Category: 1969
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Maybe I shouldn’t have complained so much about Gardner Fox. After approximately a year off (or just appearing as a guest star in Batman or Detective and not getting an Omnibus reprint), Batgirl’s started getting backups in Detective. Gil Kane came back to do the pencils, but with Murphy Anderson on the inks and—outside the…
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Atrocious “family” “comedy” about Tony Randall dragging his family into his experimental underwater house of the future to prove the validity of the project to boss Jim Backus. Janet Leigh plays Randall’s wife (she could’ve done a lot better); she’s terrified of water. Their kids are in a band. The band comes along (including very…
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Jean Simmons doesn’t smile until over halfway through The Happy Ending. The movie runs almost two hours and has a present action of like eighteen years. The first eight minutes are a mostly wordless summary of John Forsythe courting Jean Simmons in the early fifties. The time period’s not important–even though the film taking place…
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Captain Voyeur starts better than it finishes, which is too bad since it gets better as it goes along. Writer and director Carpenter opens the short with a long tracking shot of some boring workplace. Excellent black and white photography from Joanne Willens (save two shots later on) makes the opening an observation on professional…
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A Boy Named Charlie Brown gets by on a lot of charm. It takes writer and creator Charles M. Schulz forever to get to the story. It takes Schulz so long to get to the story–Charlie Brown, spelling bee champ–it seems like there isn’t going to be a story. Schulz lays the groundwork for the…
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The Lottery has a lot of mood. Isidore Mankofsky’s lucid but muted cinematography captures a routine day, not even special with an entire small town gathering in a large field. Director Yust has a few favorite touchstones among the townspeople, though only until the lottery itself starts. Then he concentrates on faces and expressions, as…
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Hans Brinker is clumsy and charmless. It plods through its runtime. Once it becomes clear Moose Charlap’s songs aren’t going to be getting any better and there’s not going to be much expert iceskating on display, it plods even more. A lot of things would help–better writing, better acting, better photography. Unfortunately, Hans doesn’t get…
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Kes has a forecasted structure (so long as you can understand the Yorkshire accents). Teenager David Bradley is about to leave school and head into the workforce. His older brother, played by Freddie Fletcher, works in the coal mines and Bradley knows he doesn’t want that career. They share a bed in their mom’s house.…
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Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow are John and Mary, respectively, and they’ve just woken up after spending the night together. They met at a singles bar. Is it going to be a one night stand or is it going to be something more? Both come with some baggage, though of different varieties. Farrow’s last serious…
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The Wild Bunch opens with a methodically executed heist slash shootout sequence. Director Peckinpah quickly introduces cast members, partially due to the dramatic plotting, mostly due to Lou Lombardo’s fantastic editing. All juxtaposed with some kids watching ants kill scorpions. The Wild Bunch opens with one heck of a declarative statement. Peckinpah wants to look…
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Midnight Cowboy gets to be a character study, but doesn’t start as one, which is an interesting situation. About forty-five minutes into the film, which runs just shy of two hours, Midnight Cowboy chucks the narrative urgency. Maybe not chucks, maybe just shuts down, because it does take the film a while to lose that…
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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid opens with a sepia-toned silent film newsreel. It’s exposition, but also contrast. The silent images of a daring train robbery distract from reading the film’s accompanying opening titles. When the film itself starts, it’s just as sepia-toned. Only it’s Conrad Hall and he’s able to suggest the lush, denied…
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I don’t know if I wish All Monsters Attack were better or if I just liked it more. Because I wanted to like it more–I wanted it to be as wacky as the concept would allow. The concept–a little boy (Yazaki Tomonori) gets valuable life lessons involving working parents, bank robbers, bullies and even criminal…
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There’s a lot of good stuff in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, some of it really good. Director Hunt and editor John Glen have a great time with the fight scenes. The film opens with a hurried, though a playful introduction to George Lazenby in the title role, then moves immediately into one of the…
