Word: joans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...best film ever made about Christ, possibly one of the best films ever made. Nothing in my experience of De Mille-school blockbusters discourages the first label, but I think that a few pitfalls have stopped Matthew short of the summit. A silent film, Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, might serve as a standard to measure Matthew against, since it steered its religious theme around some of those same pitfalls on its way to greatness...
First, like Dreyer's Joan the film is built largely in close-ups: faces or eyes alone filling entire frames. Often such close-ups are held long on stylized expressions of transcendence...
Such problems were simpler for Dreyer to deal with. Joan's characters were neither so numerous nor so challenged by our preconceived images. And as a "trial story," Dreyer's film was better suited to objective, formal set-ups, which are less risky than Matthew's hand-held tracking shots...
...worst problem in Matthew was one which no film of Joan's era had to deal with--the sound track. Pasolini gambled again, trying to match the implicit emotional values of his music to those of his images. He has permitted himself to range from Bach to Mozart to Prokoviev to Odetta to the Missa Luba to Leadbelly. Running head-on against our various stock responses, he inevitably creates image-sound discords. For me such discords arose between the healing of a leper and a cotton-field blues moan, between the infant Jesus and Odetta's annoyingly mannered "Sometimes...
...GROUP. Under the expert tutelage of Director Sidney Lumet, eight captivating young actresses rediscover the Roosevelt era in an irresistible drama based on Mary McCarthy's bitchy, college-bred bestseller about what happened to Vassar's class of '33 after commencement day. Joan Hackett, Jessica Walter, Shirley Knight and Joanna Pettet are the most active alumnae...