Monday, 28 December 2009

Histoires Extraordinaires (Spirits of the Dead)

Directors: Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim
Writers: Edgar Allan Poe (story) (segment "Metzengerstein"), Roger Vadim (adaptation) (segment "Metzengerstein")
Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, Jane Fonda, Terence Stamp, James Robertson Justice



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Friday, 25 December 2009

And Soon the Darkness

Director: Robert Fuest
Writers: Brian Clemens & Terry Nation (story)
Cast: Pamela Franklin, Michele Dotrice, Sandor Elès, John Nettleton



http://rapidshare.com/files/252446367/and.soon.the.darkness.70.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/252455181/and.soon.the.darkness.70.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/252426673/and.soon.the.darkness.70.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/252436638/and.soon.the.darkness.70.part4.rar

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Tuesday, 22 December 2009

Get Carter

You know, I'd almost forgotten what your eyes looked like. Still the same. Pissholes in the snow.


Directed By: Mike Hodges
Writers: Mike Hodges (screenplay), Ted Lewis (novel)
Cast: Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, John Osborne, Geraldine Moffatt, Glynn Edwards



http://rapidshare.com/files/222840928/Get.Carter.1971.DVDRip.XviD.AC3-2CD.part01.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/222846389/Get.Carter.1971.DVDRip.XviD.AC3-2CD.part02.rar
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or

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http://rapidshare.com/files/226497687/gtcatr.part12.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/227049861/gtcatr.part13.rar
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Sunday, 20 December 2009

The Birthday Party

Stanley Webber: How would you like to go away with me?
Lulu: What?
Stanley Webber: How would you like to go away with me?
Lulu: Where would we go?
Stanley Webber: Nowhere...
Lulu: Well that's a charming proposal.
Stanley Webber: There's nowhere to go, so we could just go, it wouldn't matter.
Lulu: We might as well stay here




Director: William Friedkin
Writers: Harold Pinter (play), (screenplay)
Cast: Robert Shaw, Patrick Magee, Dandy Nichols, Sydney Tafler' Moultrie Kelsall, Helen Fraser

IMDB

From the Losey trilogy onwards Harold Pinter’s custom-made screenplays are, of course, cornerstones of cinema. But there are also the film adaptations of his theatrical works, which are by necessity geared more towards the specialist. Losey’s biographer suggested that JL never took on a Pinter play because it would have been an “away fixture”, and certainly the plays, magnificent though they are, are also hampered by what they are.

They’re written for the stage, action almost entirely constrained to one room, with opportunities to “open out” the play severely limited; unless you want to rewrite the play, which would rather defeat the original point. There’s this one, the second feature from the man who shortly afterwards directed The Exorcist and The French Connection; there’s the equally low-budget versions of The Caretaker and The Homecoming by Clive Donner and Peter Hall; there’s a rarer-still film of Betrayal with Jeremy Irons (I think).

The Birthday Party is very early Pinter. These days his mid-to-late period, from Old Times onwards, strikes me as more sophisticated but the early “comedies of menace” were the ones that blasted a hole in the ceiling of theatre. This play is rich, mysterious, affecting and infused with a language that dazzles.

If you can get past the idea that it’s Filmed Theatre rather than full cinema, this version is actually rather stylised and quite cinematic. The opening titles are shown to the driver’s view of a Rolls Royce gliding silently through the ghost town that is Worthing on a 60s Sunday morning, scenes are broken up with panoramic views of the pier and pathos-addled shots of Petey tending to his deckchairs. Once the action’s taking place in Pinter’s Room, composition, lighting and camera angles are set out in a fairly interesting way too.

Our set up is that the stoic Petey and the warm-hearted but simple Meg are ostensibly running a shabby boarding house. Stanley (Robert Shaw) appears to have been hiding out with them for some months and a girl called Lulu (rent-a-dollybird Helen Fraser from Billy Liar and Repulsion) sometimes pops round, though most of her scenes have been cut. A suave London Jew and an Irishman, Goldberg and McCann, come to the house. They interrogate Stanley, provoking a nervous breakdown, then take him away.

After the titles, we find ourselves in Meg’s filthy kitchen. As she hums to herself, the cornflake box is aimed at the bowl and most of them go over the table; an early indicator that she’s not all there. Petey comes home and for the first few lines of trite dialogue the faces are off camera, emphasising that their conversation is not a form of communication but a barrier to it. When we first see Meg’s face, the camera is in the living room and peering through the serving hatch. People are boxed in, confined.

Petey reads his paper, they chit-chat, the camera steers around the fried bread as if it’s likely to bite. When Meg ventures upstairs to see Stanley, the camera zooms out from a detail of the wallpaper. We rejoin Petey as clatter and laughters drifts down from upstairs. Robert Shaw gives Stanley his trademark rasp and air of dormant aggression. His clothes are filthy and he looks a little like Céline.

As Stanley eats his breakfast, he teases Meg and there seems to be a sexual undertone to all their interactions- she tickles him whilst trying to get a cigarette. He steps outside to smoke, but a plane overheard drives him back inside. It’s clear that the boarding house is a hideout for him when news of two newcomers makes him so agitated (“They won’t come, it’s a false alarm”). The big monologue about his past as a concert pianist is played without tricks; just a slow, gradual zoom into Shaw’s face as it leans on his hand.

The worldly Lulu and her Sandie Shaw bob make a brief appearance from the outside world, opening the window and curtains before declaring Stanley a “washout”. He flees through the back door at the arrival of Goldberg (Sydney Tafler) and McCann (Pinter/Losey favourite Patrick Magee).

McCann is sombre and pessimistic, always peering fearfully at the backyard and disgusting kitchen, whilst Goldberg has an air of relaxed authority in his grey tailored suit. He’s got the gift of the gab and his voice has a musical, yiddish twang (“Whadda lahvly flighta stairs”). Meg is enchanted. When the pair have popped out she gives Stanley his toy drum, and as his tension boils over the first act ends with his primal-scream banging.

Cut to McCann in the front room, tearing his newspaper into strips. It’s done with enervating slowness and the noise is heavily amplified. Stanley comes downstairs and tries to impose himself. McCann does not react until he declares his intention to leave, which causes a bit of brinkmaship. Why don’t you stay in? We’re having a party in your honour. Stanley now tries to establish his credentials as a harmless, obedient recluse, before pleading and making desperate attempts to ingratiate himself (“I know Ireland. The people have a wonderful sense of humour”). McCann’s poker face doesn’t flinch. Petey tells them he’ll miss the party as he has a chess match- more of a life of the mind than his wife.

Enter Goldberg. As he sits and delivers a monologue, the camera slowly circles him to reinforce that air of authority. He speaks with eloquence but there’s something not quite right about it; as he tells us about a bygone romance with a Sunday school teacher, we hear that “walking home, I’d tip my hat to the toddlers, give a hand to a couple of stray dogs”. Stanley tries the aggression with Goldberg too, refusing to shake his hand and posing as defender of Petey and Meg (“They’ve lost their sense of smell. I haven’t”).

Goldberg and McCann spring into action, coercing Stanley to sit down. The interrogation is shot with quirky angles, the two men standing either side of Stanley. From a top corner of the room, the camera will swoop down and around the armchair before zooming back out. There are rapid cuts between the three men. Once Goldberg and McCann manage to build up a rhythm, their speech flows like music. When they take Stanley’s glasses we see his POV, fumbling through a blurred field of vision until he falls. The interrogation seems largely concerned with sex, religion and guilt, culminating in a refrain of “Why did the chicken cross the road?” (sounds daft, but as a whole the piece is very poetic with plenty of word association and its own internal logic).

Stanley reaches his breaking point just about now. He screams and we see the interrogators’ faces before the camera, looking like the reflection in a spoon. There are jump cuts and weird angles aplenty as the three fight, brandishing chairs. It’s interrupted by Meg arriving in a red party frock, which has Goldberg gurgling with laughter. Meg is asked to deliver a toast, and McCann to shine a torch on birthday boy Stanley. Photography turns an oddly psychedelic sepia as the lights go out. Told to “say what you feel”, Meg ends up crying and not noticing that Stanley is still reeling.

Lulu arrives at the party. Goldberg does some more oratory and she clearly fancies him (“You’re empty, let me fill you up”). We zoom back from those two to see McCann vigilantly topping up Stanley’s whisky. Everyone focuses on getting drunk, there are lots of intrusive close-ups on perspiring faces, snatches of multiple conversations and it’s all mildly hallucinogenic. Lulu and Goldberg start snogging on an armchair whilst Meg and McCann talk at cross purposes.

“Have you ever been to Carrickmacross?”

“I’ve been to King’s Cross.”

