The 1969 Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a Paul Mazursky film, examines the late Sixties’ trends of “liberation”, such as touchy-feely therapy, as two married couples try them on for size.  Only slightly satirical, it’s a humane work with competent performances by Dyan Cannon and Elliott Gould, but it’s also a garrulous bore which doesn’t really offer a proper resolution to the characters’ contretemps.  Instead we get a flimsy what-the-world-needs-now-is-love conclusion (with Jackie DeShannon’s song on the soundtrack).

An Unmarried Woman is still the Mazursky movie to see, not this one.

Cover of Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice

You might want to read an article for the right-leaning website, The American Thinker, called “Was Mollie Tibbetts the Victim of Mexican Machismo?” by Jeannie DeAngelis (Aug. 26)

This would be the Mexican machismo of the illegal immigrant, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, who evidently murdered Miss Tibbetts.  To be sure, most illegals would never perpetrate such an act, but just how much machismo do we want to cross the U.S. border or overstay a visa?  Machismo, I’m sure, is very averse to being rejected by women.

“Hold on, Dean,” a detractor might say.  “Immigrant machismo is not claiming the lives of a lot of American women!”  Maybe not.  The mainstream news media wouldn’t tell us if it was.  Even so, what if border security weakens again and continued influxes of Latin American immigrants lead to frequent murders of American women?  What if “catch and release” gets underway again?

Miss DeAngelis writes, “For the record, in 2016 alone, an estimated seven women a day lost their lives in Mexico [a much smaller country than the United States, remember] to femicide in public locations.”  But, hey, don’t worry.  The felony rate of illegal immigrants is gratifyingly lower than that of American citizens, right?  Irrelevant!  So says Daniel John Sobieski, another American Thinker writer, and he’s right.  He avers, “The murder rate for illegal aliens should be zero because none of them should be here . . . ” (Aug. 27)

Detective Barney Nolan is oddly quiet as precinct bookings and other activity go on around him in 1954’s Shield for Murder, and no wonder.  Nolan himself has just committed a capital offense:  he murdered a bookie’s runner.  Enacted with scary power by Edmond O’Brien, who co-directed this pic with Howard W. Koch, the wayward cop will do anything to enrich and protect himself.  There’s a lot of ugly truth his brunette girlfriend (Maria English) has yet to find out about him, but she’s on her way.  And he ain’t the guy flirty Carolyn Jones should have tried to pick up in a bar.

Two directors have turned out a well-made potboiler, an exciting one.  Violent and disturbing too.  There is an estimable shootout scene at an indoor swimming pool, and an almost Bonnie and Clyde-like shooting of a criminal.  What’s more, there is something rather grand about Shield, but what is it?  Maybe it’s that Barney is so diligent in the crummy things he does while we know perfectly well he is destined to be wholly defeated.

She who may have been the first female movie director, Alice Guy Blache, crafted the 1906 silent opus, The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (the Resurrection is there too).  It’s only 30 minutes long and features many cast extras, filmed in naught but medium shots.  The first tableau shows us there is indeed no room in the inn (it’s emphatic), after which a second tableau presents the Christ child asleep while invisible angels provide a lullaby.  No pleasantness is provided at all, of course, when a farrago of exhausted cross-carrying and deep sorrow and anxiety fills the screen.  Minutes later, though, Guy Blache does well with a risen Jesus, in the air, leaving the coffin and the tomb wherein his corpse had been laid.

In the nigh 12-minute Falling Leaves (1912), Guy Blache does well again—the flick is sensibly shot—and we get to see the choice features of a bourgeois home and clothing in 1912.  But the movie whitewashes reality, and yet . . . oh well.  It is still quite a curio with some loveliness.

Image via Wikipedia

Seemingly a straight-to-DVD product, The Parable of the Christ (2006), by George Jiha, could have been better acted and better directed, in that order, but after seeing it five times I now consider it a commendable film.  Mick Shane is incisive and pleasantly subdued as the almost morally perfect lover and then husband of a prostitute he calls Violet (real name: Lucy), played by Sylvie Hoffer.  Indisputably Hoffer is beautiful–and capable of real sweetness–but her acting is poor, as is that of several other cast members.  Jiha’s bright story has the Shane character, Josh, fall in love with and actually start spying on Violet before he learns she is a hooker.  Subsequently he befriends her and the two go out on platonic dates.  Josh is not interested in sex, albeit Violet, after Josh’s kindness to her, is—and she can no more depersonalize Josh than he can depersonalize her.  Not long after he tells Violet he loves her, Josh proposes marriage.  It is only after the wedding that they have sex.

Happy times do not last, though.  The former prostitute has a life-threatening venereal disease and she unwittingly infects her husband with it.  Both she and Josh are now dying, but Josh directs no blame at Violet.  Remorseful, Violet runs away from Josh, though not for very long.  It pleases Violet’s husband, the “Christ” of Jiha’s film, that Violet has bloomed, has changed, via his love-giving, and he is content, well, to die for her.  And die he does.  He and Violet are granted immortality, however, being reunited in Paradise.  There is transcendence, then, and their love need not perish.

It is valid to say that Josh is not really a Christ figure–he does spy on Violet, after all–or that he is only a partial Christ figure.  To be as precise as possible, he is simply a character in a parable who loves his inamorata with a Christlike love.  Violet is “reborn” because of him, although it would seem she is reborn also because of something else since, after she dies, she makes it to Heaven.  Perhaps she is the Mary Magdalene to Josh’s Christ-man (notwithstanding Josh is not the one who takes her to Heaven) and so is free to enter the Kingdom.  Mirabile dictu, she is made a Christian while Josh, with his Christlike love, already is one.

Nonverbal friendship and marital love scenes in Parable are frequently trite, although the final sequence in Heaven is lovely.  The talking scenes are the ones that matter. . .

The Parable of the Christ has its assets.  It isn’t boring.  Jiha has something to say and says it in a tasteful and charming way.  Some may find the film pallid, but after five viewings I don’t think it is.  It has its own vitality.  It deserves to be seen.