Dillinger (1973), the John Milius film, is not much of a movie—for one thing, it doesn’t really care about character—but it is exciting.  Gun battles are battles.

The fine Warren Oates plays John Dillinger, and his character isn’t sanitized.  Neither is the violence of thuggish felons, or violence in general.  A lot of sloppy writing was done, but at least the film is better than Milius’s The Wind and the Lion.

Elaine May‘s 1971 film, A New Leaf, is a misfire, notwithstanding it was butchered through cutting by Paramount Pictures, a company May sued.  I’m skeptical of it regardless, though, since some pretty weak May-written comedy dominates the movie’s first few scenes and, several years later, May was willing to direct a movie as fuzzy and unsatisfying as The Heartbreak Kid.

As the concoction goes on, it gets invigoratingly bright and witty, and Walter Matthau does, as John Simon indicated, “a very neat job of humanizing” a wastrel who needs money and chooses to marry for it (and worse).  He rightly praises May, a co-star here, for the same kind of humanizing.  All the same, A New Leaf is messy.  Despite May’s talent, it isn’t nearly as good a comedy as the Harold Lloyd films I’ve reviewed.  Old Hollywood, this time, scores over the Seventies.

Francois Truffaut’s French picture, The Story of Adele H. (1975), is a partly fictitious period piece about Adele Hugo’s unending pursuit of a British lieutenant with whom she once had a romance.  (Adele was the daughter of Victor Hugo.)  He doesn’t want her, but she obsessively wants him.

The idea was long ago expressed that there is in the one who obsessively and relentlessly loves a person unworthy of that love not only pathology but also greatness.  Critic John Simon pointed out that in Adele H. Truffaut failed to see this, and so his heroine’s greatness is casually ignored.  This is too bad, but at least the film has themes and beauty and is highly interesting.

Are there people who turn amatory love into a religion?  Sure.  They’re everywhere.  This is one of the themes in the film.  Isabelle Adjani enacts Adele and is perfect, supplying the character’s remoteness, determination and sheer fragility.  The British lieutenant is too cold—played well enough, however, by Bruce Robinson.  Truffaut’s direction is gratifyingly good, with those charming fadeouts and wipes included.  The costumes by Jacqueline Guyot and the production design by Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko are winning.

Somewhat underrated by critics, The Story of Adele H. needs to be given its due.

(In French with English subtitles.)

Cover of The Story of Adele H.

Michael Curtiz (director) and Dudley Nichols (scriptwriter) gave us 1959’s The Hangman, a riveting Western about a U.S. marshal out to arrest a popular man.  Marshal Bovard (Robert Taylor) is dedicated to his job and distrustful of people, although he becomes a little less distrustful near the movie’s end.  The man he’s after, to be sure, rightly knows that a jury will probably pronounce him guilty when he isn’t.  There is constantly a specter of legal injustice.

What is most stellar about this movie is the cast, usually because of how inherently interesting and good-looking it is.  Taylor’s virility can rattle any cage.  Tina Louise, though limited as an actress, is effectually, amicably sensual and has a charming beauty.  Mickey Shaughnessy, Mabel Albertson and even Jack Lord all have their appeal.  So does Nichols’s relatively simple if imperfect script.  The Hangman is a respectable addition to the Curtiz oeuvre (which includes Casablanca).

An Australian film, Winter of Our Dreams (1981), concentrates on a bookseller, Rob (Bryan Brown), who cheats on his wife, and now the two maintain what amounts to an open marriage.  Following the suicide of a former girlfriend, Rob wishes to talk about the woman to her friend Lou (Judy Davis), a prostitute and a junkie.  Lou becomes attracted to Rob and to a sexual relationship with him that promises nothing.  None of the characters finds the close consorting they effect very fulfilling.

During the “winter of our dreams,” people’s dreams are frozen; they go nowhere, they are unfulfilled.  This is particularly true for Lou, comforted at the end only by the melody of a song she hears at an anti-Bomb gathering.  John Duigan‘s film—written and directed by him—is astute and meaningful.  He stays away from longueurs, and his flick is not tedious.  Smooth Brown doesn’t have much to do, but Miss Davis does.  She is a fleshy wonder, convincing as a druggie who goes straight; fascinatingly fragile.  The film lives because of Duigan first, Davis second.