PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM

...Though it won the Academy Award as Best Picture of 1972, The French Connection will never be thought of as more than a highly adept gangster movie which, though far from bad, is not as good as it might have been...

...Sonny, the sensitive uneasy introvert...

...Obviously it is a film that deals with cliches, but it manages to do so in a totally non-cliche way, creating » life where there was none before...

...If nothing new is allowed to come forth and flourish, what will there be for the year 2000's Godfather to uncover and revive...

...Now there is nothing too great or too small to be gloriously revived...

...the ads ask coyly, an unfortunate question, for anyone who does remembers that the comedies of the Thirties and Forties were much better than this...

...Don't ask how many times these bags get confused, or how they help the irrepressible gamine, Barbara Streisand, win dazed scholar O'Neal away from his whining fiancee...

...It lacks the emotional thrust that only the excitement of creating an original work can evoke...

...Instead of creating new types of films they concentrated essentially on remaking the old ones, ending up with a wave of neoclassicism and a concurrent financial bonanza...

...Just about unanimously acclaimed as the greatest gangster film ever made, it came close to grossing a million dollars a day at the beginning of its run, leveled off at earnings of between $50 and $80 million for the first four months, and will undoubtedly become the most financially successful film ever made...

...Coming out first was The French Connection, directed by the second of the neoclassicists, a veteran of literally hundreds of television shows, William Friedkin...

...A replay of Love Story we can do without...

...Both the cops and the robbers had an absence of feeling about them, a metallic, almost mechanical quality which, while adding to the initial fascination, ultimately limited the film...

...Remember them...

...College and graduate students of film pore over the most innocuous of old Hollywood films for portentous signs and meanings, elevating one obscure director after another—Douglas Sirk, responsible for weepy epics such as Magnificent Obsession and Imitation of Life, seems to be the latest discovery—to the status of cinematic genius...

...It is a movie made to entertain...

...The two boys whose growing to proverbial manhood are the classic oppo-sites: Duane, the cocky brainless extrovert...

...Made in Peru at a cost of nearly a million dollars, it was edited by Hopper, who took fully sixteen months to cut it down from a von Stroheimian length of more than forty hours to less than two...

...Instead of original, ingenious laugh-producing situations we have tired old wheezes that are weaker than mere ghosts of the past, so shallow that one critic called the film "a celluloid zombie...

...If you want to see movies, you've got to work a little these days," he said in an interview...

...It is the film that has everything: weddings, assassinations, dirty jokes, homilies, kidnappings, traitors, bare breasts, crooked police, wife beatings, opulence, decadence, poverty, bigotry, crosses and doublecrosses, plots, subplots, even subsubplots, and that isn't all...

...In the last analysis, The Last Picture Show has the flaws of any other replica, no matter how artfully, painstakingly, or lovingly constructed...

...More actual happenings grace The Godfather than any dozen ordinary vehicles...

...Here at last was a simple story about real people, a straightforward and decent narrative film that was so concerned with reproducing the look of old movies it was even shot in black and white...

...It is basically an old-fashioned film, packed with all the things people want to see, but put together in a modern way...

...Like a know-it-all teenager in its relentless, humorless enthusiasm to be forever contemporary, forever Now, film has often preferred to ignore its parentage, treating the past as something to be deified only when it has gone way beyond our powers of reclamation...

...Buster Keaton's films were reissued last year, Chaplin's followed in this one...

...The Godfather will undoubtedly be used as yet another hammer to pound unconventional filmmakers out of existence...

...Unsure where to go, The Last Movie erupts everywhere at once, ending in a gush of killing, screwing, wild parties, outtakes, retakes, and bad jokes that is as trying as anything ever put on the screen...

...It took another Hopper film, appropriately called The Last Movie, to halt the trend he himself had started...

...Critics gave the film the most scathing, disparaging reviews imaginable...

...Everything in the film is so neat...

...It is gangster films that are showing us the way...

...Kansas becomes involved in a harebrained Treasure of Sierra Madre scheme to locate hidden gold, as well as with a hackneyed American family whose every member turns out more snide and sadistic than the one before...

...All imitative attempts to duplicate it were bound to fail, and did, from The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart to Been Down So Long Seems Like Up to Me...

...There is a patness, especially in the plot, which continues to rankle at the back of the mind long after The Last Picture Show is over...

...It has somewhat the look and feel of those John Ford features Bogdanovich so admires, but it is also cannily updated and modernized with frontal nudity, creaking bedsprings, and frank language...

...Quite literally, never had the American movie industry seen anything like the phenomenal success of this film, so wildly popular that New York scalpers were selling not tickets but places in the ticket line for $20 and more...

