Word: screen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lyrical murders? When Bouvier begins to kill, The Judge and The Assassin becomes utterly incomprehensible. Tavernier's presentation of these gruesome murders has an appalling pastoral charm; the young victims lie asleep in their blood, their lamb-like eyes closed forever. Little ugliness or real violence sullies the screen; death comes amid aerial shots of southern France and the lyrical song of birds...
...never-before-mentioned-factory, Isabelle Huppert, last seen as the sodomized mistress of Rousseau, now appears as an aspiring diva, singing Bouvier's favorite ballad-off-key, and the entire striking mob is bathed in a Hallmark card glow. The police prepare to shoot and the screen goes black as these significant words appear: "in the year that Joseph Bouvier killed twelve children, 16,000 died in the mines of France." Both facts are terrible; is Tavernier suggesting that Bouvier should not have been prosecuted since his tally was so small? The obscurity of its ending truly symbolizes the confusion...
Another company offered a musical synthesizer that not only played the "Masterpiece Theater" theme or "Stars and Stripes Forever" over its loudspeakers, but also projected the score to the music it was playing onto a three-foot video screen...
...mixing of words and pictures, with a Chiron machine imposing labels or texts in front of the pictures, and a computer called the Quantel-a marvelous machine that Roone Arledge first used for some of his tricky sports effects-sucking in, widening out or moving around pictures on the screen. "Zapping the cornea," ABC's style has been called. (CBS and NBC have the gadgets too, but don't let them take over.) ABC's impressive technological wizardry, alas, is not matched by a comparable effort to assess the content of the day's news...
...feat of standing out against the colorful backdrops. Though Gere at times slips into self-conscious mannerisms, he makes his character, a mess sergeant from Arizona, an appealing innocent abroad. Devane is a charming commanding officer, despite his disconcerting tendency to sound like Jack Nicholson. Both Eichhorn (a gifted screen newcomer) and Redgrave show enough backbone to prevent their roles, a shopgirl and an aristocrat, from softening into hopeless cliches...