Word: ballads
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...love is actually a moot point in this film. Antoine's one recorded moment of true passion remains his illicit fling with the shoe-store lady, Fabian Tabard, in Stolen Kisses. The first few notes of the Charles Trenet ballad ("I Wish You Love") that underlined the earlier film sneaks onto the soundtrack of Bed and Board every once and a while- but this time it quickly breaks off into an atonal clanging sound...
...musical comedy that Lolita, My Love is strangest. The sets by Ming Cho Lee are all very impressive, the choreography by John Morris occasionally exciting. John Barry's first Broadway musical score (after Goldfinger, Midnight Cowboy and lots of other movies) includes several fine numbers, including a very charming ballad about Humbert's past, "In the Broken Promise Land of Fifteen." "How Far Is It To The Next Town" is a good song, but its refrain is hardly an adequate substitute for the constant car travel between motels in the book and movie. The mindless opening number, "Going, Going, Gone...
Burgess originally planned to be a composer. He is now halfway through writing music and lyrics for a musical version of Ulysses. He could not resist, either, printing in MF the music Miles hears in Castita-the same tune, successively done as a ballad, an anthem and a wedding march. He has completed two movie scripts and is itching to get behind a camera. "So much to learn," he mutters dejectedly, but he is investing in movie-tape equipment, and heaven knows who or what will be shot on the playing fields of Princeton...
...Hoichi the Earless, the third film, is the longest, the most complex and the most successful of the four. The film is in two parts. In the first we hear the recitation of a ballad relating a famous battle between two Japanese dynasties, while on screen Kobayashi fades back and forth between a pictorial representation of the battle and actors performing it. There is an almost faultless synthesis between the haunting of the biwa, the incantatory recitation, and the elaborate pageantry of the image. Kwaidan is reputed to have had one of the highest budgets in Japanese film history...
...second half of the film we meet Hoichi, the ballad singer, living seven hundred years after the battle. He is a blind, self-effacing young man, the only character in the four films who is sufficiently developed to completely win our sympathies. Hoichi is caught between allegiance to the priest he serves and the spirits who summon him to sing each night. Kobayashi permits here the introduction of all manner of implied themes-the autonomy of art, tensions between organized religion and spirituality, illusion us, reality and so on-but these are all carefully subordinated to the thoroughly human struggle...