Word: murmured
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Pretty Baby. The come-on was irresistable. Brooke Shields--the 12 year old prepubescent tart of our most secret fantasies. And Louis Malle--the man who might have done for the topic of child prostitution what he did with the incest taboo in "Murmur of the Heart." But the product is confused in its story line and unidentifiable in its ideology, all in all a pretty big let down. Shields conveys all the mischieviousness of childhood, and none of the mystery. Her mother (Susan Sarandon) strands her in their New Orleans brothel without us ever really understanding why. And although...
...director to handle it. Of all contemporary French filmmakers, Malle has been the most subtle in his treatment of sexual hang-ups and societal perversions. It would have been hoped that he could do with our cultural inhibitions about child sexuality what he did with the incest taboo in Murmur of the Heart. Or that with his genius for cinematic austerity he could have conveyed the every-dayness of this sort of corruption, as he did with the drift toward fascism in Lacombe, Lucien. In that film he moved us through understatement. In this film, he doesn't seem...
...eighth-floor clinic's waiting room, Stacy can feel the tension. "Most of the women are just like me, scared," she says. There is a quiet murmur as the women-of all outlooks and incomes -huddle with their friends. A young man in blue jeans nervously opens a bag of coffee grounds and, thinking it is instant coffee, tries to brew a cup. His long-haired girlfriend sits motionless near by, her face blank. ABORTION CAN BE LONELY, reads a wall poster. From a loudspeaker comes the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. At intervals a small...
...rights, Pretty Baby should have been Louis Malle's masterpiece. The movie is the story of a child prostitute in New Orleans during World War I, and no film maker is better equipped to tell that story than Malle. As he demonstrated in Murmur of the Heart and Lacombe, Lucien, this great French director has a deep understanding of the process by which benign children change into corrupt adults. Like his old New Wave colleague, François Truffaut, he also has the ability to portray children on-screen without condescension or sentimentality. These talents are evident in Pretty...
...have been cast more on the basis of looks than ability. Still, the movie's major troubles cannot be explained away so easily, for at its heart there is a failure of will. While Malle has had no difficulty making films about teen age boys who commit incest (Murmur) or murder (Lacombe), he has been defeated by the pre-teen prostitute of Pretty Baby. The movie circles around its heroine without ever zeroing...