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Monday, March 26, 2012 ( 3/26/2012 10:13:00 PM ) Bill S.   MARX HAPPY Originally published in 1996 and now released in a “Revised and Expanded New Edition,” Glenn Mitchell's The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia (Titan Books) is an imposing compendium of all facts Marxian. It's a tribute to the density of the bros.' work that there's so much to be found in this volume. The Marx Brothers' oeuvre, lest we forget, comprises a fairly short list of 13 feature films, some of which are of decidedly dubious quality. (Love Happy, anyone?) Still, Minnie's Boys offer an entrance to so much 20th century entertainment -- vaudeville, theater, movies, radio and (say the magic woid!) television -- that there's loads of great material for fans and dabblers alike.The entries in this book range from the little seen (as in a description of the boys' first vaudeville routine, “Fun in Hi Skule,”) to the minute (a discussion of Groucho's fake-then-ultimately real mustache) to full-blown, somewhat flat synopses of each flick that the quartet/threesome made. If that last seems unnecessary to the fanatic who can spout Groucho or Chico patter before the comics have a chance to deliver 'em on film, Mitchell also includes snippets of some dialog that didn't make it into the completed product. In at least one instance (a courtroom scene from At the Circus) the material proves superior to much of what finally appeared on film. At times, the book's exhaustive attention to the supporting cast of each feature can seem a bit much, though when it comes to such figures as the indomitable Margaret Dumont (the grand dame in seven Marx flicks, she also played the comic foil against W.C. Fields, Red Skelton and theater comedy vets Wheeler and Woolsey) and Marilyn Monroe (in a brief but memorable role in Love Happy), the attention is fully justified. In the much debated question as to whether Dumont understood the jokes in the movies in which she appeared, Mitchell doesn't clearly take sides but seems to favor the idea that the lady knew more than she was telling. I like to believe that myself. Mitchell also excels when it comes to detailing the relationships between the Brothers Marx and many of the literary figures who came within their circle (Alexander Woolcott, S.J. Perlman), a rich source for anecdotes since in many cases the writers themselves chronicled their experiences with the Marxes. Two of the brothers themselves have written about their history -- Groucho in a slew of entertaining books, Harpo in Harpo Speaks -- and on more than occasion in the encyclopedia, Mitchell notes where their stories have diverse tellings. It seems apt that this most anarchic of comedy troupes would have such a malleable history. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: classic cinema # |Sunday, March 27, 2011 ( 3/27/2011 10:03:00 AM ) Bill S.  “NEED. . . THAT’S A BIGGER WORD THAN LOVE.” Released As a part of its Eclipse series, a line of budget-minded DVD/Blu-Ray Criterion Collection sets devoted to bringing obscure movie greats to cinephiles’ attention, Basil Dearden’s London Underground is a fascinating four-film collection showing both the city and the British film industry in a major moment of transition. Originally released from 1959 – 62, the films packaged here mix genre and socially-minded drama in ways that remain compelling. You could call Dearden the Stanley Kramer of his country were it not for the fact that the Britisher is a much defter storyteller.The set opens with Sapphire, a murder mystery inspired by the racially motivated 1958 Notting Hill Riots. Centering on the rage-filled killing of a bi-racial college girl who was “passing” as white, the movie follows superintendent Robert Hazard (Nigel Patrick) as he moves between university clubs to middle-class family setting to the black immigrant community, uncovering the racial attitudes in each. As in a later entry, 1961’s Victim, the elder Hazard is paired with a younger, less tolerant copper, the better to reflect the era's range of tolerance/intolerance. Sapphire is the only offering in Underground released in color; the remaining three were filmed in evocative black-and-white. First of these, 1960’s League of Gentlemen, is a tightly wound caper flick that follows a group of former soldiers who’ve all been unable to fully assimilate back into honest society after the war. Using a paperback potboiler as their template, leader Jack Hawkins’ crew first steals supplies from an Army Command Training Center, then use these to pull of a robbery -- essentially giving us two capers for the price of one. Aided by a strong male cast (Patrick again and Richard Attenborough among them), League moves swiftly but never loses sight of its deeper subtext: the not-so-benign neglect experienced by many returning WWII veterans. Think of it as a much less self-pitying take on The Best Years of Our Lives. It’s with Victim, the third film in Underground, that Dearden and his collaborators found their most