Word: tales
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Norhert Carbonnaux, re-writer and director of the 20th century version of Candide, captures Voltaire's spirit to such a degree that the philosophical tale is as powerful...
Carbonnaux is as brilliantly ironic as Voltaire. But the spirit of the tale has become more morose. The audience simply cannot laugh at concentration camps. Although Carbonnaux' characters, like Voltaire's, retire to a little domestic garden at the end of their perilous journeys, the garden of 1963 is even less a place of simple contentment. Candide and his retinue are annoyed and bored. Instead of ending on the faintly optimistic note of "mais il faut cultiver notre jardin," Carbonnaux ends by havng Candide dream craxily of the unreal, naive happiness of his youth...
...tyrants have historical and geographical reality, and this a depth of horror that Voltaire's did not. And Carbonnaux' Dr. Pangloss is frightingly recognizable as the "realist" spokesman who rationalizes in turn aristicracy, Nazism, Communism, sultanism, and transquilizers. It is harder for us to resolve this 20th century philosophical tale for the horror behind the comedy is so much more evident...
...CONJUGAL BED. A very funny, very salty Italian tale about a middle-aged man (Ugo Tognazzi) who marries a young girl (Marina Vlady) and makes an embarrassing discovery: the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, are pretty to look at but tiring to harvest...
...President of the United States reads that charlatan Ian Fleming as bed-time entertainment, a truly fine mystery has been published. There can be little doubt that with The Report Mr. Denning has attained the skill of G.K. Chesterton. And Chesterton was a man who could tell a tale in the old style...