Word: salooners
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...allow the director to characterize. And this film is filled with characters. Husband Clovis (Philippe Leotard), a drunken, brawling, truly ignorant ass of a man, whose battered, yet ornamented bright red Peugeot echoes so many street-customized '57 Chevies; who is introduced by his racy two-toned shoes. Saloon singer Sam Golden (Guy Marchand), Truffaut's parodied homage to Bogart and gangsters, a man who can only have sexual intercourse accompanied by a sound effects record of the Indy...
...from these characters that Truffaut constructs his vignettes, and each is uniformly chaotic. The best is Sam Golden's saloon sequence. Golden, black-shirted and white-tied, delivers a classic big band blues arrangement of a my-baby-done-me-wrong torcher, and does it in phonetic English as the camera roams over the crowd, Vegas in the South of France, eagerly fondling waitress Camille, while her lout husband seethes. From there, Truffaut films a short Western sequence. It's as if his characters had been dropped onto a John Ford backlot and allowed to pursue each other at random...
...middle of nowhere any more. Last week reporters from both Europe and the U.S. poured into town, thronging the bar of the local Elks' Club and pressing into a dusty little courtroom decorated with a painting of Wild Bill Hickok being gunned down in a Deadwood saloon...
...great crooners-from Bing Crosby to Dick Haymes to Frank Sinatra-have usually required wide exposure in cinema or TV to get their total message across. Tony Bennett, today's outstanding exemplar of the line, has been very happy to remain, in his words, "just a saloon singer...
...abundant evidence here, along with every other cliché of what has come to be called the antiwestern. The action takes place mostly on the main street of Coffeyville, Kans., which looks like a bayou. Whoever is not shot there is pretty sure to catch it in the saloon, which, like every other set in the picture, has been designed and dressed to look determinedly shabby. The actors wear worn clothes coated with dirt, as if they had all been wrestling in an anthracite pit. Their faces are ever so carefully caked with filth. Reality is swallowed up in such...