Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY Saturday!, l.ranutry l5, 1972 Page Two THE MICHIGAN DAILY -~ SoturdoyJanuory 15, 1972 71's By NEAL GABLER Each year the number of "ten best" lists seems to proliferate to the point where I half ex- pect every December-January publication to be buried in rank- ings of everything from women of the year to midgets of the year. For most of us, ten best lists are a vestige of our base- ball-oriented boyhoods when quality was easily quantified. For film reviewers, of course, these lists are a small conceit, and being only human I've suc- cumbed the last two years, grad- ing pictures as if they were eggs. They are, however, more like humans than like eggs, follow- ing that old maxim that there is a little good and a little bad in each (though sometimes I won- der). So why the list? Well, per- haps I can rationalize my sub- mission to the mania by saying first, that mine is not a list in the traditional sense, but rather a grouping of films-unranked- that I consider above the aver- age movie fare; and second, that not having had a chance to comment on many of these pic- tures, a year-end wrap-up pro- vides the perfect opportunity to briefly air my views. If you're not willing to accept my ration- alization, just say that I'm an American and a reviewer, and I can't resist. Still, American as I am, I'll have to risk charges of disloyal- ty and, worse, pointy-headed- ness, since the three films that stand above all others by virtue of their tastefulness, narrative simplicity and intellectual cmi- plexity are all French: Claire's Knee, This Man Must Die, and Wild Child. Claire's Knee fol- lows the same motif as Eric Roh- mer's, other Moral Tales - a man trying to reconcile his heart with his head, to render passion rational. Though the point that Rohmer's film is more in the mode of drawing- room comedy than cinema is well taken, the picture is always clever (in the best sense), brim- ming with empathy, and ency- clopedic in its examination of love. Like its landsmen on this list, it prompts discussion and introspection, and by- my book the two dollars admission yields dividends far greater than the bucks you'll lay down for trifling entertainments. Likewise, This Man Must Die is a faultless film from the man who is rapidly emerging as the best of the New Wave, Claule Chabrol. Because his films are cast as mysteries, Chabrol has often been derogated as a Hitch- copycat; and while it's certain- ly true that his pictures work as sheer suspense, they are none- theless much more than thrill- ers. Rohmer defines his char- acters through, the way they love; Chabrol defines his through the way they murder. So for all its twists and turns, This Man Must Die is ultimate- ly a Christian film - with debts to Homer andrShakespeare - about a man trying to control his Fate, getting tangled in his own webs, and seeking redemp- tion. Francois Truffaut's Wild Child, which premiered at the 1970 New York Film Festival, is not only his best film since The 400 Blows, but also the most relevant picture of the year, de- spite the fact that it is set in the early nineteenth century. More important, it's the only film on this list that hits the tear ducts. At a time when young people are pining for their pre-industrial roots - a tent in the woods and a jar of honey - Truffaut bucks the trend and makes his case for civilization; and by chronicling the "creation" of a social be- ing from a human animal, he raises nothing less than the question, "What constitutes hu- manness?" The film thereby serves ,as a meter for modern long-haired insanity, rankling young audiences with Dr. Itard's pedagogical persistence, as if the good Doctor would corrupt the wolf-boy by teaching him how to operate in society. Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout, out of Australia, is a kind of companion piece to Truffaut's picture, depicting the stripping away of the technological cloak from two city kids lost in the Australian outback and be- friended by a native boy. It's a lesser film than Wild Child be- cause it plays up to our mod- ern Luddite biases (oh have we been spoiled by technology!), it overstates its case (life isn't that bad), and it is very often overly literal (a swimming pool best films: list of incomparables dug out next to the oceanf; a hunt juxtaposed with shotA of a butcher shop; a dramatic close-up of the girl stepping from the woods onto the high- way). It belongs in this good company, however, because it has a haunting rhythm via montage that, to use an over- worked and seldom applicable analogy, makes it more like some lovely symphony than dra- ma. The native boy's futile love dance is as chilling and humane a scene as you're likely to see. Also from the Anglos is Da- vid Lean's Ryan's Daughter, the kind of movie that so many pic- tures pretend to be but never are - a kitschy, beautiful, ele- phantine film made solely for the eyes. Lean takes a lot of knocks for making these huge giants, and I think unfairly. These are primarily unpreten- and I can't think of a better way