Word: motif
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THIS IS A FUNNY picture about Jews and Gentiles. Not a very original idea, but uniquely successful in this case, because director Elaine May and her daughter Jeannie Berlin work blithely yet subtly within the motif, transforming its simplemindedness into simplicity and its banality into unpretentiousness...
...most elaborate set pieces was the late-night Paris café, where all the customers got up to dance, spontaneously crowding the floor; Tango's lingering and desperate ballroom interlude gives the film its title. Bertolucci is smitten by dancing the way Hitchcock is obsessed by staircases. Each motif gives the director occasion to employ the best elements of his visual style in full flourish. Bertolucci's dancers are not only orchestrated to the movement of the camera, but seem to embody it. All of his films have an overriding feeling of gentle, gliding movement, a ceaseless choreography...
...film, set unspecifically near the turn of the century, recalls Bergman's National Theatre staging of Hedda Gabler. Here, as in that production, the dominant color motif is red of a dark, smothering, somehow vaguely menacing hue. "Don't ask me why it must be so because I don't know," Bergman writes in the Cries and Whispers screenplay. Perhaps it is because "ever since my childhood I have pictured the inside of the soul as a moist membrane in shades of red." Both Hedda Gabler and this film share, too, a careful choreography of movement, with...
...conducting; RCA, $5.98). In the days when almost everyone loved Hollywood for its epic swashbucklers, almost everyone in Hollywood loved Erich Wolfgang Korngold for his epic, swashbuckling film scores. Starting in 1935 with Captain Blood, Korngold pretty much set the pattern-virtuoso tone poems that reinforced character with melodic motif, heightened situation with orchestral effect and commented relentlessly on just about everything taking place on screen. Such gems as The Constant Nymph, Kings Row, Juarez, Anthony Adverse and The Sea Hawk followed...
...Christmas overdose of Wagner, try this chaser concocted by the crown princess of musical parody. As Miss Russell plays the piano and sings, her hilarious analysis of the Ring is based on the reasonable premise that the way to solve the crime (operatic especially) is to learn the motif. "The scene opens," she chirps, "in the River Rhine. IN IT!" The Rhine Maidens? "A sort of aquatic Andrew Sisters." Wotan? "The head god, and a crashing bore, too." The incestuous relationship between Sigmund and Sieglinde? "That's the beauty of grand opera, you can do anything as long...