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“THE DEER HUNTER” AND THE DEMYTHIFICATION OF THE AMERICAN HERO – by Nick Pease

Something ominous has been going on since The Deer Hunter first made its appearance, and especially since it won an Academy Award: Certain activist groups, in an unfortunate misunderstanding of the film, have protested it as a kind of racist document that, as a New York Post article summarized it, “ . . . contrasts the innocence of American GIs . . . with the savage Vietnamese enemy they meet on the battlefield.”

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY – THE PROLOGUE INTERVIEWS

Kubrick’s original plan was to open 2001 with a ten-minute prologue (35mm film, black and white) — edited interviews on extraterrestrial possibilities with experts on space, theology, chemistry, biology, astronomy.
Kubrick says that he decided after the first screening of 2001 for M-G-M executives, in Culver City, Cali­fornia, that it wasn’t a good idea to open 2001 with a prologue, and it was eliminated immediately.

WRITING THE WEST: ICONIC AND LITERAL TRUTH IN “UNFORGIVEN”

The popular and critical success of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) has prompted a number of discussions about the status of the Western, Eastwood’s cinematic persona, and the currency of each in a changing cultural landscape. An accepted critical reading of the film that has already emerged suggests that it revises the Western genre.

CRIES AND WHISPERS: BERGMAN’S WOMEN – Review by Paul D. Zimmerman

Ingmar Bergman—the Swedish creator of The Seventh Seal—long ago abandoned his interest in the mysterious ties between God and man in favor of a broader humanism. His latest film, Cries and Whispers, confronts the realities of the human condition—man’s destiny on “the dark, dirty earth under an empty, cruel Heaven.” Now Bergman seeks his answers in the workings of the human heart alone.

FRENZY: THE HITCHCOCK PROBLEM – Review by William S. Pechter

With Frenzy, its director, Alfred Hitchcock, is said to have returned to form, but to what form has he returned? To a resounding orchestral accompaniment, so different from the anxiety-producing music with which Bernard Herrmann contributed so much to Vertigo and Psycho, we move from a panoramic view of the city of London to a Thames-side gathering at which a politician’s speech about progress against the river’s pollution is interrupted by the discovery of a floating corpse.

CRIES AND WHISPERS: BERGMAN’S STUDY IN SCARLET – Review by Hollis Alpert

In Ingmar Bergman’s latest film, Cries and Whispers, the predominant tones are red, and from the very beginning of its production he did not hesitate to explain why this is so. He had a dream, he said, and in the dream he saw a group of women dressed in white, whispering together in a room bathed completely in red.

2001: A Space Odyssey

BEYOND THE STARS – by Jeremy Bernstein

We are happy to report, for the benefit of science-fiction buffs—who have long felt that, at its best, science fiction is a splendid medium for conveying the poetry and wonder of science—that there will soon be a movie for them. We have this from none other than the two authors of the movie, which is to be called Journey Beyond the Stars—Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.

THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE: ANARCHIST’S LAUGHTER – Review by Pauline Kael

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a cosmic vaudeville show —an Old Master’s mischief. Now seventy-two, Luis Bunuel is no longer savage about the hypocrisy and the inanity of the privileged classes. They don’t change, and since they have become a persistent bad joke to him, he has grown almost fond of their follies—the way one can grow fond of the snarls and the silliness of vicious pets.

Deliverance (1972)

Deliverance (1972) | Review by Richard Schickel

Four prosperous businessmen decide to spend a weekend canoeing a wild river running through essentially untamed country before it all disappears, flooded over by a hydroelectric project already abuilding downstream.

Deliverance (1972)

Deliverance (1972) | Review by Arthur Knight

Deliverance, which James Dickey adapted from his own best-selling novel, is one of those rare films that resonates like a literary work but that —rarer still—avoids either being or sounding literary.

From Domestic Nightmares to the Nightmare of History. Uncanny Eruptions of Violence in King’s and Kubrick’s Versions of ‘The Shining’

The impact of past violence on the present is examined in the novel and film versions of The Shining. John Lutz’s essay pinpoints in these works three interrelated elements of what Freud called the “uncanny”—the domestic abuse story, “the postcolonial narrative of American expansion at the expense of nonwhite victims, and the desire for power and control that underlies commodification and the social hierarchies that reinforce it.”

SHINING: INCERTEZZA MORALE – di Giorgio Cremonini

Il presente contributo di Giorgio Cremonini è inserito nel numero monografico intitolato “Quel che resta nella cornice”, dedicato alla descrizione di alcune tra le più suggestive inquadrature della storia del cinema.

ADAPTATION OF AN AUTEUR: TRUFFAUT’S JULES ET JIM (1961) FROM THE NOVEL BY HENRI-PIERRE ROCHÉ – by Stuart Y. McDougal

In 1956, François Truffaut was browsing in a Paris bookstore when his eyes fell on a copy of Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché. He was immediately drawn to the title and, as he studied the jacket, intrigued to discover that it was a septuagenarian’s first novel. At the time Truffaut was twenty-four and supporting him­self by writing film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma and Arts. He purchased the novel, took it home, and pored over it until, like a character in Fahrenheit 451, he knew it by heart.

JULES AND JIM – Review by Pauline Kael

Jules and Jim is not only one of the most beautiful films ever made, and the greatest motion picture of recent years, it is also, viewed as a work of art, exquisitely and impeccably moral.

Pale Rider (1985)

Pale Rider (1985) | Review by Pauline Kael

As an actor, Eastwood never lets down his guard. His idea of being a real man is that it’s something you have to pretend to be—as Sergio Leone put it, he’s wearing a suit of armor. This actor has made a career out of his terror of expressiveness. Now here he is playing a stiff, a ghost. It’s perfect casting, but he doesn’t have the daring to let go and have fun with it. Even as a ghost, he’s armored.

Back to the Future (1985)

Back to the Future (1985) – Review by Pauline Kael

What keeps Back to the Future from being a comedy classic is that its eye is on the market. Despite Zemeckis and Gale’s wit in devising intricate structures that keep blowing fuses, the thinking here is cramped and conventional. I wish that moviemakers and their designers would stop using old Life magazines for their images of the American past.

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