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Gable and Lombard (1976)—Limply raunchy, meaningless picture, with nothing to say about the movies, about love, or about stardom. The moviemakers couldn’t come up with any subject but the sex drive of its hero and heroine, who keep hopping on each other like deranged rabbits. One of the most famous quotes in Hollywood history is Lombard’s “My God, you know I love Pa, but I can’t say he’s a hell of a lay.” Their love affair must have had a great many things going for it besides sex, but this movie can’t imagine what they might be. Barry Sandler wrote the trivializing, falsifying script, and Sidney J. Furie directed, with James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh in the leads, and Allen Garfield, Red Buttons, and Melanie Mayron. Cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth. Universal. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Le Gai Savoir (1968)—Weekend (made earlier this same year) was the culmination of Jean-Luc Godard’s great, rampaging, innovative career, and after it he seemed to be back at Square One, trying to found a new Maoist political cinema. Le Gai Savoir was the first of his monotonous, didactic experiments, and it’s just about impossible to sit through. Juliet Berto (as the daughter of Lumumba) and Jean-Pierre Léaud (as Rousseau’s great-great-grandson) begin on a course of study; there’s not much to look at, and since the soundtrack is full of bleeps to cover the obscenities, there’s nothing to do but read the subtitles as the two of them talk. In French. color

 

Gaily, Gaily (1969)—Ben Hecht’s reminiscences and fantasies about his early years as a Chicago newspaperman are marvellous movie material—evocative, good-humored, full of life. The promising subject and not too bad a script (by Abram S. Ginnes) are mostly lost, however, in this overproduced period re-creation, which is only moderately entertaining. The director, Norman Jewison, just doesn’t have the feeling for Hecht’s Chicago; he uses huge mobs and big locations, and the joyous comedy of our corrupt past is turned into picturesque (non-denominational) Americana—too embellished, overplayed, and almost always off target. As the young Candide-Ben, Beau Bridges has a smiling, engaging presence, and, as the older reporter, Brian Keith is splendid; the best reason to see the picture is for his timing, and for the way he can deliver an epithet like “You quack!” But the scenes of Carl Sandburg reciting a poem and the young hero screaming about political power are really inexcusable. With Melina Mercouri, who, as the madam of a bordello that looks as big as the Ritz, acts like a tempestuous female impersonator, and Hume Cronyn, who is at his worst in a condescending performance as a politician. A noteworthy anachronistic howler: the 1910 demonstrators who gather outside the Chicago Board of Trade carry placards calling for “Love.” United Artists. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Gallipoli (1981)—An exemplary academic film about the waste of war—two young Australian runners, played by (dark-haired) Mel Gibson and (blond) Mark Lee, are slaughtered. (They and other Australians are sacrificed in an ill-conceived First World War maneuver designed to protect the British.) It’s an “artistic” film, full of familiar pathos and irony—a tragic buddy-buddy movie directed by Peter Weir. His widescreen staging is very elegant; his weakness is in his habit of stereotyping villains (in this case they’re mostly the British). There’s also a larger weakness; there’s no discernible reason for him to have made the picture except to bring off a “classic.” Gibson gives a fresh and impressive performance, but Lee does a very ordinary acting job and his character is much too gallant and good and brave. With Bill Kerr, a fine, bald-headed actor with a great voice, as Uncle Jack, who reads aloud to the children. The script is by David Williamson; the cinematography is by Russell Boyd. color

 

Gambit (1966)—It wants to be a jaunty heist-caper movie, like Topkapi, of 1964, but it’s of quintessential mediocrity: not hip enough to sustain interest, not dreary enough to walk out on. The opening idea (lifted from Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours) is promising, but the writers (Jack Davies, Alvin Sargent) and the director (Ronald Neame) kill it. As a cockney thief, Michael Caine, still new to movies, isn’t secure enough to waltz through. And as his Eurasian confederate, Shirley MacLaine needs help—she can’t keep her timing from slipping. With Herbert Lom (the cut-rate Charles Boyer of so many English melodramas) as the potentate to be robbed, and John Abbott and Arnold Moss. Universal. color