provocative storyline, though. Released in 1961, when homosexuality was still a jailable offense in England, the movie follows a group of gay Londoners who are all being blackmailed for their sexual preference. One of these, rising barrister Melville Farr (wavy-haired Matinee idol Dirk Bogarde in his first overtly gay role), strives to uncover the blackmailer’s identity after an infatuated young man (Peter McEnery) is arrested with photos and news clippings about Farr in his possession. Our closeted hero, married to schoolteacher Sylvia Sims, denies that anything happened between them, but in digging into the lives of the blackmailer’s victims, he risks having his own sexual preference exposed. He perseveres anyway. Offering a broad cross-section of urban men -- from working stiffs to members of the privileged elite (represented by an underused Dennis Price) -- Victim provides a full range of takes on the Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name. (Tellingly, when it was released in the U.S., the distributor pressured the moviemakers to have the word “homosexual” removed from the soundtrack.) But in the end, its central premise proves sympathetic to its blackmailed victims. It’s the “blackmailer’s charter,” we’re told of the law criminalizing homosexual acts between two consenting adults, while the villain inflicting all the damage is described as a “cross between an avenging angel and a peeping tom.” The scenes between Bogarde and his not-quite-betrayed wife Sims are marvels of civilized emoting -- you can see the bonds that hold this closeted man to his school teacher wife -- while the movie’s collection of gay males and their circle of not-always-sympathetic friends makes for a distinct and colorful cast of suspects. Dearden films it all with a sharp eye for the London of the early sixties (theatre marques in the background, omnipresent construction) -- a city in transition but with plenty of the old attitudes still in place. Though it reportedly (per the one-page liner notes by Michael Koresky) received mixed reviews at the time of its release, the movie is now considered both a landmark in gay cinema and is credited with being a factor in the law’s 1967 repeal. If the movie has its small speechifying moments (screenwriter Janet Green also was responsible for Sapphire) its central mystery and moody portrait of the city still make it enthralling. The final offering, 1962’s All Night Long, proves even moodier. A late-night re-imagining of Othello set in a London jazz club, it features a young Patrick McGoohan as jazz drummer Johnny Cousin, who plays Iago to black band leader Paul Harris and his white singer wife Marti Stevens. McGoohan is trying to break up the couple in hopes of luring the singer to play for him (no “motiveless malignancy” for this guy), and the movie tracks his scheming over a one-night celebration being held at Richard Attenborough’s warehouse club. The set-bound flick proves more dynamic than you’d expect, thanks in part to the musical guest appearances of jazz luminaries like Dave Brubeck and Charles Mingus, who typically show up to do a number than disappear from the rest of the film. A beautifully lensed black-and-white noir exercise, All Night Long backs away from a full-blown Shakespearean tragic finish, though you still leave the movie wondering how its bi-racial couple will handle the aftermath of McGoohan’s machinations in the morning. The movie's biggest flaw proves Stevens’ singing Desdemona (here called Delia Lane), who comes across a mite too low-key to inspire the full-blown jealous rage that our jazzy Othello develops. She gets to perform a nice version of the title song, though. Eclipse’s London Underground DVD set is relatively no-frills: each movie gets a one-page liner note and that’s it. Only time this proves a deficit is in the discs' absence of closed captioning. While all four films are visually clean and sharp, the soundtrack to League of Gentlemen is low and sibilant, like a low-budget horror flick you might be watching at 2:00 in the a.m. on a local TV station. That didn't bother this viewer too much, however. It brought back memories of when I first saw some of these movies in the seventies, in a university film society series -- the copies of these films back then weren’t very pristine either -- all part of the hardcore movie lover’s experience. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: classic cinema # |Monday, November 01, 2010 ( 11/01/2010 07:22:00 AM ) Bill S.  “THERE’S SOMETHING PECULIAR ABOUT CONJURERS.” That Ingmar Bergman, king of art house cinema in the fifties and sixties, would craft an entertainment blending upstairs/downstairs sexual frolics with classic horror movie imagery is most likely one of the big reasons his The Magician is considered one of the master’s lesser works. Yet even lesser Bergman can be pretty damn amazing, and this longtime admirer found Criterion’s recent DVD release an apt offering for Halloween Day. With a beautifully restored high-def digital transfer and improved subtitles, the moodily lensed (courtesy of elegant cinematographer Gunnar Fischer) movie proves an enjoyable grown-up gothic exercise.Set in 19th Century Stockholm, the film concern a troupe of traveling show folk known as Vogler’s Magnetic Health Theater. Name on the wagon Albert Vogler (played by king of anguish Max von Sydow) is a combination stage magician/patent medicine huckster. Accompanied by his wife (Ingrid Thulin), crone grandmother (Naima Wifstrand), con man m-c Tubal (Ake Fridell) and a young coachman, Vogler is brought to the home of the city Consul where he’s forced to put on a show for the consul and his grieving wife, plus two skeptics who are meant to represent 19th Century reason. Vogler’s primary antagonist is the doctor Vergérus (Gunnar Bjornstand). An avowed enemy of the “inexplicable,” Doctor V.’s mission is to expose the magician as a charlatan. This he thinks he does until the movie’s horrorshow last act. Trapped in an attic with an autopsied body that looks to be much more lively than it should be, the rationalist physician has his secular faith tested big time. The attic sequence is the one that also most tests the patience of many Serious Students of Film. But it’s the moment the movie has been building toward. For The Magician is ultimately about filmic storytelling (part of Vogler’s show, it should be noted, involves a magic lantern) as much as it is about the battle ‘tween scientific reason and magical art. Von Sydow’s Vogler spends two-thirds of the movie pretending to be mute -- and when he breaks his silence the first words to come out of his mouth are a condemnation of his audience. He’s the struggling creator whose conflict with the arrogant doctor spurs him into concocting a convincing gothic work that blends both the surreal (an eyeball in an inkwell) and familiar (hands clutching out of the darkness.) For a first time viewer, the attic sequence is effective, though after Bergman pulls back the curtain and reveals the trickery, it’s difficult to go back to it the same way. The movie’s comic moments, primarily centering on the other members of Vogler’s troupe as they flirt with the household staff, hold up even if they do seem to come from a different movie altogether. As a moviemaker best known for somber treatises on existential despair, Bergman had a knack for believably depicting sexual tease, and the flirty bits in The Magician are indubitably entertaining, They’re not the moments most buffs recall when they think about the movie, however. No, that remains the darker material: the shots of the troupe’s wagon going through a fog-festooned forest, the image of a servant hanging from a downstairs ceiling, the casually sudden appearance of a severed hand. In these days of much more graphic terrors, it all seems a little quaint, but it still remains a treat to view -- a master moviemaker playing with both Bunuel and Val Lewton, tweaking (as Peter Cowie narrates in a bonus mini-doc) his critics and his audience as he goes. (First published on Blogcritics.) Labels: classic cinema # |Friday, March 05, 2010 ( 3/05/2010 05:44:00 PM ) Bill S.  “TOO CRAZY TO EVER BE A TAMER.” Eight years after he burst onto the moviemaking scene with Diva, French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Beineix gave his audience another obsessive youth, this time far removed from the rarefied world classical opera. In Roselyne and the Lions, we’re introduced to Therry (Gerard Sandoz), a Marseilles high-schooler who gets swept up in the world of circus lion taming. As the movie opens, the young man is a bored mischievous student who happens on a geezerly animal tamer/instructor while ditching school. It’s a toss-up as to which draws him first -- the cats or the tutor’s angelic looking student Roselyne (Isabelle Pascoe) -- but, either way, he's hooked.The movie minutely charts Thierry and Roselyne’s growth from students to performers at a high-class German circus. It’s a long (nearly three hours) trek, yet somehow Beineix keeps things interesting. What we’re basically seeing here is the growth of two artists: we shown the two as they first learn to work with bull whips and big cats at a modest local zoo, then as they negotiate the nearly-as-treacherous world of their fellow performers. At times, the director almost seems to be following the path of an old-fashioned show biz partnership flick -- wherein the more talented member of a struggling duo is shown out-stripping the other -- but this ultimately doesn’t prove to be the case. When Diva first hit American shores in the early eighties, the movie’s canny promoters trumpeted it as a new kind of French “new wave.” If that magnificent break-out was Beineix’s pop paean to Jean-Luc Godard, then Roselyne is his homage to François Truffaut: a humanistic coming of age movie set in a much less plastic world than Diva’s pulpish Paris. While the first flick gave us elegant opera singer Cynthia Hawkins as its musical center, the visually earthier Roselyne provides us with a plus-sized alcoholic gospel singer; instead of the