Word: manly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Broadway comedy (Play It Again, Sam) or his own film (Take the Money and Run), Allen fleshes out the jittery image of Everymanic-depressive. Inanimate objects become his sworn enemies, paranoia reigns and everyone becomes a Woody worshiper. But Don't Drink the Water is minus the man-as adapter and actor-and the result is the lesser half of a situation comedy...
Director Claude Chabrol, a disciple of Hitchcock, shoots more for nuance than frisson. It is his wily variations on a hoary theme that give La Femme Infidèle its own small distinction. A wealthy Parisian insurance man (Michel Bouquet) takes casual note that his supple young wife (Stephane Audran) acts rather nervous when he interrupts her on the telephone. He engages a private detective to follow her on her shopping trips to Paris and has his worst suspicions quickly confirmed: she is having an affair. Her paramour is a writer (Maurice Ronet) who lives mostly off his "independent means...
...takes his visitor on a tour. The sight of an old anniversary present in the lover's bedroom is too much even for the husband's reserve. He seizes a piece of sculpture, beats the lover to death, and disposes of the corpse like a sanitation man hauling away the weekend debris. The husband's fate is irrevocable, of course, but watching him along the way to his comeuppance is worth the slight comedown of the denouement...
...figures chiseled out of Etruscan boulders include a 19-ft.-high elephant crushing a warrior in its trunk, a giant dismembering a man, a goddess with each pubic hair clearly delineated, and a 20-ft. satanic head whose mouth opens into a large chamber. These overwhelming creations are 50 miles north of Rome. It is known only that they were carved between 1555 and 1585 at the command of Duke Pier Francesco Orsini...
Mujica-Lainez conveys not only the well-known creative energies of the Renaissance but its less understood anxieties as well. Unmoored from the sureties of medieval order, the leisured man and the artist of the 16th century sought comfort in personal style. Every inch of space had to be embellished. Emptiness and simplicity were troubling reminders of a yawning eternity...