Lina Wertmuller's loudly cynical treatise on the cost of survival to human dignity. By setting her shaggy-dog tale in Fascist Europe and, ultimately, in a Nazi prison camp, she has facilitated her argument with appeals to emotions that have already been well aroused in nearby Italian films ("The Damned", "The …
Warren Beatty's self-designed vehicle (he produced and co-wrote) assigns him the role of a womanizing hairdresser who careers along a standardized course for philanderers, ending up in a heap of repentent whimpers. The beauty parlor itself is used merely as a pivot for making quick connections to various stations on …
Michael Ritchie's malicious satire of beauty pageants, while guilty of overkill, offers long, painful, and salutary exposure to the embarrassments abounding throughout the competition for the title, "Young American Miss." And Jerry Belson's script faithfully reproduces American speech and manners with some of the quality of Sinclair Lewis (at his …
This time out, Costa-Gavras, perhaps the cinema's foremost muckraker, takes his topic from the same can of worms opened by Marcel Ophuls in The Sorrow and the Pity (after that, the deluge). Specifically, the topic is a case of injustice in the courts of the Vichy puppet government so flagrant …
The grating music at the outset establishes the tone as something severe, serious, edifying. But this adaptation of the Hesse novel develops into an easily digestible lesson in humanity, along the same lines as Zorba the Greek, about a self-destructive, stuffed-shirt intellectual learning to embrace life -- learning to foxtrot, …
Truffaut, in the Seventies, divided his time evenly between the serious and the frivolous; first one, then the other. This one belongs with the first type, along with Wild Child and Two English Girls, in ping-pong opposition to Bed and Board, Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me, and Day for …
The philosophical stance of the heroine ("O" stands for obedience? object? orifice?) is undoubtedly a little severe and off-putting for the average let's-have-a-ball skinflick audience; but if the movie version of the notorious Pauline Reage novel sends titters through that audience, the blame goes mainly to the moviemaker's timidity. Just …
In the early going, Russ Meyer gives the heartening impression of having regained his fittest form, especially in the snappy business around Martin Borman's Texaco station: a chesty coquette gyrates in the doorframe of the ladies' room while the ogling attendant squabbles on the phone with his wife, an insatiable …
The Admirable Crichton with new wrinkles. A rich bitch (Mariangela Melato) dishes out undiluted contempt to the hired help on a yachting expedition, but when she and one of the sailors (Giancarlo Giannini) are cut off from the rest and marooned on an uninhabited Mediterranean island, the tables are turned. …
Unexceptional piece of Seventies exploitation, youth-gang division ("That dirty bitch! She bit my ear!"). For sure, it has some time-capsule interest in the areas of hot pants, bellbottoms, and Power-to-the-People, but no more than any number of its contemporaries. So why should it, over all those others, have been singled …
Sidney Pollack's spy thriller caters to an intellectual's tender ego, as innocence, book-learning, and beginner's luck are called upon to fend off an army of cold-blooded CIA agents and free-lance assassins. The solitary, hounded hero appears to be comfortable with thriller literature, art photography, and the New York Times, while …
Early on, there's some promising parody of Hollywood B-pictures: a flash of lightning reveals the silhouette of a spooky Addams Family mansion to be nothing more than a children's-book cut-out; a stationary car is rocked from side to side and a hose is aimed at the windshield to simulate a …
Ken Russell is ringmaster to a head-spinning series of gaudy tableaux: London in flames after a Luftwaffe raid, a pagan religious service paying frenzied tribute to plaster icons of Marilyn Monroe, a smashed TV screen spewing a mixture of baked beans and laundry suds into an ivory-white bedroom. All the …
Roy Boulting, writer-director, brings some sniggering double-entendres and a general ooh-la-la outlook to this WWII farce located in an internationally renowned Paris brothel. But he shuffles the brunt of the responsibility onto Peter Sellers, who comes up with some amusing vocal inflections and behavioral tics, but who hardly gives any …