Theater of Blood (1973)

Directed by: Douglas Hickox
Written by: Anthony Greville-Bell
Full credits at IMDb

One hesitates to write a bad word about Theater of Blood, a goofily highbrow splatterfest, given that it's a movie in which critics who file negative notices get murdered in manners most clever and classical. Vincent Price stars as Lionheart, a thespian who only played Shakespeare and never got a good review; he fakes his own death and then picks off, one by one, the circle of London critics who disparaged his star turns. Lionheart and his merry band of feral followers, mostly backalley drunks, kill each in the manner of a death scene from the Bard's folio: one is stabbed multiple times on the Ides of March, like Caesar; another by false friends, a la Hector in Troilus and Cressida; another beheaded in bed, as in Cymbeline. (A highlight: as Price saws off the critic's head, the decapitee's sedated wife moans, "You're snoring again!") This time, Shylock gets his pound of flesh! And so on.

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A Swedish Love Story (1970)

Written & Directed by: Roy Andersson
Full credits at IMDb

The 40-year-old A Swedish Love Story (En Kärlekshistoria) is radically different from writer-director Roy Andersson's recent work in that it isn't radical at all. Unlike late-career comebacks Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living, this movie has scenes that add up to a narrative, within which the camera cuts--and, sometimes, it even moves! It does so to capture the budding romance between Annika (Ann-Sofie Kylin) and Pär (Rolf Sohlman), thirteen-year-olds whose turn-ons include pinball and strumming guitars. Andersson nails the rhythms and the details of the courtship process: for the first half of the film, the kids communicate only through silent, sidelong, pseudo-secret glances while pouting their lips, sporting leather jackets, smoking cigarettes and awkwardly struggling to project cool...

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The Touch (1971)

Written & Directed by: Ingmar Bergman
Full credits from IMDb

A little ways into The Touch, Bergman’s disowned and largely unseen English-language debut (screened at BAM for a day in a pinkened print borrowed from Elliott Gould), a teenage-or-so boy comes home from a night out. “Did you like the movie?” his father asks. “No,” he answers. “Too much hugging and kissing.” The problem with The Touch itself, on the other hand, is not so much its copious lovemaking, but that the hugging and kissing amounts to very little.

Sticking out among Bergman regulars, Gould stars as an archaeologist on a dig in Sweden, where he befriends his doctor, Max von Sydow (in an uncharacteristically quasi-comic performance), and bemorethanfriends the doctor’s wife, Bibi Anderson. (Gould is excavating a statue of Madonna, as he will soon excavate Anderson’s hidden passions!) A dark, curly-haired Jew amid fair-haired Swedes, who speaks in that condescending native-to-non-native-speaker tone, Gould seems to have been cast, in large part, for his appearance—his character plays a disrupting force, the dark stranger upending the Scandinavians’ domestic order.

Though it’s a bit of a stretch to call that order “upended”. Beyond the language spoken, this film departs from Bergman’s moviemaking M.O. most strikingly in that most of its characters seem largely content for much of the film. (Less strikingly, but notable, it’s so ‘70s, from its hairstyles and fashions to its household gizmos.) The Touch even includes a zippy montage, scored to bouncy pop music (!), in which Anderson, giddied by the attentions of another man, tries on a series of outfits. (Woody Allen seems to have recreated it near the end of the recent Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) It must be speaking Swedish that ordinarily makes Bergman so dreary?

But, as the film opens with a sobbing fit following the death of Anderson’s mother, the director clues us into the fact that such bliss won’t last. Soon enough Gould reveals another side of himself: churlish, loutish, violent and feral. He slams doors, breaks furniture, tears down posters, makes love like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet (“don’t look at me!”) and slaps women; in contrast to the Swedes’ gentle intellectualism, he’s a man of temper tantrums. Those primitive Americans!

At first, I thought this might be a knock at American culture, maybe even a sly rebuke of its post-Bonnie & Clyde filmmaking, but as the film drags on toward the two hour mark it doesn’t feel like Bergman has any such commentary in mind. These are merely scenes from a marriage (wink wink), and an affair, which Bergman uses to explore modernity’s neuroses through a romantic lens darkly: self-loathing and its destructive effects; the inability to make decisions and accept their consequences; and how provincialism’s ideals, like habit, marriage and children, can’t protect their adherents from the corrupting influences that can invade insular small-town life.

Bergman might seem the right fit for such themes, but he fumbles. The Touch is second-rate Bergman—not that that’s much of an insult. The acting, of course, is exceptional and Sven Nykvist deftly handles the camera, but scenes of laid-out themes and psychoanalysis only weigh down the characters—and the film. “It’s hard to live two lives.” “You hate yourself and so you hate me.” “All of my family died in concentration camps.” And on and on. Is it because Bergman’s dialogue, when spoken in English, can’t get away with the pretension that his Swedish usually masks? Or is that the director was insecure working in another language?