Now in high spirits, the ladies decide that they would like to play a parlour game and someone suggests Blind Man’s Buff- perfect for the purposes of Goldberg and McCann. Meg is first to wear the blind- a soundtrack of heavy breathing and she caresses McCann before the blind is lifted “Oh, it’s you”. McCann’s POV next as he takes the blind and trashes the room. His hands grope, his arms flail, the camera jerks all over the place. The breathing is quite canine until he finally catches Stanley.

When Stanley becomes “it” we see a bird’s eye view of the room, Goldberg orchestrating the others’ movements, then the camera is level with the floor as Stanley is tripped up by the drum. McCann breaks his glasses. There’s a sudden blackout, gasps and a scream in the dark. More groovy sepia negatives when McCann finds the torch. It turns on Stanley, his hands around Meg’s throat. He whimpers and moans.

Cut to golden lamps on the pier and that almost still-life shot of deckchairs. Petey has finished his early morning shift and is heading home. The third act is very morning-after, giving the film a symmetrical feel (before/during/after). Meg has a headache and frets over the broken drum. Goldberg gives Petey a diagnosis of Stanley’s breakdown and dissuades him from calling a doctor. McCann comes down from the patient’s room, his sleeves rolled up, muttering that “I’m not going up there again”. He sits to polish his shoes as Goldberg ushers Petey back out to work.

For once it’s Goldberg who is tensed up. When McCann speaks out of turn he lunges at his friend with venom and throttles him. He tries to cheer himself up with more speeches and rhetoric, but it’s as if he’s realising their hollowness for the first time. Try as he might he cannot complete his sentence, “Because I believe that the world…”. It’s Pinter giving the boot, however unsubtly, to any ideologues in this world, anyone pretending that they know the solutions (an attitude we need to hold onto now the PM-in-waiting is telling us that removal of ‘big government’ will make everything perfect).

Goldberg falls back on tradition (“Who came before your father? His father!”) before going weird again and asking McCann to blow into his mouth. When Stanley reappears he is a zombie in a smart suit. This time the pair give him a “nice”, motivational version of the interrogation which appears to be all about religion. This time Stanley is dumb, obedient, and Petey’s climactic call of “Don’t let them tell you what to do!” falls on deaf ears as he is led into the car. The car speeds off into town and the camera swings back to Petey twitching his net curtain; a nice note of ambivalence from the director.

I first read The Birthday Party at the age of 16, loved it and went on to devour all Pinter’s plays- they had a profound influence on me. When I watched this film, I was no longer so sure about his stance. Is living in a starving artist’s shabby pit really so superior to wearing a suit and conforming to tradition? I suppose that the young wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t scrutinise and challenge everything that was handed down to them.

Anyway this version of The Birthday Party has the limitations of being designed for another medium, but it’s been assembled by Friedkin with not a little skill and in a way that only augments the sense of dread. There are some genial performances (particularly those of Goldberg and McCann) and it’s still far more of a film than something like In the Loop. It deserves to be better known.

Review by Jamie
Towards the Front, Please

http://rapidshare.com/files/259624038/TBP.1968-CiNEPHILE.part1.rar
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Friday, 18 December 2009

The Quiller Memorandum

Don't blame it on me, blame it on the Bosa Nova



Directed By: Michael Anderson
Writers: Trevor Dudley Smith (novel), Harold Pinter (screenplay)
Cast: George Segal, Senta Berger, Alec Guinness, Max von Sydow, George Sanders

IMDB

The search for neo-Nazis in postwar Berlin would seem the last topic for futility or cynicism, yet as scripted by Harold Pinter from the novel by Adam Hall, The Quiller Memorandum depicted an espionage assignment that not only seemed to end as a failure, but a task that was designed without the prospect of success. Adding to this tone of despair was the casting of George Segal in the role of Quiller, an American-educated British spy whose relationship to his control, the stodgy Englishman, Pol (Alec Guiness), was a shade below outright hostility. Quiller had accepted the mission of locating the neo-Nazis since another spy, his friend, had been murdered by them at the film's opening. In his search for the clues, Quiller contacts the dead agent's girlfriend, a German schoolteacher, Inge (Senta Berger), whose friends included a former member of the neo-Nazi circle. Quiller's relationship to Inge was a critical element in the film, since it not only served as a pivot for the action, but also reversed the traditional pattern of romance in the spy film.

Quiller eventually meets the neo-Nazis and their leader, Oktober (Max Von Sydow), who is respectfully addressed by his subordinates as "Reichsführer," a reference to Oktober's rank in the past/present hierarchy. Drugged with different substances to gain information about his control's name and location, Quiller manages to confuse his answers with references to Inge, so that Oktober learns nothing. Whether a ruse or an honest mistake, Quiller is left abandoned near one of the rivers that divide Berlin and reports his contact with the enemy to Pol. Like the "Reichsführer" Pol was mainly interested in finding the exact location of his enemy's headquarters, since that was a clue to the identity of all their agents in Berlin. Using a luncheon bun as illustration, Pol coolly tells Quiller that he is in the middle of the fog that separated the two opponents while in contact with both. Using Inge's friend as a guide, Quiller locates the near-derelict mansion that serves as Oktober's base. Captured a second time by Oktober's lieutenants, Quiller is calmly released: Inge is being held as a hostage and Oktober's men are openly following Quiller to discover Pol's headquarters. Through car chases, taxi switches and abortive time bomb explosion, Quiller manages to reach Pol in his office overlooking West Berlin's Kufürstendamm. The neo-Nazi headquarters have been raided and Pol is pleased enough to offer nonchalantly that Quiller accompany him to breakfast. Quiller, tired from his dawn race with Oktober's thugs and worried about Inge, bluntly refuses. The police report on the raid mentions nothing about a female prisoner among their catch, and the next morning Quiller goes to the school where he had first met her. She is there, alive and unharmed, leading her charges back to the classroom, as they sing a children's song. As Quiller stares at her, the only noise on the sound track is the song, a cheerful yet ominous hint of the future.

The Quiller Memorandum had many of the merits of the traditional spy film: the suspense and adventure of hunting down Nazis twenty years after the war in the seat of their former glory, the confrontation of rivals who seemed equally well-organized and ruthless, the tensions between the Anglo-American Quiller and his haughty superior, the machinations in London of politicians like Gibbs (George Sanders), who engineer the spy war and the ambiguous romance between Quiller and Inge. The uncertainty of that affair was key to the sense of futility surrounding Quiller's assignment. Was Inge a born survivor, a neo-Nazi used to romance the opposition or a double-agent working for yet another side? Despite his apparent success, his skill in evading Oktober's trap, Quiller was left, as was the audience, with the feeling that the entire mission had been futile and meaningless. Underlying the film and particularly the casting of Segal in the title role, was a feeling that espionage was a horrid exercise, performed merely for the sake of form and the employment of highly placed officials and alienated adventurers. This desperation or failure of nerve on the part of the spy had been an important, though fleeting, ingredient of Hitchcock's Secret Agent, but was becoming the major theme of more modern spy films. Leamas at the conclusion of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold knew, at least, the background reasons for the intrigue that cost Nan's life and for which he sacrificed his own; Quiller and the audience were left ignorant of the real logic, if any, for his mission and of the feelings remaining between him and Inge. Isolation, despair and futility seemed to have replaced the adventure, drama and patriotism of espionage.

Review by Leonard Rubenstein
The Great Spy Films

http://rapidshare.com/files/164897513/6691TQM.part1.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/164875825/6691TQM.part8.rar

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Wednesday, 16 December 2009

The Penthouse




Director: Peter Collinson
Writers: Peter Collinson (writer), Scott Forbes (play)
Cast: Suzy Kendall, Terence Morgan, Tony Beckley, Norman Rodway, Martine Beswick

IMDB

Michael Haneke’s remake of his 1997 film Funny Games upped the ante in the current fad of “torture-porn” thrillers a la Hostel and Saw by making the victims much more personable and sympathetic than the usual beautiful but vacuous under-25 protagonists of these genre-of-the-moment exercises. As a result, our identification with them is turned against us when Haneke makes the audience voyeurs and accomplices in the victims’ ritualistic humiliation, torture and death. But that’s clearly his point – he wants to rub our faces in the violence that contemporary audiences seem to crave in so-called entertainments like Saw. If you don’t walk out on the film, then you deserve what you get. I don’t need to be subjected to Haneke’s litmus test to get the point (I already saw his 1997 original version) but what he’s doing isn’t original. Harold Pinter already explored this terrain much more artfully and effectively in some of his earliest plays. Take, for example, Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1957), which was adapted for the screen in 1968 and directed by William Friedkin: two mysterious men arrive unannounced at a shabby seaside boarding house and proceed to interrogate and torment a lodger there (who doesn’t appear to know them) until they drive him to the breaking point. Disturbing and darkly humorous, the violence in Pinter’s play is purely psychological and rarely physical.

