Word: clowns
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Beatrice (Joanne Woodward) once a clown-of-the-party, has become the party's debris, wasted and neglected. Her house is a pigsty, her yard cluttered with junk; one daughter, Ruth (Roberta Wallach), is an epileptic teenager, one, Mathilde (Newman's daughter), lost to her out of a love for biology. With slatternly hair and frowsy bathrobe, Beatrice drags out her days on too much coffee and too many cigarettes, reading the want ads and trying to sell dance tickets on the phone. She wisecracks non-stop to waylay despair, but her sense of humor has gone sour and grates...
There's moderate but bouncy rhythm in the cutting throughout much of the film, emphasized by appropriate and cleverly orchestrated themes by John Addison, that reaches a jaunty high when Caine, who is able throughout, is disguised in a clown costume and about to break into the house. Caine actually becomes a clown as he makes his way across the croquet field, dodging the wickets but falling nevertheless, and making subtler visual jokes with the sticky putty in his collections of burgler tools...
...Chicago has on view its most ambitious exhibition in some years: a loan show of 89 Renoirs, tracing his career from 1862 to 1919, when, crippled by arthritis but still painting with brushes strapped to his ruined claws, he died. At one end there are early works like The Clown, 1868, with the precociously firm, sharp structure of figure and field that the 27-year-old painter had learned from Manet. At the other, one finds the semiclassical and flowery kitsch of Alexander Thurneyssen as a Shepherd, 1911. In between there are girls, girls, girls...
...dark and gloomy film, The Clown's Evening presents life as a brutal humiliation--a life difficult to endure which, in the final analysis, resignation and companionship may make tolerable. Many people interpret the film as absolute pessimism, probably because it eschews the idyllic presentation of Bergman's earlier films such as Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika. But the romance in those films eventually breaks down--totally. The more concentrated Clown's Evening begins after the break-down, discrediting illusions that we never see on the screen...
Simon divides this film into two elements: the visual and the thematic. His justification is unclear. He would never tolerate such bilidity on the part of a film-maker. His examination of The Clown's Evening is, however, sufficiently perceptive on all counts to make this weakness merely an organizational problem. Attaching defailed comment to extensive paraphrase. Simon gives a clear picture of Bergman's command, particularly of the nightmarish flashback done with heightened contrast and masterful manipulation of sound. Drawing somewhat on earlier analyses by British critics Peter Cowie and Robin Wood, he integrates his observations, obtaining a more...