Either way, The Touch feels too American, applying some of this country’s more questionable filmmaking tendencies, particularly blatancy. In contrast, in the middle of the film, Bergman covers a six-month interval by showing Gould and Anderson in direct address, reading letters sent. Then, later, Bergman reveals the excavated statue to be infested with termitic beetles, destroying it from the inside out. That’s the kind of Bergman—the maverick of form, the master of symbol, the abstract stylist—of which The Touch could’ve used more. Grade: B-

Killer of Sheep (1977)

Written & Directed by: Charles Burnett
Full credits from IMDb

Burnett’s long-delayed, post-neorealist classic, The Killer of Sheep, is set in Los Angeles’ Watts, which he presents as a dusty, shelled-out wasteland. About black poverty and malaise, the film is sauntering slice-of-lifery set against a sweaty, shirtless ‘70s; with ghetto as war-torn cityscape, it resembles The Bicycle Thief, though absent a bourgeois, heartstrings-tugging narrative; or, with its tightly-packed neighbors and urban blight, it leans towards The Little Fugitive, but without that film’s Coney Island idyll. The kids turn the neighborhood’s vacant lots into makeshift playgrounds, but Watts offers no real escape, only mean streets full of decimation, television thieves and afro-picking idlers. Kids exercise their pent-up aggression through heaving—rocks at freight trains and signage, dirt clumps at each other. The setting transcends the role of a metaphor for its characters’ lives—it simply is their lives.

In this milieu, Burnett fashions a slight narrative, a few days in the life of one representative man (Henry G. Sanders) as he struggles to stay straight in the face of depression, both economic and emotional. Though a narrative film, it functions strongest as historical document, a ground-level sociological study. His eye for setting is as sharp as his eye for detail, and the film is best in its small moments of kitchen-table intimacy, both poignant and funny—a mother checking her reflection in the dirty lid of a saucepot, a teenager pouring half a box of sugar atop his Frosted Flakes, husband and wife stiffly, sadly dancing to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth”. Burnett’s style is loose and digressive; he’s happy to spend a good 60 seconds or so following two men as they carry a motor from an apartment down to the bed of a truck. It’s in these frames, these moments of real inner-city struggle, that Killer of Sheep finds its strength.

As well as its clever symbols, such as a car trip cut short by a blown tire: with no spare, the travelers are forced to drive home on the flat, as the characters of the film push through their lives in comparable fashion. But the most stirring symbol is the image of the title’s sheep (Sanders is the killer) led to the slaughter, then skinned and gutted, to which Burnett cuts after we see a few horseplaying boys or a woman announcing that she’s pregnant. With such despondent cynicism, Burnett looks ahead to the future of his people, but by scoring the film with the sounds of black musicianship—jazz, soul, blues—he looks at the past, too. The soundtrack gives the story historical context and, as such, is essential—worth the 30-year wait. Killer of Sheep is not so much about one family at one point in time as it is about one family at one point within an ongoing cultural continuum. Grade: A


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Carnal Knowledge (1971)

Written by: Jules Feiffer
Directed by: Mike Nichols

Grade: A-

A character portrait, both epic and intimate, that studies the sexual lives of two men, friends, over the course of the mid to late Twentieth Century, Carnal Knowledge does nothing if not remind us that life in post-war America was a lot dirtier than we're often led to believe. The script by Jules Feiffer, who, though known primarily as a cartoonist, wrote the screenplay for another 1971 study of American moral degradation, Little Murders, feels a little dated by today's standards, especially in its portrayal of college-aged sexual naivete (in this, the age of Superbad), but it touches on enough hard-hitting truths about the now universal character of modern romance to maintain a level of compelling convincibility and absorbing authenticity.

In its assessment of modern romance, Carnal Knowledge seems like a precursor to the films of Woody Allen, despite its lack of flaunted intellectualism or quick-witted hilarity. (The comparison seems especially obvious early on, when big band music of the sort Allen often features plays at a college mixer.) Carnal Knowledge is structured as three era-spanning glimpses into the evolving lives of college roommates Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson, from their university days as two vertices on a love triangle (the other being Candace Bergen) through the various relationships that fill the rest of their lives. Nicholson's the cocky, snaky one—"believe me," he says, in contrast to an assertion from Garfunkel, "looks are everything"—Garfunkel, the timid and impressionable type. Both are on a lifelong quest to find fulfillment in the opposite sex and wind up married, but lacking the capacity for love they can look only for sex, and they find domestication to lead to a lack of sexual fulfillment. "I'm so bored," Garfunkel sighs mid-way through the film, "I'm going out of my mind."

