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Olive is releasing it soon. In the meantime there's a widescreen rip floating around in backchannels that's from the laserdisc, I believe

Viewingsssssss

the Aristocats (Wolfgang Reitherman 1970) I know I saw this when I was a kid as it was one of my mom's favorite Disney movies but damned if I hadn't forgotten just about everything about it. All I remembered was the infamous "Everybody Wants to be a Cat" number and had pictured the whole film being a cartoon version of the Subterraneans. Imagine my surprise when the actual film was a road pic through rural France where the hepcats only show up in the last fifteen minutes! But I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed all that came before, as the film is a gentle riff on a dozen other non-animated musicals of this ilk, and the whole thing's pretty damn cute. I'd sooner sit kids in front of this than a lot of other Disney movies, that's for sure.

Capone (Steve Carver 1975) Roger Corman muscles in on the Godfather with this production. After suffering through the cutesy antics of Bugsy Malone but a week ago, it was all too refreshing to be exposed to a movie that makes no pains to emulate the artifice of the gangster pics and yet feels of a piece with those earlier classics. This isn't high art, and neither were many of the best B gangster pics of the classical Hollywood era. Titular star Ben Gazarra didn't appear to share my enthusiasm for the project, as far from acting like his usual Joe Cool self, Gazarra uses the opportunity to play to the back rows in the theatre across the street. Though he may have taken the job as a joke, his bizarre approach works wonderfully and Gazarra's actorly indulgences mirror Capone's own grandiose ego. Even though this won't make my list, it provided some great entertainment all around.

Ryan's Daughter (David Lean 1970) By no charitable meaning could I be accused of being a Lean fan, but I still wasn't expecting this film to be actively awful. Three and a half hours of idiotic narrative that only exists to occasionally show off the Irish seaside. Poor Robert Mitchum is cuckold to Sarah Miles, as she cats around with a British soldier who for some reason is instantly irresistible to Miles despite the fact that he may or may not have been portrayed by one of those lifesize cardboard cutouts from Spencer's Gifts. Trevor Howard's in the mix as a hard-drinking Catholic priest and John Mills keeps alive the Oscars' streak of awarding statues to characters they feel sorry for with his grotesque town idiot. If there has ever been a worse performance that garnered an Oscar, I'd like to know it, because this is my area of expertise and I am coming up blank.

I watched a couple of comedies that also happened to be debut features:
Bone (Larry Cohen, 1972)
Defying easy categorization, Larry Cohen's debut is a surreal, darkly humorous, stream-of-consciousness skewering of white entitlement that plays like a strange grindhouse meshing of Weekend, Mary Poppins, Repulsion and A Woman in the Dunes while completely defying even the blaxploitation tropes that the movie was/still is marketed under. Andrew Duggan plays a Beverly Hills car salesman who has his life inexplicably invaded by pests, debt and a large black man named Bone (played wonderfully by Yaphet Kotto) who mysteriously appears beside Duggan's pool to remove a rat and then proceeds to systematically harass Duggan and his wife (a game performance from Joyce Van Patten) into giving him money instead of raping her. Duggan rushes out to withdraw money from a secret account that Bone has accidentally brought to light and ends up surreally wandering through a sleepy Beverly Hills where he encounters some strange women who prove how feckless he truly is, all the while Bone is growing tired of trying to menace Van Patten and they begin to share some genuinely tender moments. There is an astonishing monologue by Bone and a strange sort of fantasy-fulfillment taking place by the three main characters across the film. I won't spoil the rest but just believe me when I say I truly had no clue where this movie was going from scene to scene.

In one way, Bone is a satire playing on the reductionist notions of white flight (the blacks are going to move in next door, bringing increased crime and lowered property values) and in another way, it illustrates white upper-class masculinity being exposed as a lucky, impotent fraud. Cohen skates a narrow line with his broad satirical strokes and grindhouse surrealism, but still includes some affecting moments of quiet naturalism. It is a total anomaly of a film, a wonderful revelation and likely contender for my top 50. See it even if you don't normally go in for the grindhouse/exploitation films. You should be surprised by what you find.

