Word: sadisms
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...accurately reproduces the sadism and repressed sexuality and pointlessness of English public school life, but fails to give us the class connections which inform them (like Orwell's Such, Such Were The Joys, say, did). And the movie dissolves into ponderous surrealistic fantasies near the end. With Malcolm MacDowell, directed by Lindsay Anderson, who more recently was guilty of O Lucky...
...brought in by Underworld Overlord Edmund O'Brien to fight his gang war for him. O'Brien's rival is Bradford Dillman; Dillman's big gun is Chuck Connors, who performs various cruelties (on Kathrine Baumann, among others) with an artificial arm. The sadism strikes the moviemakers as funny; it is not. And as further evidence of the decline of Director Frankenheimer's creative energy, the film approaches tragedy...
...kings or Yorkshire. It's a seriocomic Pinteresque melodrama involving two spouse-swapping couples in our own Wakefield just north of Boston, where the playwright was born. It's a handsomely acted and fascinating fable of four frustrated and funny freaks. You may believe that murder, adultery, impotence and sadism can't be amusing, but you're wrong; and you'll also have something to mull over for days afterward. But you've got only until Aug. 17, when the troupe follows up with "A Man For All Seasons," a fine play that does have to do with kings...
...worth recalling the 100,000 slave, laborers in at least 100 concentration camps operated by the Krupps during the Second World War. As testimony at the Nuremberg Trials showed: Alfried Krupp's exploitation of slave labor was worse than any other industrialist's. Nowhere else was there such sadism, such senseless barbarity, such shocking treatment of people as dehumanized material. His power was absolute and therefore absolutely corrupting...
Malizia is being sold, and in some critical quarters accepted, as a jolly little sex comedy-something on the order of Divorce, Italian Style. Obviously either the power of movie promotion to cloud perceptions or the number of people who find sadism funny has been seriously underestimated. But viewers who bear the title firmly in mind-it means "malice" and is as accurate as they come -may derive a creepy sort of pleasure from Director Samperi's adroit study in perversity...