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Bad direction from Rich hobbles the whole picture, which concerns destitute blue blood turned gigolo Michael Sarrazin plotting with latest squeeze Gayle Hunnicutt to off (Sarrazin’s) rich aunt, Eleanor Parker, for her money. Complicating matters is Parker and Sarrazin’s history. They’ve been carrying on in the biblical sense since Sarrazin was a teenager. Icky bad.…
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Ah, the joys of boyhood. Watching A Day with the Boys, one quickly tires of all the outdoor activities director Gulager chronicles. The titular boys have no names and no dialogue–Boys is entirely dialogue-free–and they just act adorably rambunctious. When they’re sliding down a hill on cardboard sheets, they even put their faithful dog in…
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Naughty Nurse should be better. Bartel’s direction is outstanding–Jan Oonk’s black and white photography is particularly phenomenal–and he writes some funny material, but it should be better. Bartel seems to think because he’s funny, he doesn’t have to keep Nurse logical. It would have been funnier–and better–if Bartel had kept it all together. He also…
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Intervals is a series of profile shots of Venice buildings. It’s unclear it’s Venice until the boats start passing. It’s impossible to tell when director Greenaway shot the film, but the light never changes much so one might assume he either did it every day at the same time. The sequence, with almost imperceptible changes,…
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The Hole, though a precisely, beautifully animated little (two minutes, but that run time includes titles and a preface) piece, is just a cute exercise. Director Kamler comes up with a nice illustration of the futility of the human condition. But he’s too honest and Hole is predictable. The visuals are simple. There’s a flat…
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“It Was a Short Summer, Charlie Brown” is a rather ambitious cartoon, both from Melendez’s directorial standpoint and Charles M. Schulz’s narrative. It starts with the beginning of the school year, then moves back–through the writing of a theme–to the summer. Schulz uses Charlie Brown, Linus and Lucy to establish the flashback, which gives “Summer”…
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Several Friends is in four parts. The first part has nothing to do with the rest, except Eugene Cherry appearing in it. It’s four friends sitting in a car talking. Burnett’s composition is great, but his dialogue is even more impressive. For ninety percent of the film, Burnett’s dialogue is perfect. It falters occasionally, usually…
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With Age of Consent, Powell bewilders. His approach to James Mason and Helen Mirren’s dramatic arcs is excellent, but then he includes this terrible comedy material. He’s got a bunch of slapstick in an otherwise very gentle drama. Mason is a successful artist who feels like a sellout so he runs off to isolate himself…
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What a strange film. I’d never really heard of it, past the title, so… I didn’t know what to expect, but even if I’d known something about it, I doubt I could have expected it. Collinson is a fantastic Panavision director, so the Italian Job is always watchable, even through the awkward opening. The first…
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Take the Money and Run kind of dangles on a line. It’s occasionally a screwball comedy–something the Marx Brothers would have done–and alternately a thought-out spoof of documentaries. The breeze moves the film’s direction and it’s hard to know where it’ll go next. Allen has a significant problem with the film’s structure, however, with the…
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For a while, somewhere in the late second act, Sam’s Song is really good. It has its characters established and it seems like it’s going to take an interesting path getting to its inevitable plot point. The film is mostly about Jennifer Warren, who has a husband (Jarred Mickey) apparently eager to philander; they’re wealthy,…
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Is that the one where Katharine Ross plays an Indian? Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Tell Them Willie Boy is Here starts incredibly strong. It gives a real sense of building towards something, but when that something arrives–Robert Blake and Katharine Ross on the run from a posse–it’s handled so poorly, the film falls apart. Maybe…
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From the first scene of Support Your Local Sheriff!, I thought of one thing: Blazing Saddles. Mel Brooks lifted the tone of the frontier townspeople scenes, just giving them ribald dialogue. In Sheriff, the humor poked at the Western stereotypes is smarter and funnier. The characters themselves are–in character–aware of the absurdities of the genre…
The Stop Button 