Word: whodunitism
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...Graffiti, and Medium Cool. Here he's filming North Vietnam and the liberated sections of South Vietnam--shots of Hanol, and the ruined Bach Mai Hospital, PRG soldiers, interviews with Le Duc Tho and others. All of this was done on very low budget, narrated by Fonda and Hayden. Whodunit Festival. At the Orson Welles until the end of March is a batch of mystery movies, some good, some not so good, ranging from The Third Man and Touch of Evil to weaker pictures like Preminger's Laura, Harper, Gumshoe and The Last of Shella. This week, though, looks terrific...
...film "festivals" starting in Boston and Cambridge this week celebrate what are probably the cinema's two most popular genres--the whodunit and the skin flick. In the sixties film festivals tended to showcase a great actor or director, and the nearly constant Bergman and Bogart festivals at places like the Brattle Square are holdovers from those days. Now they tend to focus on particular genres. These festivals aren't Hitchoock festivals or even Radley Metzger festivals; they aim to show the whole range of detective films and erotic films, the good, the bad, and the commercial, the typical...
...whodunit" series at the Orson Welies is probably the most ambitious thing of this kind in be shown in Cambridge in the last few years. It will last two entire months and include 36 feature length films. As with any selection, one can argue with what has been chosen. The management itself, in a small note at the end of its program, regrew that four films--The Maltese Falcon. The Big Sleep, Chinatown and The Conversation--are unavailable. But the group, is so inclusive as it is that the only possible complaint is not what it excludes but what...
...classic Peanuts, Lucy tells Linus about Rosebud as he starts to watch Citizen Kane. Any true whodunit can be ruined that way--it's a foolproof test. The most facile of the genre proceed according to a formula, and if you're good enough--as my mother is with Perry Massons--you can guess the victim, and then, the murderer, nine times...
...whodunit doesn't have to--be epistemological, doesn't have to take a position on whether or not we can ever really get to the bottom of what's going on around us. Perhaps the best film being shown at the festival isn't really a whodunit at all. Carol Reed's The Third Man is one of the movies made in the forties that seem to have no flab at all, in which every word, every shot is necessary, not to mention each scene and each character. Holly Martins, writer of westerns and most idealist of the idealist Americans...