Word: bogdanovich
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that film makers are paying scrupulous attention to the old genres, and such formulas as the police thriller, the horror flick and the private-eye caper have been dusted off with success, screwball comedy was hardly likely to escape. All in the name of homage, Peter Bogdanovich ripped off Bringing Up Baby, called it What's Up Doc? and made himself a hit. Doc also represented Barbra Streisand's initiation into the realm of frenetic comedy...
...inference, in the risky currents of society which can warm or chill in their natural course. When James' people talk about being invited to a salon or about being cut off, they are employing the author's own intricate metaphor-performing a ritual of crucial selection. Bogdanovich and his screenwriter, Frederic Raphael (Darling), have swept out all the undertone from Jamesian society, trying instead to make high drama out of mere social graces. It is a little like trying to wring a sonnet out of a bill of fare...
Among all the flaws in this movie-the numbing literalness, the flagrant absence of subtlety-nothing is quite so wrong as Cybill Shepherd. Bogdanovich installed her in the lead as if she were some sort of electrical appliance being plugged into an outlet. Shepherd has a home-fried hauteur good enough for the one-dimensional roles she played in The Last Picture Show and The Heartbreak Kid. She knows how to strike poses for the camera (she used to be a fashion model, after all), but she has no resources as an actress. She runs short of breath...
Most of the actors behave with the sort of animation generally reserved for lyings-in-state, although Cloris Leachman's Mrs. Miller is skittish and well observed. Bogdanovich, a hugely eclectic director, borrows heavily here again. The use of a popular tune-Maggie, in this instance-as a sort of sentimental signature comes directly from John Ford, and the mood of much of the light-comedy moments seems a gloss on Ernst Lubitsch. The film's opening is quite ravishing, however-the early moments of a hotel stirring for a new day-and throughout there is a kind...
Someone says of Daisy Miller that "she did what she liked." Bogdanovich seems to be following that rather wayward course too. There is always the feeling with him that he is really better than he is showing us. But the further he gets from his kinetic first film, Targets, the more fragile that hope seems. · Jay Cocks