Real Life (Albert Brooks, 1979)
Albert Brooks' debut feature is a fun spoof of An American Family and thereby also a spoof of the reality TV craze of today, though it also lampoons Hollywood filmmaking, documentary realism, anthropology, pop psychology, the scientific method and consumerism all without breaking a sweat. Books is wonderfully neurotic as himself, a film director who has permission to enter the home of a Phoenix family to film their life for a year. Entering into their lives with some wonderfully strange state-of-the-art cameras, he becomes an integral part of their fracturing as a family unit. The scientific contingent quickly becomes less accommodating of Brooks' methods as his influence on the family even blossoms a crush from the matriarch. Though he talks of not interfering with their life, it isn't long before he becomes over-concerned with the charisma of the family patriarch and a film audience's ability to sympathize with him and starts trying to find scenarios in which the patriarch's sympathy can best be seen. Filled with some wonderful set-pieces and comedic images, it moves at a brisk pace before ending in a ferocious swirl of neurosis and aggrandizement. Highly recommended.

If you haven't seen it already, the trailer for Real Life is not just one of the best trailers ever, it's one of the funniest short films of the decade. Actually, now that I think about it, can I vote for a trailer?

You most certainly can.

domino harvey wrote:Ryan's Daughter (David Lean 1970) By no charitable meaning could I be accused of being a Lean fan, but I still wasn't expecting this film to be actively awful. Three and a half hours of idiotic narrative that only exists to occasionally show off the Irish seaside. Poor Robert Mitchum is cuckold to Sarah Miles, as she cats around with a British soldier who for some reason is instantly irresistible to Miles despite the fact that he may or may not have been portrayed by one of those lifesize cardboard cutouts from Spencer's Gifts. Trevor Howard's in the mix as a hard-drinking Catholic priest and John Mills keeps alive the Oscars' streak of awarding statues to characters they feel sorry for with his grotesque town idiot. If there has ever been a worse performance that garnered an Oscar, I'd like to know it, because this is my area of expertise and I am coming up blank.

Hopefully you check out the big Corman Bonnie and Clyde flick of the era, Bloody Mama, which is just a grand dirty time with some really overcooked performances. It's not a masterpiece, but it sure is a lot of fun. Also the Lean was my first film to watch for this list and you've kind of nailed why I haven't been able to write about it yet. It's awful, but awful so closely to the middle that lacks the life to really talk about. I'll also definitely be voting for Real Life (and possibly Bone) as two of the funniest and smartest films of the decade.

bamwc2 wrote:Does anyone know where to get a copy of Fedora? As of tonight it'll be the last of Wilder's 70s output for me to see.

The recent restoration is Wilder's preferred cut before the distributor made him cut out 10+ minutes and also delete half of Miklos Rozsa's score. The missing scenes and Rozsa's complete score have been restored for the new version. I've actually seen the release version and I found it to be a solid film, but with the director's cut around the corner on blu (the rip I saw, which domino is surely referring to, was VHS quality albeit letterboxed) I would hold out for that.

Dylan wrote:

bamwc2 wrote:Does anyone know where to get a copy of Fedora? As of tonight it'll be the last of Wilder's 70s output for me to see.

The recent restoration is Wilder's preferred cut before the distributor made him cut out 10+ minutes and also delete half of Miklos Rozsa's score. The missing scenes and Rozsa's complete score have been restored for the new version. I've actually seen the release version and I found it to be a solid film, but with the director's cut around the corner on blu (the rip I saw, which domino is surely referring to, was VHS quality albeit letterboxed) I would hold out for that.

Thanks to you and Domino for the news. I had had no idea that Olive was working on it. Since Amazon has no page for it, I tried looking around the web for any information. Holy cow! According to this post from two years ago (!) Olive has forthcoming plans to release a ton of stuff that I've been looking for, including some titles that I consider to be essential viewings for me before the end of the project. Hopefully some of these will make it out in time.

I certainly agree on your assessment of Bone lifeboy - it has been years since I last watched it but doesn't the Weekend-feel to the film come from the paranoid automobile obsession and the TV presenter broadcasting from a car scrapyard. I think the film also ends there too? A weirdly allegorical film. I'd be tempted to call it a black comedy but that might be racist!

I also love the rather misleading trailer positioning it as a pure sexploitation/home invasion film under the title Housewife!

knives wrote:

domino harvey wrote:
Ryan's Daughter (David Lean 1970) By no charitable meaning could I be accused of being a Lean fan, but I still wasn't expecting this film to be actively awful. Three and a half hours of idiotic narrative that only exists to occasionally show off the Irish seaside. Poor Robert Mitchum is cuckold to Sarah Miles, as she cats around with a British soldier who for some reason is instantly irresistible to Miles despite the fact that he may or may not have been portrayed by one of those lifesize cardboard cutouts from Spencer's Gifts. Trevor Howard's in the mix as a hard-drinking Catholic priest and John Mills keeps alive the Oscars' streak of awarding statues to characters they feel sorry for with his grotesque town idiot. If there has ever been a worse performance that garnered an Oscar, I'd like to know it, because this is my area of expertise and I am coming up blank.