tious entertainments, not art, to spend an empty Saturday aft- ernoon than with Lean. (If pressed I might be able to come up with one or two better ways) Those viewers so inclined might even squeeze a little content out of his latest: the foibles of a girl in love with love, who tosses her husband aside for the first dashing young buck she sees. Hanging around coeds long enough can make you empa- thize, and if not, there is still Frederick Young's picture post- card photography which does for Ireland what it did fpr Arabia. A few years back Americans took a certain ingenuous pride in churning out pure entertain- ments like Ryan's Daughter. But no longer. Now we get our thrills by projecting our national neur- oses on the big screen, and while this definitely has its positive side in that the old gilded dream world has at least been tempor- arily displaced, it has its nega- tive side in ;that there is noth- ing worse than a bad intellect posing as a good one. Andrew Sarris is right in declaiming that movies are rapidly becom- ing silly, self-conscious meta- phors, and the chief victim - surprisingly, with all these manics floating around our screens - has been the drama. It seems that we're all too willing to accept bad substitutes for real drama - lots of words, violent exchanges, sullen si- lences, and a death thrown in at the end. Maybe it's just that the fabric of modern American life doesn't lend itself to dramatiza- tion, but to my mind only one American film this year stood on its characterizations rather than on its issues. That was playwright Frank Gilroy's Des- perate Characters, a penetrating look at dull lives and passive torture, which was only very peripherally a social drama. The film had its burrs, but they were all on the 'side of dramatic ex- cess and not cinematic excess like gyrating cameras and fan- cy cutting. Too often we find an engineer's mentality behind the camera (Where oh where are all those young poets Pauline Kael said would flock to the di- rector's stool?), and so it's re- freshing to find a man whose sensibilities are humane, ex- cesses and all. Similarly refreshing, though the blessing is more mixed, is the integrity of the BBS Pro- duction Company responsible for such uneven but sincere pictures as Easy Rider, Drive He Said, ULYSSES SUN.-7 & 9:30 NEW PUBLIC HEALTH AUDITORIUM Alice's Film Series MA RK'SCOFFEE ARK'SHOUSE 605 E. WILLIAM BREAKFASTS EGGS OMELETS FRIED RICE HAMBURGERS SOUPS 'SALADS SANDWICHES TEAS JUICES ESPRESSO 7:30 A.M.-Midnight M-F 10:00 A.M.-Midnight S-S PINBALL WIZARDS DOWNSTAIRS A Safe Place, The Last Picture Show, and Five Easy Pieces. Only Pieces really belongs on this list - the others released last year have defects too grave for even minor canonization - but even Pieces was overpraised, this reviewer being one of the culprits. The trouble with Pieces, after seeing it again recently, is that it bamboozles you. Not the way so many pictures bamboozle you, acting as if they had some deep message when they really have none. Pieces does have content; what it lacks is drama. It's an outline for a movie rath- er than a complete film, and Jack " Nicholson's marvelous, vein-bursting performance can only blur the sketchiness, not flesh it out. In short, minor art. Two of the more successful films last year placed contem- porary problems in the Ameri- can mythic mold. Arthur Penn's Little Big Man had more bad- moments than his mythic mas- terpiece Bonnie & Clyde, but it was still a stirring, panoramic, intelligent analysis of modern America. Penn continues to be the only American film-maker dealing sympathetically, yet piercingly, with our bloodlust. (To show you just how schizo- phrenic we Americans are, Little Big Man finished second to Love Story in the box-office sweepstakes). Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, also a Western, was no less severe an indictment of our culture than Little Big Man, but Altman's organic style stirred far more controversy, which shows just how tradition- ally we view movies. Directorial- ly. McCabe'is the year's major achievement. Altman built his tnining town, had his cast live there, and seemingly cantured their day to day lives through garbled conversations and dis- jointed vignettes, as their in- dependence slipped away. This was not merely cinematic gym- nastics a la Marienbad; it was the wandering camera of a Western "Our Town." and if it wasn't always satisfying, it was always brilliant, so brilliant that McCabe somehow gr'ows in ret- rospect. The exact opposite has hap- pened to Carnal Knowledge. Like McCabe, it became an in- stant storm center, filling the New York Times' Arts and Lei- sure Correspondence with ti- rades pro and con. Unfortun- ately. I think, the furor ob- scured the film's real worth, which was neither so great as its supporters would have it, nor so little as its detractors would have it. The main spark of the controversy on the male side seems to be the film's un- canny knack for striking respon- sive, if not always welcome, chords in our sexist hearts. Nichols and Feiffer apotheosize