Much more entertaining is the trashy but compelling Peter Collinson thriller, The Penthouse (1967), based on Scott Forbes’s play “The Meter Man.” It is clearly imitative of Pinter’s 1957 play yet Haneke’s Funny Games bares more than a passing resemblance to it. Is it a mere coincidence? Arriving toward the end of that period when films about “swinging London” were the latest craze – Morgan, Alfie, Georgy Girl, Blow-Up – The Penthouse could be viewed as a moralistic backlash against those movies and some of the hedonistic hipsters who populate them. Within the first five minutes of the film, the central couple, Barbara and Bruce, are established as illicit lovers. Barbara, who is your basic working class shopgirl, is clearly frustrated by their sporadic secret trysts and Bruce, a married real estate agent, is equally wary of the “when-will-you-ask-your-wife-for-a-divorce” discussions which inevitably follow their couplings. But there is already tension in the air, established under the opening credits of The Penthouse, as two sinister looking men gaze upward at the top of a sterile new high rise, see the lights come on in the penthouse, and then with a knowing smile between them advance toward the building.

The penthouse in question turns out to belong to one of Bruce’s clients who is on vacation in the Bahamas and Bruce is using it without their knowledge. So, right from the beginning, we know Bruce is a jerk. He’s unfaithful to his wife, takes advantage of his mistress and his clients and is a spineless jellyfish to boot; we know this as soon as he sends Barbara off to answer the door when an unexpected visitor comes knocking, afraid their love nest will be exposed. As soon as she opens the door, the film crosses over into theatre-of-the-absurd territory as first Tom, and then his partner Dick, invade the penthouse, posing as meter men who have come to take the gas reading. They end up taking more much in both physical and psychological terms, and as their mind games become increasingly sinister, the film develops a compelling theatrical tension between how far Tom and Dick will go and how much abuse Barbara and Bruce will take before they fight back or snap. While Barbara is easily the more sympathic member of the couple (mainly because she’s played by the dazzlingly beautiful and sexy former model Suzy Kendall), neither character allows for easy identification because of the film’s highly stylized structure which emphasizes its stage origins. It allows us to experience the couple’s night of torment as a surreal, avant-garde happening – not hard-edged realism. Like other plays such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? where souls are stripped bare and relationships built on hypocrisy crumble when forced to face the truth, this one ends with Bruce and Barbara forever changed and damaged by their ordeal, unable to face each other again. It’s as if Tom, Dick and Harry (more on “him” in a minute) were externalized versions of each other’s worst fears come home to roost.

But back to The Penthouse. The type of funny games Tom and Dick favour seem to have no rhyme or reason other then breaking down their victim’s will. When they first gain entrance to the penthouse, they start by berating Barbara, who presents herself as the actual tenant, for not knowing where the gas meter is. Bruce, who pretends to be sleeping while overhearing Barbara’s harassment, finally rouses himself for a confrontation, only to be threatened with a switchblade. Tom and Dick then bind Bruce to a chair with silk cords, spinning him around until he is completely ensnared and forced to watch while the duo force Barbara to get drunk and strip down to her underwear. And so it goes, one humiliation follows another and Bruce’s attempt to turn Dick against Tom by planting a seed of distrust between them leads nowhere. Finally the two intruders pack up their things and leave Barbara, who’s been ravished by them both, and Bruce to sort the whole thing out. But just when you think the whole ordeal is over, the games begin anew with the introduction of “Harry,” who claims she is Tom and Dick’s parole officer. Verifying that she has the two men in custody and in handcuffs in her police car, she appeals to Barbara and Bruce to see the duo one last time so that they can apologize and ask for their forgiveness. By this point in this movie, you know that Bruce and Barbara are condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and so The Penthouse comes to a close with one more round of madness.

While The Penthouse is often self-consciously arty AND unapologetically exploitive – Barbara’s transformation into a docile sex toy is helped along by John Hawksworth “blue movie” music cues– it is also compulsively watchable with a powerhouse cameo by Hammer Films sex siren Martine Beswick (Slave Girls, One Million Years B.C.) as Harry (she receives third billing but doesn’t appear until the final fifteen minutes). Her perverse presence – she arrives in male drag and soon “lets down her hair” with a wicked laugh – is as much fun as Amanda Donohoe’s camp turn in Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm (1988). In addition, the movie has some striking Pinter-like dialogue. When Bruce blurts out, “Why’d you have to do this? We haven’t done you any harm.” Tom responds, “Well, it’s not a question of that. It’s more a question of the harm you might do us.” Haneke’s dialogue in Funny Games follows the same ying-yang logic.

Tom and Dick may be absurd creations but their enigmatic relationship remains one of The Penthouse’s most intriguing aspects. While they both have their way with Barbara, their flamboyant behavior and bitchy banter between themselves wouldn’t be out of place in The Boys in the Band. At odd moments in the narrative, Bruce and Barbara’s degradation becomes secondary to Tom and Dick’s passive-aggressive role playing. There is one scene where Dick is having fun trying on Bruce’s clothes as his victims watch and Tom sarcastically comments, “Dick’s rich you see. He’s terribly rich. You should see all the clothes he’s got. I don’t know where he keeps them all.” Disgusted, Dick strips off the jacket and throws it at Tom, saying, “I think this coat will fit you better than me.” Tom then flashes him an intimate look and says, “Maybe I’ll try it on a bit later” which brings a sly grin to Dick’s face. But the game remains a secret despite occasional signs that a clue will be revealed. It’s pointless to fight a tight, airless contraption like this but there is a certain fascination in monitoring your own reaction to it. What would you do if you were in Bruce or Barbara’s situation?

Tom Beckley, the actor who plays Tom, might look familiar to you. That’s because he played the twisted psychopath who terrorized Carol Kane in When a Stranger Calls (1979), his final film before he died of cancer in 1980. He was also appropriately creepy in Robert Hartford-Davis’s The Fiend (aka Beware My Brethren, 1972) and offered memorable support in Get Carter (1971). Norman Rodway as Dick is less familiar to American audiences since he spent most of his career working in British television but you can see him in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965) and Michael Winner’s I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘isname (1967), which also starred Welles. Terence Morgan, in the role of Bruce, is also an actor who received little exposure stateside but appeared in numerous British B-movie melodramas such as The Shakedown (1959) and Tread Softly Stranger (1958) and a few A-list titles such as Alexander MacKendrick’s Mandy (1952).

Those of you who enjoy Italian giallos or swinging sixties cinema from England need no introduction to Suzy Kendall, who first made favorable impressions in the James Bond imitation The Liquidator (1965) and To Sir, With Love (1967). Her film career has been eclectic, to say the least, and she’s appeared in a variety of genre films from the international espionage thriller Fraulein Doktor (1969) to the horror anthology Tales that Witness Madness (1973) to nunsploitation Diary of a Cloistered Nun (1973). However, it is her appearances in giallos that have earned her an international cult following for Dario Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plummage (1970), Sergio Martino’s Torso (1973) and his subsequent Spasmo (1974).

As for Peter Collinson, The Penthouse was his first feature film and he followed it up with Up the Junction (1968), also starring Suzy Kendall, in a working class expose that was firmly in the “Kitchen sink” school of British realism. His next film, The Long Day’s Dying (1969), a grim anti-war drama, received critical acclaim and won two awards at the San Sebastian Film Festival, but most of Collinson’s later work was ignored by the cinema intelligentsia though he is probably best known for The Italian Job (1969) starring Michael Caine. He died of cancer at the age of 44 the same year that Beckley died of the same disease.

The Penthouse is a film with a desaturated color scheme and the dominant color is gray – the skies are gray (one of the few exterior shots shows an urban landscape dwarfed by an industrial complex where toxic clouds of smoke are billowing forth from its towers) and the interiors are gray with some black and white highlights. Here and there are shades of sickly green on the walls or on furniture. And Arthur Lavis’s cinematography concentrates on eerie shadows across faces, the shiny sweat on foreheads and the low florescent lightning that casts a dreary spell over everything. All of it adds quite effectively to the movie’s sense of alienation and despair and John Hawksworth’s alternately brooding and sleazy score is the putrid icing on the rotten cake. Eat it up, yum, yum!