 

The Gambler (1974)—The gambler here is a brilliant young Jewish prince, professor of literature to ghetto blacks, and potential great novelist. The conflicts in his psyche are spelled out in his discussions of will and Dostoevski with his students at City University. He’s as flamboyantly superior as Norman Mailer’s Rojack, and the prevailing tone of the film is Mailerian dread, abetted by Jerry Fielding’s elegantly oppressive score, based on Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. The script, by James Toback, is a grandiloquent, egocentric novel written as a film; it spells everything out, and the director Karel Reisz’s literal-minded, proficient style calls attention to how airless and schematic it is. The big difference between Robert Altman’s gambling film California Split and this one is not just that Altman’s allusiveness is vastly entertaining while The Gambler seeks to impress us, but that California Split invites us into the world of its characters, while The Gambler hands us a wrapped package and closes us out. In Bay of the Angels, as in California Split, we shared in the highs and lows of gambling; for those of us who aren’t gamblers it was a heady sensation, like entering a foreign culture. Here, we’re trapped at a maniacal lecture on gambling as existential expression. The picture isn’t at all dull, though—it has a self-conscious flash. As the hero, James Caan stays clenched, the bit in his teeth; it’s a commanding performance but not a convincing one. With Lauren Hutton, Burt Young, Morris Carnovsky, Jacqueline Brookes, and Paul Sorvino. Paramount. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Game of Love Le Blé en herbe (1954)—Claude Autant-Lara’s film version of the Colette story treats the theme with beautiful simplicity. The 16-year-old boy (Pierre-Michel Beck) and the 15-year-old girl (Nicole Berger) are disturbed by the emotions and impulses developing in them; it isn’t until the boy is initiated by an older woman (Edwige Feuillère) that the two adolescents get together—he passes on what he has learned. Feuillère conveys the painful and degrading position of the older woman with infinite tact (though not to the reviewer of one newspaper, who described her as a black widow spider searching for prey). In French. b & w

 

Games (1967)—A Manhattan-set thriller, with James Caan as a cold-blooded, fortune-hunter husband, Katharine Ross as his rich, bewildered wife, and Simone Signoret as a mysterious woman in black, fond of gazing into her crystal ball. Corpses are encased in plaster to resemble sculpture by George Segal, and the ambiance is meant to be chic and modern, but the story is uninvolving, the plot twists don’t do as much for us as they need to, and Curtis Harrington’s directing lacks pace. This tedious movie is handsomely got up, however, and the good cast includes Don Stroud, Estelle Winwood, George Furth, Florence Marly, and Kent Smith. The script is by Gene Kearney; the cinematography is by William Fraker; the music is by Samuel Matlovsky. Universal. color

 

Gandhi (1982)—A biographical epic, directed by Richard Attenborough, whose sensibility is conventional. Spanning 55 years, the picture covers some of the principal events in Gandhi’s public life and tidies up his rather kinky domestic relations. Gandhi goes by in a cloud of serenity, and everyone who sees him knuckles under (with the exception of a few misguided fellows, of course). Ben Kingsley, who plays the Mahatma, looks the part, has a fine, quiet presence, and conveys Gandhi’s shrewdness. Kingsley is impressive; the picture isn’t. The first half builds up considerable interest in Gandhi; the second half is scattered—as if it had been added to or subtracted from at random. And Kingsley can’t give his role a core, because it has been written completely from the outside. A viewer’s reaction: “I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn’t know.” From a script by John Briley. With Edward Fox, John Gielgud, Trevor Howard, Martin Sheen, John Mills, Ian Charleson, Candice Bergen, Ian Bannen, John Clements, Michael Hordern, Richard Griffiths, and with Rohini Hattangady as Kasturba Gandhi, Athol Fugard as General Smuts, Saeed Jaffrey as Sardar Patel, Geraldine James as Mira-behn, Alyque Padamsee as Mohamed Ali Jinnah, and Roshan Seth as Pandit Nehru. (3 hours and 8 minutes.) Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Actor (Kingsley), Original Screenplay, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing. Released by Columbia. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971)—When farce isn’t expertly played and directed, it becomes just stupid, and that’s what happens to this Mafia farce, from the Jimmy Breslin book. Lionel Stander, Jo Van Fleet, and Jerry Orbach are among the clownish crooks who are impaled by the camera; molestable Leigh Taylor-Young and the buoyant (and very funny) Robert De Niro are the romantic leads. Directed by James Goldstone; the script is by Waldo Salt. Also with Hervé Villechaize and Joe Santos. M-G-M. color