Both Feiffer (Little Murders began off-broadway) and director Mike Nichols came to this project from theater backgrounds, and Carnal Knowledge has a conspicuous theatricality to it, both structurally and formally. The visual patience works, though, in the film's favor, thanks to its sophisticated sense; Nichols never treats the material as a recorded stage play, but he does have a theater man's confidence in the text, as well as in the actors to shoulder the dramatic burden. Often, Nichols has Nicholson and Garfunkel, in conversation, stare directly into the camera, using the theatrical technique of direct address, incidentally forcing the audience, uncomfortably, to alternately identify (probably against their wills) with both leads. Nichols also often allows the camera to linger on a single character, visually (but not aurally) oblivious to the action beyond the frame, underlining the alienation that defines the characters' relationships to each other and the larger society. As Garfunkel cautions Nicholson, "you can't make fucking your life's work."

Nicholson's character overshadows Garfunkel's, becoming the most lucid avatar of psychological corruption in the film. "I want you!" his girlfriend pleads. "I'm taken," he answers, "by me!" Nicholson, as Twentieth Century American male, needs no love nor woman—to him, they are little else than pieces of ass, and as such always wind up only busting his balls. During the opening credits, we overhear Nicholson asking Garfunkel if, he had to choose one, he'd rather be loved or in love. Nicholson offers that he'd take the second, and by the end we know it's because he knows it's not something he could ever actually otherwise feel.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

Directed by: Joseph Sargent
Written by: Peter Stone

Grade: A

Four trenchcoated older men with color-coded code names, wearing old-fashioned hats, black-rimmed glasses and ersatz mustaches, board a crowded downtown No. 6 train (called, by transit staff, "Pelham One-Two-Three" for its departure time and point of origin) stop by stop, starting at Fifty-Ninth Street. By Thirty-Third, they've overtaken the two conductors at gunpoint. ("I didn't know these things went backwards!" exclaims one when no longer in control of his train.) I remember that once I was stuck on a train, traveling from Manhattan to Brooklyn, in a tunnel, between stops at a dead halt for about forty five minutes. I didn't even have a seat, and as my knees buckled in a Guantanamo-style stress position, I thought it'd be tough for life to get much worse without a firebomb attack, an extended Giuliani mayoralty or a hijacking. In The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, eighteen New Yorkers are stuck in a similar situation, the victims of a stalled, mid-tunnel train...and a hijacking; the "terrorists" demand one million dollars in cash in one hour, or they'll start picking off the passengers. You can only begin to imagine the awful terror they feel, but still—at least they had seats.

When the hijackers first threaten to shoot anyone who moves, the passengers all laugh; one wino remains passed-out and unawares, while others don't understand and need the threats translated into Spanish, of which, of course, several people on the car are capable. Oh, New York! The Taking of Pelham... is a marvelous snapshot of New York, during the 1970's in particular—a New York of "terr-lits" and "fifty-foist streets"—on par if not better at capturing the time and place than more legendary contemporary vehicles by the likes of Scorsese, Lumet and Woody Allen. (It's also a fantastically efficient crime/thriller, and its influence is clearly visible on such vehicles as Inside Man, Speed and Reservoir Dogs.)

City government is lampooned, from the reviled and impotent mayor (of Kochian stature and temperament), debilitated by the flu—it's been going around, symbolically, in the film's decimated Big Apple—and seen receiving a rectal thermometer (a cheap shot at the rumors of his homosexuality?), to the transit police who spend most of the day sitting around reading the newspaper. It's suggested that New York, which at the time was in serious financial straits, couldn't even afford to pay the ransom if it wanted, until the mayor's wife speaks the politicians' language: "A million dollars sounds like a lot of money," she says, "[but] just think what you're gonna get in return—18 sure votes." (The mayor's wife is played by Doris Roberts; seasoned character actors and familiar faces, many known as comedians, dominate the frames of Pelham, notably including Jerry Stiller and Tony Roberts.)

Every actor in Pelham is marvelously authentic and convincingly cynical, and its their credibility that makes the script work, which is hilarious in the wise-cracking mode of your legendarily typical jaded and hard-boiled New Yorker. "Screw the goddam passengers," barks a train supervisor, delivering probably the film's most famous line, "what do they expect for their thirty-five cents? To live forever?" (Initially, it's tough for anyone to take the hijackers seriously.) But Pelham is hilarious without ever succumbing to being goofy, without ever surrendering its grit or its gravity. There isn't a moment in which you don't doubt the sincerity of lead hijacker Robert Shaw when he threatens to kill everyone on-board, and while Walter Matthau, as a Transit Authority lieutenant (under the direction of Joseph Sargent, whom he ought to outrank) is a source of constant crack-ups, the audience never doubts for a minute that he has the smarts and seriousness necessary to save everyone's life and catch the bad guys. In the end, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three reminds us why New York City has always been such a great place to live—sure, it can be dangerous (well, not so much anymore) but, like the film, it's a hell of a good time, without parallel.

