In Search of Gregory

The San Franciscan in Geneva selling “Air des Alpes” around the world, turning the Hobo Gadget Band into “Catherine”, with whom he is in love from a photograph, and who flies from Rome in hopes of meeting him.

Roger Greenspun of the New York Times pined for Julie Christie like an airman at General Dreedle’s briefing and could not be consoled, “nitwit” he called the film.

“A superbly-wrought gem”, said Variety.

Halliwell’s Film Guide sank to the nadir of John Simon in its vexation, “irritatingly pretentious Pinterish puzzle-drama with apparently”, note that, “no hidden depths except the urge to be clever,” and gives the Monthly Film Bulletin’s opinion, “depressingly inert.”

From the author of L’Avventura, one of them.

The Dog It Was That Died

The title is the punchline of an ancient and venerable joke that also dates from the earliest sound films, the Vitaphone shorts of Burns & Allen for instance, of which this might well be an expanded example in color on Q.6 anti-Soviet espionage and vice versa, except that the provenance is finally revealed on Palmerston Street to be the works of Lewis Carroll.

A certain resemblance will no doubt be observed to Preminger’s The Human Factor on the same subject, also by Stoppard, from Graham Greene.

Oliver Goldsmith has the prevenience, after all, in an elegy on a man of “kind and gentle heart”, or rather on his dog, who, “to gain some private ends,/ went mad and bit the man.”