 

The Gang’s All Here (1943)—Busby Berkeley’s own special brand of kaleidoscopic fantasy, turned into psychedelic surrealism by the electric reds and greens of 20th Century-Fox’s color processing. Those who consider Berkeley a master consider this film his masterpiece. It is his maddest film: chorus girls dissolve into artichokes; there’s a banana xylophone; and, for the song “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat,” Carmen Miranda appears in platform wedgies on an avenue of giant strawberries. Alice Faye sings the torch song “No Love, No Nothing,” and also introduces the “Polka-Dot Polka” ballet, which, as a piece of staging, passes description. With Benny Goodman and his orchestra, and Charlotte Greenwood, James Ellison, Edward Everett Horton, Sheila Ryan, Eugene Pallette, and Phil Baker. The songs are by Leo Robin and Harry Warren, except that polka, which is David Raksin’s. Screenplay by Walter Bullock, from a story concocted by three other fellows.

 

The Garden Murder Case (1936)—S.S. Van Dine’s supersleuth Philo Vance (Edmund Lowe) is called in when a man is killed during a steeplechase. William Powell was a more amusing Philo Vance earlier in the series, but the backup actors are the same here—Nat Pendleton as the lummox Heath, and Etienne Girardot as the minuscule coroner, Dr. Doremus. Not much stays in the mind from this one except Frieda Inescort being pushed from a double-decker bus. Virginia Bruce and Benita Hume are as lovely as ever. Directed by Edwin L. Marin. M-G-M. b & w

 

The Garden of Allah (1936)—Heavenly romantic kitsch, panting with eternal love, a moment’s happiness, and spiritual anguish. Marlene Dietrich is the lonely, rich Domini, dressed in swirling chiffon as she seeks truth in the African desert. She meets Charles Boyer (whose eyes have never been darker or more liquid) and marries him. Then, right at the purple start of their desert honeymoon, his conscience and a Trappist liqueur combine to ruin everything, for he is a Trappist monk who has bolted the monastery and violated his vow of silence. Back he must go to repent. Taken from Robert Hichens’ old squash pie of a novel, it’s the juiciest tale of woe ever, and David O. Selznick produced it in poshly lurid color, with a Max Steiner score poured on top. Richard Boleslawski directed; with Tilly Losch, who has a wild minute as an entertainer in an Algerian hot spot, and Basil Rathbone, John Carradine, Joseph Schildkraut, C. Aubrey Smith, and Lucile Watson. Just about perfection of its insanely goopy type. Adapted by W. P. Lipscomb and Lynn Riggs. Released through United Artists.

 

