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.
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.
Every chronicle play is a reduction of history. In a great chronicle play, this reduction means compression of events, intensity, selection — an artistic vision of history; Marlowe’s Edward II concentrates 24 years (1307-1330) into five credible acts. The Lion in Winter is another sort of reduction: It diminishes a struggle for the English crown into situation comedy.
The Go-Between (1971, Columbia) is the third film Joseph Losey has directed from a Harold Pinter script. Its virtues and defects are so much those of the first two (The Servant, 1963, and Accident, 1967) that Pauline Kael’s judgment on Accident fits — “a fascinating, rather preposterous movie, uneven, unsatisfying, but with virtuoso passages of calculated meanness.”
As an entertainment (“chewing gum for the eyes,” to apply John Mason Brown’s view of TV), Bullitt (Warner Bros. – Seven Arts) must be considered “a good buy”: It holds the attention for the whole of its 114 mins. Problems are mostly concealed by the film’s hip stances.
Dario Argento’s debut feature, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (UM Film Distributors), is assured, inventive, put together with a self-renewing energy and glee. No explanation is necessary and none should be permitted.
Fogged with the Easy Rider air of self-defeat, Five Easy Pieces is much stronger on feelings than on insight. It’s not art but still affecting; the actors under Bob Rafelson’s direction lend a certain truth.
The Girl on a Motorcycle (Warner Bros. – Seven Arts) is not a title likely to attract studious filmgoers, and on the whole it is perhaps just as well. But the movie succeeds at what is seldom attempted — re-creating a poetic novel’s imagery in visual terms.
I have never been able to get behind director Vittorio De Sica as much as the critical consensus tells me I should. His neorealist classics — Shoeshine, The Bicycle Thief, Umberto D. — seem to me flaccid, concerned with whipping up pathos to the exclusion of all else, and not always employing the most respectable means. When he made The Roof in 1956, it became clear that neorealism had reached a dead end...