Word: reichenbach
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Directed by FRANÇOIS REICHENBACH and S.G. PATRIS
WHOEVER OUR AUTHOR is--the aging Watson or the youthful Meyer--he has created this tale out of the stuff of the traditional Holmes canon in a brilliant and startling fashion. The Reichenbach Falls death-struggle of the Final Problem has been elevated here to a hellish showdown above a train careening through the Bavarian mountainscape. The Moriarty mystique has been defused until it becomes simply Holmes's refracted trauma at having discovered two skeletons in his father's closet. And the story, with its pivotal heroine, its deferentially anonymous references to European nobility, its global crisis in the offing...
...Nonsense," expostulated the consulting detective. "I annihilated the Napoleon of crime at the Reichenbach Falls. No, no, Watson, heroes may be summoned from the annals of fiction, but this villain rises from reality. Whoever made those erasures is an intelligent, living, breathing human. Well, living and breathing, anyway...
...caravan duly set forth in the summer of 1970, and the filmed record proceeds predictably enough for the first few minutes. Then Director Francois Reichenbach appears in an on-camera interview. As he goes into a number about the glories of grooviness, the film cuts abruptly to a very quick shot of a bus being thoroughly whitewashed...
What prevents audience atrophy during all this is a recurring, if not pervasive sense of irony. Director Reichenbach appears throughout the film bobbing around and asking inane questions ("What means for you vibrations?") in heavily accented French. He becomes a buffoon in his own movie. Toward the end of Caravan, there is a long scene at Antioch College during which the students denounce the film makers as frauds, the caravan members as dupes and the executives of Warner Bros, as flat-out bandits. From the evidence at hand, it's hard to disagree. The gnomish sabotage of the film...