The Crime of Monsieur Lange. Other Renoir films draw the devoted back for different reasons--The Rules of the Game for its seering social satire, Grand Illusion for its flawless humanity--but this film ranks as the French director's most endearing work. For once Renior lets us unabashedly sympathize with his protagonist, a dreamy, doe-eyed printer who stays up nights writing hack Westerns. The corrupt, sybaritic publishing boss closes his eyes to the printer's serial, "The Arizona Kid," and monopolizes the woman who the poor dreamer worships from afar. But Renoir slips a little social message into the revenge against this meany; the printer and his fellow workers triumph by taking over and collectivizing the printing shop, bringing the "Arizona" serial to predictible fame and fortune. The story ends sadly, but with all the unsentimental humanity that ennobled almost everything Renoir touched.
The Rules of the Game. Did we say seering social satire? Certainly the sting and class indictment in this story about an upper crust weekend at a country estate is undeniable. And yet Renoir also manages to pay tribute to loneliness, love and the more harmless foibles of servants and bourgeois along the way. Added to priceless observations, this film treats us to the acting talents of Renoir himself, as the oafish, big-spirited Octave, who in the name of civility and social convention must see his true and secret love unrequited. See this masterpiece, again--and if you've already done that once more.
Stanley Kubrick has seen the future and it doesn't work, judging by his apocalyptic vision better known as A Clockwork Orange. Malcolm McDowell's Alex and his trusted droogs mug, rape and generally terrorize their way through a British Sodom masquerading as a civilized society. If your stomach holds out, your sensory organs will be grateful; this is first-rate Kubrick, and you'll appreciate the perfectionist approach to his craft evident in every scene as he spares no detail in creating this nightmarish conception of the fate awaiting modern society.
Accessibility is not a quality commonly associated with the work of Federico Fellini, but his film The Clowns reveals an ability to handle a journalistic topic like the world of the circus in a straightforward manner. The quasi-documentary approach to the material checks Fellini's growing affinity for the self-indulgent excesses that emerged in Roma and Satyricon, yet the gaudiness and affected posturing of the clowns enables him to at least satisfy this inclination without damaging the artistry of the film. An ultimately compassionate insight into the bittersweet experiences of life's buffoons, The Clowns provides a fairly painless introduction to Fellini for the moviegoer unfamiliar with his work, while supplying a refreshing contrast with the bulk of his recent films.
Robert Bressen's Lancelot of the Lake is an ideal offering for the cineaste who revels in the romanticizing of the age of heraldry and the Round Table. Yet all the painstaking attention to detail and craftsmanship cannot save the film from deteriorating into a ponderous trek through the medieval Britain of King Arthur, a pedestrian piece of work which fails to justify the necessity of its production.
"The course of true love never did run smooth," wrote the old Bard, and Eric Rohmer's adaptation of Heinrich von Kliest's 1808 novella in The Marquise of O shows just how contorted that path can get. A young marquise, fleeing from an invading army, is set upon by four enemy troops determined to appropriate the spoils of war. Suddenly a figure in white leaps down from an overhanging bluff, saving the young marquise's honor and perhaps her life. The savior takes the distraught marquise to safety and receives her father's effusive thanks. Sound familiar? Ah, but there's a twist. The smitten young officer takes the marquise's honor himself, while she is in the depths of opium-induced slumber. For the next two hours or so, Rohmer and Kleist provide us with an object lesson in the ways in which rigid social and religious mores can blind people to the obvious. The comedy of manners is beautifully filmed, and Rohmer's skillful, low-key direction prevents the story from degenerating into a farce. But after an hour or so, you'll wish you'd saved three and a half bucks and watched "As the World Turns" at home.
On Sunday, the Harvard-Epworth Church brings us a must for anyone who takes his film expertise seriously--a collection of early Lumiere brother shorts shot between 1895 and 1900 in Europe. Brought together under the title The Lumiere Years, these shorts apparently turned up after seventy years sitting in a trunk in the loft of an abandoned garage in Southern France. The shots of the Paris Exposition, the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II and a film of President McKinley preparing to invade Cuba constitute some of America's earliest documentary by two of movies' first greats.
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. This is a movie about time--how the madness and happiness of May 1968 in France transformed itself into the drabness of today. But the Alain Tanner film is almost defiantly hopeful. Jonah examines the shifts in time; the changes it makes in people and their ideologies. If the protagonists end up on a farm outside Geneva as anachronistic misfits with absurd jobs and lifestyles, it's not because they are misfits, but survivors. They are guardians, and if the flame glows a bit dimly at times, well, there's always hope for the child Jonah. The movie would border on the maudlin if it didn't poke fun at itself and bourgeois society constantly. When Jonah turns at the end of the film and smiles impishly at you, the sunshine that gleams through this movie and smiles in general reaches out a hand. Recommended twice.
Serpico. Blood and guts story of the New York undercover detective who was set up by other police because he refused to go along with the department's "official" payoff system. Al Pacino in one of his lesser roles--lots of nice disguises, a crazed scene with Pacino caught in a door, and the crooks inside pointing a gun at his head with the complicity of the backup officers, more blood than a hospital. Which is, well, maybe your cup of tea--much better to see Serpico battling crooked cops than Clint Eastwood murdering everybody. But the bloody scenes alternate with Serpico's home life, which is just about as boring as your uncle's. Still, great drive-in fare. Sit in the balcony and bliss out, waking up only when you gunfire.
42nd Street. This 1934 movie is the first of the great musicals. Hear the beat--of those dancing feet. Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, all caught up in a story line of the chorus dancer who has to fill in for the star at the out-of-town premier but sorry--not time for stories here, just singing and dancing, including "42nd Street" and "Shuffle Off to Buffalo." Doo-wop-a-wop. I love this musical. See you there--on the avenue I'm takin' you too, 42nd Street.
