For doing The Missouri Breaks Marlon Brando, as bonkers bounty-hunter Robert E. Lee Clayton, finally got paid ($1.5 million, to be exact) to thumb his nose at the world and, like some aging belligerent artiste at a cocktail party, to eventually become a public bore. Not that the script--running from saccharin to soporific to just plain stupid--gives the hefty Brando any leg up. Not does the film's only female presence, a cattle baron's educated, sensitive, bored and basically horny daughter who sums up her view of the prairie with a quote from Samue Johnson: "A blade of grass is a blade of grass; show me a human being."
This woman means what she says, too because once presented with a human (in the guise of Jack Nicholson), she wastes no time in offering up her virginity (I didn't clock it, but let's say 35 minutes into the film). Director Arthur Penn then gets down to the real business of the film, the mutilation of cattle thieves. (Blowing a man's kidneys out while he's having intercourse, flinging a steel rabbit trap through a man's eyeball--you know, "the breaks.") This grotesque circus of gore soon winds down into incoherency, and buffs who expected more from this line-up begin to realize the full meaning of "the breaks." Or, as Dr. Johnson might put it, "A humorous or ugly bit is a humourous or ugly bit; show me a plotline."
"We're gonna Cody-fy the world!," Joel Grey promises in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, Robert Altman's parable for the Old West that tells us how a handful of big-mouth lily-livers made up their own myths as they went along. Grey, the weazy sycophant behind Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, certainly found his modern counter-parts in the New York film critics crowd, a bunch that seems to want to "Altmanify" the world, and did their damndest to verbally contort this pleasant but rambling work into a masterpiece.
Well, Altman's legend will not stand on this little contestant, no matter how much Vincent Canby cheers her on from the sidelines. But chalk it up mostly to Altman's never-failing eye for realism. Because once having chosen this metaphor--a band of bad actors for a generation of gun-slingers--Altman portrays an acting troupe as he knows most of them to be--generally hungover, self-deluding, myth-gobbling and over-rated. So the real question remains: why choose this metaphor in the first place? Maybe Altman just wanted to give his real actors an improvising hey-dey. Or perhaps he meant only to provoke Dino De Laurentis, his producer. But in a day when far more pretensious films produce far less needed results, a hot-foot for De Laurentis almost seems justification in itself.
Une Partie de Plaisir. Nothing pleasant here, but rather Claude Chabrol's story of two unwed partners who play around on the side, driving the male in this hip arrangement to show his true chauvanist, possessive, jealous and increasingly inhuman colors. We cautioned you about the cruel commentary on the new morality in Alpha-Beta last week, but at least the outcome of that romantic fiasco stayed pretty much up in the air. The wind-up here is far less ambiguous: this Mr. Machismo stomps his liberated and true love's face in with his bootheel. Subtle, Chabrol, subtle.
The Producers. It is amazing, but there are some people who haven't ever seen it; more amazing still are the ones who hate it. My junior roommate from Rochester, New York, really a marvelous guy and a cineaste to boot, just couldn't see why this was so funny. (Senator Moynihan would try to tell him Eth-nic-ity, but that's not the answer.) This was Mel Brooks' first feature and it reaches heights Catskillian. Surely if one had the chance to show a class of Martians any ten American comedies, this would be included in the green syllabus because, as Alex Haley might point out, of its roots. Like tumescent udders (ech!) Mel Brooks's toors hang, full of borscht and seltzer while the crazed milkmaids Mostel, Wilder, Dick Shawn and Kenneth Mars squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. So much of the American comic strain flows through this film that it makes a pallid commentary like Bob Fosse's Lenny a misrepresentation. That movie tried to deal with other, broader things, not what Lenny lived for; this does. The Producers lets an audience know the wild juices that flow when a comedian works--it's like running for your life. "I'm wearing a cardboard belt!" Mostel screams, undoing his pants and inflicting his misery and poverty on all of us with the most venal of ulterior motives, sweating grease and doing the other things a great comedian does.
Ten From Your Show of Shows. The brilliant Kenmore Square scheduling people paired this parent piece with The Producers. In the fifties, Sid Caeser looked over the television landscape like one of the Easter Isonad heads might. Slaving for the boss were Brooks, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Imogene Coca, Howard Morris, Carl Reiner and some other people they could use in the United States Senate. The product was called Your Show of Shows and it has never been equalled.
