Word: tango
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...BEEN A year since the big stir over Last Tango in Paris. This year the commotion is over The Exorcist, and it's a more honest fuss over a less honest movie. People see The Exorcist because they want to be scared. They want to feel the emotion of the movie, and they say so. But people who saw Last Tango in Paris hid behind critical pretension. Not many people would admit they wanted to see the movie to feel the sex, the passion and the hate it contained. The audience, like the critics, thought its role was to decide...
...Last Tango presents sex without a disguise, and this scares off an audience. Even Pauline Kael, the most ardent defender of the film, was too busy figuring out things like whether Bernardo Bertolucci had made the first truly erotic film to explain her emotional reaction. The way audiences and other critics talked about the film suggests that people still have trouble thinking about their emotional reactions to cinema sex. Perhaps the emotions Last Tango in Paris elicited were too subtle to allow clear thoughts. More likely it's just that a moviegoer has a harder time saying "I was aroused...
PARTNER, a 1968 film being shown for the first time commercially in the United States now, is a derivative, incoherent, flamboyant yet unemotional film that would deserve little mention were it not made by the same man who made Last Tango in Parish and a possibly greater film, The Conformist (1970). Its pseudo-political content, called "Marxist" by Bertolucci, is puerile at best. And there is no way to classify Partner with some sweeping phrase: even the most taxonomic of critics would have to allot a special hole for this quirky film. Partner is interesting only because it accents Bertolucci...
...Theater of Cruelty, one of the Jacobs says, "People believe themselves immortal. We must give them a sense of death." Bertolucci's own beliefs may be showing through in lines like these, as they never do when he echoes Moravia's political sentiments in The Conformist. Last Tango in Paris is pure Bertolucci, written without a source, and it too gives us a sense of death. But in that film there was a fervent impression of life set apart from a dying culture outside. Partner gives no importance to life at all. Stefania Sandrelli and Tina Amount, the two women...
Though the Watergate serial dominated our mail, our Jan. 22 cover on Marlon Brando's controversial film, Last Tango in Paris, elicited an unprecedented 12,000 letters for a single story, surpassing the number received for the previous record holder, the cover story Is God Dead?, in 1966. A story need not be cover-length, however, to stir up a big response. A short item in People [April 2] on Billy Graham drew scores of letters, most of which criticized the evangelist's suggestion that rapists be castrated. "Bless Billy Graham for making virtue secure," wrote one subscriber...