rachel,
rachel
Two of the
greatest legends of Hollywood, the one about a director of genius from his very
first picture, the other about no-one noticing.
The two main
figures are Blue Roses and Giulietta degli spiriti. Why that makes a peculiar
symphony out of American landscapes as simple as waves breaking is a good tale.
The essential
structure is Dante’s hell, purgatory and paradise.
Sometimes
a great notion
This is,
precisely understood, a remake of Hud for the purpose of analysis, there
having been some controversy about Ritt’s film in the general mind, supposedly.
Newman’s virtues
as a director have been lauded in this sufficiently, there remains only to
point out a significant subtheme from rachel, rachel and let it go at
that.
The
Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
A director so
cruel he makes Godard’s Wyler seem almost pusillanimous.
Beatrice and Blue
Roses, specialty of the house.
Singularly
inspired score by Maurice Jarre.
The
Shadow Box
The joke of the
teleplay is long-sustained to the very end, and rests on a formal resemblance
to The Best Years of Our Lives.
An end, an
accommodation, a certain hope (James Broderick, Christopher Plummer, Melinda
Dillon). A dry wit in the director, with some smooth Altman touches, and the
cast rounded out by Valerie Harper, Joanne Woodward, and Sylvia Sidney singing
“Roll Me Over in the Clover”.
The script
plainly offers a sublime joke, the blind demolition man with an artist son. The
joke is multiplied. Joanne Woodward runs a pet shop, her avocation is teaching
parrots to sing Puccini.
This is filmed
with a really unembellished realism, nowhere do you find a film that looks the
way things look really, the way this one does. The son and his pregnant
mistress are on a bus bench, behind them the steel-stucco-and-aluminum sidewalk
covering exhibits a long warp.
Before his
literary success the father-to-be is sternly advised to get a real job. This
scene with a machine that assembles cardboard boxes is modeled on the
roadmending scene in Cool Hand Luke.
There is a little
joke toward the end thrown in from Beckett, “his little bump of amativeness.”
The style throughout is usefully flexible and ranges from the comic to the
harsh instantaneously. Newman is at the service of the satire, Harry weeps at
his son’s success, looks at him fondly for the first time over the café table.
Criticism seems
not to have risen above Halliwell’s observation that he didn’t know why Newman
had made the film in the first place.
The
Glass Menagerie
It was Matisse
under the Occupation who went to the movies every night.
The supreme poetry
of the play has it all in Newman’s direction.