Word: lovelies
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Banality aside, the love story suffers from Carradine's performance. Once more he is playing the corruptible innocent he already created in Nashville and Pretty Baby. This humorless characterization has calcified: instead of being boyishly naive, Carradine is just pompous and prim. Certainly he is no match for Vitti, who has rarely seemed as radiant and emotionally full-blooded as she is here. With smoky eyes and a voice to match, she reduces her co-star to the stature...
...LOVE AT FIRST BITE...
There is some racial joking in Love at First Bite that one could have done without. It is intended to prove that nothing is sacred to the film makers, but it just plays uncomfortably. There is also a flatness about Stan Dragoti's direction that prevents the film from realizing all its comic potential. But the performances (including that of Arte Johnson as Renfield, the count's bug-eating assistant) are uniformly jolly, the parody of the basic Dracula formula well observed and its social commentary deliciously off the wall. The production's genially tatty air enhances...
Judged by Le Misanthrope, the engagements should be a success for France's mission civilisatrice. In telling the story of Alceste, a man torn between hatred of the world's deceit and flattery and his own love for a deceitful, flattering widow named Célimène, Molière pressed poetic comedy and satiric wit to the edge of tears. Le Misanthrope is his bittersweet masterpiece. In a comedy of manners, Alceste's notion of telling the truth himself on all occasions and correcting the chicanery of the age clearly marks him as a crackpot...
...François Beaulieu and Béatrice Agenin project modern, realistic feeling at the expense of classical eloquence. During his tirades against mankind, Beaulieu runs through the Alexandrines and casts caesuras to the winds. But he builds sympathy by the low-key, unstylized way he plays the love scenes. Agenin, too, is better at intimacy than poetic elegance. She is a wonder, though, at dispensing petits fours and nasty court gossip to a fine pair of dandies whose wigs make them resemble Bert Lahr playing the Cowardly Lion. When she leans back and says lovingly to poor, scoldy Alceste...