The face of modern age catastrophe through human evil obtains in the Tim Fehlbaum film, September 5 (2024). ABC Sports becomes a brief arm of ABC News as it covers the stupefying kidnapping of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches—an actual occurrence—at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. It is done by Palestinian terrorists known as Black September: a mini-October 7, 2023. Roone Arledge, the head man for Sports, provides something less than competence in the situation (as do the Germans). Not so Geoff Mason, and the Jewish Marvin Bader sometimes knows what is best. The acting of Peter Sarsgaard (Arledge), John Magaro (Mason) and Ben Chaplin (Bader) unerringly deepens the film, and the script sizzles. The movie seems eager to capture history.
Author: EarlD Page 13 of 315
Military pride and victory, battlefield suffering, religious conviction, and death in all its pervasiveness all meet in the Julien Duvivier film, La Bandera (The Flag, 1935), whose gritty screenplay Duvivier and co-scenarist Charles Spaak adapted from a novel.
The picture concerns a Frenchman called Gilieth who murders a man in Paris (“a piece of crap” he calls him) and then runs away to Barcelona, where he is unemployed and hungry. In order to survive, he joins the Spanish Foreign Legion, though not without a clandestine Spanish detective on his trail. All the legionnaires, Gilieth included, volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and an agonizing, disastrous experience it is. Can there be—is there—the acquisition of honor in this?
The French actress Annabella, who was married to Tyrone Power, has top billing in this film (she plays an Arab girl whom Gilieth marries), but she is not the star. Jean Gabin is, satisfyingly cast as the one-time murderer. . . La Bandera is now creaky and obstreperous, but also vivid and candid. I would say that at first its attitude is misanthropic, but eventually it does see Gilieth as acquiring honor as it puts a measure of faith in men on the battlefield, as it necessarily respects human risk and endurance. At least the Spanish detective seems to see Gilieth as acquiring honor (or expiation).
(In French with English subtitles)
Tom is a college boy who is not very virile, and because of the ridicule and suspicion he elicits, the college headmaster’s wife, Laura, is kind and helpful to him. Laura herself could use some kindness, though, since she is married to a man who, though manly, resists her and is a repressed homosexual. He is seemingly jealous of Tom—a heterosexual, by the way—who knows how to receive and appreciate Laura’s sympathetic care.
The agony associated with what the human heart demands and needs is what Tea and Sympathy (1956)—film by Vincent Minnelli, play and screenplay by Robert Anderson—is about. Properly and knowingly, Minnelli put the play on the screen, and the top-notch cast from the Broadway production (Deborah Kerr, et al.) was used. The result is a truly adult film, i.e. one for an adult sensibility, presented with appreciable power. Kenneth Tynan rightly thought the play a good middlebrow work; no less so is the movie.
Tea and Sympathy (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Panic in Needle Park (1971) doesn’t have a very memorable ending, but the movie in toto is penetrating. Filmed in New York City, it concerns a man and a woman, lovers, in the grip of heroin addiction. Helen, the woman (Kitty Winn), a transplant from Indiana, knows that what’s going down in her new surroundings, in the pathetic big city, is questionable and indeed bad. But she becomes a user like her boyfriend Bobby (Al Pacino), an extroverted, unemployed nonentity. The subjects of experimentation, compromise, drift, squalor—the film presents them all. And it isn’t dated. Helen’s encounters with medical workers because of her neediness and suffering are true and disturbing.
Scriptwriter Joan Didion didn’t have all that much to do since Needle Park is based on a novel by James Mills and she collaborated with her husband John Gregory Dunne. Jerry Schatzberg directed. Pacino is piercingly strong in his acting job, expert at exhibiting thought. Winn is shattering as an evidently complex character.
The first half of The Last Run, from 1971, was directed by an interesting American film artist, John Huston, but Huston’s angry arguments with leading man George C. Scott drove the director to abandon the film. He was replaced by Richard Fleischer, a lesser talent. Run doesn’t pass muster. It’s a bland thriller—still worth seeing, nonetheless, for Huston’s early shots and scenes and Scott’s committed performance. Too, because of Sven Nykvist’s cinematography, it looks decidedly better than numerous other U.S. movies from decades past. Plus, Trish Van Devere is a lovely actress. I’m glad The Last Run wasn’t Huston’s last run.