The Garden of Delights El Jardín de las Delicias (1971)—Carlos Saura’s comedy about upper-middle-class greed is the story of an amnesiac industrialist (J. L. López Vasquez) whose relatives act out grotesque psychodramas from his childhood, trying to shock him into remembering and telling them the number of his Swiss bank account. The film is elegant in a dark, heavy-lidded sort of way, but Saura has a maddening habit of cutting away from a sequence just when we’ve got interested in where it’s going, and the film lacks impetus. Saura works in a sedate, measured style; he isn’t an instinctual Surrealist, and, given the nature and drive of Surrealism, that’s the only authentic kind. He’s an academic Surrealist: his images don’t come from the hidden and unadmitted—they’re impeccably planned to be Surreal. There’s one brief gloriously redemptive sequence: when the voluptuous Lina Canalejas enters the industrialist’s Art Deco bedroom, opens the French windows, and lets the breeze waft through the curtains and her chiffon gown, the film has a trace of magical reminiscence—she brings back all the sexy, elusive movie stars who ever wafted through our imaginations. Written by Rafael Azcona and Saura. In Spanish. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1970)—Vittorio De Sica’s lyric evocation of a vanished group of people (the cultivated, aristocratic Jewish-Italian landowners) and a vanished mood. Based on Giorgio Bassani’s semi-autobiographical novel, the film records how Giorgio, a middle-class outsider (Lino Capolicchio), is drawn into the decaying, enchanted world of the Finzi-Continis by the imperious, contrary Micol (Dominique Sanda); she and her languid brother (Helmut Berger) are spoiled, beautiful people without the will to save themselves. This extraordinary film, with its melancholy glamour, is perhaps the only one that records the halfhearted anti-Jewish measures of the Mussolini period—which were, however, sufficient to wipe out the Finzi-Continis and all they represented. In Italian. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Gardens of Stone (1987)—The period of this Francis Coppola film is 1968 and 1969, and the title refers to Arlington National Cemetery; most of the characters serve in the Old Guard, the Army’s official ceremonial unit, and take part in the burials of up to 15 young men a day. The film is far from being a seamless work of art, but it probably comes closer to the confused attitudes that Americans had toward the Vietnam war than any other film has come, and so its messiness seems honorable. James Caan gives a sturdy, hypermasculine performance as the sergeant who loves the Army but doesn’t believe the war can be won. The movie is too wet when it deals with his fatherly efforts to wise up an eager, gullible young trainee (D. B. Sweeney), but when Caan and James Earl Jones, as the sergeant major who’s his best friend, express their profane disgust with the war and the Army bureaucracy they’re great together, overacting joyously. (Jones’ strange gray eyes have a dancing wit.) Coppola stages some terrific scenes. When the sergeant is giving a dinner party to impress the woman he has just met, a Washington Post reporter (played by Anjelica Huston), and the sergeant major is there with his steady woman friend, a senator’s aide (played by Lonette McKee), the conversational crosscurrents are explosively funny. At other times, the film is pulpy, and its energies are dispersed. With the magical, humorous Dean Stockwell, and Mary Stuart Masterson, Dick Anthony Williams, Casey Siemaszko, and, in a scene that’s an embarrassment, Bill Graham. The screenplay, by Ronald Bass, was adapted from Nicholas Proffitt’s novel; cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth. Tri-Star. color (See Hooked.)

 

Gaslight (1944)—Ingrid Bergman is the cherubic bride who is terrorized by the grisly, dirty tricks of her husband, Charles Boyer. She runs the gamut from antimacassar to antimacassar, and it’s good scary fun all the way (with a prize at the end—the Academy Award for Best Actress). This pseudo-Victorian thriller is rather more enjoyable than one might expect, and Bergman is, intermittently, genuinely moving. (Though at times you may suspect that she is feeling rather than acting, her hysteria in the musicale sequence is a good demonstration of how hard it sometimes is to tell the difference.) Boyer is expert, and the cast includes Joseph Cotten, Dame May Whitty, and Angela Lansbury (only in her teens, but you couldn’t guess it). Patrick Hamilton’s play has been toned up with smooth dialogue by John van Druten, Walter Reisch, and John Balderston, and the full-dress production is directed by George Cukor. When you watch a picture like this one, you’re so aware of how expensively careful it is that you can’t help being a little impressed and maybe more than a little depressed. (In this case, the expense included the cost of suppressing the 1940 English version by Thorold Dickinson, with Diana Wynyard and Anton Walbrook.) M-G-M. b & w

 

Gate of Hell Jigokumon (1954)—Famed for its use of color, this exquisitely stylized tragedy of passion tells a subtle story (which resembles The Rape of Lucrece) of a warrior’s desire for a married noblewoman and her way of defeating him. It’s as if the director, Teinosuke Kinugasa, had read those critics who compare every Japanese movie to a Japanese print and had decided to give them more pictorial effects than they could handle—delicately choreographed battles, the flow and texture of garments, and everywhere grace of movement and composition. The setting is 12th-century Kyoto, where the abstract patterns of interiors and architecture suggest that modern decor has a long way to go to catch up with medieval Japan. With Machiko Kyo as the Lady Kesa and Kazuo Hasegawa as the demonic warrior Moritoh. In Japanese.

