Reviews

"Play It as It Lays" impressed me at first viewing. For a decade, I waited to read a thumbnail review of it in "Sight and Sound." When I finally read one, the review disparaged the movie I most want to have on a DVD. Too bad.

Frank Perry directed several terrific films, including "Monsignor", "Diary of a Mad Housewife", and "The Swimmer." This is a movie I want to study in detail. I think it might belong on my top ten list; it is a faultless film version with a screen play by Joan Didion of her outstanding minimalist novel. The attention to nuance and detail reflects the same attention in the novel.

Every actor brings a subtle touch to his or her role. The editing is faultless. The cinematography by Jordan Croneweth is as matchless as his work in "Blade Runner" and "Handle with Care". Some think that Tuesday Weld merely played herself, but she has told us she is not the nihilist Maria is.

I recall with immense gratitude performances by Tammy Grimes, Adam Roarke, and Anthony Perkins, but everyone in this film is top notch I think this is the classic film about the moral and existential corruption of much American life. I will write more when I get to watch the film again. That final scream haunts me.

I watched this film with my family over a long Thanksgiving holiday weekend. I am thankful that someone insisted that we watch it, though I didn't pay much attention until the end of the film when a head shearing seems promised, but, alas, doesn't happen.

On the other hand, I watched this movie some years later and loved its liveliness, absurdity, sparkle, and just plain fun. I think that the film has a female tone. Women are not exploited in it even though I am sure that someone might think that the movie is pure exploitation. I think the movie plays with tropes of the period.

I keep thinking someone ought to remake it. And flesh out some of the implications in the original.

If good intentions made a film great, then this film might be one of the greatest films ever made. The film has great actors, a master director, a significant theme--at least a would-be significant theme, undertone of fifties existential world-weariness, aerial scenes that ought to have thrilled both senses and imagination, and characters about which one might deeply care. It is about patriotism and about patriotism in a healthy way.

Not quite ten years after the film, I knew Air Force officers who taught my R.O.T.C. classes at university. They were intellectuals. They thought deeply about their work. They has senses of humor. One had been a crew member on the first plane to drop a hydrogen bomb. I have wondered if any one of them died in Vietnam. I imagine that they flew missions there.

Regrettably, the film fails. The movie lacks visual interest, drama, expression of feeling, and celebration of the very patriotism that underlines the narrative. No actress has been worse used that June Allison in this movie. Her Susan Holland is a woman that one would flee, not embrace. Col. James Stewart (who as then a colonel) makes a good stab at this role as Lt. Col(and later Col.) Dutch Holland. But the most interesting thing he does in the role is bite into a sandwich. I'm not kidding. Stewart was good as biting in sandwiches as he did in The Spirit of Saint Louis.

One might think of Ted Williams, but I don't when I watch Mr. Steward in the role. I do think of William Holden as Lt. Harry Brubaker in The Bridges at Toko-Ri . The comparison is not good for Mr. Stewart, who seems wasted in this film.

Footage shot from a B-36 looks like outtakes from commercials for an airline. Though beautiful, the aerial shots are mundane. For the time, they might have impressed viewers. The crash in Greenland involves unexciting modeling You expect the outcome to be good.

The undertone--the subtext-- for the film voices the tedium that Air Force flight crews must have felt during their long missions and the banality that the Air Force used to make its business--well business like any other business. One imagines how a La Nouvelle Vague director might explore this theme and then one begins to think about how someone with imagination might have filmed this movie. Little moments are missed.When crews returned from long missions, the members of the crew got a shot of scotch and a massage before debriefing the mission. Showing that might have helped.

Banality was the image the Air Force wanted and Mr. Mann accommodated the brass. Maybe, in that sense, the film works, but not for me.

I mourn when I watch the movie, because I think all of us, director, actors, crew, viewers, and members of the armed services might have enjoyed giving and getting much more than we get here.

I don't think that this movie had to be Dr. Strangelove or 2001, both of which it presages, but it had potential never realized. Yet, I enjoy watching it. I think of the airmen on their long missions and the ground crews in isolated places. There is a certain sense of honor celebrated here and I celebrate that honor.

I certainly understand why people who praise this movie here and other places appreciate it. If there were no intentional fallacy, it would get a 10 from me.

