Word: directors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...supporting players are no less tacky. The pouty Michelle Phillips, as the ship's social director, wears so many silly getups that one might think ABC is trying to trick viewers into thinking that she is Cher. The blow-dried Chad Everett (Medical Center) is cast as a Pulitzer-prizewinning author who wears what appears to be a Pulitzer Prize medal on a gold chain around his neck. There are real French actors in the cast - Marie-France Pisier, Louis Jourdan - as well as ersatz French men like James Coco. Brooklynese is provided by Shelley Winters, who seems...
...production is often strikingly effective, and Paul Monash has written a script that conveys pity without mawkishness. What either he or Director Delbert Mann, who has chosen a flat, documentary style, has not managed to evoke, however, is the passion of Remarque's book or the intensity of that creaky but wonderful 1930 movie. This All Quiet is so dutifully, ploddingly good, indeed, that it might almost be shown...
...Young Man of the '50s, the hero of Quadrophenia is named Jimmy. Estranged from his family and bored with his London mailroom job, he has become a member of the mods, a loose, nationwide gang of motorbike dandies that sprang up with the Mersey sound. As the talented director Franc Roddam follows Jimmy and his cronies around, we watch a society being born. When The Who's pivotal song. My Generation, flips on at a boozy make-out party, the kids forsake their '50s dance steps for the tribal free-for-all that would typify...
...director does not always record Jimmy's personal adventures with the same grit and humor that he brings to the film's social canvas. The hero has too many stereotypical conflicts with his overly villainous parents and employers; there are too many scenes that try to convey his sensitivity by showing him brooding on the beach at Brighton. The film's final section, a long chain of cathartic crises, is contrived. Still, Phil Daniels, as Jimmy, is both appealingly quirky and a good double for Who Guitarist Pete Townshend. Daniels also has two funny and touching...
This is not to say that Douglas is an unappealing actor or that Susan Anspach, his long-suffering spouse, does not have some good moments playing a lady who knows better than to love him but cannot help herself. As a director, Steven Hilliard Stern does some nice, gritty road and street work. It is as a writer that he allows too much rigging to show. In both capacities, he tends to veer from the excessively melodramatic to the overly adorable, never finding the steady realistic pace that in movies, and in marathons, makes for a winning - or at least...