punk-inspired gunsels of the former film, there’s a caustic circus dwarf named Li’l Prince and a self-absorbed strongman. The movie even includes a Truffaut-like idealized speech from Thierry’s teacher about the true mission of education. Pascoe and Sandoz are appealing leads, though neither one is as colorful as the case of carnival-esque eccentrics surrounding ‘em. Beineix is not afraid to make each of his attractive protagonists unlikable at times, however. During the film’s final third, Thierry becomes particularly bullying as the duo work up their set: a hectoring director in his own right. In a bonus disc documentary provided with Cinema Libre’s DVD edition, “Le Grande Cirque,” Beineix gives a glimpse of his own personality as a creator and moviemaker. When one of his actors asks the director why he’s making things more difficult for them, he replies quite simply, “Complications are my business.” A decent tagline for this great French moviemaker’s oeuvre, come to think of it. Labels: classic cinema # |Saturday, September 05, 2009 ( 9/05/2009 10:45:00 PM ) Bill S.  "YOU HAVE A DREAM. I HAVE NOTHING." As a movement in Japan, film noir didn't really gather steam until 1957, when the venerable Nikkastu Studio plunked the stars of the mega-popular flaming youth flick, Crazed Fruit, into a despairing little potboiler entitled I Am Waiting. The box office success of this "borderless B-movie" led to a steady stream of hard-boiled features featuring hard-luck heroes, five of which have just been collected as a part of Criterion's Eclipse Series in a handsome box entitled Nikkatsu Noir. Good grim times for lovers of gritty black-and-white melodrama, multiple betrayals, and violent showdowns in the seedier fringes of the city landscape.Koreyoshi Kurahara's Waiting, the breakout flick that opens the set, is in some ways the most curious -- containing, as it does, elements of the "Sun Tribe" movies that first brought sweet-faced lead Yujiro Ishihara into prominence. An ex-welterweight once jailed for killing a man in a bar fight, Ishihara's Joji runs a seedy restaurant by the wharfs in Yokahama, dreaming of the day his brother sends him a letter from Brazil, presented here as a Land of Opportunity. We know from the mournful jazzy soundtrack and the rain-drenched opener that our hero's dreams are gonna be crushed, however. Walking to the mailbox to drop off a letter to his brother, Joji runs into a sad-looking young girl (Mie Kitahara, the married vamp of Crazed Fruit), who he takes back to his restaurant. The girl, Saeko, is a cabaret singer who once had dreams of becoming an opera star until illness robbed her of her voice. ("I'm a canary that's forgotten how to sing," she says.) Mistakenly believing that she's killed a lecherous punk who attempted to assault her backstage, she's on the run from the punk's brother, a gangster who also has a connection to our hero's absent brother. The duo have a believably tentative relationship in Waiting (Ishihara and Kitahara ultimately costarred in something like two dozen films together). Though he may be a pug with a violent temper, Joji also proves to be a sensitive young guy capable of crooning and strumming a ukulele. He's strong enough to face down the movie's former fighter gangster villain and his thugs, but, once he does, the movie leaves him standing by himself, crazed with sorrow over all that he's learned about his brother. Waiting may be noir, but there's a strong element of the misunderstood youth theme also common to the era. Toshio Masuda's Rusty Knife, the second entry in the set, also features the twosome in starring roles, and, once again, Ishihara plays a character trying to leave behind a sordid past that inevitably catches up with him. In this entry, he's one of three would-be robbers who unexpectedly witnessed the murder of a councilman by a local gangster. When one of the three (Joe Shishido, the lead of two later entries in this set) is thrown in front of a train for attempting to blackmail the gangster, his death alerts authorities to the existence of the remaining two witnesses. As in the first movie, Ishihara's Yuhiko has a regret-filled past. In this case, his girlfriend killed herself after being raped by one of the gangster's henchmen, causing our quick-tempered hero to kill the slime-ball in a murderous rage. Yuhiko dreads the capacity for violence that he knows is still within him. ("I killed a man with these hands," he tells Kitahara's girl reporter, who also is the daughter of the murdered councilman. "The disease, I still have it.") And when he learns that his victim wasn't the only one responsible for the sexual assault of his girlfriend, it's only a matter of movie time before that violent side erupts. There's a subplot revolving around the councilman's killing, his reporter daughter's investigations into the assassination, and the presence of an evil criminal mastermind directing all the proceedings, but none of this is what lingers from the movie. What stays in the image of another fallen Ishihara hero, stumbling away