Word: petulia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last decade, all full of soured good vibes and oafish notions about freedom of the spirit. Maritza is supposed to represent the wildness that Main longs for, the last chance of his life. From everything Director John Korty (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) and Writer Lawrence Marcus (Petulia) show us, she is as liberating as Lucrezia Borgia. Maritza gobbles fruit and chats about Django Reinhardt while Alex makes love to her; she also has a hard time staying out of jail for assaulting another bedmate. No prize himself, Alex is ever aware of his paramour's wanderlust; during...
...Look Now (1973). Wide popular success continues to elude him, however, perhaps because he is a director who challenges an audience continually. Roeg means to change, or at least radically modify, the way we watch and respond to movies. He was formerly a brilliant cinematographer (Petulia, Far from the Madding Crowd), and images retain primacy in the movies he has directed. He uses little dialogue, intending the meaning of a movie to come clear through what is seen and intuited, not what is spelled...
...movie was directed by Richard Lester, a film maker of satiric skill and carbolic wit unsurpassed in the contemporary English-speaking cinema (Petulia, The Bed Sitting Room and the recent Three Musketeers). Lester is also a superb stylist, and he has made Juggernaut into a cunningly engineered entertainment, full of suspense. The Poseidon Adventure, by inevitable comparison, looks like something staged by a kid in his bathtub just before bedtime. Lester has done the calamity number about as well as it can be done. Why it has to be done at all is another matter...
...editing had a breezy spontaneity that spoke for the swinging London of the '60s. With the artistic freedom that success can buy, Lester then turned his comedic scattergun to more serious and deeply felt purpose. Starting in 1967 he made one troubling social satire about modern materialists (Petulia) and two savage antiwar polemics (How I Won the War and The Bed-Sitting Room). All three fizzled at the box office, and by 1969 Lester found himself effectively out of the movie business...
...wizardly but little-seen Bed Sitting Room, which played in the U.S. in 1969 for approximately the time it would take to soft-boil an egg. Lester made his reputation from his two gymnastic Beatles movies, but his later work (most notably How I Won the War and Petulia) disclosed a deeper, even more enterprising talent-one tempered by a pointed satiric force. The Three Musketeers is not so astringent; it is ebullient, full of roughhouse, and careens along on its own high spirits...