Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Golf Balls. A case in point is The Fox, in which Schifrin used a lone flute with a sad, fragile melody to frame the film's lesbian theme against its bleak, Canadian country background. He can make points just as effectively with unusual sounds and effects. For Hell in the Pacific, he wrote mostly in a serialistic orchestral style, but at one point bounced golf balls on the strings of a piano to underline the irrational hatred between the film's antagonists, Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune. In the recent Che!, he suggested the primitiveness of the Bolivian...
...play is Ptakovina, by Milan Kundera, who is one of those fighting to keep the writers' union committed to the liberalization program of 1968. Kundera's novel of Czech Stalinism, The Joke, has the directness of a fist in the face; it has been made into a film shown at Cannes this year. Ptakovina is a made-up word, literally "Birdtrick," meaning stupidity...
Still, these are minor lapses in a major movie. In terms of contemporary mores and methods, Easy Rider has told its story from the far side of the generation gap. For once the aura of evil that clings to drug-and-motorcycle movies is gone. Like other films directed to-and by-youth, Easy Rider could have settled for catcalls and rebellion. Instead the film has refurbished the classic romantic gospel of the outcast wanderer. Walt Whitman might not have recognized the bikes-but he would have understood the message...
...course of this alternately acute and naive odyssey, Wyatt and Billy carom from ranch to hippie commune to jail to the New Orleans Mardi Gras. En route, they pick up a Civil Liberties lawyer named George Hanson. As it emerges in the film, the lawyer's part is only a mug shot of a wry, wistful boozer. But in his first major role, Jack Nicholson proves that he knows far more about acting than either of his costars. His elegies for a vanished life are melancholy without being bathetic; his marijuana-flavored description of a UFO takeover...
Ironically, the film has less to say when the stars step forward. Their visit with the hippies is sticky and overlong; only the owner of a motorcycle or a gasoline company could remain entranced by the endless sequences of Wyatt and Billy throttling down endless roads. Moreover, the riders often lack perspective on themselves. Their "search for America" is rather like eyes looking for a face; they are part of what they seek...