Word: durgnat
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...Film Comment, associate editor Melinda Ward and I put together a special issue on Cinema Sex (January-February 1973). It included Donald Richie's report on Japanese eroductions, Ray Durgnat on Jess Franco, Stephen Farber on sexual censorship in California, my long interview with Metzger and Ebert's definitive study of Meyer (which is quoted in the first pages of The Other Hollywood. My favorite essay, a real startler, was Brendan Gill's on porno films. Brendan, a New Yorker staff writer for a half-century, and author of the magazine's unofficial history, Here at the New Yorker...
...belly laughs and slasher screams; for a cathartic sob one must go to TV for a Movie of the Week or a late show. Once in a while, though, a film will buck the glut of exploitation movies and attract any viewer who still carries a hankie. Critic Raymond Durgnat called them "male weepies": films to make a grown man, or a baby mogul, cry. They describe a heroic life struggle that may end in defeat or death but never in ignominy. There is nothing like a fighter against the odds--a caring father (Kramer vs. Kramer), a troubled teenager...
Among the "classics" canonized in Confessions of a Cultist are Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, Hitchcock's The Birds, Preminger's Advise and Consent. All are auteur genre items; Sarris rarely has the flexibility of such British auteurists as Raymond Durgnat to admit that non-auteurs can produce great films. Each has raw narrative material of questionable significance, and a blatant commercial bent which made the few respectable critics feel rotten and cheated the morning after, unless trash was all they expected...
Belle de Jour, a very willful fantasy by Luis Bunuel compensates for its personal eccentricities by being so tolerant of the perversions of its characters. Raymond Durgnat (I think) points out that Bunuel's preoccupation with fetishist love differs little from, say, Max Ophuls' preoccupation with sentimental romance--that all forms of love are pure, and identical in the eyes of whatever strange God Bunuel worships. Belle de Jour is a film-maker's film, uncompromisingly unclinical, its often shocking material bathed in the warm yellow-brown glow conveyed by sensuous moving shots...
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