For the young filmmaker with a music-video past and large aspirations, sci-fi horror can represent fertile ground. Narrative logic makes minimal demands, while extravagant style and pop nihilism are granted a prominence the mainstream denies. Richard Stanley’s ferociously effective Hardware (1990) was shot almost entirely on a single set for a meager $1.5 million; under its required elements, it fairly bursts with attitude.
French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville (1917-73) is hard to pigeonhole. He operated outside established channels (eventually running his own studio) yet he employed movie stars. An inspiration to the New Wavers who liberated French cinema, he remained a consciously classical technician. Abroad he’s best remembered for a trilogy of gangster dramas — Le doulos (1962), Le deuxième souffle (1966) and Le samouraï (1967).
In The 400 Blows Truffaut introduced Antoine, a 12-year-old at odds with the world in which he found himself. Antoine lost his girlfriend to an older and more masterful rival in the opening segment of Love at Twenty. Now, after two failures (not only of execution), Truffaut has returned to that character, but Stolen Kisses does not mark a reprise of his most confident style.
Terence Young is a moderately skillful Englishman who keeps laboring away at the action thriller, always with less than satisfying results. His three Bond pictures (Doctor No, From Russia with Love, Thunderball) had barely an atom of personality, and it would be charitable to describe The Poppy Is Also a Flower and Triple Cross as mediocre.
By this viewer’s idiosyncratic standards, Cul-de-Sac (1966) is Roman Polanski’s sole brush with greatness, and the only feature to keep faith with the surrealist metaphors and perceptions of his celebrated short films. It’s his most bizarrely funny, as well as his most serious work.
The praise that has rained on Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun has a desperate ring, citing it with All Quiet on the Western Front and La Grande Illusion in the roll call of antiwar classics. Trumbo, of course, was one of the Hollywood Ten, refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and eventually imprisoned for 10 months for contempt of Congress.
Sunday Bloody Sunday has been praised to a pulp, and that is understandable; it looks so ostentatiously intelligent and restrained. It has no plot, but a set of circumstances: a bisexual triangle in which Bob, a young London artist, is having simultaneous affairs with Daniel, a middle-aged homosexual doctor, and Alex, a divorcee in her thirties who works as an employment counselor.
Costa-Gavras’ Z predisposes one to admire it, as the first film to indict the brutal military regime in Greece; in fact, the music by the long-imprisoned Mikis Theodorakis had to be smuggled out of the country. From the bitter opening title card (“Any similarity to actual events, or persons living or dead is not coincidental. It is intentional”) our sympathies are engaged.
In The Hospital the screenwriter – director team of Paddy Chayefsky and Arthur Hiller does for modern medicine what it did for war heroism in The Americanization of Emily: They set out to score cheap, quasi-satiric points off a target so large and helpless that one is almost inclined to take pity on it, and fail even on their own cowardly terms.
Volker Schlöndorff’s Young Törless, which shared the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival with Resnais’ La guerre est finie, has finally arrived here, and it emerges as a strange, hypnotic work with deep implications.