...sidered only European-made films to be worthy of more than scorn...

...What passes for a plot here concerns four identical plaid bags, one containing Barbra's clothes, one the professor's rock collection, one stolen government documents, one priceless jewels...

...Perhaps Harry Langdon's or even Ben Turpin's films lurk in the on-deck circle...

...On reflection, Rider appears an amiable aberration, a one-of-a-kind film with a singular combination of invigorating outdoor photography, a superfine soundtrack, and an uncannily timely script...

...film affairs: "At this time of swift and violent social and political change, the rising middle class began to assume a more active leadership in public and private affairs, and the straightforward simplicity and uncomplicated forms of neoclassicism made a strong appeal to the stoic and austere taste of the revolutionists...

...it took nothing less than a phone call from John Ford himself to change his mind...

...There are moments of wrenching violence, but it handles even those so superbly that nothing else seems to matter...

...Which is exactly what happened...

...It is the same type of patness that flawed The Last Picture Show taken to a stultifying extreme, an endless, infinitely tiresome movie, constructed solely out of knee jerk responses...

...The Godfather is the past made vivid...

...The flaws of Bogdanovich's excessive derivativeness were even more apparent in his next film, What's Up, Doc?, an attempt to revive yet another genre, the screwball comedy...

...Inexplicably incapable, however, of realizing that the film's violence was phony, they beat up everyone in sight, causing the village priest to proclaim in inelegant woe, "Movies have bring here violence and I don't like it...

...All are from old molds, but all are vivid in a way that is distinctly contemporary...

...And present one he did...

...However, instead of Cary Grant as the absent-minded professor, we are stuck with Ryan O'Neal, and Barbra Streisand replaces Katharine Hepburn as the woman who disrupts his scholarly life...

...Ironically, in a most amazing example of perverse wrongheadedness, Hollywood not only chose to ignore for quite a while these obvious clues about its audience's wants, but actually became involved in a wave of films that were based on diametrically opposed principles...

...It had its birth with Hopper's phenomenally successful Easy Rider, which returned more than $50 million on an initial investment of $500,000...

...The Godfather has a plot of diabolical intricacy, featuring a gaggle of interlocking threads and stories that effortlessly nurture and sustain interest...

...This was the "do your own thing," "anything goes," "try-it-you'll-like-it" school of filmmaking...

...In one subject area, nominally the least respectable and least humanistic one, the films produced have been vibrant offshoots of the old stock...

...Naturally the former is dating Jacy, the most fetching girl in town, while the latter, his best buddy, is content to have his sexual consciousness raised by the love-starved wife of, of all people, the football coach...

...A perpetual time-lag appears to be in operation, obscuring the quality of a director or his films until long after his years as a director have ended...

...But people are laughing at it at a phenomenal rate...

...His intention, expressed in a letter to The New York Times, was "to present a relevant, faithful-to-character, cops-and-robbers movie like the ones we enjoyed when we were kids," presenting as examples White Heat, The Roaring Twenties, The Asphalt Jungle, and The Maltese Falcon...

...The first and most prominent fighter for the glories of the old days was a thirty-one-year-old director-worshiping film critic named Peter Bogdanovich...

...Yet not everything neoclassical in films has ended up second rate...

...While there are vague hints of sociological significance in its portrayal of the Mafia as just another big business trying to stave off competition, The Godfather for the most part does without that sort of thing...

...Topping it all is Marlon Brando in the title role, a physically small part which he turns into a large, overshadowing presence...

...Everything fits into place just a little too neatly, from Sonny finally getting his chance at Jacy to his eventual return to the coach's wife to face her inevitable tantrum, followed by the even more inevitable relenting...

...Hollywood turned up not one or two but three classically oriented directors, eager to cater to what turned out to be an overwhelming audience preference for the form, simplicity, and a-place-for-everything-and-every-thing-in-its-place plot coherence that marked American films in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood's equivalent of the Periclean Golden Age...

...Yon don't really want to know...

...They make a religion out of moviemaking, constructing torch reflectors and eerie wicker cameras...

...The simple village people, however, have other ideas...

...From the jowly, glowering, mut-N tering, gravel-voiced, and menacing Don to the rasping oldster chased around a tomato patch by his grandson, Brando reaches levels of perfection one dreams about seeing, creating not only a man but an entire lifestyle in bold, awesome strokes...

...It has excellent naturalistic acting by all of its six principals, and its photography is as finely crafted as anyone could want...

...After the chaos and confusion of these years, citizens felt the need for the disciplined orderliness, economy of means, and logical predictability inherent in neoclassical forms...

...This homage to the old days is a bit overdone, more a modernized relic than a new approach to things old and revered...

