Word: whore
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...written by the authors of Pillow Talk and offers the same sort of antique situation comedy: a virtuous woman flirts with immorality and emerges unsullied and, indeed, victorious. Achieving this happy result requires some odd fancy-stepping. Pete, knowing that his wife had tried to be a whore (but not knowing, as the audience does, that she had been unsuccessful at it), forgives her by giving her a ring and proclaiming his pride that she loved him enough to "sell herself...
BLACK EYE. Dim days on the private-investigator scene: a shamus named Stone, cashiered from the force for strangling a dope dealer with his bare hands, lights out after a kinky killer who has disposed of the whore upstairs. Stone (Fred Williamson), who is black, is helped along by a friendly detective (Richard X. Slattery) who is white, and tormented by thoughts of the slinky number on the first floor, who is bi. Stone is made to feel unduly stuffy because the sight of his girl (Teresa Graves) with another woman makes him queasy. She sets him straight, though, without...
...attempt to get out of this claustrophobic world, like marriage, seems like just another manipulation of unreality. The only thing that makes the acceptance of marriage seem so important is that it is discussed at the end of the film, but Eustache has built The Mother and the Whore so that what happens at the end should be no more important than what happens near the beginning...
...subtly than he could have in a feature-length film. So many conceptual avant-garde movies have burdened us with their length--like Andy Warhol's eight hours of the Empire State building--that we are accustomed to associate subtlety with economy. But nothing in The Mother and the Whore is superfluous, and sometimes the long stretch of time allows for effects impossible in shorter films. By the time Alexandre brushes past his ex-lover Gilberte in the supermarket, for example, we have forgotten her completely, and so we experience the same double-take shock of recognition that he does...
...leave The Mother and the Whore disappointed, but realize a few days later it is still unfolding as you think about it. It's always undercutting itself, being generally obstreperous, mocking any intention to take it seriously. The last line is "I don't like to be watched while I'm vomiting"--a slap in the face to an audience that still half-expects a dance of death silhouetted across a mountain-top at the end of a talky black and white film. But if you see the film without preconceptions or a burning need to analyze, and stick...