Word: downbeater
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...Woman Is a Woman is an unabashed display of cinematic bravura by French Director Jean-Luc Godard, whose first big success was Breathless. Breaking completely with the downbeat, darkly evocative themes that made his reputation international, Godard has brought off a flashy little showpiece so full of daring artifice and visual horseplay that it cannot fail to divide viewers into two camps: those who find its excesses unforgivable v. those who find its successes unbeatable...
...They have been courting each other every spring for the past 34 years. But to tradition-steeped Bos ton, the match is as youthful as ever. The town turns out when the red neon sign atop Symphony Hall blinks Pops, Pops, and Conductor Arthur Fiedler signals the first, firm downbeat to his first love, the Boston Pops Orchestra...
Since the work was commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, it was only right and proper that Aaron Copland should entitle it Music for a Great City-diplomatically leaving the city's precise locale to the imagination of his audience. But Copland had no more than struck the downbeat at his new work's premiere last week when it was obvious to everyone in the packed house at Royal Festival Hall just what city they were hearing about. Great City is an unmistakable evocation of Manhattan. It might well be titled "An American in New York...
...nearly every song. But even at home, the Portuguese seem eager to have their hearts broken. "A wild group of students can roar into a tavern," a medical student says wonderingly, "and immediately they become despondent, wailing their favorite fado." Positive-thinking Portuguese try unsuccessfully to combat this downbeat sense of life; if such songs must be sung, a Portuguese intellectual has urged, "let us suffer en famille and avoid letting foreigners think we have invented a new kind of yawn...
Happily, the movie soon rises above downbeat sociology. Filming in Manhattan, Producer Alan J. Pakula and Director Robert Mulligan (the To Kill a Mockingbird team) have not only caught the flavor of the city-they have imbued it with a gritty freshness all their own. An Italian neighborhood springs to life in one vivid scene set against the background of a concrete piazza, where the men play bocce while the women pull food out of brown paper bags. Some of the film's funniest moments involve Tom Bosley as Angie's feverish, fumbling suitor. One look from...