Manhattan (1979)

Directed by: Woody Allen
Written by: Woody Allen & Marshall Brickman

Grade: A


"This is really a great city, I don't care what anyone says," Woody Allen mutters earnestly over Manhattan's well-known money-shot of the 59th St. Bridge and, thanks in large part to Gordon Willis' magnificent photography, he really makes you believe it. Manhattan, kicking down the cobblestones on the heels of Allen's much derided Interiors, is a return to the comedic form of the beloved (and Academy Award sweeping) Annie Hall, though with a matured voice; despite its poignancy, Annie Hall is, for the most part, tonally silly, while Manhattan plays more like Interiors with jokes. It's about modern romance, New York City and the way the two intersect; as Allen says in the introduction, of his love for New York, the film's "romanticized all out of proportion". But at the same time it's incredibly emotionally sincere, and it's the careful balance between the two that is Manhattan's most winning virtue. "He was too romantic about Manhattan," Allen says critically of himself, in third person narration once again during the introduction, following it with, simply, "he adored New York City." Manhattan is simultaneously celebratory and critical of the Big Apple, its intellectual class, men & women, the 1970's and even Woody Allen himself. It's both adoring and scathing.

After the gorgeous opening sequence, a stunningly photographed travelogue paired with Allen's voice struggling to work out the first chapter of a novel, the first line of the film is spoken by Michael Murphy, playing Allen's best friend: "I think the essence of art is to provide a kind of working-through situation, so that you can get in touch with feelings you didn't know you had". And that's just what Manhattan sets out to do, forcing the neurotic lovers of the 1970's to confront their own neuroses, and despite that it's been hailed as the defining film of its decade it still works and it still stings--lovers of the twenty-first century are not exempt from its trenchancy. Manhattan is one big romantic entanglement between rich, white New Yorkers, but it's both specific and generalized. Every relationship in the film is fucked up--Allen's dating a high school girl (Mariel Hemingway, in a perfectly mousy performance), he's divorced twice and on bad terms with his ex (Meryl Streep), a born-again lesbian; meanwhile, Murphy's married with a girl on the side (Diane Keaton), who's divorced herself and soon to be romantically involved with Allen.

Going beyond a mere love triangle into the complexities of a love pentagram, with a lesbian on the side, Manhattan's romantic perfidy plays out in art galleries, bookstores, museums, the Russian Tea Room, Elaine's, Lincoln Center, apartments overflowing with books and, finally, on the streets themselves; there are many extended, virtuosic tracking shots as the peripatetic characters peregrinate through the proudly pedestrian city. It's the most thoughtful valentine New York ever got, set to a lush score of George Gershwin orchestrations performed by the New York Philharmonic and photographed by Willis with startling artistry. (Slick appearances are an important aspect of the film; the carcinophobic Allen smokes throughout the film--without inhaling--because he knows that it makes him look cool, just as he hides the legitimate dangers of '70s New York behind a sumptuous veneer. While Martin Scorsese had exposed the grit of the New York streets three years earlier in Taxi Driver, Allen sweeps it all under the celluloid rug.) But Allen is nothing if not a comedian, so his not-too-serious portrayal of New York and its inhabitants--his fantastical approach, as J. Hoberman recently argued--is the perfect fit for Manhattan, which is end-to-end hilarious; it wouldn't be nearly so easy to laugh if Travis Bickle were lurking in the background. Allen's one-liners zing flawlessly, and there are even several scored sequences of physical comedy that recall his early-career farces, such as Bananas. (Allen does bear more than a passing resemblance to Buster Keaton, albeit with thick-rim glasses.) But lightheartedness is the characters' undoing; Allen, Murphy and Keaton want to treat their romantic relationships as insignificant loads of laughs, but are caught by surprise when they always, inevitably, turn serious. Relationships, inherently, are no laughing matter.

Manhattan could easily have slipped into mere static verbalism, a la the Marx Brothers, but as it stands it's cinematically more than just its crackling script. It's rare for comedic films, though typical of Allen's, to have such dedicatedly meticulous photography, but every anamorphic Panavision shot in Manhattan is framed in such a way that's always surprising and revealing. (It was the first movie released on video in a letterbox format, as Allen insisted the original ratio be preserved.) For instance, characters are often marginalized to the corner of the screen, while New York's architecture towers over them, reducing them to insignificant spots of a larger world.

