Word: themes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! Severing the skeins to one's past is the theme...
...MONKEES (Colgem). A monkee is a species of trained beatle, of which four have been assembled for a zany new TV series. Their first album begins with their television theme song: "We're the young generation, and we've got sumpin' to say." Actually, they don't say so much (This Just Doesn't Seem to Be My Day, Buy Me a Dog) but they do have some engagingly catchy songs, notably Lust Train to Clarksville...
...ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE, by Kingsley Amis. The nervous neutralism of the cold war provides Amis with a theme for this slightly outrageous suspense story...
...telling of the life of the famous ascetic who spent most of his life standing on a huge pillar in the desert, is a synthesis of Bunuel's anti-clerical nature and his feelings about temptation and innate corruption in society. Bunuel heightened the power of the theme with photography and cutting. Using simple, almost formal, camera movement to create a sense of Simon's grandeur and isolation, Bunuel undercuts the effect with his cynical dialogue and ironic ending (Simon understands the futility of his faith when the Devil takes him into the future to a Greenwich Village discotheque...
Shostakovich's score swells at all the wrong places. When Hamlet confronts Ophelia "mad," there is a chance for some very sinister stuff: a glaze-eyed Aryan appears, bearing down on her. But up jumps a nervous little Dragnet theme to turn it ludicrous. When Hamlet asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "Am I easier to fret than a pipe?" the scene is played in heavy silence that exaggerates its portent. But presumbaly that's the director's doing, as, unfortunately, is a lot else...