The tale of an aging gunman in 1901 bound to die of cancer, Don Siegel’s The Shootist (1976) is not what a Western ought to be.

John Wayne performs memorably as John Bernard Books, but far more pleasure is to be had from such energetic Wayne Westerns as Stagecoach, True Grit and even the messy Red River.  In contrast, The Shootist needs a pacemaker.  What it does not need is decent period-piece production design, for Robert Boyle has provided it.  But Siegel—he who directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Line-Up—can only disappoint us with a derivative oater like this.

Cover of The Shootist

The best thing about the late Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni was his perennial interest in the human condition.  His first feature film, 1950’s Story of a Love Affair, offers an original screenplay wherein a husband investigates his young wife’s obscure past and a vexing affair between said wife and a car dealer gets rekindled.  Ironically, however unsavory the (rich) husband is, the two lovers enable him to morally one-up them.  At long last, an event that would seem to “free” the lovers merely leaves them at a painful impasse.

Although some of what is here cannot be taken seriously, alas, Affair is a personal and impressively directed enterprise.  As was expected, stylistically it anticipates L’Avventura, Eclipse, etc., and it is near-profound—unlike L’Avventura, Eclipse, etc., which are profound.  The progress was beginning.

The film stars Massimo Girotti and Lucia Bose.

(In Italian with English subtitles)

Wanda (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wanda (1971)—written, directed and acted in by Barbara Loden—is one of the truly good American films of the Seventies.

The newly unemployed, soon-to-be-divorced Wanda (Loden) ignorantly takes up with a robber (Michael Higgins) who is unstable and tyrannical.  Theirs is a pathetic (occasionally funny) relationship, but Wanda never has to assist the robber in his stealing until he finally insists on it apropos of a bank.

The cannily written film has to do with what the lives of working-class people—Wanda, not the robber—sometimes become, and with the slow, harmful creep of irresponsibility.  The movie concludes with a freeze-frame shot of Wanda sitting in a tavern and at a dead end, not enjoying the conviviality of the strangers who have invited her to drink with them.  With her deep performance, Loden proves she understands the character she is playing; likewise with Higgins.

Loden, by the way, was married to Elia Kazan.  One wishes she could have made at least one more film before she came down with a fatal cancer in 1978.

The 1964 Jean-Luc Godard film, A Married Woman, held my attention for about an hour of its 94 minutes but then became dreadfully dull.  The very pretty Macha Meril enacts Charlotte, who spends quality time with both husband and lover but lacks a veritable devotion to either.

The most interesting thing about the film is the Village Voice review it inspired after being re-released in 2015 in New York.  To Godard, asserts Calum Marsh, “A sort of mass delusion . . . had begun to seize the young [in Europe], manifesting itself in historical ignorance and prevailing trivialities like TV and fashion magazines”—and thematically this is what A Married Woman is about.  I respect this, and I respect that Godard’s visual poetry, though sometimes too obvious in its meaning, frequently hits the mark.  But a relatively short picture shouldn’t be this talky, shouldn’t be a slog.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Une Femme Mariee

Cover of The Collector

I stopped reading John Fowles’s absorbing novel, The Collector, once it seemed to be getting philosophically dark; my own philosophy of life is not dark.

The book’s plot concerns an English art student, female, who is held prisoner by an unstable English bank clerk who claims to love her.  Released in 1965 was a William Wyler film version—an intelligent quasi-Hitchcock version starring Terence Stamp as the bank clerk (and collector of dead butterflies) and Samantha Eggar as the student.

As usual, Wyler knew how to direct the film—notwithstanding there is too much of Maurice Jarre‘s music on the soundtrack—and the Stanley Mann-John Kohn screenplay, though dark, is without philosophical despair.  It never reaches a philosophical plateau; but, yes, it is dark.  As John Simon informed us, evil here prospers in the end.  Certain people in society have an appetite for violation.  Those on whom the appetite is turned may not survive.

Stamp and Eggar are just about the only actors in The Collector, and what a job they do!  Eggar, incidentally, later commented that Stamp had a “nasty attitude” toward her.  If this is true, I’m sorry Stamp didn’t believe in gallantry.  Up to a point, the disturbed guy he’s playing does.