Word: gangsterisms
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...being desegregated," recalls Danny Glover, a likely Oscar nominee for his performance as the hobo in Places in the Heart, "you saw Poitier become a film star. And in the wake of the Watts riots and the push for community control, you got blaxploitation." These were the low-budget gangster and horror movies that, along with prestige efforts like Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues, detonated the explosion of black films in the early '70s. Suddenly directors like Gordon Parks and Melvin van Peebles had broken the color barrier, and Cicely Tyson and Diana Ross were crossover stars...
...worldly way of Edward G. Robinson. She rents a preposterous weekend apartment in Lille, where she and Gueret calculate their future in the Congo or Senegal, "two unlikely, hardworking lovers...planning for their years of triumph and luxury." But Mme. Biron has also got in touch with an old gangster crony in Marseille to help her fence the jewels, and after that, reality takes a brutal measure of the couple's dreams...
...cushions that are to pass for a Paris mansion, a basket is overturned, and the stage is suddenly bestrewn with red apples, which reappear throughout the show as tokens of temptation or insignia of passion. At the end, Tartuffe arrives to claim Orgon's fortune in a 1930s gangster-style roadster that literally bursts through the back wall of the set. His face is scarred; his henchmen wear fedoras; his manservant (Peter Francis-James), who in Pintilie's most inspired invention turns out to have been spying for the King all along, guns him down...
...playing at movie theaters not very near you: the two versions of Director Leone's $28 million gangster epic. If you wish to see the sprawling, lurid, hallucinatory film cut to Leone's specifications at 3 hr. 47 min., you need only make a pilgrimage to Paris (where the film opened to good business two weeks ago) or, later this month, to a single theater in Chicago, where the Leone version will have its American premiere. If you want to see the Ladd Co.'s cut-brisk, less ambitious and audacious, dramatically more coherent...
This is a gangster film, so the screen pulses with gunfire and garroting. There are scenes as sweet as one of a boy's bringing a charlotte russe as payment for his first sexual encounter, then greedily devouring his pastry when the girl takes too long to show up, and moments as gruesome as Noodles' back-seat rape of Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern), the only woman he ever loved. But America is, first and last, a European art film that rarely accelerates into the power drive of a slick Hollywood vehicle. Instead it tells its story in the form...