Review by morlockjeff
Movie Morlocks

http://rapidshare.com/files/179625446/SUKEPECOTPH.part1.rar
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Tuesday, 15 December 2009

The Holy Mountain



Director/Screenplay/Production Design: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Photography: Rafael Corteidi
Cast: Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Alchemist), Zamira Saunders (The Written Woman), Juan Ferrara (Mon), Adriana Page (Isla), Burt Kleiner (Klen), Valerie Jodorowsky (Sel), Nicky Nichols (Berg), Richard Rutowski (Axon), Luis Loveli (Lut)

IMDB

Awakening from a comatose sleep and covered in insects, a bearded thief (Horácio Salinas) is almost crucified by children but he is then rescued by an amputee dwarf. After he and the dwarf share a joint, they travel through different scene after scene of surreal images. They wander into a town populated by freaks, fascists, hookers, and religious fanatics, where skinned, crucified livestock are paraded down the street. Costumed frogs and iguanas bloodily reenact the Spanish conquest of South America, Innocent people are massacred, and birds fly out of their bullet wounds as soldiers of this Mexican police state rape peasant women for the benefit of tourists who photograph these horrific tableaux. The thief gets drunk with Roman soldiers who proceed to use his body as a mold to create hundreds of kitschy Christ statues. He returns to the street and, with the aid of a fistful of balloons, he rises to the top of tower where he encounters "The Master," an alchemist (Jodorowsky). The alchemist demonstrates his transformational prowess by turning the thief's excrement into crystals and gold.

A mother wakes up her son by tickling his genitals. She sits on the toilet seat while he takes a bath. A gas is sold that turns mothers into cannibals who then eat their children. A handbag case Holy Mountain comes equipped with a bear trap for feminists to castrate men. The ruler of an empire is deaf, mute and blind. Before making an important decision, he puts his hand into his wife's sexual organs. If they are moist, the decision is positive. If dry, the response is negative. Groups of young men are initiated into a secret society by cutting off their penises.

The alchemist then leads the thief to a room where he views the bodies, naked and shaved, of seven wealthy people of notable achievement. Each person is corrupt and greedy involved in politics, war or mass marketing. Each has their own planet and a weakness. They are willing to give up their money and be reborn as a Buddhist monk. They are preparing for their respective spiritual awakenings, an ascension up "the holy mountain," in search of the secret of eternal life. They Holy Mountain include a sexually perverse bed maker and a craftsman who creates religious weaponry and a woman with Kabala tattoos. The Alchemist leads nine souls up the mountain where, it is believed, nine wise masters reside and must be replaced. The nine represent the planets of our solar system, based on, and distorted from, their classic meanings in astrology and alchemy with earth portrayed by a Christ figure. Along the way, they encounter more sights, including a chicken massacre and an old man who shoots tiger breast milk. They go through many confusing and mystical treks until they finally reach the mountain. When they get there, the wise men are shown to be fakes and Jodorowsky, the film director, and company laugh at how their trip was pointless.

odorowsky says "Zoom out camera" and the camera zooms out to show the sound crew and cameramen. The whole point of the film is pointlessness. It reveals the absurdity of religion and mysticism. Jodorowsky shows an overwhelming slew of religious and mystical symbolism and many are led to believe that they are significant. Jodorowsky intones: "The flower knows. You don't need to ask it. Plants are the books where knowledge is written. The grave is your first mother." However, at the end Jodorowsky lifts the veil and shows that it was all meaningless. Even the movie is an illusion, the film admits to being a meaningless illusion, just like religion and the idea of higher powers. Or is it?

Review from Alejandro Jodorowsky- Father of the Midnight Movie

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Sunday, 13 December 2009

Alice's Restaurant


Director: Arthur Penn
Writers: Arlo Guthrie (song), Venable Herndon (screenplay)
Cast: Arlo Guthrie, James Broderick, Pat Quinn, Geoff Outlaw, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Michael McClanathan, Tina Chen, Kathleen Dabney, William Obanhein, Graham Jarvis, M. Emmet Walsh

IMDB

I harbor a somewhat jaundiced view of the 1960s. From my point of view, the legacy of that era is decidedly mixed, and I am truly offended whenever someone of a certain age speaks to me with condescension that they "were there" and I wasn't. Of course, that's not exactly true; I was there--just not old enough to participate in the earth-shaking events that shaped the next few decades. Be that as it may, Alice's Restaurant is a window on the 1960s unlike any other film I have ever seen. It's the only film I know of that actually makes me feel sorry that I was too young to be a hippie.

The film is based on Arlo Guthrie's long, narrative song "Alice's Restaurant." The song ranges over the famous garbage incident that landed him and a buddy in a local Massachusetts jail, as well as Arlo's experiences in a military induction center in New York City. The movie recreates the events in the song faithfully, but tacks on other story elements, presumably events related to the script writer and director by Arlo, who stars as himself in the film. (In the interest of full disclosure, I need to tell you that I had a huge crush on Arlo Guthrie, still find him adorable, and that my feelings may color this review a bit.)

The film opens with the bad news that Arlo must report to sign up for the draft that is supplying troops to fight the war in Vietnam. Arlo does what many young men did at that time--he finds a college to enroll in to qualify for a draft deferment. He travels all the way from New York to Montana to find a college, thumbing his way across country as his famous father, populist musician Woody Guthrie, used to do. The long-haired, festively clad Arlo is an uneasy fit in conservative Montana, and he is regularly subjected to taunts by the locals who feel threatened by his appearance. One day, his friend Roger (Geoff Outlaw) comes to visit. Two hippies in town are way too much for the locals. Roger is run off, and Arlo takes a beating at a local diner. He staggers into the street and collapses from the concussion he likely suffered. This is no fist fight from the Old West. One young man is outnumbered, shown no mercy, and felled in a very realistic way. He is immediately thrown out of school.

Arlo decides to visit his friends Ray (James Broderick) and Alice Brock (Pat Quinn) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The 40ish couple have just purchased a church and set up a commune for their friends and anyone else who decides to drop in. In a rather amusing scene, the priests hold a last service for a handful of congregants, reminding them that God is not attached to any one building, but can be found everywhere. They desanctify the church and file out. Ray and Alice watch expectantly, take the keys from one of the priests, and run through the church like a couple of ecstatics.

When Arlo shows up shortly thereafter, Alice embraces him in a mighty friendly hug. Alice is an extremely affectionate earth mother to all her charges, many of whom are young, lost teens. Arlo heads down to New York City to play some folk gigs. He is propositioned by a 14-year-old girl, who takes him to a crash pad so that she can notch up another musician. Arlo declines very politely, saying he'd rather not catch her cold. The authenticity of this scene again provides a fuller picture of how these lost youth who became flower children lived and survived.

One young man named Shelly (Michael McClanathan) is being released from Bellevue, where he has been kicking a heroin habit. Ray goes to New York to fetch him. Shelly, a creator of mobiles, wants his art back. Ruth (Eulalie Noble), one of Woody's crowd and now the middle-aged owner of the club where Arlo is playing, offers the money needed to pay Shelly's back rent and give him access to his apartment. Ruth tries to seduce Arlo, who is much less gallant in rejecting her. The casual sex casually sought is a fixture throughout the film.

When Shelly arrives at the church, Alice shows an affection toward him that is uncomfortable for Ray. Jealous, he teases Shelly and pursues sex with Alice more regularly, ringing the church bell, as is the prerogative of the lord and lady of the manor, after each tryst. Shelly's fragile grip on sobriety is tested, particularly after he and Alice have sex, and he gets to feeling jealous himself.

Alice opens her famous restaurant with the construction help of the entire tribe. She's a fabulous cook and manages to attract the locals, who seem to be pretty tolerant of the commune, perhaps because they are good, independent New Englanders. Officer William "Obie" Obanhein (playing himself) is fairly passive and accepting of the tribe; Alice has a way of working her charms. His patience is tested, however, the day after Alice and Ray's Thanksgiving feast. Arlo and Roger decide to fill Arlo's VW van--a fixture in the 60s--with the garbage this large celebration generated and take it to the town dump. Unfortunately, the dump is closed. The pair start driving and, spying some debris down an embankment on the side of the road, choose that spot to deposit their load. They are seen in action by an older couple and turned into the police.

After a comically exhaustive investigation of the crime scene, Obie does his duty; he arrests the pair and throws them in jail, asking them to remove their belts to prevent suicide and removing their toilet seat to see that they don't bang their heads on it and drown. Arlo and Roger come to trial, plead guilty, and agree to pay a $50 fine and clean up the garbage. This conviction will stand Arlo in good stead when he receives his induction notice and must show that he is physically and morally fit to serve in the military. When he is found to have been convicted of a crime, he is asked by a sergeant if he has rehabilitated himself. A quote from the song comes in on voiceover: "Sergeant, you got a lot a damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench 'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug." Arlo is released to the loving arms of his girl, Mari-chan (Tina Chen), whom he met at the Thanksgiving feast only a few days before.

