Prologue: "Reality is too complex, so you make it fiction to make it comprehensible." What this fiction is about, according to its tentative original title, is "Tarzan vs. IBM." Godard takes his hero from the public domain, the pulp domain — Lemmy Caution, a sort of Gallic Mike Hammer — …
Slack, poky, capricious, meandering improvisation on an American crime novel by Dolores Hitchens, one of the more -- one of the many -- ephemeral efforts from the salad days of Jean-Luc Godard. (Or, as he is credited here, Jean-Luc Cinema Godard.) To see this film today is to understand perfectly …
Histrionic history lesson, with Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole showing their stuff, or stuffing their show, as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, and His Royal Majesty Henry II, respectively, once inseparable friends, driven apart by the demands of their posts. On the tongues of these actors, talkiness becomes talkier. …
Satyajit Ray pursues his interest in Women's Issues into the past century, with an autobiographical Tagore story about a neglected wife's gradual attachment to a scholarly cousin (the Tagore figure). The pursuit, as usual, is a cautious and circumspect one, maybe a little too much so, and the wife as …
Not the first project that Buñuel undertook in France, but the one that signalled his thorough Frenchification: more refinement, more elegance, more finesse. The Octave Mirbeau novel, which Renoir had adapted into a synthetic Hollywood production in 1946, was felt by some (perhaps predominantly Renoir partisans) to be too Buñuelian …
Stanley Kubrick's scattershot spoof on the military in the push-button age. Several of the players — Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott, and Peter Sellers in two of his three roles — have their own assigned areas well under control, while Kubrick darts helter-skelter in eagerly salivating pursuit of comedy material …
The second of the Bonds. Istanbul, a gypsy revel, a horde of rats in a dank underground passage, and so forth. The main event is the close-quarters, hand-to-hand combat, back and forth in adjoining train compartments, between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw, his hair dyed Nazi blond. Shaw and Lotte …
Carl Dreyer's final film (he lived four more years, but was unable to launch his pet project on Jesus) contains some of the most rarefied black-and-white photography -- very soft and gentle -- in the history of cinema. Or history of still photography either, for that matter. And indeed the …
The first of the Bond movies self-consciously to flout the tendency of some commentators to tsk-tsk about the sex and violence of the series, and the first of them to exhibit a formidable degree of self-assurance about establishing a separate identity from the Bond books. Aside from all that, and …
The Beatles’ hyperthyroid first film, directed by Richard Lester with a sense of comic and cinematic inventiveness — funny, silly, and stupid, by turns — that never stops asserting itself for a minute.
Commie propaganda has never had a champion capable of rising to the cause in a manner as distinctly and visually sumptuous as Mikhail Kalatozov’s (The Cranes are Flying). Politically facile? You bet! Sexually on par with Hef’s Playboy philosophy? Damn straight! But with images such as this, who has time …
Strange artifact unearthed thirty years later and co-promoted by Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola: a Russian celebration of the birth of her Communist sister, Castro's Cuba. Director Mikhail Kalatozov, best known for The Cranes Are Flying (1957), was thinking in terms of an Eisensteinian epic. Yevtushenko had a hand in …
The precocious first feature of Kevin Brownlow (better known as a film historian and preservationist), begun when he was eighteen and completed six years later. It has a viable alternative-universe premise -- what if the Nazis had won the war and occupied England? -- but it hasn't the wherewithal to …
Unbuttoned Billy Wilder bedroom comedy, set in Climax, Nevada (joke). Kim Novak, a sinfully undervalued actress, is very touching as a small-town chippie with a bad head cold and some flattering blouses. Dean Martin winkingly kids his "swinger" image, and Ray Walston and Cliff Osmond overplay abominably. However, the dullsville …