Deeper into Movies
Deeper Into Movies is a collection of 1969 to 1972 movie reviews by American film critic Pauline Kael, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1973. It was the fourth collection of her columns; these were originally published in The New Yorker. It won the U.S. National Book Award in category Arts and Letters.[1]
Containing reviews of individual films from the aforementioned time period, the collection also includes a long essay entitled "Numbing the Audience".
In the anthology, Kael praises the merits of then up-and-coming directors Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola, in her reviews of MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and The Godfather. She pans Stanley Kubrick and his A Clockwork Orange for its brutality and moral convolutions.
The book is now[clarification needed] out-of-print in the United States, but is still published in the United Kingdom by Marion Boyars Publishers, an independent publishing company.
Films reviewed
- Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - " a glorified vacuum"
- Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice - " the liveliest American comedy so far this year - this movie is made up of what was left out of the optimistic Doris Day comedies - Dyan Cannon is most effective (really brilliant)."
- Oh! What a Lovely War - " lethal - the small-mindedness of the approach destroys feeling "
- The Bed Sitting Room - " an apocalyptic farce - but there's no spirit, no rage, nothing left but ghastly, incessant sinking-island humour."
- A Walk with Love and Death - "a tale of chivalry which is at times as brutal as The Seventh Seal - it has an unusual integrity of vision."
- de Sade - " a rotten movie "
- High School - "so extraordinarily evocative that a feeling of empathy with the students floods over us - Wiseman is probably the most sophisticated intelligence to enter the documentary field in recent years. "
- The Royal Hunt of the Sun - " could turn into a classic of the hooting variety. Christopher Plummer, hissing and prancing, is a wickedly funny Inca king - "
- The Madwoman of Chaillot - "Jean Giraudoux's fragile play is doubtful screen material at best, and Anhalt's updating and message-mongering destroyed at the outset whatever chance it might have had."
- Paint Your Wagon - "how can we watch Clint Eastwood in a musical? - He's controlled in such an uninteresting way "
- Lions Love - "first American feature by Agnès Varda -visually it's very pretty - but it lacks a sense of the fitness of things - true sensibility"
- The Sterile Cuckoo -" directed very simply, but with remarkable and sustained tact, by Alan J. Pakula; - Pookie Adams (Liza Minnelli) is one of those brilliant, disordered, and dissociated kids - Miss Minnelli's sad, quizzical persona - the gangling body and the features that look too big for the little face - are ideal equipment for the role."
- The Secret of Santa Vittoria -" a horible kind of picturesque anti-Fascist opéra-bouffe bacchanal"
- Duet for Cannibals - "one more sealed-off-sex-games-and-guess-what's-real movie. - Miss Sontag is often a thoughtful writer, but she has never had much dramatic sense - and she certainly doesn't get a lot of drama going here."
- Coming Apart - " a sex-exploitation-plus-hangups-movie."
- Goodbye, Mr. Chips - " Peter O'Toole and Petula Clark play together so well that one smiles, wanting to accept the romance, wanting to believe in this middle-class fairy tale."
- Adalen 31 - "Bo Widerberg has made Adalen 31 with great skill and artistry and intelligence, yet it's uninspired - it's fundamentally didactic and academic."
- Hail, Hero! - "conglomerate-made "youth" soap opera"
- In the Year of the Pig - "assemblage of news footage and interviews that presents an overview of the Vietnam War - it provides a historical background and puts the events of the last few years into an intelligible framework."
- Downhill Racer - " Michael Ritchie making his début as a movie director - shows some talent, and some wit, in handling the actors in the semi-documentary situations."
- The Arrangement - " painfully bad in a way that isn't fun."
- La Femme Infidèle - "exquisitelty detailed, impeccably acted, stunningly directed suspense story about adultery and passion among the bourgeoisie - I only wish it were fundamentally more interesting."
- Futz - "I sat there to the repulsive end. It's still not easy to explain why it's awful -"
- All the Loving Couples - "sex-exploitation film"
- Popcorn -
- The Comic - " an emaciated little picture"
- Z - "a political film with a purpose - it derives from American gangster movies and prison pictures and anti-fascist melodramas of the forties (Cornered, Crossfire, Brute Force (1947 film), All the King's Men, Edge of Darkness, The Cross of Lorraine, et al ) - Z is based on the novel by Vassilis Vassilikos about the assassination of Gregorios Lambrakis, in Salonika, in May 1963 - a hell of an exciting movie"
- Alfred the Great -"appears to be not about the king who burned the cakes but about a movie studio that has been burning money."
- They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (film) -" Gloria is played by Jane Fonda - the strongest role an American actress has had on the screen this year - Fonda goes all the way with it -[she] stands a good chance of personifying American tensions and dominating our movies in the seventies as Bette Davis did in the thirties "
- John and Mary (film) - " a trifle"
- Gaily, Gaily - " Norman Jewison tries hard, but he just doesn't have the feeling for Hecht's Chicago "
- The Reivers (film) - " the script has great charm - of the Our Town and Ah, Wilderness sort, - " "I wish The Reivers were better done, but it does make one feel good."
- Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here - "There isn't a character who doesn't make points and stand for various political forces"
- Topaz - - "the same damned picture Alfred Hitchcock's been making since the thirties, and it's getting longer, slower, and duller."
- Hello, Dolly! (film) - " Dolly - Barbra Streisand - in the second half of the movie she energizes and transforms the prancing rubbish."