What makes this film so unique is its unflinching, but essentially positive view of the story, participants, and era. We see the tragedy of the times--the runaways, drug addicts, painful infidelities, prejudice, and violence. But we also see the love the tribe has for each other and the joy of living an improvisational life. Arlo Guthrie isn't a very good actor, but he is a very good hippie. His fresh, smiling face says so much about why society's misfits were able to come together and create a world of their own that aspired to celebrate the best of what it means to be alive--love, sex, family, caring, a live-and-let-live ethos that abhorred cruelty. A scene during which Joni Mitchell's haunting "Songs to Aging Children," is sung, pays a beautiful and sad tribute to this sweet and doomed community.

James Broderick embodies a man who was born just a little too soon. Ray--not the real Ray, but the movie Ray--seems to me to be a man who was burdened with responsibilities, perhaps as a soldier in the Korean War and a husband in the conformist 50s. His mid-life crisis came at a perfect time, but his emotional and experiential baggage prevented him from truly understanding his newly embraced life. The movie Alice was born to be a hippie. Her backstory could not have been as fraught as Ray's, and her frequent disappointment and uncomprehension of him create a sadness at the core of the joyful family.

Although Woody's legacy is written all over this film, scenes between a mute and dying Woody (Joseph Boley) and Arlo seem awkward and unhelpful in understanding that legacy. Filming a duet between Arlo and influential folkie Pete Seeger does nothing to correct this weakness. The viewer simply must know that Woody's solidarity and rapport with the Dust Bowl refugees like himself who inhabited the shanty towns of California in the 1930s has its direct mirror in Arlo's life. The respectable Hal Ashby film, Bound for Glory, is recommended viewing to help get a bit of perspective on the life and early times of Woody Guthrie.

Alice's Restaurant paints an authentic and hopeful picture of a time most have heard about, but few, even those old enough to have been hippies, ever really saw or understood. What the film may lack in structure and style, it more than makes up for in sincerity and understanding. Among Arthur Penn's many examinations of society through individual experience, Alice's Restaurant stands as a unique, near-documentary, achievement.

Review by Marilyn Ferdinand
Ferdy on Films, etc

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Thursday, 10 December 2009

Last Tango in Paris



Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Writer: Bernardo Bertolucci (screenplay), Agnes Varda (source)
Cast: Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, Maria Michi, Giovanna Galletti, Gitt Magrini, Catherine Allegret, Luce Marquand

IMDB

LAST TANGO IN PARIS is an important film because of the way it deals with film history. By showing the inadequacy of and parodying two recent influential film styles, 1950s Hollywood and French New Wave, Bertolucci critiques and condemns the outmoded ideas and attitudes which informed these styles. This important aspect of LAST TANGO has been ignored, partly because the film so quickly became a cultural object encrusted with layers of largely irrelevant criticism that diverted attention from deeper meanings. But the aspect was also ignored because Bertolucci did not present it clearly. I will argue that the film ultimately failed, largely for this reason, and then go on to show the confusion that resulted from casting Brando in the role of Paul. I will discuss sexism in the film and Bertolucci’s failure to make clear statements about Jeanne. I will end by suggesting what I think Bertolucci is really saying about outmoded social forms and film styles. The insights are there, although they lie beneath the surface of the film. Bertolucci must be praised for his critique of bourgeois styles and attitudes, but criticized for not finding a technique adequate to express expressing his perceptions.

Bertolucci’s failure to establish a coherent perspective on events in the film through style and tone makes LAST TANGO a particularly difficult film to interpret. The late 50s and early 60s French New Wave accustomed us to ambivalence in the directors’ attitude to their films and even to their characters, but the overall tone, style and mood of each film indicated well enough what the director was expressing. LAST TANGO, however, lacks a consistent attitude on the director’s part of the and thus has produced an especially confused and subjective critical controversy. Critics have differed in their interpretations of the film because Bertolucci has not placed the encounter between Paul and Jeanne within a framework that would clearly tell us what he is saying about the characters. The actors could, perhaps, have provided the perspective themselves. (Many critics suggest that the film would have been quite different with Dominique Sanda and Jean-Louis Trintignant.) But in contrast to this, Brando dominates the film.

Let me dwell on Brando for a moment because his overwhelming screen presence is at least partially responsible for the confusion about the film. Brando uses essentially the same acting style that had worked so well in his U.S. 50s movies. Here this clashes with Bertolucci’s own more modern, European attitudes and style. The sheer strength of Brando’s personality in a film like this is jarring. His old method acting, tough Hollywood style, is often quite out of place, as in the scene near the start of the film when Paul is reminiscing about his past with Jeanne. That style was fine for U.S. films like STREETCAR and ON THE WATERFRONT. Here the effect of drawing the audience in close to the character is inappropriate in Bertolucci’s very European kind of cinema. Brando’s acting style makes us feel a closeness which is unsuitable for the brutality and insensitivity of the character here. Both Terry and Stanley, despite their surface toughness and male aggressiveness are essentially good guys. But there is nothing likable about Paul. He is selfish, self-pitying, indulgent and hostile. Yet as Brando’s acting style draws us close to the character, it only leaves us puzzled as to what he is really all about, or what we are to feel towards him.

However, in one sense Brando was perfect for the part. If, as I'll argue, Bertolucci’s film is as much about film styles as it is about sex and bourgeois society, then Brando was a good choice for Paul through whom Bertolucci is commenting on 50s Hollywood film attitudes and styles. Brando immediately conjures up Terry and Stanley, although, of course, here he is an embittered, alienated and aging version, living out attitudes in a society where they no longer have meaning or context. But Brando (understandably) is unable to parody himself. Instead he seems to use the film for his own ends, expressing his personal loathing for bourgeois life and attitudes. In this, he is similar to other contemporary heroes, such as Alex in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE or, more recently, the two men in GOING PLACES. All these men so hate a false middle-class way of being, with its phony niceness and artificial goodness, that they become monsters in revolt against the majority in their culture. In LAST TANGO, one often feels that Brando is not really acting, but that he is rather expressing a real hostility toward society. He obviously feels that it is better to be openly and deliberately ugly and brutal than to subscribe to bourgeois superficiality, and the film was a perfect vehicle for expressing such ideas.

The result, however, of Brando’s using the film in this way is that he absolutely dominates the film and thus sends the whole thing off balance. To express what I think he wanted to express, Bertolucci would have had to establish a critical perspective on Brando. If one is looking for parody, one can find it in scenes where Paul’s actions are so extreme as to be ridiculous. For example, even the opening shots can be seen this way. The camera is tracking backwards, focusing on Brando walking slowly underneath a bridge with an incredibly pained expression on his face. A train passes overhead, and he curses “Fucking God!” into the roar. Everything is just a little too slow, a little too belabored to seem natural. At one point, when Jeanne comes to see Paul, he is sitting with his head covered. For a moment he resembles Bottom, the weaver with the ass head in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. Another time, we see Paul crying meaninglessly, sitting in a broken chair while Jeanne masturbates in the other room. The butter scene is nearly ridiculous. And in some way, it is also hard to believe in Paul’s emotional outburst over his wife’s elaborately decked-out body. The scene again borders on the ridiculous.

Many people missed the director’s ironic tone in these scenes partly because the irony is subtle. Also, seeing it required familiarity with the consciousness and style in new films. Bertolucci takes types of people and attitudes common in new films. Then he exaggerates them so that we become distanced from the type or the attitude and look critically, often with ridicule. For example, in the opening scene mentioned above, Bertolucci constructs a very forced meeting between his two central characters. Paul is an exaggerated version of the typically alienated, lost, lonely modern hero as he plods slowly along with contorted face. The exaggeration of the familiar type makes it hard to take him seriously. The unreality of the scene caused by the emptiness of the streets and the echoing of Paul’s steps distances viewers even more as we wonder why the camera is staying so long with Paul. The second pair of footsteps turn out to belong to Jeanne, and we know that she and Paul will end up together. Bertolucci again exaggerates the “first meeting” scene, distancing us and shocking us into awareness of the attitudes that underlie such meetings in many films we have seen. Instead of merely flirting a bit with a total stranger and setting up a date, Brando virtually rapes a rather willing Jeanne. Impersonal genital sex is the basic form for encounters between lonely people in our culture. The shock may make us absorbed in the actual sexual meeting. But the abrupt ending and the matter of fact way each smoothes out clothes and departs is ironic because we still expect some kind of follow-up.

Bertolucci, thus, achieves his ironic tone by parody and exaggeration. He violates our expectations by going further than we are used to or by introducing some element that seems inappropriate. Thus he undercuts our ability to take a scene seriously. There is something comic about butter being used in the sodomy scene. Again, Brando covering his head or sitting among broken furniture crying seems inappropriate in the context and shatters our belief in that scene. We are shaken into an awareness about what is actually going on rather than merely accepting it passively.

