Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Since Red Beard, Kurosawa has occupied himself by preparing his first American film, a dramatization of the events leading up to Pearl Harbor called Tora! Tora! Tora! Twentieth Century-Fox gave him absolute freedom, and Kurosawa revised the script 27 separate times before he felt that he was ready to proceed. Then late last month after only nine days of shooting, the director, 58, was overcome with exhaustion and forced to withdraw from the film. Said Kurosawa's wife, "My husband is no longer young." Unable to replace the irreplaceable, Fox has announced that it will halt production...
...made in 1965 but just released in the U.S., has little of the celebrated Godardian resonance. There are no impalements of the future, as in Alphaville or Weekend, nor is there much of the mordant social satire of La Chinoise or Les Carabineers. Godard himself feels that the film is merely "life filling the screen as a tap fills a bathtub that is simultaneously emptying at the same rate...
Godard is partly right; wanton flow is the film's main source of entertainment. But the melodramatic sluice-of-life interludes-based on Lionel White's novel Obsession-are what ultimately swamp the film's modest blend of whimsy and melancholy...
...Level. In his most recent films, Godard has overemphasized polemic at the cost of the cast. In Weekend, for example, windy politics fray some of the film's visionary power. But in Pierrot Le Fou Godard shows that he can coax fine actors into superlative performances. Belmondo earns his lunatic (fou) sobriquet; his quirky bantam strut and broken-nosed banter are only a gasp away from Breathless. Karina's sensuality gives her ultimate villainy the quality of revelation...
...does omit one American target, however. At one point, Karina sets the theme of the movie by telling the tale of the man who had a brush with death and fled, only to meet it in his flight. Throughout the film, Godard leaves a trail of authors' names: Robert Louis Stevenson, William Faulkner, Jack London, Raymond Chandler. One name he fails to drop is that of the man who made the legend famous by basing a whole novel on it. He is John O'Hara, and his book was Appointment in Samarra...