Walking through the streets, Allen and Keaton notice a beautiful old building being slowly demolished, and he remarks that, "this city's really changing," a brief and easily overlooked moment that's essential to the film, as it underscores Allen's point of the culture in (literal) decay. There are real and serious problems in the world, and I don't mean landmark preservation, but the New York neurotics are able to avoid dealing with them, even thinking about them, by obsessing over their own (invented) neuroses; Manhattan exposes solipsistic intellectuals and their tendency to over-intellectualize to the point of inventing problems for themselves that distract them from facing the serious matters of the world, blinding themselves to and in denial of their essential insignificance.

In another scene, Allen gets a call from Keaton. "I was just sitting around looking through the magazine section," he tells her, adding, "uh, no, no, I didn't read the piece on China's faceless masses, I was checking out the lingerie ads." A struggle between the physical and the cerebral underlies Manhattan; "nothing worth knowing can be understood by the mind," Allen claims but Keaton doesn't buy it, and she makes him go see a film by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, after which he makes a sour face, letting us know he'd rather have watched W.C. Fields on the late show. In an early scene, Allen reports that neo-Nazis are going to march in New Jersey, and proposes to some guests at a gallery opening that they go down there with bricks and baseball bats, to which one replies that there's a devastating satirical piece in the Times about it. "Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing," Allen replies, "but bricks get right to the point."

Allen's particularly hard on high-browed Manhattanites, from whom he largely tries to separate himself, although he knows them too well to be convincingly wholly disconnected (the issue of Woody Allen the person vs. Woody Allen the character), and the film is still, consciously, heavily autocritical. Allen may constantly speak haughtily of himself ("I don't need you to tell me that," he says when Keaton tells him he has a good sense of humor), but ultimately it's the seventeen year old Hemingway who comes out as the most mature, putting the adults to shame; when Allen is livid over Keaton's tour-de-force teardown of his artistic heroes, she's the one who notes that she just seemed nervous. She also gives a speech on the outmodedness of monogamy, and calls Allen out for thinking six months apart is the end of the world. In contrast, in an earlier scene Allen disparagingly tells Keaton, of her new relationship, "I give the whole thing four weeks."

"Well I can't plan that long in advance!" she replies, exasperated.

Despite its critical commentary and romantic cynicism, Manhattan is, overall, an optimistic film. At least, it doesn't advocate society-wide suicide. Allen acknowledges that there are things that make life worth living, like Willie Mays, Mozart, Louis Armstrong, Cezanne, Flaubert, good Chinese food, and pretty girls. (Allen's often accused of being a misogynistic creep, for, in this film, giving himself a high-school senior as a girlfriend, or for his bitterness towards his now-lesbian ex-wife, but he's really a philogynist. Not only is Hemingway the most mature character in the film, the lesbian couple is the only healthy and successful couple portrayed, the only one that seems like it might actually last for a long time.) But outside of great art, great crabs, and great gals, he acknowledges that life's a mess. "What are future generations going to say about us?" Allen says with worry, over his era's lack of personal integrity and abundance of neuroses. Well, unfortunately, that we look a lot like you.

Barry Lyndon (1975)

Written & Directed by: Stanley Kubrick

Grade: A

Despite his glowing reputation and relative improlificacy, there are still a small number of Stanley Kubrick films that have fallen below the radar of the casual cinephile; most of these are early efforts (Killer's Kiss, anyone?) but stuck in the belly of his hallowed oeuvre is an underseen and often undervalued classic: Barry Lyndon, a flop upon its release that has struggled ever since to claim its rightful place in popularity. While its proponents tend to hyperbolize its distinction, calling it not only Kubrick's finest film but one of the best ever made—it's neither—Barry Lyndon is indeed a marvelous film that deserves a loftier position in the annals of history and criticism, not to mention on the video store shelves. Leon Vitali, who was Kubrick's assistant to his death and has a supporting role in the film, laconically introduced the film recently at Walter Reade in New York by saying, with tears in his eyes, "It brings me great pleasure to say: this is Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, and I just know you're going to love it." As well you should.