 

Gates of Paris, see Porte des lilas

 

Il Gattopardo, see The Leopard

 

The Gauntlet (1977)—Clint Eastwood, as a slow-witted cop, and Sondra Locke, as the fast-witted hooker he’s bringing back from Las Vegas to testify in a trial in Phoenix, are always in movement. They use a police car, a motorcycle, a train, a bus. A mere whisper of a plot serves as a pretext for shoot-’em-ups with thousands of rounds of ammunition going into whatever buildings or vehicles the cop and the hooker are in or on. At times the whole world seems to be firing at them; buildings and cars are turned to lace. You look at the screen even though there’s nothing to occupy your mind—the way you sometimes sit in front of the TV, numbly, because you can’t rouse yourself for the effort it takes to go to bed. Eastwood directed; the script is by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack. With Pat Hingle and William Prince. A Malpaso Production, for Warners. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Gay Desperado (1936)—Rouben Mamoulian was in a playful kooky mood when he put together this satirical farce that’s also a parody of an operetta. Leo Carrillo is the Mexican bandit chief who’s enraptured by the racketeering methods he sees in American movies; soon, his men are doing their damnedest to behave like Chicago mobsters. The movie kids the clichés of several genres. The chief is a music-lover, and he kidnaps a tenor (Nino Martini) to sing to him. This has the unfortunate result of forcing us to listen to some over-familiar arias and a song, “The World Is Mine Tonight,” that’s particularly hard to take. Luckily the tenor becomes romantically involved with a gang hostage, who is played with great zest by the young Ida Lupino. This deliberately artificial comedy was shot on stylized “picturesque” sets that feature giant cacti, giant sombreros, and archways and cathedrals—it’s all a takeoff of Eisenstein’s Mexican footage. (Peons pose in ponchos.) The pacing is often too slow for the silly, semi-surreal jokes, but there are a lot of compensations. With Mischa Auer, Harold Huber, Stanley Fields, James Blakeley, Paul Hurst, Frank Puglia, and Chris-Pin Martin. The script by Wallace Smith is based on a story by Leo Birinski; the cinematography is by Lucien Andriot. Produced by Pickford-Lasky. b & w

 

The Gay Divorcée (1934)—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers appeared together in Flying Down to Rio in 1933, but this was their first co-starring film. The plot is trivial French farce (about mistaken identities), but the dances are among the wittiest and the most lyrical expressions of American romanticism on the screen. It may be accurate to say that no one who saw them do “The Continental” or watched the great, tense, seductive dance they perform to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” has ever quite forgotten The Gay Divor-ceé —even if he thinks he has. With Alice Brady, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes, E. E. Clive, Lillian Miles, Paul Porcasi, and Betty Grable—a cuddly pixie in satin pajamas dancing “Let’s K-nock K-neez.” Directed by Mark Sandrich; adapted from the stage musical The Gay Divorce. R K O. b & w

 

The General (1926)—One of Buster Keaton’s most celebrated comedies. It’s a classic and many people swear by it, although it isn’t funny in the freely inventive way of his Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1927). Its humor is too drawn out for laughter. And yet it has a beauty: it has the shape of comedy. The time is the Civil War. Keaton plays a shy railroad engineer on a steam engine called The General. He wrote the script and directed, in collaboration with Clyde Bruckman. The girl is Marion Mack. Silent. b & w

 

