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LOVIN’ MOLLY (1975 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1975 (Vol. 42, No. 496). Blythe Danner, incidentally, was a classmate of mine at Bard College, where I had the privilege of seeing what a gifted actress she already was (I remember especially her performance of one of the lead roles in Jean Genet’s The Maids) and the pleasure of accompanying her once or twice on the piano when she performed as a jazz singer (in particular, on “‘Round Midnight”). — J.R.

Lovin’ Molly

U.SA., 1973 Director: Sidney Lumet

Bastrop, Texas. The lives of three characters, narrated by each in

turn. 1925, Gid (Anthony Perkins): Gid and Johnny (Beau Bridges)

are friends who compete for the favors of Molly (Blythe Danner),

who likes them both. When Gid proposes to Molly, she replies

that she’d rather have sex with him for its own sake, not as part

of a marriage contract, and invites him to join her in a nude swim,

but he refuses. She goes to a dance with Eddie (Conrad Fowkes),

another local boy, and Johnny picks a fight with him. Gid sleeps

with her for the first time, and is shocked to discover she isn’t a

virgin. On a train to the Panhandle to sell his father’s cattle, Gid

attacks Johnny for sleeping with Molly and not proposing to her, but

then discovers that Eddie slept with her first. After the cattle is sold,

Johnny decides to work away from home. Molly’s father dies and

Gid comforts her; one day he learns that she’s married Eddie, and he

eventually decides to marry Sarah (Susan Sarandon), another local

girl. Gid’s father (Edward Binns) dies, leaving him the farm. When

Eddie is away, Molly tells Gid she wants to have her first child by

him, a secret that only they and the child will know. Johnny comes

home. 1945, Molly: Matt, her first son, and Joe, her second (fathered

by Johnny), are away at the war, and Gid continues to see her;

Eddie has been killed in an oil rig accident. Joe is reported dead

and Matt writes Molly that he is ashamed to be her bastard son;

she burns the letter and doesn’t tell Gid about it. Still influenced

by his strait-laced upbringing, Gid announces that he can’t go on

sleeping with her. She continues to see Johnny; Gid brings her

a puppy to raise. 1964, Johnny: Johnny visits Gid in the hospital;

the latter has become a hard-working and rather stoical farmer

like his father. After returning home and repairing his windmill,

he has a heart attack; he says he wants to move in with Molly,

but dies before Johnny can drive him to the hospital. Johnny

proposes to Molly; she refuses, but says she’ll continue to love him

and sleep with him.

On the face of it, Lovin’ Molly appears to be working with

hopeless material, hopelessly attenuated — in structure (if not in

theme) a kind of rural Carnal Knowledge, with the lives of three

characters split into discrete and isolated episodes from which the

physical fact of their environment is virtually stripped away. (The

film was shot on location, but for all that Sidney Lumet makes of the

terrain, he might as well have used a sound stage.) To compound

difficulties, we have three evidently urban actors out to impersonate

country folk, with the delivery of a new-born calf by Perkins and

Danner clearly faked through tricky cutting, and comparable

evidence of straining after verisimilitude and continuity all along the

way. And yet, with the odds stacked so firmly against it, the film gets

away with a lot more than one would have any right to expect. At his

best, Lumet has always been an actor’s director, and the cumulative

impact of the three leads often persuades one to forget the quaint

precocity of the material with which they are working. The ambiguity

of the title — whether one regards the first word as an adjective or a

gerund — reflects the two ways one might regard the story, as the

portrait of a free and generous woman or as an account of the

separate ways her two lovers learn to appreciate her. Either way,

Blythe Danner has a natural way of turning cliché into conviction that

keeps the wispy myth of the plot going, emerging as a sort of ageless

and unaffected symbol of boundless love, while Perkins and Bridges

impress mainly through their ability to show the transformations

of age, Apart from this very professional trio, the principal sense one

has of an authorial presence derives from the relationships of the

story and milieu to those of Hud and The Last Picture Show, two

other impersonally directed adaptations of Larry McMurtry novels.

[2012 note: This film was adapted from McMurty’s Leaving

Cheyenne by Stephen Friedman.] One feels the McMurtry

influence here for better and for worse: negatively, in the rather

sappy portrayal of the patriarch-sage dispensing rustic pearls

of wisdom (with Edward Binns assuming the Melvyn Douglas/

Ben Johnson part); more positively, in the unforced sweetness

and goodness of the characters within their acknowledged

limitations, persisting like stable parts of the scenery over

four decades of a mundane existence.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Night Moves (1975 review)

This review of Night Moves appeared in the May 1975 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. [September 11, 2009 postscript: Having just reseen Night Moves for the first time since it came out, I think it holds up remarkably well, in terms of its script and direction and almost uniformly fine performances. There’s also some additional interest now in seeing Melanie Griffith in her first credited performance and James Woods, less impressive, in one of his earliest after Elia Kazan discovered him for The Visitors. As for Alan Sharp, it would appear that his filmography (which also includes The Hired Hand and Ulzana’s Raid) warrants further investigation — as does Jennifer Warren’s.]—J.R.