in the dark from a showdown that has psychologically wounded him more than it has physically. A true noir protagonist. In contrast, the lead in the box's center film, Seijun Suzuki'sTake Aim at the Police Van, isn't as damaged. A prison guard suspended after one of his charges is murdered during a raid on a police van, he takes it upon himself to track down the killers, venturing into a world of exotic dancers and hookers. A relatively decent guy, Michitaro Mizushima's Daijiro is largely unfazed by his explorations into the city's seamy underbelly, making him the least interesting hero in this set. Still, director Suzuki slips some great dark moments into the flick, most memorably a scene where a murdered dancer falls out in front of us with an arrow in her breast. Two later Nikkatsu entries take a different tack with their protagonists, making them clearer antiheroes instead of flawed guys with a past. Both 1964's Cruel Gun Story and '67's A Gun Is My Passport starred Joe Shishido (the doomed blackmailer in Rusty Knife) as hardened criminals forced on the run after pulling off violent capers. In the first, he's called in to lead a heist on an armored car carrying racetrack money; in the second, he's a hit man hired to take out a Yakuza boss. In both, Joe's character is betrayed by the higher-up criminals who originally hired him; in Passport, it's when the rival gang who hired him enters into a partnership with the son of the slain gang boss. The one thing that makes Shishido the hero in both pieces is his unbroken loyalty to his fellow team members. As a feature lead, Shishido is an intriguing specimen: fat cheeked with a dour expression that brings to mind a Japanese Jack Webb, he's a marked change from the pretty boy lead of Nikkatsu's earlier excursions into crime melodrama -- and more believable for it. As if to compensate, the studio's crime films became increasingly more stylized, relying on Shishido's lived-in mug to anchor the proceedings. Takashi Nomura's 1967 Passport, for instance, liberally borrows the sound and look of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, but Shishido remains so naturally committed to his role as an unreflective hard-ass that we buy the movie's affectations. The movie's final showdown, with our man facing an army of hired goons on a desert-like industrial wasteland, is a doozy. Criterion's DVD set doesn't contain any commentary tracks or other extras: just five handsomely transferred black-and-white movies in Japanese with English subtitles. Each movie does contain informative notes by Asian movie critic Chuck Stevens, who delineates each film's place in the studio's history and also points out many of the themes that keep emerging in these flicks. There is, for instance, an evocative post-war theme in most of the movies collected in this set: an understandable ambivalence toward modernization and the American presence in Japan after the war. Cruel Gun Story, for instance, opens on the image of an American Air Force plane tearing through the sky, while its gun-packed showdown is set in an abandoned U.S. Army party town; all that's left in the wake of the occupying army is noise and debris. Too, these films evoke the grime of industrialization in ways that go beyond being just visually arresting: they show a world where a nation's past mistakes have seemingly led its characters to a gray and dusty dead end. As such, these flicks provide a tidy time capsule of a nation in a period of profound transition -- even as they deliver some crackling B-pic thrills. Labels: classic cinema # |Saturday, March 21, 2009 ( 3/21/2009 07:35:00 AM ) Bill S.  "A MONUMENT TO DISASTER: DELUXE KIND." Hard to believe that Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva could have gotten heavily panned back when it was first released. Watching the gorgeously remastered Meridian Collection DVD of the film that was released last year following its twenty-fifth anniversary, it's even harder to see how the movie's first reviewers missed the point. "Empty, though frightfully chic-looking," Vincent Canby once sneered, and while the film still looks "frightfully" glossy thanks to its popping visuals, first time director Beineix's blend of pulp and youthful romanticism proves anything but empty. An examination of enthusiastic aestheticism by a director unafraid to put his own adolescent passions for moviemaking up front for all to see, Diva remains vital even after more than two decades of inferior imitators.The movie concerns a young Parisian postman named Jules (Frederic Andrei), who worships Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhemina Wiggins Fernandez), a recording-shy Afro-American soprano who is on the verge of aging out of her diva status. (She's 32, we're told.) At a performance of "La Wally," Jules illegally records the diva's performance, an act that is witnessed by two shady Taiwanese businessmen who in the first of the film's many patent contrivances happen to be seated right behind our hero. In addition to stealing her performance, Jules