The, undercutting can be missed because it is subtle, and also because the ironic tone is inconsistent. Often, Brando seems to be viewed totally without comment. It is logical for people to take Brando’s consciousness for the consciousness of the film. Bertolucci perhaps expected the audience to provide perspective for themselves—after all, one could expect anyone with a healthy view of sexuality to be disgusted by Paul’s treatment of Jeanne. But people evidently saw the encounter as merely an accurate version of the way things are, with nothing particularly wrong with it. Few critics saw Jeanne’s treatment as particularly shoddy, but rather they constantly referred to her as “slutty.” Evidently, reviewers accepted the stereotype as “true.”

For all his claims to be on the side of women’s Liberation, Bertolucci cannot have it both ways. Either he does intend Paul’s consciousness to be the film’s consciousness, in which case he did not have to make Jeanne believable. Or else he wants to criticize what Paul is doing, in which case he had to create a framework within which to view Paul and with which to show clearly how appalling the sexual encounter is. As it is, the relationship is presented in a sexist way. It is not enough to argue that the entire sexual relationship is intended to symbolize Paul/Brando’s hatred of bourgeois society; or that there are in fact girls like Jeanne who deserve all they get by putting themselves in the situation in the first place. Men’s hatred of bourgeois society does not justify taking out this hostility on women. Nor does the fact that we can empirically observe women acting like Jeanne, relieve Bertolucci of the responsibility (in an era of heightened consciousness about women’s psychology) of showing why Jeanne acts the way she does, how she has, in fact, internal internalized male ways of seeing women.



Sexism in this case then has to do with assumptions made about Jeanne without Bertolucci letting us understand what is going on in her mind. Presented in a stereotypically male point, she is ready to make love any time in any place, and she is apparently enjoying the initial abrupt encounter with Paul, whom she has just met in the apartment. Coming back for more, she is prepared to go on with the relationship, even though Paul hits her merely for wanting to tell him her name. She goes along with Paul’s silly sexual games, aimed at humiliating her, even though he tries all kinds of things on her. His games include keeping his clothes on while demanding she strip; withholding sex until she masturbates; anal intercourse when Jeanne angers him. All this leads up to the humiliating scene where Jeanne has to sodomize Paul with her fingers while repeating Paul’s fantasies of her performing degrading sexual acts for him. Paul never relates to Jeanne as a peer, even outside of sex. He mocks her, talks down to her and in every way treats her as an empty-headed little girl.

Inadequate in many ways as is Paul’s development as a character, we do have some idea of his mental state and his personal tragedy that somewhat explains his hostility and misery. This is not the case with Jeanne. Thirs is a one-sided relationship seen for the most part through Paul’s eyes. Jeanne functions as part of his world when the two are together, not as a character in her own right. Presented as a tool for Paul’s self exploration and for his acting out of his hostility, she becomes a thing, an object to be played with and to be used for Brando’s ends. Bertolucci never lets us know her thoughts, feelings or wishes. The few times she does rebel, it is in a childish, petulant way that no one can take seriously. Since we never know what Jeanne is thinking or why she is even bothering with Paul, her actions in the last part of the film are incomprehensible. Her abrupt murder of Paul is implausible. It reveals the extent to which Bertolucci has been working with fantasy in relation to Jeanne. Nothing in the rest of the film prepares us for her suddenly turning into an archetypal bitch. She has on the contrary been treated as a frothy headed, superficial little mod girl. But now Bertolucci throws in the bitch image simply because it fits what he wants to do with Paul. He is evidently not at all interested in Jeanne as a character. He has not even tried to think her through adequately, and merely draws on stereotypes of women as he needs them to develop his male character.

To summarize: the film reflects many overused myths and stereotypes of women in the treatment of Jeanne. For example, the film reflects men’s beliefs that women are inferior beings, made for men’s pleasure; that women really want to be humiliated and treated brutally; that women are essentially cold and rejecting, and will cut a man down once he’s become vulnerable; that women are essentially frivolous characters who don't know what they want or where they are headed; they are incapable of deep feeling or, true commitment.

Again, taking the film at its face value, these ideas about women may be seen to pervade the film and extend to all other women characters. Catherine, the maid, whom we see cleaning up Rosa’s room after the suicide, babbles on incoherently about what happened and seems stupid. Rosa’s mother is ridiculous in her grief, and is mocked by Paul throughout. Rosa herself is revealed to have been a bitch, taking lovers behind Paul’s back and giving him nothing. Indeed, the women around Paul become symbols for a grotesque and alienated world that offers Paul no comfort and no peace. Like Michel in Godard’s BREATHLESS, Paul, after using Jeanne for his own ends, becomes her victim. Both Michel and Paul die with ironic gestures as if to say, “What else can you expect from women?”

Looking at the film in this way, the image of women in LAST TANGO accords well with the images in contemporary fiction from Hemingway and Henry Miller to Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. Kate Millet’s analyses of the sexual debasement of women in modern fiction apply equally to LAST TANGO (see Millet, “Instances of Sexual Politics,” in Sexual Politics, New York, 1970). Like women in most fiction, Jeanne is a male projection rather than a character in her own right. Bertolucci never moves outside of male consciousness to present Jeanne as a person. In De Beauvoir’s existential terms, Jeanne remains “the other,” and never becomes a subject.

It is precisely this dehumanizing image of women that contemporary feminists are taking exception to. Given the present consciousness about women’s roles, it was surprising that more critics did not deal with the sexism in the film. Grace Glueck’s review in the New York Times (March 28, 1973) was the only piece I saw which was totally from a feminist point of view. Other female critics—Judith Crist and (surprisingly) even Molly Haskell barely mentioned the sexism although they were critical of the film as a whole. John Simon was a surprising bedfellow, but while he rightly attacked the sexism, he also had to attack “women libbers” for not attacking the sexism (New Leader Feb. 19, 1973). Norman Mailer predictably identified totally with Brando and was using his review of the film in the same way as Brando had used the film itself, that is, to vent his personal hostility toward society. He exults in the humiliating sex scenes while regretting that there was “no shot of Brando going up Schneider.” Mailer delights in the degradation of Brando’s “beautiful closet-fuck” and recounts the scenes in detail in his review. Mailer is full of praise for what Brando reveals about himself and his sexual hostility. After going over the sodomizing scene, Mailer says about Brando:

“He has plighted a troth. In our year of the twentieth century, how could we ever contract for love with less than five hundred pounds of pig shit? With his courage to give himself away, we finally recognize the tragedy of his expression across twenty five years A stroke of genius to have made a speech like that. Over and over, he is saying in this film, that one can only arrive at love by springing out of the shit in oneself.”

I am not denying that Mailer and others like him (and Lawrence before them all) did not serve an important historical function in breaking through sexual taboos that were particularly repressive for women. In recognizing that women do have sexual needs and in fact enjoy sexuality, these writers destroyed the Victorian notion of woman as a pure, innocent being devoid of contact with the earthiness and ugliness of sex. Pauline Kael claims a similar breakthrough for LAST TANGO, although on a different level. She says that we have been used to mechanical sex in pornography but that we had never expected “a sex film that would churn up everyone’s emotions.” Obviously, Italian (and to a lesser extent, French) consciousness is behind that created by the women’s movement in the contemporary United States. Possibly to those audiences Jeanne is breaking taboos in handling the affair with Paul so casually while continuing her relationship with her financé, totally free from guilt. But this merely reflects confusion about what being “liberated” means.

It may be true that Bertolucci is opening up the film form to certain realities about sexual relations and is thus contributing to overthrowing remaining puritan ideas about sex, but it is a pity that he remained within negative stereotypes about women. Bertolucci could have done something really interesting with Paul and Jeanne if he had built in an historical framework linking film styles to attitudes to sexuality in the film. Bertolucci clearly wanted to contrast the irresponsible, New Wave world of Jeanne and Tom, with the old style of suffering, the bitter world of jealousies, hurt and violence that Paul exists in and that is familiar to us from 50s U.S. films.

Tom, of course, is a parody of the Godardian New Wave filmmaker, running around putting up his fingers to make camera shots out of everything, and apparently not knowing or caring what Jeanne is doing. He is fittingly played by Jean Pierre Leaud, who was discovered by Truffaut as a child and has since played in many New Wave movies, looking increasingly like Truffaut himself. Tom is characteristically in the New Wave ethos in trying to make a film about the progress of his love affair leading up to his marriage. His crew creep around after Jeanne, filming her meetings with Tom and then filming her childhood mansion complete with relics from the past. Real life and the world of their film become so entangled that it is hard to say anymore what their reality is. Jeanne’s life becomes the film; the film becomes their reality together; they live the film rather than making a film imitating their lives.