Adapted from the novel of the same name by William Makepeace Thackeray—an increasingly forgotten contemporary of Dickens'—Kubrick's film maintains a literary character by being divided into two "chapters" and using voice-overs from an omniscient narrator (Michael Hordern). Ordinarily, narration is as anathema to good filmmaking as Michael Bay, used as a cheap shorthand by unimaginative and insecure directors, but Kubrick's narrator provides a valuable ironic counterpoint to the on-screen images, as he'll go out of his way to undermine a seemingly romantic or heroic scene with a flippant remark, providing the film with a genuinely novelistic depth. But Barry Lyndon is not a film of mere words, which Kubrick emphasizes by allowing many scenes to play out silently, their emotional content expressed only in gesture and facial expression; Kubrick also maintains a proper level of cinematicality to counter the literariness by composing, with his frequent cinematographical collaborator John Alcott, some of the most impressive shots ever seen in film, before and since. The compositions mimic famous paintings, and contributing to the recreated pictorializations effect is that oftentimes many of the characters, placed within the gorgeously arranged tableaus, remain as stationary as the static figures on a canvas. Alcott and Kubrick went to such meticulous lengths for fashioning a proper period atmosphere that they even designed and built their own special lenses, based on NASA technology designed for the moon landings, that would be able to capture natural light; many scenes are amazingly lit by candles alone, providing a startling naturalism to the mise-en-scène. Beholding the stream of evocative images in Barry Lyndon is akin to a three hour walk through the Metropolitan Museum of Art while listening to a book on tape.

Even Barry Lyndon's detractors, however, would acknowledge the mastery of its photography, as well as that of the Victorian production and costume design. (Barry Lyndon marks the height of baroque set design in film; it's like Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons taken to the next level, incidentally complemented by the Bach and Vivaldi on the soundtrack.) Their gripes have more to do with its extended running time (184 minutes), its deliberate pacing, and Ryan O'Neal's lead performance. (We may also attribute American audiences' reluctance to appreciate the film to a rejection of all things "too English", as this is certainly Kubrick the expat's most thoroughly British film.) In this regard, Barry Lyndon is nearly as divisive in its reception as Kubrick's swan song Eyes Wide Shut, another undervalued masterpiece. I won't bother arguing about the pace of Barry Lyndon—just to say that it isn't "slow" by any means, and is never guilty of superfluity—though I will mention O'Neal, as I think he's unfairly maligned for his performance. He plays Redmond Barry, the title character, a man of base birth who rises to a position of power and influence only to fall back down, and O'Neal does so mostly with appropriate reserve; in his scenes of youth, he conveys a convincingly deep longing, an idealism informed by lustful and jealous impetuousness that, through the course of the film, ages somewhat but never matures. Barry winds up a scalawag among gentlemen and, as Jim Ridley recently noted in The Village Voice, "O'Neal's gauche inability to fit into the surroundings ultimately suits the role."

Barry Lyndon, divided in two by an intermission (unwelcomely elided at the recent Lincoln Center screening), concerns Barry's rise to title and his fall from grace; it's a tale of coming-up and comeuppance. Part One is primarily a story of fate and chance; the course of Barry's life is determined by a series of random fortunes, starting with his escape from the law after, or so he's lead to believe, killing a competing suitor (Leonard Rossiter) in a duel over the love of his promiscuous cousin. The narrator bemuses about how different Barry's life may have been had he not fallen for that girl, or instigated the duel, as it's the starting point for a series of contingent adventures: stopping for a drink of water, he attracts the attention of bandits who happen to be at the same inn; losing his money and horse to said bandits a bit down the road, he walks to the next town, where he is recruited into King George's forces; deserting the army, he finds an officer's uniform hung to a tree; traveling in that uniform, he meets a buxom Prussian who takes him in; leaving her, he's met on the road by a Prussian officer who catches him in his lie; conscripted by the Prussians, he is assigned to spy on an effete gambler who becomes his employer; and so on, all of these events ultimately leading to Barry's meeting and marrying Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson).

Part Two deals with Redmond Barry's, now Barry Lyndon, fall from the status that he's married into. If Barry was brought up by chance, he is brought down by action and poor decision, particularly the ill treatment of his stepson (Vitali), and eventual mortal enemy; their antagonism culminates in a dragged-out and unbearable duel, a sequence accompanied by a ceaseless and unbearable beating of the timpani, punctuated from time to time by violent string trills. Ritualized violence plays a prominent role in Barry Lyndon, whether it's the twisted custom of dueling, the ring formed by soldiers when Barry boxes a man who embarrassed him, the gauntlet hazing of the Prussian Army, or, most devastatingly, when a line of English soldiers marches on the positioned French army, unflappable even as large numbers of them are picked off. Never has war made less sense than it does in that moment, and Barry thankfully gets it quick and runs off. While Barry Lyndon is certainly a romantic film in some regard, it does not romanticize violence, nor does it afford its characters with any sort of cheap heroism—indeed, Barry is not a hero by any means, and Thackeray's novel is considered by many to be the first English-language novel without a respectable hero as its protagonist. War is grim, war is fire, and war is death, an observation underlined by a sermon from the narrator. (Cf. "It is well to dream of glorious war in a snug armchair at home, but it is a very different thing to see it first at hand...")

