Word: sexuality
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...strategically seeded with role reversals. Garp, raised on the campus of a New England boys' school where his mother is head nurse, exhibits strong maternal instincts. When his wife decides to have an affair, she behaves with all the distracting caution of the philandering commuter. The most striking sexual suspect is Roberta Muldoon, formerly Robert, a transsexual who once played tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles. She is Garp's closest friend and squash partner...
...framework of the sexual drama has changed, age has lost its determining relevance. Older women are no longer quite so afraid of becoming involved with younger men. With feminism and exposure to the brittle fragility of so many marriages in the '70s, women of almost all ages have developed a certain independence. In the past, as a matter of sociobiological order, desirable women (especially in youth-worshiping America) tended to be those of the courting age, from 17 or so to 25 or 28. Because married women were usually considered off limits, the focus of male desire was officially...
...plays the lead in Pretty Baby. and based on his previous work, French director Louis Malle seemed like the perfect candidate to tackle the subject--child prostitution in early 20th-century New Orleans. In Malle's hands, the film could be expected to either purge our inhibitions with sexual explicitness, or plague our consciences with subtle social commentary. But unfortunately, the film turns out to be confused in its subject and unfocused in its attack--a movie that never seems to know where it's headed. In the end it's almost pathetic--about as pathetic as a john...
There are at least two memorable performances in the film--but they come from characters on the periphery. One is Francis Faye's Madam Nell, the whorehouse madam. She delivers a series of deadpan wise-cracks with the dry timing of a George Burns, and this cool sexual sarcasm produces a clever variation on Mae West's old routines. But in the end the bit doesn't mesh with the plot; it is precisely because of her toughness that we fail to be touched her Madame Nell goes crazy after the authorities shut down the brothel. The house's black...
...WOULD BE much easier to be charitable to this film if the subject did not have so much potential-- and if Malle hadn't seemed the perfect director to handle it. Of all contemporary French filmmakers, Malle has been the most subtle in his treatment of sexual hang-ups and societal perversions. It would have been hoped that he could do with our cultural inhibitions about child sexuality what he did with the incest taboo in Murmur of the Heart. Or that with his genius for cinematic austerity he could have conveyed the every-dayness of this sort of corruption...