Bertolucci shows clearly the superficiality, irresponsibility and triviality of Jeanne and Tom’s world together. It is a shrewd comment on contemporary, fashionably “hip” worlds where people are so sophisticated and blasé about everything that they have ceased to be human beings living in the realities of our society and historical moment. It is an entirely escapist world with all the inevitable consequences of shallowness that follow escapism. But Bertolucci does not deal with Jeanne and Tom’s sexual relationship as a function of their world, nor with how unsatisfactory such a casual way of relating must be. We see that Jeanne is unthinkingly adored by Tom and that she is free to run around as she wishes, but Bertolucci makes no comment on the lack of emotional involvement between the two. Had the critique of male-female relationships in the New Wave context been made, then Jeanne’s interest in Paul could have been accounted for in the sense that Paul’s world, despite the degradation, was more interesting.

Paul, of course, belongs in the pre-New Wave world, where men were expected to dominate at their women. From the start, Paul assert control of Jeanne and the situation, and he continues that way until Jeanne wrests control from him at the end. With the historical framework clearly presented, Bertolucci could have explored the drastic changes that have taken place in sexual relations in films over the past twenty years. Jeanne and Paul are both getting something out of returning to clearly defined roles that our era has called in question. Both postwar U.S. and New Wave ideas about sex are ultimately shown to be inadequate. Jeanne and Paul do not manage to create a new place, free from their unsatisfactory lives. Paul uses Jeanne to act out a hostility that he brings with him from his painful world. He cannot let go of his suffering, be free with her, receive from her. His pain rather sours their world, making it harsh and ugly.

Jeanne, for her part, brings with her a casual irresponsibility and cannot meet Paul squarely and directly. She lets him dominate her without really confronting him seriously, knowing all the time that she is free to leave. Since Jeanne forms the bridge between the two worlds of the film, Bertolucci could have used her more effectively than he does. Had he developed her fully as a character, he could have contrasted the worlds she moves in more completely. From this point of view, it would have made structural sense to have Jeanne at the center of the film. With Paul taking the center, and Jeanne being superficially treated, the scenes with Tom and Jeanne seem irrelevant, except as a Godardian parody. More could have been done with the contrast between Paul and Tom as male types. Both types interestingly enough evolve out of the same male fantasy—that if women become strong, then men become weak, small and ineffectual. The Paul types depend on feeling superior to women in order to experience themselves as “manly” and worthwhile. The Tom types, who predominate in New Wave films, have given up their machismo strivings. Young, appealing and cute-looking, few of them take their male role very seriously, tending rather to self-mockery and a cynical outlook on everything. Often these men are presented as dominated by female bitch types. If we are to judge by the movies, the training of neither men nor women has yet equipped them for a concept of mutuality and equality.

The contrast between Paul and Tom is implicit in the film, but it is hard to see how more could have been made of it without giving Jeanne a central role. Only through Jeanne’s consciousness could we come to see how Paul is holding on to an outdated macho concept in a world where women no longer willingly play a submissive role. On the, other hand, how little a man like Tom has to offer. The ending of the film resolves nothing and seems contrived because Jeanne has been inadequately developed. Had we really known her motivations, we would have had the key to the main ideas in the film.

For Joan Mellen,

“The ending confirms the characters in their destinies; Paul is as worn-out as the chewing gum he takes out of his mouth before he dies and deposits under the terrace railing of Jeanne’s bourgeois apartment. He is as out-of-date as the tango dancers; emphasizing again that he is of another era and that there is no beginning again.”

Mellen sees Jeanne’s action as arising from the fact that she realized Paul “was no longer the strong father figure, but a real man beset by the identity of a flawed, inadequate human being,” and that she no longer wanted him. Another possibility is that Jeanne had come to realize that her relationship with Paul was destructive and sick. In order to be healthy, she had to kill that part of her that Paul represented. But both these interpretations have to be invented from the outside rather than “read” from the screen, since there is no evidence within the context of the film that any of this is going on. As it stands, the ending appears to be merely one more parody of Godard and New Wave cinema. Many New Wave films end with a sudden killing that does not appear to have much motive or structural meaning (as in BREATHLESS, VIVRE SA VIE, SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, JULES AND JIM). Sudden death simply expresses the New Wave world view of the meaninglessness and absurdity of existence.

To interpret the ending this way, however, is to say that Bertolucci was not very serious about the entire film, and this is obviously not the case. Much of the confusion ultimately comes down to the problem of the film’s style. Bertolucci was clearly heavily influenced by New Wave filmmakers, and the opening sequences lead one to believe that the film will use that style. There are the location shots of Paris, the jump cuts, the meaningless and comic interactions with the lady at the apartment house, the mystery surrounding the characters. Bertolucci surely also learned from other Italian filmmakers (in turn influenced by the New Wave), and uses color and environment somewhat similarly to Antonioni in THE RED DESERT.

But, as I mentioned earlier, there is a suggestion of parody in the way the opening scenes are shot. This ironic attitude to the New Wave style is at first confusing. Also confusing is the way that Brando seems more “real” as a character than anyone else, and thus there is a strangeness about his interactions with people. In fact, as the film develops, we realize that Bertolucci is using two different styles for the two worlds in the film.

Brando’s world is presented through an aggressive, assaulting kind of style. The jump cuts are disorienting and jolting. Scenes often open up with the camera close-in on a face, or with a door opening. Often, we do not know where we are or who the person is. The narrative sequence is interrupted; we do not know anything about time. Brando is simply presented in contact with various people, and Bertolucci leaves it to us to figure out what they have to do with him and his past life. But the style fits Brando’s character and attitudes in the film. The scenes with Jeanne and Tom are shot quite differently. There the characters are often out in nature. There’s a certain lightness and lyricism in the bright colors. The group is often caught in long shot, and there are humorous aspects to what they are doing.

These contrasting styles are both parodied to a degree and it is through the irony that Bertolucci expresses the inadequacy of both the 50s U.S. style and the French New Wave film style. But still, the framework is missing that would make clear what he is saying through the criticism. Perhaps Bertolucci could have worked more with symbols to make his perspective known. The tango scene is successful because of the symbolic meanings it contains. Brando’s truculence and rebelliousness here for the first time take on explicitly cultural and anti-bourgeois dimensions. His behavior towards Rosa’s mother and towards people in the hotel throughout reflects a kind of adolescent rebelliousness against these people’s conventionality and rigidity, but all of this is shown clearly only in the tango scene. Here, the stiff, artificially dressed and made-up couples going through their rigid and highly stylized dance sequences symbolize all that is most distasteful to Brando in the old-style bourgeois world. He and Jeanne deliberately violate all the conventions and expectations of the situation, dancing wildly and drunkenly, ending with Brando’s removing his pants and with Jeanne’s masturbating Paul under one of the side tables.

At the same time, Bertolucci has found in the outdated tango a fitting corollary for Paul’s jaded ideas about male-female relations. For the first time, Paul becomes almost attractive. He has softened finally, and he has admitted his love for Jeanne. But, as out of date as the tango dancers, he does not understand Jeanne or her world. She is not real for him outside of himself. He thinks he can simply force her to marry him and make his life bearable, and he has no awareness of what she might want. As the two roll around on the tango floor, one realizes that Paul’s secure world has slipped out from under him. He is in a world whose bearings and rules he does not know and where he is therefore bound to fail.

The tango scene, thus, indicates what Bertolucci might have been able to do had he kept control over the film’s direction and built into it symbolic connotations that would give it coherence and meaning. There is no consistent perspective on Paul because Brando simply takes over the character, unheeding of larger meanings Bertolucci may have had in mind. In relation to the Brando character, the film is not a close study of the Paul type of man nor is it a comment on our sexuality today. Instead, the film simply becomes the story of a macho male with a sexy woman ready to go along with anything. Brought down to this level, the sex in the film becomes the film. Bertolucci has not managed to make the sex scenes an analysis of the incompatibility of old and new life styles, or of the alienated nature of relationships today.

However, the film is important in terms of film history. Bertolucci has correctly seen the inadequacy of both the 50s U.S. style and the French New Wave. He suggests that these styles served a function at the particular historical moment that produced them, but that they are outdated now. He seems to be saying that we must move on to something new, and that our social forms are as outworn as our film styles. But he unfortunately failed to provide any direction in this film. The framework is lacking that would have made his perspective clear and that would have placed styles in their historical context. As a result, people naturally focus on the sex scenes and take the film in the most literal manner, missing the deeper meanings buried in the film. But TANGO does present filmmakers that follow with the challenge of carrying out what he failed to do, and of initiating a new direction in film form that accords with the liberated radical consciousness of our period.