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One too easily forgets how multifarious and rich a movie can be. Billy Ray's Breach transposes history into something with exquisite nuance. Several of my favorite actors create a splendid ensemble. Not only Chris Cooper, Ryan Phillippe, Laura Linney, Dennis Haysbert, Caroline Dhavernas, Kathleen Quinlan but also actors with only brief time on screen help Mr. Ray and his editors weave a tight film with rich undertones. Several commentators have voiced observations about why this is an outstanding film. This work is already high on my list of spy films, but even more it recalls the films of classic Italian and Swedish directors from the fifties and sixties.

Michelangelo Antonioni creates a small masterwork. Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar Wai, unfortunately, are not up to his standards. Still, one great work out of three efforts rewards the viewer The silence of Antonioni's work continues to echo the emptiness of our modern world. Behind the silence is that secret violence that shapes our lives. Soderbergh has declined a bit in his vision, but the old master retains lucidity and insight. The DVD is excellent. I recommend watching the Antonioni work first. Then put the DVD aside for a moment when you tire of commercial television and holiday parades and endless football scores. The non-Antonioni sections are worse than American football. Watching them will improve your appreciation of televised American football.

Though I prefer the Krips recording of Don Giovanni, I consider this one of the greatest renderings of the opera. Furtwangler's pace seems slow after recent recordings by Gardiner and other contemporary musicologist conductors, but the old German's sound remains incandescent, not quite as brilliant as his 1954 recording but close enough.

Maybe, Lisa della Casa seems a tad too feminine for the strong-willed Donna Elvira, but she is second only to Schwarzkopf in the role. She had a splendid voice, though I agree that she does seem a tad weak at the beginning. She was the most beautiful of opera divas of her time. She is simply beautiful on film.

Cesare Siepi made the role his personal property. Some recent singers such as Thomas Allen understand the miserable state of the character better than Siepi, but no one enjoyed playing him as much as did Siepi. Erna Berger may have been a tad into her fifties and her voice does seem small for this vital character. On key or off, Otto Edlemann's portrayal never feels exaggerated; he balances Siepi perfectly, though recent performers grasp the mirroring between the two characters better than those in this performance do. Anton Dermota had a splendid voice. No one can criticize Walter Berry.

Both performances are among the best recordings I have heard. I first saw this film when I was 12-years-old. I never lost the sense of enchantment and intrigue watching it gave me.

An earlier reviewer is on target for a first viewing. First viewing the film, I did think of Patricia Highsmith, Laurence Harvey, even Dirk Bogarde, and, of course, "A Place in the Sun." Then I saw the movie a second time. The Allen film is much more sharp-witted, more intelligent, and at the same time deeper than the echoes one hears or sees in references that Mr. Allen makes. Mr. Allen touches Shakespeare and Sophocles. Remember opera emerged from an effort to revive Greek drama.

Yet, there are moments that echo Alfred Hitchcock's playful humor and that reveal the humor rather than mere irony masked in much of the dialogue and plot. Humor frequently seems about to erupt into plain view. The second audience that viewed the film with me did laugh and then failed to laugh when the joke turned on them. The third audience was silent.

Every nuance in this exquisite movie shows discernment and balance. Archetypal operatic arias from ancient recordings support but simultaneously overturn the oppression that the story presents—just as the somber references to dark film turns on itself. With my first viewing, I experienced dread during much of the film until just before the very end. This film seems to emerge from the earlier "Melinda and Melinda." The films make companion pieces.

Is life fair? You must be joking, if you must ask. In the end, maybe the first viewing got it right. Do you laugh or do you cry?

One of my two favorite films, Nuit et brouillard speaks the unspeakable. It recalls me as a child seeing for the first time those images that could not be what they were but were what they were. With commentary in French, the least mystical of languages, color footage of decaying camps mixed with those impossible realities haunt consciousness. Nothing could be or is the same. One has to put the film into historical context. One has to explore the history, but the images make the history eternally immediate.

I contrast this brief documentary with Marcel Ophuls' somewhat dissimilar five-hour documentary Memory of Justice. One leaves the later film cleansed; one can never leave the former without the taste of dust and ashes that linger forever on the palette. Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast is the other of my two favorite films. Somehow, it makes sense to me to pair them. I do not understand why.This is a film that transcends the easy nonsense of too much criticism.