The two sections of Barry Lyndon vaguely parallel one another, up to a point at least; they both feature a session of fisticuffs, instigated by an insult to Barry's hono[u]r, as well as Barry engaged in a competition for the attentions of a woman—this time with his stepson for his wife's—that ultimately results in pistols at dawn. But while the Redmond Barry of Part One is a forgivable youth, the Barry Lyndon of Part Two emerges as nothing short of a categorical cad, mercilessly caning his insolent stepson and engaging in extramarital affairs right under his wife's nose. In one scene, Barry hovers lovingly over his wife and his newborn son, but Kubrick immediately cuts to Barry osculating with two topless sexpots, neither of whom happen to be his betrothed. Even Barry's mother, who in Part One was a kindly Irish peasant, is by Part Two transformed into a shrewy, manipulative Lady Macbeth type; she's used to help reveal another of Barry Lyndon's many themes, the corruptibility of stature. (Though the film is thematically dense, it's never convoluted, and the clarity of its execution is a mark of its master director.) Barry strives throughout the film to reach the level of gentlemanhood, but once he does it destroys him; even his one redeemable trait—his genuine and unqualified love for his son—proves to be a deciding contributor to his undoing. "Behind my back I am despised," Barry acknowledges near the film's conclusion, adding, "and quite justifiably so." Barry Lyndon is the tragic tale, told with grace and patience, of an antihero's decline, ruthlessly concluding with Barry legless and alone; it's a melancholy reproach of war and money, of polite society and powerful institutions. Sprawling in length, ambition and thematic intent, it's an emotional epic and a roaring success.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

Directed by: Robert Altman
Written by: Robert Altman & Brian McKay

Grade: B

Warren Beatty had a tendency in the 1970's to take a lot of self-indulgent roles, from an irresistable hair stylist in the abominable Shampoo to a courageous newspaperman in the uneven Parallax View, so the title role (guess which) in McCabe & Mrs. Miller is something of a departure—despite Beatty's good looks, his character's an out-and-out cad, an unsympathetic and redemptionless anti-hero. For once, Beatty's character is intentionally unlikeable.

That's because McCabe... is a sort of anti-Western,a modernized and revised take on the genre. Altman, as he would do for Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles in The Long Goodbye two years later, strips the West of its romantic trappings—there are no cowboy hats, no John Waynes, no proud masculinity on boastful display. The sets were constructed by Altman's crew in the middle of the wilderness, and they lived in the houses they built or, in the case of many structures, half-built, so there's no denying McCabe & Mrs. Miller's authenticity; overall it's visually stunning, and Leon Erickson's strikingly realistic production design is captured gorgeously in Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography, a combination of soft lighting and hazy filtering that gives the film an antiquated and dreamy look.

But Altman's revisionism goes a bit too far; his characters aren't ambivalently sympathetic or equivocally heroic, just an aggregation of scoundrels, louts and whores. McCabe rides into a frontier mining town, Presbyterian Church, as a stranger—just some Joseph looking for a manger. (Songs from Leonard Cohen's first album constitute the soundtrack, contributing to the poetic delicacy established by Zsigmond.) He walks into the tavern, starts up a poker game, and before you know it the townsmen are working for him, building McCabe his own casino and ramshackle brothel. Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie, over the top), another stranger and sister of mercy, arrives on a whim proposing she be allowed to build and manage a high-class whorehouse, on McCabe's dime of course; McCabe gives in to her, surprisingly and rather quickly, despite the fact that, as he tells tavern-owner Patrick Sheehan, "deals is what I come up here to get away from."

"The minute you arrived in town, I knew you was a man to be reckoned with," Sheehan tells him. "That's a lot of shit and you know it," McCabe fires back. That is a lot of shit, I knew it, too; McCabe's a nobody, and as Mrs. Miller's whorehouse proves more successful than any of his personal ventures, she assumes a more forceful position of leadership in their relationship, reducing the emasculated McCabe to a drunken pimp and vulgar wiseass, a rich man stumbling drunk around his town telling dirty jokes. When representatives from a large Mining Company come to buy him out, his bratty attempts at negotiation are construed, correctly, as obnoxious arrogance. Well, there's more than one way to get his land, and hired guns are dispatched to Presbyterian Church.

Cowardly McCabe doesn't run away, but he does try to take the matter to the newspapers or the courts, trying to find someone, anyone, else to fight his battle for him; ultimately he confronts the contract killers, practically pleading to take any offer the mining company will make. When he insinuates that they've come up to kill him, the enormously tall leader of the hitmen feigns ignorance: "I came to hunt bear," he claims, and the audience, seeing McCabe decked-out in his ridiculous fur coat and looking like a grizzly, knows he's fucked.

