Film
Seitz, Michael H.
The Way We Were The Compleat Beatles should be seen by anyone under fifty and by those with the slightest interest in popular music and recent cultural history. The two-hour movie compiles, in a...
...The destination is the Adriatic island of Erimo, where the ashes of Edma Tetua, the reigning soprano of the pre-war period, are to be scattered...
...Ochs songs are also performed by Yarrow, Pete Seeger, Tom Pax-ton, and Odetta...
...Confidentially Yours When the owner of a real-estate agency in southern France is tapped as the prime suspect in a double murder (one of the deceased being his adulterous wife), he must go into hiding...
...Well-acted, original, and very Spanish...
...World War I is about to begin...
...Android Rather endearing low-budget science-fiction film, deserving of some popular and critical acclaim...
...Such charges seem to me quite ridiculous...
...The Compleat Beatles is several cuts above the ragtag television eulogies for the group...
...It is the end of an epoch...
...Kipperbang Small, pleasant comedy about the adolescent tribulations and eventual maturation of a fourteen-year-old British schoolboy...
...It's all tied together with an intelligent voice-over narration by Malcolm McDowell, and the strains of more than fifty Beatles' songs can be heard...
...Truffaut can develop a narrative with greater economy than almost any director alive, and the sheer speed of development in Confidentially Yours mitigates the film's lack of dramatic content...
...For some years now—since La Dolce Vita— Frederico Fellini has increasingly rejected realism, renounced character portrayal and traditional dramaturgy, and scorned the major artistic and intellectual currents of our time...
...The family that runs it, however, is racked by repressed sexual desires, jealousy, and corruption...
...This is the most recent work of Robert van Ackeren, a coolly imaginative German filmmaker whose earlier works are largely unknown in this country...
...Ironically, the film's androids have more character than its humans do...
...though it has garnered some praise, it has also drawn fire for pornographic pandering...
...The Compleat Beatles traces the group's evolution—from the early years in Liverpool cellar bars and Hamburg clubs to the limelight era, and ultimately to the disintegration of this most influential force...
...This murder mystery is indisputably among the lightest of Francois Truffaut's works, but it has its compensations: delightfully tuned performances in the lead roles by Fanny Ardant and Jean-Louis Trintignant, wonderful black and white cinematography by the great Nestor Almendros, and the deft touch of a master filmmaker...
...These tendencies can be seen in full relief in And TheShipSails On, twenty minutes of which are striking cinema...
...Demons in the Garden A family drama, in the mode of Luis Bun-uel, by Spain's most talented young writer-director, Manuel Gutierrez Aragon...
...His feisty secretary, although she has just been fired, assumes the task of clearing him...
...Contrary to prevailing practice in this genre, Android places greater emphasis on character than on spectacle and hi-tech achievements...
...Woman in Flames A middle-class wife and doctoral student walks out on her husband, becomes a high class prostitute, sets up house with a handsome bisexual hustler, and ends up finding that their relationship suffers from the same contradictions and hypocrisy that infect a traditional marriage...
...Unfortunately, he looks nothing like Ochs, and though he sings well, Burnett's renditions are much less powerful than the two original recordings heard on the film's soundtrack...
...Bill Forsyth's That Sinking Feeling Earliest feature filmmaking effort (1979) by the delightfully witty Scotsman who has since given us Gregory's Girl and Local Hero...
...Fellini's work reflects, in fact, a positive distaste for introspection and ideas...
...Taken together, The Compleat Beatles and Chords of Fame capture more of the spirit and feel of the period than all other recent efforts, the most paltry of which was The Big Chill...
...M Hits and Misses And the Ship Sails On In 1914, an ocean liner is boarded by a gaggle of musical and artistic luminaries...
...The movie was obviously produced on a shoestring, but it is fresh, and blessed with Forsyth's peculiar, understated brand of humor...
...His more recent films have substituted artsy imagery for reality, caricature for character development, clowning for drama, and hollow metaphor for profound thought...
...The dramatic segments are the outgrowth of a 1980 New York stage production that starred Burnett...
...A refreshing antidote to the sophomoric and routine American films that have worked the same genre—and which equated coming of age with losing one's virginity...
...An engaging bunch of wayward and unemployed Glasgow youths plan and pull off a great heist...
...Ochs's story ended tragically when he committed suicide in 1976...
...The film has generated considerable critical controversy...
...The garden of the title is a mom-and-pop grocery story that flourishes during the Franco years...
...No film about the Beatles could be complete, but director Patrick Montgomery made judicious selection of the vast material and has provided an essential document of our times...
...The two-hour movie compiles, in a crisply edited manner, just about every piece of pertinent material the filmmakers could lay their hands on: vintage stills, newsreel footage, television clips, press conferences, interviews, excerpts from the Beatles' movies, newspaper headlines, posters, record covers, and more...
...Included, too, are interviews with producer George Martin, in which he explains the origins of the innovative instrumentation on key Beatles albums...
...Still, Chords of Fame evokes the political activism of the 1960s and the disorientation many New Left activists felt in the late 1970s...
...It contains interviews with some of Ochs's musical friends and political allies—Peter Yarrow, Dave Van Ronk, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman—as well as acted scenes in which Bill Burnett plays Ochs and sings his compositions...
...Chords of Fame, a musical biography of antiwar movement troubadour Phil Ochs, is a somewhat less polished product...
Vol. 48 • April 1984 • No. 4