General della Rovere Il Generale della Rovere (1959)—Vittorio De Sica has perhaps his greatest role in this otherwise mediocre film, directed by Roberto Rossellini. It is set in Genoa in 1943. De Sica is a small-time swindler with a classic con man’s grand manner; the Germans induce him to impersonate a Resistance general whom they have inadvertently shot, and send him to a political prison, where he is supposed to ferret out information for them. But the petty, self-loathing crook, experiencing for the first time the respect and admiration—even the awe—of other men, becomes as courageous as the fighter he impersonates. The mask has molded the man, and the Nazis must destroy their own creation. De Sica is superb; we watch his evolution from worm to Il Generale with utter astonishment and delight. At its most original, the film is a shockingly funny black comedy: the con man, battered and bleeding from torture, weeps sentimentally over a photograph of the real Generale’s children—a scene as excruciatingly comic as the surreal torture scenes in Bend Sinister, Nabokov’s novel about the Nazis. But this film, made on a slender budget and shot and edited in six weeks, is—surprisingly—too long; the director doesn’t seem to have discovered his best material until it was too late to pull the story together. The compositions, the groupings of actors, the ideas, and the milieu are like a reprise of the neo-realist Open City (1945). The rawness and immediacy are gone, though; the faces are actorish, and the sets are obviously sets. With Hannes Messemer, Sandra Milo, Giovanna Ralli, Anne Vernon. From a script by Sergio Amidei, Diego Fabbri, Indro Montanelli, and Rossellini. In Italian. b & w

 

Il Generale della Rovere, see General della Rovere

 

Generals Without Buttons, see La Guerre des boutons

 

Genevieve (1953)—Genevieve is a venerable motor vehicle, a 1904 Darracq; this English film is a venerable little vehicle in its own right. John Gregson and Dinah Sheridan race the Darracq against Kenneth More and Kay Kendall in a 1904 Spyker. That the two men should be testing their masculine prowess in these antiques gives the comedy a double edge. Kenneth More is wonderfully smug and infuriating as an advertising man; Kay Kendall had perhaps her happiest (and most irresistible) role as the trumpet-playing model. Written by William Rose, directed by Henry Cornelius, harmonica music by Larry Adler, cinematography by Christopher Challis. Also with Joyce Grenfell and Geoffrey Keen. Everything about this movie seems to go right, and it looks relaxed and effortless. color

 

Le Genou de Claire, see Claire’s Knee

 

Gentleman Jim (1942)—As the young James J. Corbett, a chipper showoff bank clerk in San Francisco who’s loyal to his family and friends, Errol Flynn plays in the quick-witted, cool, and cocky style that he was best at. Narrow-hipped and long-legged, he’s fast on his feet; he looks as if he might be able to lick his opponents, or, at least, outdance them. The film, which covers Corbett’s transition from amateur boxer to professional, is well paced and has considerable charm, though the Corbett clan, headed by Alan Hale as Jim’s father, is Warners lovable Irish, with hot tempers and wobbly brogues. As a young society woman who develops a love-hate relationship with Jim, Alexis Smith wears her hair in a thick roll swept up from her forehead, and goofy high hats; she looks like a ship in full sail, but she’s quite entertaining. With Ward Bond, as the magnetic John L. Sullivan, and Jack Carson, William Frawley, John Loder, Rhys Williams, Madeleine LeBeau, and Lon McAllister. Directed by Raoul Walsh; one of the scriptwriters was Horace McCoy. (The film straightens out Corbett’s life—his marriages have been divided by three.) b & w

 

Geordie, see Wee Geordie

 

Georgy Girl (1966)—A glib little farce that tickled a lot of people. Georgy (Lynn Redgrave) is a brontosaurus of a girl who’s childlike and “natural” and artistic, and the picture is determinedly heartwarming and kinky and on the side of youth. We’re supposed to like Georgy because she acts out her ludicrous and self-pitying impusles, and doesn’t think too much about it afterward. She has all the blessings of affect and affectlessness. Georgy gets a baby to mother only to have the authorities take it away. (Underneath all the 60s nonconformity gear are the crooked little skeletons of old Shirley Temple pictures.) In those years, young men identified with the gorilla hero of Morgan! and a surprising number of young women identified with the misfit Georgy. With James Mason, Charlotte Rampling, Alan Bates, and Rachel Kempson. Directed by Silvio Nariz-zano, from the script by Margaret Forster and Peter Nichols, based on Forster’s novel. Released in U.S. by Columbia. b & w (See Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.)