Review by E. Ann Kaplan
Importance and ultimate failure of Last Tango in Paris (Jump Cut, no. 4, 1974)

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Saturday, 5 December 2009

Novecento (1900)



Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Writer: Bernardo Bertolucci, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli
Cast: Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini

IMDB

The enormous popular success of Last Tango allowed Bertolucci to assemble a massive budget and an impressive cast for his next film, the impossibly ambitious 1900 (Novecento) (1976) a politically committed 5-hour-plus epic about 20th century Italy starring Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster, Donald Sutherland, Sterling Hayden, Dominique Sanda, Stefania Sandrelli and the late Laura Betti. However, the film's vast running time and its explicitly Marxist political stance caused a major rift between Bertolucci, his producer and his studio. The film was recut twice and finally released by Paramount in the US with no publicity in a compromised 4 hour version.

1900's immense running time was not just a stunt: Bertolucci cut a wide swath through history, telling the story of two boys born on the same day in 1901 (the date of Giuseppe Verdi's death) – Olmo (played by Depardieu as an adult) is the son of peasants and destined to be a socialist; the other, Alfredo (De Niro as an adult) is the son of landowners and destined to be a hopeless bourgeois, an unwitting defender of fascism, and an inadvertent propagator of crimes against his labourers. The vast historical melodrama that ensues is one of Bertolucci's most committed and audacious works. Paradoxically, for most of its running time, 1900 is also probably the director's most conventional film, full of war and conflict and love and sex. Its last act, however, sharply divided audiences, with Bertolucci depicting a Red Flag-waving trial of the landowners after the fall of fascism – a purely fantastical scenario that was closer to a Maoist show trial than anything that occurred in Italian history. Addressing those critics of his – many of them from the Italian Communist party – who claimed that these final scenes were inconsistent with historical fact, Bertolucci himself confirmed this: “This entire sequence is an anticipation”, he said in 1978. “It is a dream of something yet to be”.

The popular failure of 1900 – still one of the most ambitious works ever made by a major filmmaker – left Bertolucci scarred, but an American studio releasing a Communist film at the height of the Cold War seems downright surreal even now, and it's to Bertolucci's credit that he managed to mount such a contradictory production in the first place. The film's reputation has increased over the years; the full version was restored in 1995 and finally released properly in the US, garnering significant critical praise.

Review by Bilge Ebiri
Senses of Cinema

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Wednesday, 2 December 2009

Une vraie jeune fille



Director & writer: Catherine Breillat
Cast: Charlotte Alexandra, Hiram Keller, Rita Maiden, Bruno Balp

IMDB

The title translation could more accurately be “A True Young Girl”, it shouldn’t be read as “A Really Young Girl”.

Alice is a French teenager who goes back to her home for summer vacation after being at boarding school. It is the early 1960s. She is horrified and intrigued by her budding sexuality and the effect she has on the men of her farming community. She flirts with leather-jacket boys in a soda shop, but her heart (or at least her out-of-control lust) belongs to a skinny, semi-creepy guy who works at the local lumber mill who she names “Jim” in her head. He avoids her come-ons because she’s too young. This doesn’t stop Alice, our heroine, from a rich fantasy life where she and Jim enjoy passionate interludes at the beach, in the woods, at the lumber mill, and in his car.

Alice is incredibly curious and as she’s an only child, she spends her time walking around her parents’ farmland and riding her bike into the small town. She watches TV with her parents and has an incredible crush on pop singers of both genders. She also sees how the cute, female singer captures mens’ attention. Alice isn’t sure how to use her power. She also finds a way to pull her panties down wherever she happens to be. She sits in the surf at the beach, she flashes a passing high-speed train, she touches herself on the tracks, and she makes sure that when she rides her bicycle, everyone gets a quick glimpse of her panties.

The men in the town stare, while the women remember when they used to be the subject of such attention and scorn her forwardness. Alice spills out of her too-revealing bikini, but sleeps in a little-girl nightgown. She “enjoys” the scornful looks her mother gives her when she sits on her father’s lap for just a moment too long.

Because Catherine Breillat is at the helm, we get all manner of fluids. This one has vomit, blood (a chicken is decapitated in close-up), semen (and its female equivalent), suntan oil, urine, soap, water, a crushed egg, milk, fly paper glue, dripping candlewax, tree sap, and somehow, even earwax. Breillat never met a visceral liquid she couldn’t use as symbol. When Alice first arrives home, we linger on flies trapped on flypaper, a dream sequence has Alice tied up with barbed wire. She wants to blossom, but is forced to conform.

Her parents’ relationship isn’t what she first thought. She begins to see her parents as sexual beings, she sits next to a flasher on a carnival ride, she sees how men look at her and can’t decide if she’s flattered or mortified.

This film is a shockingly honest (and explicit) story about the awkward and incomprehensible age when a girl changes into a woman. The body blossoms well before the mind can catch up. The scenes she concocts whereby she makes out on a beach with a pop star she’s seen on TV, includes a lot of rolling around and giggling, but no actual sexual contact. It’s as if she’s trying to learn how actual adults embrace and make love. She has seen some beach blanket films, but isn’t sure what happens after a couple finishes rolling around in the sand. In her most explicit dreams with Jim, no penetration occurs. Alice isn’t sure about the mechanics of lovemaking–she’s going on her teenage instincts which those of us well-past our teen years recognize were probably wrong more often than they were right. Try to remember what you thought sex was back when you were ten or eleven years old. Oops.

Is it good? I’m not sure. I always like a film where young people are allowed to be the sexual beings they’re going to become without some big punishment or morality tale. In slasher films, we see naked bodies just before those naked bodies are killed. This is a frank depiction of a young woman trying to make sense of her feelings about her body and her urges. I feel like it should be championed on that basis. I wasn’t bored, but neither was I riveted. The girl/woman who plays Alice, Charlotte Alexandra, was interesting enough. She had to be an innocent and a lolita in equal measure. She appears to have only made three films after this one, each about a temptress. Typecasting or is this the only role she can competently play?



I’ve read various pieces on this film and I’ve seen Alice’s age listed as young as 14, but I distinctly remember a line where her mother says that she’s going back for her final year of high school. I believe her to be 17 or so. But more important than the numerical age is the process that she’s going through. She admits to being disgusted with her budding body, but then decides to ride her bike down a country road bare-assed.

John Petrakis of the Chicago Tribune wrote something very insightful: “Breillat has long been fascinated with the idea that women are not allowed to go through puberty in private but instead seem to be on display for all to watch, a situation that has no parallel with boys.”

Is Catherine Breillat the single voice for young female sexuality in the movies? Perhaps. This film was completed in 1976, but not released until 2001 due to its content and difficult genre identity. Too artsy and well-acted to be porn. Too explicit to be part of the late 70s golden age of film. Too weird to be embraced by large audiences. What sets A REAL YOUNG GIRL apart is that the writer and director actually went through the urges and body-changes depicted in the film. She has felt the changes in her emotions and body, she hasn’t just read about them or guessed at them like a male director must. This is a very important difference and why I’ve decided to do an informal Catherine Breillat film festival. Spike Lee can direct a more honest MALCOLM X than Oliver Stone could have, John Woo does better Hong Kong than Quentin Tarantino, and Breillat can honestly depict the experiences of females (especially their sexuality) better than a man could.

Someone named Lauren Kaminsky has written a fantastic piece on this film here. Yes, Lauren is female, and yes, she sees things in A REAL YOUNG GIRL that males can’t.

“At its best, A Real Young Girl deals honestly with the uncertainties of an awkward transition, when girls are thrust into womanhood without knowing quite how to handle it. Breillat gets inside Alexandra’s head almost too well, viewing the world outside of it with a juvenile’s listlessness and contempt.” — Scott Tobias.

“The theories about sexuality and trauma artfully advanced in this previously unreleased 1975 debut of director Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl) are more nuanced and intuitive than those of most schools of psychology. Alice (Charlotte Alexandra) is as fixated on her genitals as are the men who expose theirs to her, in fantastic and realist sequences that blur the line between what she desperately wants, what repulses her, and what she actually experiences. While her mother aggressively does housework, complaining all the while about her life, Alice sunbathes and flirts–or more–with her father, who’s having an affair. It’s as if she’s biding her time until she manages to seduce one of his dreamier employees or, better yet, escapes by returning to school at the end of the summer vacation.” — The Chicago Reader

Review by MichaelVox
The MichaelVox Movie Review Weblog

Download Links

http://rapidshare.com/files/68675765/CBARYG76.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/68679647/CBARYG76.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/68683755/CBARYG76.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/68687999/CBARYG76.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/68692367/CBARYG76.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/68697454/CBARYG76.part6.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/68703298/CBARYG76.part7.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/68703825/CBARYG76.part8.rar

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Cinema Retro

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The Case for Global Film

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