also swipes the gown that Cynthia was wearing on-stage. Back in his garage loft, he holds the garment to his face while playing back the singer's performance on his state of the art reel-to-reel tape player. Later he'll take the dress to a black prostitute and have her wear it. "You seem a little nutty," she says. There's a definite element of creepiness to the innocent-faced Jules' actions, and the movie doesn't shy away from it. Unfortunately for our hero, fate pulls him into an even more sinister plot. A tape describing the drug and prostitution connections of the city's homicide police chief winds up in the bag of his moped, and poor clueless Jules' attempts to get close to Cynthia are regularly thwarted by pursuing cops and a duo of menacing henchmen. This leads to the film's two most suspenseful scenes: an exuberant chase where our hero flees a running cop by riding his motorbike down into the Paris Metro and a sweat-drenched sequence where our wounded hero is relentlessly pursued by the nihilistic, ice pick wielding thug Priest (Dominique Pinon, perhaps best known to American audiences for his role in Amelie) through a bowling alley arcade. Jules' rescue comes at the hands of a mysterious pair, Goradish (Richard Behringer) and Vietnamese nymphette Alba (Thuy Au Luu). Both characters figure prominently in a series of mystery/caper novels by the Swiss novelist "Delacorta" (of which Diva was the first), though in the film we're not really given much background information about them. Jules meets Alba when he spies her shoplifting a jazz elpee from a record store (making her a kindred spirit perhaps), though we quickly learn that she's swiped it for Goradish, who's going through a "cool phase." This we see when Goradish gives Jules an utterly straight-faced lecture on the Zen of spreading butter over French bread. Diva's crime plots are connected as sturdily as a house made out of popsicle sticks, but its characters and colorful sense of place are so strong that you readily accept each outlandish coincidence. Jules' obsessive devotion to his diva is so heartfelt that even at his most stalker-ish, he remains appealing. "Who do you think I am? The Beatles?" Cynthia asks, after the postman returns her gown to her. She's simultaneously irritated and charmed by his fannishness: "You know music too well," she declares, and she says this as both criticism and a compliment. In contrast, Pinon's Priest, the nihilistic skinhead killer, is presented as Jules' polar opposite. Everything he sees is subject to his sneering disdain, which ultimately leads his cohort to wryly observe, "You don't like much, do you?" The killer is always seen wearing an earpiece, which he presses more firmly into his ear whenever he's about to do something dire. We think he's listening to something hard-edged and punk, but, in one of the movie's best jokes, we ultimately learn otherwise. For years, lovers of this movie have had to make due with an inferior Anchor Bay DVD with a washed out, occasionally scratchy look. The Meridian Collection corrects this flaw with a crisply re-mastered Dolby monaural soundtrack and a digital transfer overseen by the director. You can immediately see the difference in the movie's opening sequence: Cynthia's swiped concert performance. Standing on the stage of a decaying Paris theatre, the camera worshipfully circling her as she sings from "La Wally," it's a moment that has to work pristinely in order to pull us opera-phobes into Jules' world, and the new Meridian disc does just that. As bonus feature, the disc includes an extensive series of interviews conducted with cast and crewmembers by Phil Powie, author of a book on Jean-Jacques Beineix. The only complaint I have about the feature is the fact that only one dubbed voice is used so that when more than one person is in a segment -- as when Pinon and actress Anny Romand are interviewed by Powie -- it can get initially confusing as to who is actually speaking. Still, Powie's interviews are themselves quite thoughtful, covering practically every aspect of what proved to be a landmark film. I first saw Diva as a date movie in a Champaign Illinois art house that has since long closed. My soon-to-be wife and I both fell in love with the flick, though, characteristically, this happened during two different scenes. For me, it was a moment when Priest ice picks an informer as the guy is shilling at a carnival wheel of fortune -- grabbing a ceramic Beethoven bust from the dead man's hand, he delivers one of his signature statements ("I don't like Beethoven.") before dropping the bust to the ground. For my wife, it was a lushly romantic sequence where Jules and Cynthia wordlessly stroll through a Paris park, surrounded by fountains, Vladimir Cosma's evocative piano theme playing on the soundtrack. The latter scene ends on a chaste note, which is just the way it should. Jules may be "a little nutty," but in the end he knows it's still all about the music. Labels: classic cinema # | |
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