Central India...
...The first film contains some powerful moments but suffers from repetition...
...he aspires to live, notwithstanding lack of food, clothes, and possibility of perpetual material and status failure, as deeply and meaningfully as possible...
...Apu, who is delineated as a Christ figure in appearance and behavior, is working on a novel, and his desire to complete it possesses him...
...From Japan—The Human Condition, Carmen Comes Home, and A Girl in The Mist...
...When the groom suddenly goes berserk Apu is asked to marry the girl else she will be cursed...
...From France comes The Cousins, The Lovers, The 400 Blows, and Black Orpheus...
...All the Bergman excesses show up here...
...He does not advance his perceptions by logic but by some well-ordered intuitive process that convinces the beholder of their absolute truth, so that the hero's trajectory, which in a plot precis borders on fantasy, is plausible and in fact could not be otherwise...
...He knows more about people in simple and complicated human situations than any director I can think of...
...They return to his room in Calcutta and, strangers to each other, begin falling in love in some of the most poetic scenes of early marital days yet done on the screen (a hairpin on the pillow, taking turns at fanning each other at breakfast, childlike staring at each other's face and body...
Vol. 24 • February 1960 • No. 2
