In the landmark Michelangelo Antonioni film L’Avventura (1960), from Italy, the troubled young woman Anna (Lea Massari) disappears during a yachting party, never to be found.  While searching for her, Anna’s best friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) and her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) begin a shaky romantic liaison.

A striking secularism, with mere touches of Catholicism, exists in L’Avventura‘s vast world.  But man without religion, without belief, turns into a missing person of sorts (as Anna is literally missing), with only eroticism employed as a tool for consolation.

Never again would Antonioni show as much ingenuity as he did in this picture.  Consider the eerie footage of the empty town called Noto.  And the filmic suggestion of human vulnerability in the spaciousness of the ocean.  Consider the small-town men eyeing and beginning to surround an uneasy Claudia.  And the sad, riveting mise en scene in the film’s final minutes.  On top of it all, the scenario glitters with merit.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Cover of L’ Avventura

Jesse James, as played by Robert Duvall, is too vicious a man to be a Robin Hood-like criminal, as the Duvall vehicle, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)—and pop legend—would have it.  Amnesty is proposed for James and Cole Younger (Cliff Robertson) and their two gangs because they have kindly protected ordinary people from railroad men.  Once the amnesty is denied, though, decent-in-some-ways Younger agrees to join James in robbing a Northfield, Minnesota bank.

For the most part the film, written and directed by Philip Kaufman, tries to be realistic about America in the 1870s.  Primitives confront a changing world, although rage over the Civil War ain’t going away.  The ritualistic behavior and James’s religious-sounding declamation suggest the rise on American soil of pious, heretical cults like Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Kaufman’s script falls short here and there, but he ably presents moral ambiguity and chaos at their most mystifying.  And Minnesota Raid can be explosively fun.  It is a much better movie than Kaufman’s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with scenes that are winningly shot and designed.  Today it would be rated R, but in ’72 it got a PG.  But, yeah, it is an adult Western.

Taylor Swift‘s liberal politics are boring (“any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG”).  But no wonder.  Her music is moving in a boring direction too.  Such songs as “Delicate” and “Dress” have their hooks, but they’re wasted on insignificant lyrics.  They’re pedestrian.  “Look What You Made Me Do” does the same score settling we got from “Shake It Off.”  Really, Taylor’s subject matter is no good now.  She isn’t actually maturing—in all the ways that count.  Maybe next time.

The nocturnal robber in the 1948 He Walked by Night ends up murdering a police officer and thereby brings down on himself a load of professional energy for his seizure.  Played by Richard Basehart in what is supposed to be a true story, Roy The Killer is a loner obsessed with electronics, for, after all, he himself is an alienating machine.  No emotion, no conscience.  He even shoots and leaves paralyzed a second cop.

He is L.A.’s public enemy no. 1 (so it seems) and gets his comeuppance in the huge dark city sewers.  The pursuit there is a visually striking scene, with direction by Alfred L. Werker and an uncredited Anthony Mann.  Crane Wilbur is the main writer for this filmic procedural with good gunfights.

The border separations of children from their illegal-immigrant parents are infinitely sad.  The makers of Law and Order: SVU are probably very proud of last night’s episode dealing with the matter, but they need not be.

Regarding certain individuals, such as a federal agent whom Liv (Mariska Hargitay) orders to be arrested,  it was highly unlikely, and it emitted the usual sentimentality.  Annoyingly, the show used Hargitay for liberal agitprop—fatal for fiction—and I am prompted to opine something about the scriptwriters:  they are blithely unaware that the family separations problem is not a simple issue.  This is owing to Trump’s responsibility to uphold federal law and to the weak policy of catch-the-illegal, release-the-illegal.  These things were not mentioned in the SVU episode.