A tense and craven shoot-out concludes the film: a film with a hitherto drained and muted palette, comprised exclusively of browns and grays, is suddenly bright white and orange—as a snowstorm rages, men are dishonorably shot in the back while, simultaneously, the church burns allegorically, the two events working in parallel to forge a sad and effective finale. Though Altman's overall approach is unique, it still feels as though he aspires to classical tragedy; but can an effective tragedy have an irredeemable scalawag as its protagonist, with a prurient, opium-addicted harpy as his lover? It's simply detaching. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is, in the end, just a failed experiment, a complete 180 from the standard Hollywood form, when all it needs is just a bit of complexity and ambiguity. Altman's film is simply black instead of white, when what it really ought to be is gray.

The Parallax View (1974)

Directed by: Alan J. Pakula
Written by: David Giler & Lorenzo Semple, Jr.

Grade: C+

The Parallax View is regarded as a paragon of the ‘70s paranoid political thriller, but, make no mistake, it is no taught, thrilling procedural along the lines of All the President’s Men—it’s an uneven bore that's as incredibly dated as Warren Beatty's haircut.

Thematic and pellic obsolescence seem to be a real problem for many Warren Beatty movies (I'm thinking of the abysmal Shampoo); as a colleague, Clayton White, told me recently: "They might have been big in their time, but most of them need to stay in their time." Beatty plays Joe Frady, who mostly uses aliases throughout the film, a two-bit journalist present at the assassination of a prominent Senator. The murder is declared, familiarly, the work of a lone, crazed gunman, but several years later many of the other people who were present start dying, whether from seemingly benign accidents or natural causes. At first, Frady is satisfied that everything is as they say and the unusual deaths are mere coincidence.

But when a fellow journalist and assassination attendee dies immediately after fortelling her own death, Frady decides to dig a bit deeper, and soon unearths a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of…the Parallax Corporation; well, that's just a cheap cop-out, a free pass to the CIA et al., that allows the film to avoid directly indicting the US government as complicit in the assassinations of the late 1960’s. The best part of the movie, though, is the classic Parallax training video that bifurcates the film, a staccato photocollage that examines the natures of, and relationships between, the concepts of self, family, country, and religion. It’s some serious, subversive Kuleshev shit.

The world of the film, in which superficially innocuous surfaces are far more sinister once you dig a bit deeper, is perfectly reflected by Gordon Willis’ gorgeous photography, the movie’s strongest point, that features bright exteriors and shadowy interiors. Willis also captures the ominous threat posed by the colossal Parallax Corporation by commonly shooting Beatty against enormous man-made artifices, be it a dam or a glass-paneled office building. (It's a visual motif that should be familiar from the same year's far superior examination of paranoia, The Conversation.) Beatty's pit himself against forces far larger than the inquiring individual.

But the first half of the movie simply plays out as a corny action movie, brimming with car chases, feral fist fights and, everyone’s favorite, big explosions! (Whereas the recent film Shooter is playfully aware of its fundamental stupidity, The Parallax View is unduly conceited, taking itself far too seriously to the point of approaching unintended kitsch.) The second half is far superior, primarily comprised of two long, tense assassination set pieces: one an aborted attempt at blowing up an airplane; the other, trouble at a political rally dress rehearsal. They're paradigms of dialogueless, suspenseful filmmaking, but they’re awkwardly stuffed into a senseless, flimsy, confusing (it felt like a reel or two were missing) film that adds up to little other than: don’t trust the Warren Commission. Well, duh.

Shampoo

Directed by: Hal Ashby

I recently read somewhere that Hal Ashby's reputation has not aged as well as many believed it would back in his hey-day. I can see why -- Shampoo is a travesty. A ‘70s screwball sex comedy with a glowing reputation (#47 on the American Film Institute's 100 Funniest Films) and it can barely muster a decent joke?

It’s a remarkably unfunny film, with the exception of a few performances (notably Jack Warden) and a few tossed off lines here and there. Warren Beatty, who also co-wrote and co-produced the film, plays a gay pirate, or at least that’s how he’s dressed, decked out in a flamboyant foulard and sporting the most ridiculous haircut in film history. Is that supposed to be intentionally funny or just lamely dated? Who cares? A brief dinner party scene in the middle of the film picks things up a bit, but they just fall off again so quickly that the laughs seem to have been a serendipitous accident. Perhaps frank sexual comments and chides regarding Beatty’s sexuality were risqué and shocking enough to induce a few chuckles thirty years ago, but it just doesn’t cut it, especially in a post-Borat world. Attempts at pathos near the end of the film fall embarrassingly flat. Who gives a shit about these unredeemable, self-obsessed characters? It functions more successfully as an indictment of Beatty-vehicles than it does of the free-lovin’ hipsters of the 1960’s.

Grade: C