...It is that extremely rare event, a movie to relish rather than rehash, a quality film one can sit back and simply enjoy...

...Lovingly photographed by Laszlo Kovacs, who also did Easy Rider, The Last Movie takes us to a Latin American country where a Hollywood company is making The Death of Billy the Kid, Samuel Fuller directing...

...While old-time gangster characters were cardboard cutouts at best, The Godfather's are fullbodied, humanized as well as illuminated by fine, understated, totally modern acting that makes us see the people within the monsters...

...So much so that old-time actor Ben Johnson, the heart of the movie as the aging Sam the Lion, at first turned down the role because he found that frankness offensive...

...If this sounds muddled and unresolved, it gets worse...

...Doc is a direct steal from the 1938 film, Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby...

...The title of Bogdanovich's film—The Last Picture Show—was uncannily close to the name of Hopper's picture, but the general reaction could not have been more disparate...

...Since then, Fuller has been content to play the film director as superstar, guest-starring as himself in more movies —including Godard's Pierrot le Fou and Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie—than he has been allowed to direct, and he has been the subject of no less than three heavily intellectualized studies parading his once ignored virtues...

...Or else you can go see the same old Hollywood stuff...

...The rounded characters and the intelligent actors who play them are almost endless, ranging from Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duval as the Brothers Corleone all , the way to the minor nameless hoods of Sicily and Las Vegas...

...He had written glowingly on John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Allan Dwan, among others...

...The only person apparently unconcerned over the uproar that greeted this melange was Hopper himself...

...Its acting is edgy and to the point, its feeling for New York impeccable, and its instantly famous subway-car chase quite literally breathtaking...

...Filled out with touches that are distinctly "today," it is an improvement on the films of both eras, an artful neoclassical blend...

...The reasons for this are not hard to find...

...Finally and totally alienated by films which purported to be contemporary in both technique and subject matter but ended up annoyingly incoherent and surprisingly stereotyped, Hollywood's producers went the opposite way and hit the jackpot...

...The Encyclopedia Britannica's description of the circumstances which led to the Eighteenth Century's wave of neoclassicism in art and architecture reads startlingly like a catalogue of the current state of U.S...

...Notwithstanding the disaster of Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, this would be a great shame, for the film industry is still much too young to decide that all experimentation is bound to be fruitless...

...He is co-author with William Gildea of "The Future Is Now," a book about the Washington Redskins' coach George Allen, just published by Houghton Mifflin...

...So after Bogdanovich and Friedkin it fell to director number three, Francis Ford Coppola, the first graduate of a university film school to direct a Hollywood movie, to pull all the pieces together and create the neoclassical trend's first legitimate masterpiece, The Godfather...

...In America, the consensus was that Hopper needn't have agonized over his editing apparatus so long...

...In Europe, where any and all signs of American decadence are seen as enduring art, the film was well-treated and won the Best Film Award at the 1971 Venice Festival...

...The story of a small, rundown Texas town in the early 1950s, the film is in many ways a fine one...

...For instance, a man named Samuel Fuller directed between 1948 and 1963 a series of brash and gutsy action melodramas on the order of Shock Corridor, China Gate, Merrill's Marauders, and Pickup on South Street, films that got little or no domestic critical notice until Andrew Sarris lauded him as "an authentic American primitive" in an issue of Film Culture that appeared just as Fuller's career was disappearing...

...Apparently audiences have been so alienated by the mishmashs they have suffered through in recent years that anything familiar and easily understood, no matter how obviously contrived, becomes a welcome type of relief...

...Hopper, who stars here as well as directs, plays ye olde bumbling cowpoke, name of Kansas, an extra and stuntman who stays on after the company leaves, caught in the twin webs of lust for a local lady and the hope of somehow striking it rich...

...Popular though it is, this first ripple of the neoclassical Hollywood wave is far from being entirely successful...

...Fuller is the most prominent example of an overwhelming rekindling of interest in America's once belittled film past, an interest so great it is hard to recall that perhaps a decade or so back intellectuals conKenneth Turan is a staff writer for Potomac, The Washington Post magazine, as well as a film critic...

...Detailing the story of how New York City Detective Jimmy (Popeye) Doyle and his co-workers ruthlessly follow a hunch and end up smashing a multimillion-dollar heroin shipment, as well as assorted cars and human beings, The French Connection has an immediacy of excitement even the old classics would be hard-pressed to match...

...Eventually nominated for eight Academy Awards, including best picture, it was, though technically Bogdanovich's third film, compared favorably with Orson Welles' classic Citizen Kane debut...

...Yet there was a flaw here: a specific, definite lack of humanity...