Without harshness This Is Spinal Tap (1984) satirizes hard rock musicians: the few who make up the British band Spinal Tap are blokes with very little going for them.  Rob Reiner’s modest film is a mockumentary, still as funny as ever, with dandy cameos by Fran Drescher, Patrick Macnee and Fred Willard.

Principal cast members, Christopher Guest among them, wrote the script, which outdoes later mockumentaries which Guest himself directed.

Note: The sight of a long-haired, shirtless Harry Shearer is not one I care to see again.

Cover of This is Spinal Tap (Special Edition)

It’s a pity that American movies declined in quality in 1975 and did not recover at all until the Nineties.  Granted, they were not much better during the Sixties, but the years ’70 to ’74, for all the consistently adult material, told a somewhat different story.  To be sure, I hate M*A*S*H and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the Robert Altman offspring, but Badlands, Carnal Knowledge, Chinatown, Slaughterhouse-Five and three or four others are solid artistic successes.  The Godfather might be, too, but I need to see it again to be sure.  Even such films as The Conversation and Save the Tiger, though failures, are at least interesting and non-homogenized.  A late ’70s film like Breaking Away, on the other hand, is interesting and homogenized.

A problem arose in that most of the artistic stuff failed to make money.  Chinatown did okay, but the weird Slaughterhouse-Five?  Forget it.  The 1975 Michael Ritchie picture, Smile, didn’t make the commercial grade either, by which time Hollywood had had enough.  It very much wanted stuff that was tamer and less ambitious.  The truth is that to an extent moviegoers had let down the artists.

Cover of Carnal Knowledge

Save the Tiger (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is post-World War II, in 1948, and New York City marches on, busy and packed with the citizens.  Jules Dassin’s Naked City is the most urban movie I’ve ever seen, giving Serpico and An Unmarried Woman (you’re so Manhattan, girlfriend!) a run for their money partly because of the black and white cinematography.

How productive the Big Apple is!  Ah, but as the police know, the jewel thieves are out there, and so are the murderers.  There are no dirty cops in this film, fortunately.  They’re very amiable, whereas the felons, especially the killer of one Joan Dexter, are not whitewashed.  Sinners are true sinners in Naked City.

The screenplay by Malvin Wald and Albert Maltz is generally credible, and Dassin has so directed as to almost produce pictorial art.  It’s the biggest canvas you’ll find in film noir.

The movie stars Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff and Don Taylor.

The Naked City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Big adolescent Seth MacFarlane has come out with Ted 2 (2015), a sequel to Ted.

Just because the jokes in a comedic flick are sometimes politically incorrect doesn’t mean the flick is a good one.  The concept of a talking teddy bear (who’s a stoner) is pretty puny, pretty mediocre, and thus it doesn’t well serve the movie’s plot.  Yes, although Ted 2 is too vulgar, it is often funny, and yet some of those jokes seem a bit desperate.  Example: a black woman comments on slavery by saying that, first, you’re working beside an African river; then, the next thing you know, “you’re being f**ked by Thomas Jefferson.”

Did Thomas Jefferson f**k a lot of slaves?  Or is it just that McFarlane’s movie is f**ked up?

1958’s The Left Handed Gun is a Billy the Kid movie—Paul Newman enacts the Kid—directed by Arthur Penn, who holds his own among other Hollywood directors of Westerns.  In fact he proves he can be a bit daring.

Billy and his two buddies engage in a lot of mischief while, at the same time, an undercurrent of dire threat exists—as in Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.  Penn said he and writer Leslie Stevens, adapting a television play by Gore Vidal, tried to demonstrate that in the Old West life was cheap (if that is indeed true). . . Gun is a pretty good movie, and Newman’s attention-grabbing talent is evident.  The film is superior to every other Arthur Penn work I’ve seen, though I’ve yet to lay eyes on Mickey One, and miles above his rotten Western The Missouri Breaks.

The Left Handed Gun (Photo credit: Wikipedia)