Word: bileful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unsure of himself and perhaps of America. Forman has resorted to caricatures instead of characterizations, and drawn not on ingenuity but on bile. Even the device of the audition, which Forman has employed in two previous films, reinforces the general feeling of nastiness. He shoots the scene "live" -as far as most of the participants know, it is a real audition-and the fumblings and failings become the source of some crude, easy laughs. In partial compensation there are a couple of very funny performances by Vincent Schiavelli, playing a freak who tutors the S.P.F.C. in the art of blowing...
They've ripped out his guts and substituted bile, have transformed his rhetoric into rant. No longer the liberator of a stage, he has been bound into its conventions, becoming a plaything for experimenting youngsters and a typical "serious" theatre audience in wire-rims and leotards...
...campaign seemed an ill-concocted brew of partisan bile. Much of it was politics-as-usual, but the last spurt of violence and anger -coupled with Nixon's bellicose rejoinder-took it sharply beyond the ordinary. Anti-Administration members of Congress who survive the elections may return to Capitol Hill less inclined than ever to give Nixon an even break, especially as 1972 approaches. Quite possibly the broader political irritations will subside, as they traditionally do after a campaign. But for the present, the 1970 electoral battling left the land still more riven than it was before the skirmishing...
...plot could have been lifted from a 1933 story conference at Warner Brothers. Siffredi (Alain Delon) is a petty crook, all bile and brilliantine, who goes looking for his girl friend Lola (Catherine Rouvel) after his latest prison term has expired. Stalking the streets of Marseille, he finally finds her happily biding her time with a nattily tailored sharpie named Capella (Jean-Paul Belmondo). Siffredi immediately initiates repossession proceedings. Capella only grins. Siffredi glowers. Capella still grins. Then, of course, they fight. After knocking each other around for a while, over pool tables, into mirrors, across bars, that sort...
This might well be a defensible theory. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing whether it is or not from Kelman's book. His arguments are so tainted with personal bile that the book descends to the mudslinging level of the worst of last spring's pamphlets...