Word: devilment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Roper: So now you'd give the Devil himself benefit...
...there an idea on the wind that he can't ensnare and turn into a jaunty, funny, shocking piece of fiction? There have already been the international spy thriller (Tremor of Intent), the scatological novel (Enderby), the population-explosion novel (The Wanting Seed), the Third World satire (Devil of a State), the historical novel (Nothing Like the Sun), and the futuristic novel (A Clockwork Orange). Now comes MF, the biggest send-up of them all, on Claude Levi-Strauss's intellectually fashionable structural anthropology...
UNTIL Little Murders, the great American sound comedies had always been nihilistic, disrespectful of traditional film genres, but severely handicapped by their own uneasiness in scoring thematic points. It is hard to take even films as distinguished as Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux or Huston's Beat the Devil as little more than devastating evidence of the director's hatred for the work he had been doing and the authorities he had obeyed. Chaplin could glorify his own superiority, Huston could include himself (through Bogart) in ironic rings of betrayal and failure; the result was the same. Righteous indignation was nullified...
Rocha treats these conflicts between elites and masses in two other films about primitive religion in the impoverished northeast of Brazil, Black God. White Devil (1964) and Antonio das Mortes (1969) where the people are actually killed off during the fighting between the elite revolutionary cangaceiros and the beatos, the hired killers of the landowning aristocracy. Rocha deals with Warrior Saints and Dragons of Evil, cut off from the masses by their self-consciousness as legend and their mystical level of existence. Sebastiao, for instance, the revolutionary "Black God," seeks to "revenge the death of Christ with the blood...
...more in what it implies than in what it delivers. For one thing, the plot of the movie denies the gut reaction to Dietrich as femme fatale. The image of the cold-eyed castrator stands up, in fact, in only two of her films- The Bine Angel and The Devil is a Woman, the first and last movies, respectively, of her six-year association with Josef von Sternberg. In most of her work, Dietrich is notable mainly for her almost martial sense of loyalty to her man. She may flirt in Morocco with everything in trousers (and sometimes those...