the locker-room mentality that treats sex as essentially deriva- tive, something to tell the guys about: and their film lurches from the Inferno of the late 40's campus to the Purgatory of the early 60's middle class to the Paradise of the 70's where act has been sufficiently separated from object. Many women; for their part, objected that the picture was sexist, as if a film about male chauvinism is auto- matically chauvinistic itself. (I, for one, thought the film went a little too easy on the gentler sax, and am waiting to see the story told from the other side. Sexism does work both ways,) But now that the critical dust has settled, Carnal Knowledge, more a mirror than a sinking probe,, seems destined for a safe niche among very good middle- rank movies. It' is well written and well directed, with much skill but little daring, and that's why I think it is less than ma- jor. McCabe took risks. It was Altman's own crazy. energetic vision of the dying West. Car- nal Knowledge takes no risks. It is slick, programmed, per- fect. Too perfect in fact - the product of an intelligent but hopelessly New York-Jewish- Middle-Class sensibility. There are two other films - one French-Algerian, the other Italian - that deserve recogni- tion. Following his Z, most crit- ics gave Costa-Gavras' The Con- fession perfunctory praise as a competent political drama told from the Right side this time. Actually, The Confession, though almer and more conventional- ly dramatic than Z, is no less sizzling and has more implica- tions. What is the relationship between idealism and action? How much can and should be sacrificed for a movement? Must cause co-opt conscience? Just as the right-wing func- tionaries in Z determine justice by fiat and then set about jus- tifying their decisions, so the left-wing functionaries in The Confession determine history by fiat. The film is bitter, yet noble, especially when London (Yves Montand) watches Soviet tanks roll into Prague and feels his old sympathies fade. After all that has transpired, the scene is terribly moving. I have much greater reserva- tions about another largely po- litical film, Bernardo Bertoluc- ci's The Conformist. It comes on like mini-Visconti (better done), with fascism somehow equated with repression of homosexual tendencies. This is the stuff of high - brow pseudo - Freudian trash, but the picture is so im- peccably scripted and dazzlingly directed that I believe a char- itable reviewer might adduce evidence for a different, wiser interpretation. Here homosexual repression is not literally the cause of the conformist's obedi- ence; it is a metaphor for it. You can take your choice of analyses. By either Bertolucci is creative. By the second he is intelligent as well. Three more pictures definite- ly in the middleweight ranks aren't without their rewards. Woody Allen's Bananas brings non-sequitur to a new high, and places its creator even more firmly among the great screen comedians, a generous tribute in these humorless days. Anoth- er solid comedy, Milos Forman's Taking Off, seemed to slink out of town like a whipped cur. For- man, as is his custom, compiled a series of sympathetic ironies about the American middle class and its freaked-out kids, string- ing them on a Joe-type story of two parents in search of their runaway daughter. Never hys- terical, Taking Off is often fun- ny, gentle, and painfully true. The third minor triumph, Gimme Shelter, is a failure in so many ways that you would hardly think it belongs on a best' list, even in the middleweight division. To say it's poorly done, Uof M Riding Club MASS MEETING MON., JAN. 17 7:30 UNION BALLROOM Everyone Welcome Questions-call Don, 769-3364 however, is almost - but not quite - like challenging the; aesthetics of the Zapruder film of President Kennedy's assassin- ation.. I don't ;use this, .analogy because both films .captured a murder, but-rather because they' both captured an event. In the case of the Maysles Brothers, they've used Meredith Hunter's death at Altmamount as a kind of orgiastic climax to a modern Bacchae. Jagger is 'the andro- gynous Dionysus returning "to Thebes-America, and the Sys- tem losing its head (played here by Mel Belli) is Pentheus. The duality, as in Euripedes and the, title song, is intellect versus raw emotion, 'and' the trigger is chance: Rape, murder. It's just a shot away/Love, sister. It's just a kiss.away, As a documen- tary, Gimme Shelter is only so so. As a document, it's absolutely harrowing. Rostropov eh here tonght: M s t i s 1 a v Rostropovich, the' famed Soviet cellist, will' appear in Hill Aud. tonight at 8:30 p.m. under the asupices of the Univer- sity Musical Society. Tickets. are still available, at the Society of- fice in Burton Tower. The program will include works of Bach, Strauss, Beethoven and Prokofiev. The Paul Kuentz-Chamber Or- chestra of Paris returns tAAnn Arbor next week, for two, con- certs in the Power CenterMon- day and Wednesday at 8 p.m. IS 'BAR TON IGHT NAT. SCI. AUD. INEED? NIGT U SEVC? 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