Word: lessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reader's poll will be wrought from all submissions received before midnight, January 20th, and results will be printed in a later issue. Everybody in their heart of hearts has a ten-best-films list. Send yours in and be counted. The one below is listed more-or-less in order of personal preference...
...death in Les Biches also ends on a note of moral uncertainty as we wonder whether it will act as an agent of destruction or of change. If Les Biches proves a spellbinding and gloriously beautiful melange of personal relationships, The Champagne Murders is more complex and experimental, less perfect but ultimately greater. The character of Chris (Anthony Perkins) combines the Chabrolian malevolent driven to seek expedients selfishly and the Chabrolian romantic clinging to an intangible yearning for love and friendship; his vain attempt to satisfy both needs makes up the story (although we don't learn this until...
...cutting that compels in Lylah Clare working against him in Sister George. Aldrich is a heavy-handed man, and Lylah Clare deals in heavy-handed mysticism, heavy-handed acting stylization, heavy-handed melodrama, heavy-handed tragedy, and heavy-handed meaning. This ideal blend, strange-but-true, results in something less than heavy-handed, perhaps because Aldrich has been able to adapt his style to fit the many different eras of movie-making the film describes. His black-and-white-and-red-all-over flashbacks do evoke the twenties; the flagrantly overdirected love scene in Lylah's old room effects...
...work are characters controlled by social and economic pressures, most distinctly by their immediate surroundings. In the early films (Fallen Angel, Angel Face), money, sexual abberation, and class distinction had much to do with the ultimate failure of Preminger's struggling protagonists. But increasingly, external dramatic pressures play a less important part--the determining factor becoming instead Preminger's own camera treatment of space, his cross-cutting techniques, his ultimate vision. No one seeing Skidoo can deny that the Mafia threat (central to the plot) is secondary in moving the action to the power of Preminger's decision to control...
Coogan's Bluff, Donald Siegel's second film of 1968 falls just short of Madigan by virtue of less serviceable writing and blunter editing. Nonetheless, anyone willing to bypass an unfortunate reliance on convention gets caught up in a compelling and consequential morality play, honestly acted and extraordinarily well filmed...