Word: corman
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...Love in London or as Robert Nelson did in The Grateful Dead; rather he sticks it in and lets it lay there, guaranteeing large audiences. In my view the film is poorer for it. Nothing in Easy Rider's endless shots of motorcycles (stolen, as was some of Roger Corman's work in Wild Angels--in which Fonda also starred--from Kenneth Anger's incantatory Scorpio Rising) matches the groaning ferocity of Steppenwolf's lyrics ("Get the motor running/Shoot out on the highway/Looking for adventure/And whatever comes our way/Hey darling gonna make it happen/Take the world in a love embrace/Fire...
Optically ascetic, Rooks and Frank film Harwick's visions in full or less-than-full color, sometimes taking colors away, never bombarding the screen with panoplies of colored light; the color sequences are always unfiltered, the tones those of the film stock without distortion. Unlike Warhol and Corman who treat the drug experience in terms of warped reality, of optically twisted images and superimposed patterns of color, Rooks and Frank are more concerned with the relationship between drugged and normal perception. Harwick, on Peyote, says, "I saw a yellow circle of light . . ." and Rooks cuts to a grey sky with...
...necessity gone forever. Chappaqua, however, transcends personal therapy, Rooks keeping the audience in mind and treating his own life with little self-indulgence. As a personal statement, Chappaqua appears uncompromisingly honest, by virtue of the rigorous structuring of the film, the asceticism of the visual effects (compared, say, to Corman's The Trip), and Rooks' own sympathetic and attractive personality...
...would be nicer to worry about bullets zipping, but everybody has his own little idea about what's melodramatic. Corman's is oddly pedestrian, especially plot-wise. Whenever a bastardly gangster pokes his head on the screen for the first time, an ominous reportorial voice treats you to his date of birth, to a list of his illegal actvities including the number of wives and mistresses he keeps, and to the picturesque means of his invariably violent death. The resumes are satisfying; Corman kills any curiosity about a man's fate that may have started growing malignantly inside...
...Corman is unlucky, as usual, with his cast. Jason Robards shouldn't have played Capone even if he were the only available brunette in Hollywood. He looks like a fine man who tumbled into the murder business by accident; he isn't crass enough for silk scarves and tophats to look appropriately ridiculous on him. Ralph Meeker, his Irish contender, is more like a gangster. His grubby soul shines right through his lovely suit. George Segal, another Irishman, has Robards handicap-elemental elegance. On top of that, he bears such an incredible resemblance to Robards that when...