November Film Roundup

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) One of those post- Bonnie and Clyde films that defies conventional notions of story structure. Save the cat? There’s no cat here at all! Just senseless violence, though fortunately depicted with spectacular stunts rather than gore effects. I loved the train robbery scenes, loved the language-barrier bank robberies when BC&tSK move to Bolivia. I dunno what’s up with the bicycle scene or the bouncy Henry Mancini tune, seems tonally inconsistent, but that’s the New Hollywood for ya. Claudine (1974): A really nice romcom with good attention paid to character development, especially Claudine’s oldest son. James Earl Jones is great as the love interest. The scenes with the social worker go alongside the unemployment office scene in Fun with Dick and Jane (1977) as satirical indictments of the now-dismantled welfare state. I’ve mentioned before that I often go to the Museum of the Moving Image looking for hidden gems, films I’ve never heard of but which turn out to be something really special, and Claudine is one of those for me. Please Turn Over (1959): When it comes to double entendres, this is of those postwar British movies that wants to have it both ways. (Nudge nudge, wink wink.) It’s absolutely loaded with phwoar, but the phwoar is smothered in layers of framing devices so that nothing dirty actually happens. It’s a movie, guys! We know it’s fiction. It’s a lot of cinematic work to go through just to show a woman en deshabille . Halfway through Please Turn Over , safely ensconced in framing devices, the actors get to do some Unfaithfully Yours -style acting and play the polar opposites of the milquetoast characters they established outside of the framing devices. This is the most fun part of the film… except, I would argue, the ending. That’s where Jo’s parents tell her that although she has slandered them and her entire town, ruining everyone’s reputation, they’re proud of her for getting her novel published. Now that’s supportive! What’s Up, Doc? (1972): Peter Bogdanovich, man, what a director! When he wants to make a drama, he makes a boring slice-of-life thing like The Last Picture Show that wins all the serious awards. When he switches to comedy, he knocks it out of the park with this and its immediate follow-up Paper Moon , which are among the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. You’ve got to admire that level of talent. I saw What’s Up, Doc? at the museum and it was pretty much nonstop laughs from the audience. It includes a car chase that’s so funny it took a good three minutes before I noticed “this is a car chase in a 20th-century Hollywood comedy, those are boring” and another two minutes until I actually got bored. Unfortunately, it kept going for like three minutes after that. Apart from that, a stellar movie that accomplishes something normally thought impossible—recapturing a dead genre of film without emplying revisionism, nostalgia, or ironic distance. This isn’t even a period piece: it’s a real screwball comedy set in 1972. It’s great stuff. Barbra Streisand really elevates the comedy, a phenomenon I’ve dubbed “the Streisand Effect.” I did find one part of the movie hard to read initially: I didn’t get why Judy is so cruel to Eunice. The movie itself isn’t cruel to Eunice—she and Howard achieve a Billy Wilder-esque mutual cheating arrangement and she ends up with Max from The Muppet Movie . Then it clicked: Judy is Bugs Bunny, and Eunice is her Elmer Fudd . I spent the whole movie thinking Howard was Elmer Fudd, but he’s actually… a really big carrot, I guess?