Word: michell
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...chairman of the House Campaign Committee, Rep. Robert H. Michel (R-III.) told the Los Angeles Times Friday he has heard a lot of private discussion favoring resignation...
Wearing bright orange rubber gloves that extend just past the French cuffs of his delicate shirt, Michel Piccoli lifts the head of a slaughtered calf high above his own head. "To be, or not to be," he screams in a shrill voice. Ugo Tognazzi makes a loud farting noise, tongue between his lips, and the feast begins. Kidneys bourguinon. Kidneys bordelaise. Crayfish a la Mozart. Each dish has an identity of its own, but the diners ignore all subtlety in order to concentrate more conscientiously on their suicidal quest. Marcello Mastroianni stuffs down six clams in one bite. Grubby fingers...
...standards of soft-core pornography weaken The Grande Bouffe. The simulated sex becomes funny in otherwise serious scenes. The film leads from abuse of food to abuse of bodies, but the bodies are less real than the food, so the progression falls flat. A similar problem occurs in suggesting Michel Piccoli's gastric disturbances by loud, artificial noises on the soundtrack. In both sex and scatology, The Grand Bouffe is curiously tentative and embarrassed even when it exaggerates...
JUST BEFORE NIGHTFALL is Director Claude Chabrol's cunningly engineered fable about a man (Michel Bouquet) who strangles his mistress and is slowly enveloped by guilt. He blurts out a confession to his wife, who understands; he tells his best friend, who is similarly sympathetic. The fact that his friend was also his mistress's husband only adds a little piquancy to the situation. Awash in forgiveness, the hapless killer has only one logical object for his mounting horror and self-loathing. His home, all glass and chrome and odd, abrupt angles, makes a suitably antiseptic moral landscape...
...would-be shock. He does not deal in satire that could threaten or amuse, that could give the sequences substance and, therefore, true impact. His careful chronicle of the dietary excesses of four men is like a prank-a loud, bad practical joke. The men-Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret-hole up in an old house to eat themselves to death, to kill themselves with the very staff of life. Along the way, they also enjoy the company of some whores and a pudgy schoolteacher (Andrea Ferreol), who dispenses her fatty favors equitably and withstands...