Hopefully you check out the big Corman Bonnie and Clyde flick of the era, Bloody Mama, which is just a grand dirty time with some really overcooked performances. It's not a masterpiece, but it sure is a lot of fun. Also the Lean was my first film to watch for this list and you've kind of nailed why I haven't been able to write about it yet. It's awful, but awful so closely to the middle that lacks the life to really talk about. I'll also definitely be voting for Real Life (and possibly Bone) as two of the funniest and smartest films of the decade.

Also don't forget Corman also directed The St Valentine's Day Massacre back in 1967, so he certainly milked the period-set gangster-fad for all it was worth!

I actually haven't seen Ryan's Daughter yet but both of your views on the film are worrying similar to my take on Lean's final film A Passage To India - epic style and production applied to a film whose story and especially characters do not really deserve that much attention. Lean was always better at intimate drama, but appears to have gotten overwhelmed in his last films (Lawrence of Arabia is really the last one that works for me) by sheer scale and weight of expectations of 'epicness' that had to be lived up to with every project.

Ryan's Daughter has a myriad of problems beyond its epicness, to be sure-- this story wouldn't cut it in an intimate venue either. For one, every single member of the town moves in a flock and while Lean paints the island shore as a vast expanse, this gaggle of boorish and crude villagers somehow manages to pop in at key junctures whenever they're needed, like the old cliche sitcom convention of having a neighbor walk in the door at the exact right time for a punchline. It doesn't help that anyone who isn't our primary cast is portrayed solely as a shrill, vile creature, which makes it hard to give a shit about anything since the film goes to such great pains to hold the audience's hand so as to make it easier to wring it directly.

Viewing Log:

Cold Cuts (Bertrand Blier, 1979): Although I may have seen better films for the project (The Mother & The Whore springs to mind), I think that Blier's absurdest comedy may well be my favorite so far and is a definite lock for my final list. This pitch black comedy tells the story of Alphonse Tram, a man who may or may not have murdered another man on the subway. Tram calmly explains this situation to his neighbor, a less than enthusiastic police inspector Morvandieu, who has a penchant for randomly shooting his gun and murdering musicians. Soon the two pick up a third killer, a strangler of women after he randomly murder's Tram's wife. The three begin a late night adventure and the body count begins piling up. Although it may not be the best comparison, this surreal comedy felt like it could have been written by Samuel Becket's serial killer alter ego. There's no adequate way to explain the goings on here. It just has to be seen to be understood.

The Front Page (Billy Wilder, 1974): Billy Wilder's antepenultimate film is a clear tribute to old Hollywood. This goes beyond the fact that it was based on the same play as His Girl Friday and stands effectively as a remake to Howard Hawks's original. The film stars Jack Lemmon as a newspaperman leaving the business to marry his fiance (played here by the unbelievably young Susan Sarandon), but gets sidetracked when his boss (Lemon's frequent co-star, Walter Matthau) ropes him into covering one more execution. Of course, nothing goes as planned and Lemon and Matthau's characters soon find themselves at the center of the story. It's a mildly effective story even if not everything works. Some of the slapstick is too over the top for my tastes (especially the runaway gurney scene). The leads are too loveable not to be pulled in, and while Wilder was not at the top of his game when he made it, there's enough of his touch to make it worth viewing. That being said, it's still not in the same league as the original.

A Man Called Horse (Elliot Silverstein, 1970): Well, this was an unexpectedly strange viewing and not just for the copious nudity from Richard Harris. Going in I was expecting something more akin to a traditional "cowboys vs. Indians" western. While the frontiers men and the Sioux clash in the film, it is far more nuanced than my expectations, though some of it was uncomfortable. The film tells that story of British aristocrat John Morgan, who is the sole survivor of a Sioux raid on a frontier settlement. Morgan, though initially taken as a hostage by the Sioux, eventually earns their respect by murdering two invading scouts. After showing his bravery in battle Morgan changes, adopting Sioux customs taking a squaw wife and becoming their leader. The film is well made, but I can't help but cringe at its racial politics. The natives are shown as murderous savages that keep humans as playthings. Even though this was Morgan's story there is still also something that makes me shudder when I think of the trend of using a tribe of Native Americans to tell the story of a noble white man who can "out Indian the Indians" (e.g. Dances with Wolves). I have part 2 coming through Netflix tomorrow. I'll write it up in a few days.