- On Her Majesty's Secret Service (film) - " marvellous fun "
- Marooned (film) -" a sci-fi space epic, is total, straight Dullsville"
- The Damned - " I have rarely seen a picture I enjoyed less, - a ponderously perverse spectacle by Luchino Visconti"
- Hamlet - " Hamlet's speeches, as Williamson delivers them, lack beauty."
- A Boy Named Charlie Brown - " a pathetically limp animation feature"
- M*A*S*H - " a marvellously unstable comedy, a tough, funny and sophisticated burlesque of military attitudes - It's a sick joke, but it's also generous and romantic - an erratic, episodic film, full of the pleasures of the unexpected."
- Anne of the Thousand Days - " well acted and with much sharper dialogue than the original Maxwell Anderson play"
- Patton - " holds out on us - because we aren't given enough information to evaluate Patton's actions."
- Hospital - " documentary by Frederick Wiseman -as open and revealing as filmed experience has ever been. The movie was made at Metropolitan Hospital in New York - the doctors and nurses are not unctuous in that fake-"professional" fashion of private hospitals [-] their occasional crudeness, even roughness, seems to be part of a recognition of the facts of life for the poor in a big city."
- The Milky Way - " a guided tour of heresies [a] relaxed parody of religious doctrines and excesses."
- The Molly Maguires - " an impressive failure - we don't quite believe any of it."
- The Kremlin Letter - " a complicated plot that loses one at the outset."
- The Honeymoon Killers - " based on the lives of the multiple murderers Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez - it's simple minded - a primitive version of old Republic pictures "
- A Married Couple - " Allan King's actuality drama - What is abandoned in this kind of filmmaking is imagination"
- End of the Road - " the filmmakers throw in every fancy trick they can steal - It's intelligence that's missing"
- Zabriskie Point - " Michelangelo Antonioni - winds up with an America as false and unconvincing as if it had been manufactured in a studio by foreign craftsmen. Though he uses actual locations, Zabriskie Point is as far off America as the Italian Westerns shot in Spain."
- The Looking Glass War- " fails at the premier level of drama - basic involvement."
- Loving - " an unusual movie - compassionate but unsentimental. [Director] Irvin Kershner is fortunate in having as his middle-class anti-hero George Segal, - He has perhaps the warmest presence of any current screen actor. As the wife Eva Marie Saint gives a stunning performance ""
- The Only Game in Town - "a sluggish star vehicle of the old, bad days"
- Start the Revolution Without Me - "a spoof of swashbucklers - It's worth mentioning mainly for Hugh Griffith, who is oddly poignant as a bufuddled Louis XVI"
- The Magic Christian (film) - "contemptible"
- Tropic of Cancer - "much less than the book"
- Fellini Satyricon - "a terrible movie - Somewhere along the line - Fellini gave in to the luxurious basking in sin that has always had such extraordinary public appeal . He became the new De Mille - a purveyor of the glamour of wickedness."
- The Adventurers (1970 film) -"Mr. Levine and Paramount Pictures are said to be cutting a half hour from the version I saw; they should keep cutting until there's nothing left."
- Airport - "doesn't work"
- The Boys in the Band - " it's a theatre piece that has lost its theatrically satisfying form, and what was bad is now worse, while what was passable because it "played well" doesn't play so well on screen."
- Women in Love -
- Trash -
- The Baby Maker -
- The Great White Hope -
- Monte Walsh -
- First Love (1970 film) -
- Ice -
- I Never Sang for My Father -
- Goin' Down the Road -
- This Man Must Die -
- Little Fauss and Big Halsy -
- C.C. and Company -
- Burn! -
- The Twelve Chairs -
- Cromwell -
- WUSA -
- The Owl and the Pussycat -
- Where's Poppa? -
- The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes -
- Song of Norway -
- Ryan's Daughter -
- Perfect Friday -
- The Pizza Triangle -
- Bombay Talkie -
- Scrooge -
- Groupies -
- I Walk the Line -
- The Confession -
- The Act of the Heart -
- Gimme Shelter -
- Little Big Man -
- Love Story (film)
- Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion -
- Husbands (film) -
- Alex in Wonderland -
- Brewster McCloud -
- There Was a Crooked Man... -
- The Music Lovers -
- Bed and Board (1970 film) -
- Promise at Dawn -
- The Last Valley -
- Puzzle of a Downfall Child -
- Little Murders -
- The Hour of the Furnaces -
- Doctors' Wives -
- The Sporting Club -
- The Garden of Delights -
- Claire's Knee -
- Wanda -
- A New Leaf -
- The Conformist -
- The Andromeda Strain -
- McCabe & Mrs. Miller -
- Klute -
- Carnal Knowledge -
- The Anderson Tapes -
- Sunday Bloody Sunday -
- The Last Picture Show -
- The Last Movie -
- Skin Game -
- The Trojan Women -
- Murmur of the Heart -
- The Début -
- T.R. Baskin -
- The French Connection -
- Long Ago, Tomorrow -
- Is There Sex After Death? -
- Fiddler on the Roof -
- El Topo -
- Billy Jack -
- Born to Win -
- Going Home (1971 film) -
- King Lear -
- Man in the Wilderness -
- Bedknobs and Broomsticks -
References
- ↑ "National Book Awards – 1974". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-10. (With acceptance speech by Kael.)