Night Moves

U.S.A., 1975                                                                             Director: Arthur Penn

Cert—X. dist—Columbia-Warner. p.c—Hiller Productions/Layton. p—Robert M. Sherman. assoc. p—Gene Lasko. p. manager—Thomas J. Schmidt. asst. d—Jack Roe, Patrick H. Kehoe. sc—Alan Sharp. ph—Bruce Surtees. col—Technicolor. underwater ph—Jordan Klein. ed—Dede Allen, Stephen A. Rotter. p. designer—George Jenkins. set dec—Ned Parsons. sp. effects—Marcel Vercoutere, Joe Day. m/m.d—Michael Small. titles—Wayne Fitzgerald. sd. ed—Craig McKay, Robert Reitano, Richard Cirincione. sd. rec—Jack Solomon. sd. re-rec—Richard Vorisek. aerial co-ordinator—Dean Engelhardt. l.p—Gene Hackman (Harry Moseby), Jennifer Warren (Paula), Edward Binns (Joey Ziegler), Harris Yulin (Marty Heller), Kenneth Mars (Nick), Janet Ward (Arlene Iverson), James Woods (Quentin), Anthony Costello (Marv Ellman), John Crawford (Tom Iverson), Melanie Griffith (Delly Grastner), Susan Clark (Ellen Moseby), Ben Archibeck (Charles), Dennis Dugan (Boy), J. C. Hincks (Girl), Maxwell Gail Jnr. (Stud), Susan Barrister and Larry Mitchell (Ticket Clerks). 8,893 ft. 99 mins.

Former football star Harry Moseby, now working as a private detective, is hired by Arlene Iverson, a promiscuous former starlet, to find her runaway teenage daughter Delly. After speaking to Delly’s previous boyfriend Quentin, a movie stuntman who explains that she went off with Marv Ellman, another stuntman, Harry surreptitiously follows his own wife Ellen as she leaves a cinema with another man, Marty Heller, and later confronts Heller in his flat. There is an angry scene with Ellen, just before Harry leaves leaves to look up Ellman, also meeting and befriending stuntman Joey Ziegler, who directs him to Delly’s stepfather, Tom Iverson, on the Florida keys. There he meets Tom, and his girlfriend Paula and Delly, who appear to be involved in a ménage à trois. Delly refuses to come home, until she comes across a corpse in a wrecked plane while swimming at night and changes her mind; later the same night, Paula comes to Harry’s room and seduces him. Shortly after Harry returns Delly to Arlene, she dies in a movie car stunt with Ziegler at the wheel; suspecting foul play, Harry goes to see Quintin, who reveals that Ellman was the corpse in the wrecked plane. Hoping to save his marriage, and closing down his detective office, Harry nevertheless insists on flying back to Florida when he learns that Ellman’s death hasn’t been reported to the Coast Guard. There he finds Quintin has just been killed by Tom; after a fight with the latter, Harry sets off in his boat with Paula, who explains that she, Tom, Ellman, and Quentin  had been smuggling archaeological remains out of Yucatan, and admits that she was seducing Harry while Tom was diving for a statue in the wrecked plane. While she is diving for the statue, a seaplane appears; Harry is sounded by gunfire and Paula killed just before the plane crashes; Harry sees that the pilot is Joey Ziegler. Alone, Harry navigates the boat in circles around the wreckage.

Beneath the complicated unraveling of a mystery, an anti-mystery, with the hero’s detection registering as an evasion of his own problems; beneath a densely charted intrigue of betrayals and cross-purposes, a cryptic void, like that ambiguous trophy of treasure and wreckage around which Harry is drifting in the final shot. Thanks to an efficient script by Alan Sharp, and clean direction by Arthur Penn that lingers over seemingly peripheral matters only further to drive a bitter moralistic message home, Night Moves effectively subverts the Ross Macdonald formula that it partially appropriates — runaway child of wealthy, corrupt household saved from perdition by fatherly detective, who sets all the closet skeletons in order — by making its detective as much of a “runaway” as the child, and a virtually “solved” mystery as oddly unedifying and irrelevant as an unresolved one. Distanced by a brittle and heartless muzak score  that ironically reflects genre expectations, the plots its focus almost equally between what Harry uncovers and what he “misses” — or is in flight from. Thus one is only half-engaged in the seductions of a game while intermittently scoring off points against the featured player, although Hackman makes Harry likeable enough to keep this tension interesting for a while, as long as he can remain a step or two ahead of the film’s impending sermon about the folly of his ways. Absurdist anarchy and a search for roots, the thematic poles common to all of Penn’s features, figure implicitly in the sardonic, fleeting references to American history in the dialogue (Washington, Franklin, the Kennedy assassinations) — wistful epitaphs to lost purposes in a post-Watergate climate that the film is at some pains to describe. Within such a context, a quintessential Penn “folk” character like Paula, however corrupt, serves more as a spokesman for the film’s values than Harry, if only because of her relative flexibility and lack of illusions. And her sexuality, for all its apparently duplicitous nature in her seduction of Harry, is made to seem rather freer and looser than Arlene and Delly’s indiscriminate promiscuity, Tom’s incest, and the indiscriminate girl-chasing of Marv Ellman (of whom Ziegler remarks, “He’d fuck a woodpile on the chance there was a snake in it”), perhaps because it appears to be less bound up in automatic reflexes. (Jennifer Warren’s performance — like Hackman’s, Binns’, and Crawford’s — is a model of completeness suggesting incompleteness, i.e. teasing aspects of the character that are never spelled out. Harry, on the other hand, seems to be handled throughout as the stooge and representative of our self-deceptions: nothing we see in the film goes beyond his range of vision (the boat he is marooned on at the end is called, a bit patly, “Point of View”), so that his responses to events — such as his denunciation of Arlene after Delly’s death – often seems designed to duplicate, and therefore ultimately question, our own. Unlike Delly, who likes for “things to change no matter what”, he and (by implication) the audience are delineated as victims of compulsive habits, going nowhere in a hurry: Penn’s image of America today. According to the somewhat awkward chess motif bandied about in the film, it is a stalemate whereby one becomes estranged equally from present and past (exemplified by the story Harry tells Ellen about tracking down, and then fleeing from, his missing father in Baltimore) while mechanically stumbling after a fugitive and steadily diminishing future –- a plight epitomized by Harry’s helpless exchange of looks with Ziegler through a glass pane while the latter recedes from sight in the sinking plane, recognition suddenly dawning only when communication is no longer possible.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

–Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1975 (vol. 42, no. 496)

La Signora Senza Camelie (1975 review)

This may be Antonioni’s most unjustly neglected fiction feature, at least in the U.S. (though even in France, where it’s on DVD, it’s only available in a box set). I reviewed it for the May 1975 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. –J.R.

Signora Senza Camelie, La
(The Lady Without Camelias)

Italy, 1953                                                      Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

If it lacks the final fusion of purposes characterizing a masterwork, La Signora Senza Camelie is nevertheless so unmistakably and remarkably that work of a master that one is shocked to discover the rather cursory critical treatment is has generally been accorded. A frequent bone of contention is Lucia Bosè’s performance as the starlet in search of an identity –- recalling that the part was first offered, in turn, to Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, and usually implying some difficulty in accepting Bosè as a persuasive Milanese-shopgirl-turned-sex-symbol. Yet what strikes one at once today is how totally her cold, somewhat remote beauty establishes and “places” the tone of the film, clarifying her cosmic distance from the brassy world of popular filmmaking as well as the natural way in which she might become the goddess of such a realm. In anticipation of Godard’s Vivre sa vie, Antonioni brilliantly opens the film with an image of Clara seen from behind, as an anonymous pedestrian -– tracing her fingers across a move poster and then strolling down the street, the camera gliding slowly after her until she turns into the cinema entrance. When we cut to the auditorium as she joins the crowd inside, the first clear image that we have of any face in the film is the large one looming on the movie screen, which subsequently proves to be her own -– a succinct introduction to that discontinuity that registers with such cumulative force in the film’s final shot, when the capacity to smile for publicity photographs becomes the very token of her alienation and despair. Tracking back along the same street after the preview, Antonioni literally shows us the other side of the coin –- the bustling, fluctuating world of the movie-makers that contrasts so sharply with Clara’s static, lonely stance in relation to it. This fundamental dichotomy (and formal symmetry) permeates the entire film, which oscillates between the shifting centers of public events (filmmaking, premieres, “scandals”), where Wellesian permutations of stresses between foreground and background details continually redefine the space, and the relatively shallow stasis of more private moods and events, where figures and settings seem locked together (even if estranged and isolated) in the desolation of frozen space. Antonioni’s genius for composing a scene manifests itself most strikingly here in his choreography of crowds and mobile camera; as instructive and hilarious satire, the movie-making sequences compare quite favorably to those in La Nuit Américaine (which depends more for its effects on isolated gags and various kinds of borrowed rhetoric, such as the use of Baroque music), while the more attenuated “intimate” scenes –- characteristically matched with the mulish plaintiveness of the Marcel Mule Saxophone Quintet, and closer to the style of Antonioni’s subsequent films -– tend to veer more towards the mannerist trappings of “tone poems”. But all the best scenes combine both sides of this dialectic: the return of Clara (imperious and passive) and Gianni (angry and volatile) from their honeymoon plays against both the spirited, interlocking frenzy of the waiting producer and film crew and the solitary distress of Clara’s stand-in, weeping and forgotten in a corner at the scene’s close; the long conversations between Clara and Nardo in the wintry wastes of exterior sets at the studio is effectively counterpointed throughout by the evidence of activity around them. Handicapped somewhat by its episodic structure, which requires some top-heavy narrative exposition at the outset of each segment, The Lady Without Camelias still impresses through its annexation of an all-too-familiar theme to the personal and singular style of its director, with Bosè figuring grandly and mysteriously as both the pivotal point and the troubled center of a densely created universe.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

–Monthly Film Bulletin, May 1975 (vol. 42, no. 496)