Three, Two, One (Lino Brocka, 1974): This was only the second film by Brocka that I've seen. The other, Insiang, was quite the revelation. While good, this one doesn't reach the same heights. The film tells three separate stories are all connected by the themes of loss and loneliness. The first details the travails of an openly though ashamed gay man in drug rehab, the second concerns a woman whose US serviceman boyfriend returns to Manilla after 17 years to collect his daughter that he abandoned, while the third is about a domineering mother who demands her daughter's full attention. All three films were good, but to varying degrees. Of the three, I probably liked the first segment the best, though it had some disturbing homophobia that was probably spot on for the place and time. I certainly look forward to seeing more of his films, but some aren't exactly easy to come by in the US. Does anyone know how to procure a decent copy of Manila: in the Claws of the Neon?

I'm glad to see the love for Bone in this forum. Yaphet Kotto is a force of nature in this film. I wouldn't say that it's a lock for my list, but it stands a very good chance of making it. I've been planning to do a writeup on Larry Cohen's highs & lows this decade, though it'll have to wait until I get my hands on a copy of Hell Up in Harlem.

To be fair, technically His Girl Friday is a remake of Milestone's the Front Page, so Wilder's is the third bite at the apple

domino harvey wrote:To be fair, technically His Girl Friday is a remake of Milestone's the Front Page, so Wilder's is the third bite at the apple

Thanks for letting me know. I had no idea about the original.

Edit: Wait a second. What am I saying? I just noticed that the Milestone is in my Amazon video library. I actually watched it about two years ago and plum forgot about it! I know that I make jokes about having a bad memory, but this is a little scarey.

domino harvey wrote:Ryan's Daughter has a myriad of problems beyond its epicness, to be sure-- this story wouldn't cut it in an intimate venue either. For one, every single member of the town moves in a flock and while Lean paints the island shore as a vast expanse, this gaggle of boorish and crude villagers somehow manages to pop in at key junctures whenever they're needed, like the old cliche sitcom convention of having a neighbor walk in the door at the exact right time for a punchline. It doesn't help that anyone who isn't our primary cast is portrayed solely as a shrill, vile creature, which makes it hard to give a shit about anything since the film goes to such great pains to hold the audience's hand so as to make it easier to wring it directly.

Also seems even worse to me after having seen Du cote d'Orouet last night which recognizes why someone would watch it immediately and plays around that tune like Rivette's home movies. Any film that can keep me charmed during a ten minute scene of women screaming deserves all of the credit.

I have these dreams of Du côté d'Orouët winning over the board, member by member, until it actually makes the Top 10 come December

colinr0380 wrote:I certainly agree on your assessment of Bone lifeboy - it has been years since I last watched it but doesn't the Weekend-feel to the film come from the paranoid automobile obsession and the TV presenter broadcasting from a car scrapyard. I think the film also ends there too? A weirdly allegorical film. I'd be tempted to call it a black comedy but that might be racist!

I suppose I should have also thrown Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in with that string of Bone's references/off-shoots. Yes, colin, the opening scene is a car commercial with Duggan in a junkyard that, as he turns, suddenly has all these cars filled with bloodied bodies. The film doesn't end there...

Spoiler

though it does feel like a deconstruction (ala-Weekend) of much of what came before, or rather a full expression of the lingering hatreds and tensions of the characters. It ends on a desert like beach where Duggan has been killed by his wife and Bone mysteriously disappears. She is explaining to the camera (as if to the police) her explanation of how the black man killed her husband. Because of it's fractured, surrealistic tone, this was the moment that reminded me of Teshigahara's film. There is even a insert of a line of ants crawling down his arm.

bamwc2 wrote:I'm glad to see the love for Bone in this forum. Yaphet Kotto is a force of nature in this film.

Yes he is. That monologue is a brilliant scene but his whole performance is filled with a charismatic screen presence that vacillates between fuming menace, childish glee and end-of-his-rope frustration.

We've even got the makings of a tagline: "You will be charmed by girls screaming for ten minutes!"

Domino: I predict it will come in somewhere south of Small Change! #-o

zedz wrote: Domino: I predict it will come in somewhere south of Small Change! #-o

I hope not. Though it already has something like 160 points pledged.

Viewing Log:

There are fewer today because I've been preparing for an on campus job interview tomorrow. Wish me luck!