Hearts and Minds. A gentle intelligence made this Viet Nam documentary which has received the repercussive cracks of retrospective masterminds lately. There are some cheap touches (to be sure, the interjection of old movie clips and football footage overstate the obvious) but the scenes show on location are touching and unforgettable, and the interviews (with Westmoreland in a verdant set It's not Ophuls, but it's a miracle it was made at all.
It Happened One Night. Frank Capra hits his crest. This legend, a tremendously successful commercial venture ruined undershirts and all that, but it is funny and still fresh too. Gable became an important star with this, mostly by taking off his shirt and having another on underneath and that was swell for the dames of America, but we all wish that it was Claudette Colbert who sent the underwear business into Depression with the rest of the country.
Sunday Woman. Despite certain charming touches, Sunday Woman could serve as a textbook model of how to make an unsuccessful mystery film. The director immediately plunges us into the heart of a murder investigation before we have developed the most casual interest in either the characters or the situation. This would not be so bad in itself, but though the film becomes progressively more involved with solving the murder, we are not given any meaningful information until the last five minutes, and then after the fact. At that point both murderer and arcane motive are brought in out of left field to wrap up this rambling indecisive attempt at a thriller "American style." It is as if in Chinatown Jack Nicholson only discovered that John Huston had any interest in land just before he shot Faye Dunaway. Nor does the film's shallow social satire allow its all star cast to flourish any more than does the plot. Mastoianni is locked into a dull role as a middle class detective unsure of how to treat the high society Torinisti he is investigation, in particular how to deal with his growing non-professional interest in Jacqueline Bisset. Bisset does not seem half so bored as her constant companion. Trintignant. (who frequently looks as if he might scream if forced to make one more stereotypical gay gesture), but only because she does not appear sharp enough to figure out that neither the picture nor her character are going anywhere while she and Trintignant argue about how to pronounce "Boston". Though somewhat slow on the uptake, Bisset is of course beautiful, as the film in typical if unsubtle manner reminds us, by flashing a bare-assed shot of Bisset once all the action is over, as if to propitiate the audience.
Badlands. The basic ambiguity in this 1974 fictionalization of the Stark weather murders of the fifties is whether the director did it on purpose. Either way we lose. If the film is serious, it is a tasteless romanticization of mass murder as teenage alienation in the silent 50's: if it's not, the film can only be taken as a coy parody of James Dean which has nothing to offer beyond its original kitchy conception.
King of Hearts. After roughly six months of pretending to be a real movie theater, the Central Cinema appears to have give up the ghost and brought back the King of Hearts for an encore to its five year run. After all, there's a new class of freshmen all over Boston that can be convinced that merely because a film has run for five years it must be ineffably beautiful and sensitive, or at the very least, that they must see it to find out. King of Hearts isn't actually a bad film--you wouldn't actually turn it off the late late show or walk out on it as the second half of a double bill unless you'd eaten too much popcorn--but it has no conspicuous merits that could justify its return.
Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky is, unfortunately, a tedious, though visually beautiful film by a great director. Alexander Nevsky is a patriotic Russian prince of the fifteenth century who drives out the Teutonic Knights, and the whole film is a transparent Russian nationalist allegory for the Second World War consisting almost entirely of battle scenes. For the first twenty minutes the sight of these elaborately armored and cross bedecked knights fighting in the snow seems breathtaking, but the effect soon wears off and cannot sustain the last two hours. Eisenstein made this film to please Stalin, making it possible for him to film the brilliant and subtly antistalinist epic Ivan the Terrible, an infinitely more interesting film whose courage and vision vindicate Eisenstein for making Nevsky.
Salt of the Earth. A highlight of the women and work film series, this film was made by blacklisted Hollywood directors in the fifties about a strike in a Chicano mining town in the southwest. The strikers themselves form the cast for this extraordinary documentary which conveys in all its intensity the importance of union struggles for people who face the entire weight of a discriminatory and oppressive society arrayed against them, from mineowners to the goonish forces of law and order they control. But the unusual aspect of this film is its focus on women's participation in the strike: when the somewhat macho Chicano men are forbidden to picket by court order, the women go out on the line and win the strike.