 

Gervaise (1956)—A painstaking and rich evocation of mid-19th-century Paris, photographed to suggest Daguerre. René Clé-ment’s rather heavy-going film deals with the spiritual destruction of Gervaise (Maria Schell)—a destruction accomplished by her lover, who deserts her, and her gentle husband, who becomes an uncontrollable drunkard (a memorable performance by François Périer). Gervaise Macquart, for those who find Zola overpoweringly uninviting, is the heroine of L’Assommoir, one of the 20 novels in the Rougon-Macquart series, and the mother of that corrupt little Nana who figures in a later volume (and many a movie). With Suzy Delair as Virginie, except for the scene in which Virginie gets paddled; at that moment, a dubber known as Rita Cadillac offers her bottom to the camera. Music by Georges Auric. In French. b & w

 

Get Carter (1971)—There’s nobody to root for but the smartly dressed sexual athlete and professional killer (Michael Caine) in this English gangland picture, which is so calculatedly cool and soulless and nastily erotic that it seems to belong to a new genre of virtuoso viciousness. What makes the movie unusual is the metallic elegance and the single-minded proficiency with which it adheres to its sadism-for-the-connoisseur formula. With John Osborne, Britt Ekland, and Ian Hendry. Directed by Mike Hodges, who also wrote the fashionably fragmented script, based on the novel Jack’s Return Home, by Ted Lewis; the cinematography is by Wolfgang Suschitzky. Shot in Newcastle. color

 

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs Préparez vos mouchoirs (1978)—This sex comedy by the writer-director Bertrand Blier is flagrantly funny in a slangy, buoyant, unpredictable way. Feelings are expressed that hadn’t come out in movies before, yet it’s all reassuringly quiet; the film’s texture is soft and sensual, and there’s a velvety underlayer to the scenes. Blier’s slapstick poetic logic is so coolly, lyrically sustained that nothing that happens seems shocking. Like his earlier Going Places, it’s about two pals (played by Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere) who don’t really understand women, and their not understanding women is part of their bond. This time, the two aren’t roughnecks; they’re polite, respectable men, for whom women are like another species. Seeing this film, a woman enters a man’s fantasy universe stripped of hypocrisy. With the lovely, dark Carole Laure as Depardieu’s wife and Dewaere’s mistress, Michel Serrault as the neighbor, and Riton as the Mozartian prodigy. Cinematography by Jean Penzer; music by Mozart, by Georges Delerue (writing in the spirit of Mozart), and by Schubert. In French. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Getaway (1972)—Another bank heist, and the wholesome, clean-cut robber pair (Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw) take forever to make it across the Mexican border with their loot. The audience hoots her line readings and applauds when he smacks her around; maybe this audience participation helps to explain the film’s success. Sam Peckinpah directed in imitation of Sam Peckinpah; it’s a mechanical job, embellished with a vicious, erotic subplot involving Al Lettieri and Sally Struthers. The cast includes Slim Pickens and Ben Johnson. The script, by Walter Hill, is based on Jim Thompson’s novel; cinematography by Lucien Ballard; music by Quincy Jones. First Artists. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Getting of Wisdom (1977)—A minor post-Victorian autobiographical novel about an Australian girl’s coming-of-age, re-created for the screen in its own terms—or, rather, in what the re-creators think are its own terms. At 13, an impoverished girl (Susannah Fowle) from the back country who is highly precocious and a gifted musician comes to Melbourne, and she spends five years there at the Presbyterian Ladies College, a select school for the daughters of the wealthy, where the teachers sneer at her because her mother runs a post office in the bush, and the girls are harpies. She almost succumbs to snobbery, but she has her brains and her talent and her intrepid nature to see her through. This self-infatuated fantasy is presented in the guise of harsh realism, and the faithful, meticulous period re-creation makes it hard for us to connect with the heroine or with anything else. Directed by Bruce Beresford, whose attitude toward the material is cold and literal, as if we were in need of a muckraking expose of the Victorian education of ladies. From a script by Eleanor Witcombe; cinematography by Don McAlpine. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Ghare-Baire, see The Home and the World

