Word: arkins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Alan Arkin's Barney is a composite of small, shrewd gestures and intuitions, as in a marvelous sequence where he watches Bobbi sing What the World Needs Now Is Love with a mounting mixture of apprehension, thwarted lust and concern that the little old lady next door will hear. Arkin is a vast improvement over James Coco's preening, keening act in the Broadway Lovers, and he has Barney's look meticulously right, down to the monogrammed pocket handkerchief he wears in the pocket of his blue business suit...
...self-deprecating good spirits, and mugging incessantly as if she thinks she is any the more attractive in a state of perpetual motion. Miss Minnelli is simply another victim of a double standard that remains anachronistically true of today's movies: while actors who aren't conventionally handsome--Alan Arkin. Dustin Hoffman. Eliot Gould--are permitted to admit to a certain degree of sexual attractiveness, actresses who aren't conventionally beautiful--Minnelli. Barbra Streisand--must play it strictly for laughs. (And meanwhile, the irony of it is that the "conventionally" attractive actor or actress is no longer in particular demand...
...Northwest. The portrayal is vivid, the material trite. Little Murders is a child's garden of negations. It plays on TV family stereotypes until their insular evils are revealed--and set in the context of a stupidly monied America. It's a rare, original, American comedy, but director Alan Arkin slings more mud with Jules Feiffer's screenplay than he can make stick with his staging. Gordon Willis's camera helps quite a bit. Beatty in the first film and Gould in the second give their best performances yet on film...
There are flaws in the film: vignettes featuring Lou Jacobi as a past-throttled immigrant judge, Donald Sutherland as the pastor of the First Existentialist Church, and Alan Arkin as a neurotic police chief are all ill-timed. The first is prolonged to an ineffectively surreal note, the second (by far the funniest) turns into roundhouse farce, the last starts and ends hysterically...
...most part, however, Alan Arkin's first job of direction is marked by the conscientiousness and compassion that he has shown throughout his acting career. Arkin has stated that the films which he most admires are Renoir's Grande Illusion and Regle de Jeu; the latter film has obviously instructed him more than any American comedy could in the use of setting to explain character, and the need to root a danse macabre in thematic and dramatic progressions. Like the early Renoir, he is very much an actor's director, using his characters' figures and reactions to make comic points...