Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972) is excellently directed rubbish, without even the gripping force of Psycho and The Birds.  Anthony Shaffer’s script has to do with a psychopathic rapist-murderer in London, and there’s nothing wrong with the movie’s realism per se.  But, directorially, the man obsessed with and rebuffed by Tippi Hedren (and others?) is intent on getting even with women, and this renders the film loathsome.  Murdered females lie dead with their tongues hanging out.  The corpses of women are desecrated in one way or another, and female nudity is somewhat overdone.  Every woman but Vivien Merchant—Merchant is too good for this tripe—is at least close to being bitchy.

Shaffer’s writing is far less than first-rate, but morally the film itself is barely third-rate.

Cover of Frenzy

Peter Yates’s police drama Bullitt (1968) is poorly written in several ways but is engrossing nonetheless.  It has to do with killers and witness protection, and it contains enjoyable action, but it’s a mostly quiet film.  Proceedings are quiet, as they frequently are in life.  Only now and then do people get noisy.  Correlatively, the hero—Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt—is a loner.

Also, it’s a profoundly American film.  The manly loner lives in a place of obvious, nonstop manufacturing, of urban construction and extensive roads.  He has an English girlfriend, however, played by Jacqueline Bisset, whose celebrated beauty is another reason Bullitt is worth seeing.

It beats me why Frank Bullitt isn’t a better protector of his witness, but this movie is fun and interesting in spite of itself.

Bullitt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I never saw the original Footloose movie from 1984, but the story told in Footloose the Remake (2011) is pure rubbish.  It rattles along indecorously and, in spite of everything, it’s dated.  Yet filmmaker Craig Brewer concentrates on it as carefully as he does the dancing.  Big mistake.

Even so, at least the dancing doesn’t get shortchanged.  The music does.  Both “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” and a forceful White Stripes song get lost in the narrative balderdash.  Footloose should have been more of a musical and less of a drama.

The movie stars Kenny Wormald (Ren) and Julianne Hough (Ariel).  Ren is a teenaged know-it-all, Ariel knows nothing except how to have fun.  I wish to have no truck with either of them.

2008 saw the publication of the Marilynne Robinson novel, Home, which explores such common themes as religious faith, old age, personal failure, and forgiveness.  But, as it relates what occurs between Christian believer Glory Boughton and her prodigal brother Jack, it yields a boatload of meaning which is not terribly common at all in world literature.

It affirms that for spiritual and unspiritual persons alike, life happens, as when Glory and Jack’s elderly father, a Presbyterian minister, develops severe dementia.  Glory’s ex-fiance declined to tell her he was already married, and here the book paves the way for a message about how difficult it is for even a Christian to forgive.  Alas, more than once Glory proves she is, to an extent, an unforgiving believer.

In addition, Home is about the mystery of the salvation of the soul.  Glory says she is not certain what a soul is, but what is also evinced is that the salvation the minister father has long had is to Robinson so important that Jack wishes to convince the old gent that he now sees theological belief as valid.  Nothing less than validity would cause the author to wrap up the novel with the sentence, “The Lord is wonderful.”

Cover of Home: A Novel