Word: deviled
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Like Weekend Sympathy for the Devil is about cars and Black Power. It is a series of episodes unified by three basic threads. The first is, of course, the Rolling Stones slowly working out the song from which the movie takes its name. At the same time a group of blacks are in a London junk-yard, reading from Le Roi Jones and Eldridge Cleaver while they periodically machine-gun obsequious white women wearing virginal white gowns. The third thread is a hilarious pornographic narrative spoken throughout the movie in clipped, unemotional tones...
...superb. And, for about half the film, the Stones are fascinating to watch. When Nicky Hopkins plays the organ (not the piano, as on the recorded version) while Jagger chants, "I was here when Jesus Christ had his moments of doubt and pain," you begin to believe that the devil is holier or at least more human, than...
...Sympathy for the Devil has its problems, particularly in the second half, but it also contains flashes of intellectual and visual brilliance. Perhaps we can forgive Godard his unease about being a revolutionary who makes films and feeds on the movement he supports. Just as we can forgive the Stones for feeding on black music. If it weren't for Godard and the Stones, how would we know ourselves...
...with the Devil," he says, "is that we will figure out the consequences of whatever we do. We may have a 100% probability of solving all those problems as they arise. But as we solve them, we may find that our only remedies will create more of the same problems...
...unavailability of many Bogart films, the Brattle will be able to present only two pictures, The African Queen and Beat the Devil . In past years Harvard audiences could view 17 or 18 Bogey movies, including such all-time greats as Casablanca, High Sierra, and The Maltese Falcon...