10 Rillington Place (Richard Fleischer, 1971): Jesus Christ, Richard Attenborough was creepy as hell in his portrayal of real life serial killer John Christie. Being an American who was born long after the events depicted in the film (and even long after the film itself), I had never heard of the case before watching this last night. It's a shame since I'm a death penalty abolitionist and this movie documents the trial ultimately led to the abandonment of capital punishment in the UK. In the film Christie lets out an apartment to a family, but uses the wife's unwanted pregnancy as a way of gaining her trust before killing her. He convinces her husband (played in an atypical role by John Hurt) that his wife died during a botched abortion and that they'd both face serious jail time if he reported it to the police. This decision proves tragic for Hurt's character as Christie's blood lust has yet to be sated. The film is very well made with great performances all around. I'd give it a strong recommendation.

Le orme (Luigi Bazzoni, 1975): Bazzoni's sci-fi thriller comes off as an extended, middling episode of The Twilight Zone. The film chronicles two intertwined stories. Alice wakes up to find that she's lost three days. Nothing seems right and faces that were once familiar are now somehow...different. At the same time an astronaut is abandoned on the moon by the mad Professor Blackmann (Klaus Kinski) to test the psychological effects effect of lunar isolation (or something). By the end of the film the stories come together and we find out why Alice has been dreaming about the experiment. However, so far as I could tell, none of this made any sense. I didn't help that the version I saw had atrocious dubbing and looked like it case from a VHS tape left in a hot station wagon in 1985.

Primate (Frederick Wiseman, 1974): Had I participated in the horror list (I actually made a list, but my laptop died before I submitted it. If I can ever dig it up, I'll post on it), then Wiseman's documentary about a group of Berkeley scientists performing sexual/aggression research on a variety of non-human primates. The tests themselves are some of the most gruesome ever filmed with vivisections and mutilations frequent occurrences. However, like all of Wiseman's documentaries, he wisely allows the footage to speak for itself and the viewer to make up their own mind. While I certainly do not believe that the actions in the film were justified (the tests had little value that I could discern), I find the subject of animal experimentation far more difficult than other issues in animal welfare. Since there have been invaluable medical discoveries made using non-human animal test subjects are at least some of the experiments justified? I don't have the answer, and Wiseman doesn't try to give me one. Perhaps that's what makes Wiseman's documentaries such worthwhile viewing. I've never seen anything less than spectacular from him and I doubt that I ever will.

I actually feel like Le Orme is one of the better Italian non-Giallos of the decade taking its dream existence (and that of many horror films) and working it as the concept for the psychology of the lead character rendering much of the fantasy horrifying on the primal level.

bamwc2 wrote:However, so far as I could tell, none of this made any sense. I didn't help that the version I saw had atrocious dubbing and looked like it case from a VHS tape left in a hot station wagon in 1985.

That's too bad, as it's a beautifully photographed movie, as you'd expect from Storaro.

I don't think the movie is all that incoherent, either. It suggests more than it outright explains, but:

Spoiler

the scenes with Kinski and co. are not another plot strand, but scenes from a movie that the lead had seen as a child and which, for some reason, have become intertwined with a repressed trauma (I don't think it's hard to miss the suggestion behind her fixation on an astronaut left all on his own and slowly dying). As she comes closer to reliving her trauma by investigating her lost memories/identity, the scenes from the movie become more feverish until they merge with her waking reality, signaling her collapse into insanity. On some level of her consciousness, she has imagined herself as being persecuted by mysterious figures much like the government figures tormenting the astronaut. By relocating her trauma to the movie, she has avoided dealing with it. But obviously her investigations cause dream and reality to collapse into each other.

Much as with Bazzoni's other films, dream, memory, fantasy, and reality blend with each other, forming epistemological dilemmas for the characters. The real interpretive problem in the movie revolves around what's fictive and what's true--that is, what parts of the movie take place solely within the head of the lead and which don't, and why they all seem to hold an equivalent importance.

Even if you weren't a fan of this one, I highly recommend you try Bazzoni's giallo, The Fifth Cord, with Franco Nero and some more Storaro cinematography. It's a more straightfoward genre exercise than this or his earlier giallo, La Donna del Lago (also recommended, tho' it's a sixties film), but on a formal level it's beautifully crafted.

To be honest it, Le Orme didn't have my full attention. I was trying to set up my travels for today while the video played. I'll definitely give it another chance if I can find a better looking copy.

To offer a dissenting view more in line with yours, the charms of Le Orme were completely lost on me. I don't begrudge it its fans, but I think I've just hit my saturation point on

Spoiler

"It was all a dream... or was it?" movies

And good luck on the interview!

Anybody know where an OAR copy of Sargent's Goldengirl can be found?

I remember trying to track it down after seeing the trailer on one of those 42nd Street comps and coming up empty