 

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)—The dashing Rex Harrison is the ghost of a sea captain and Gene Tierney is the widowed Mrs. Muir, who falls in love with him. Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed this somewhat too gentle and whimsical diversion; it’s on the sleepy side—partly because it has all been designed and staged to show “class.” The script, by Philip Dunne, is taken from a novel by R. A. Dick. The music is by Bernard Herrmann. The cast includes Edna Best, George Sanders, Natalie Wood, Vanessa Brown, Anna Lee, and Robert Coote. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

The Ghost Goes West (1935)—A rich American (Eugene Pallette) buys Glourie castle in Scotland, complete with its unhappy ghost, has it dismantled, shipped across the ocean, and reconstructed in Sunnymede, Florida, with modern plumbing. This crude, painfully frolicsome satire on America was written by Robert E. Sherwood and directed by René Clair. The movie is lucky in its star: Robert Donat brings elegance and his melancholy face and voice to the dual role of Donald Glourie and his phantom ancestor, Murdoch Glourie. Intermittently, he redeems the action. With Elsa Lanchester and Jean Parker. Americans loved the barbs thrust at them in this picture; it was very popular. b & w

 

Ghostbusters (1984)—A scare comedy, with Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis as parapsychologists who try to save New York City from an influx of spooks. Murray is the film’s comic mechanism: the more supernatural the situation, the more jaded his reaction. But nobody else has much in the way of material, and since there’s almost no give-and-take among the three men, Murray’s lines fall on dead air. The film cost roughly $32 million, and the producer-director Ivan Reitman may have been overwhelmed by the scale of the sets and special effects; his work here is amateurish, with kids-movie pacing. Audiences respond to the picture, though, and their laughter helps to fill the dead spots. The movie does have some things going for it. Playing opposite Murray, Sigourney Weaver is a living zinger; when she stands talking to Murray, she’s eye to eye with him and she looks vivid and indestructible. When he asks her for a date, he rises in the viewer’s estimation. (And in his own, too—after she agrees to go out with him, he lifts his arms toward heaven and twirls.) The cast includes Annie Potts, who uses her wonderful self-enclosed quality, and Rick Moranis, Ernie Hudson, William Atherton, and David Margulies. The script is by Aykroyd and Ramis; the cinematography is by Laszlo Kovacs. The images have a heavy, overdelib-erate look—they’re too rigid for comedy. Columbia. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Ghostbusters II (1989)—Surprisingly, it’s more enjoyable than the first Ghostbusters. It’s a big comedy, but it’s light on its feet, and the throwaway jokes are weightless—they ping! and dissolve in the air. You can’t remember what you’re laughing at, but you feel great. The script, by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd, is a floating crap game, like the scripts for the Hope and Crosby Road pictures. Bill Murray holds it together, and assorted comedians—Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, Annie Potts, Ernie Hudson, Peter MacNicol, Cheech Marin, Harris Yulin, Ramis and Aykroyd—come in and out of the scenes, dropping one-liners. The comic premise is that the collective angry energy of Manhattanites is feeding an underground river of boiling slime, which is swelling; our bad vibes are literally destroying the city. Directed by Ivan Reitman; cinematography by Michael Chapman. Columbia. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Giant (1956)—George Stevens directed this handsomely designed, big, glossy version of the profoundly second-rate Edna Ferber novel about a couple of generations of a Texas cattle-ranching family, and James Dean (in a supporting role) ran away with it. This was the last film in his brief, meteoric career, and he was dead when it was released. His appearance here is particularly startling, because he plays his misfit role in the twitchy, self-conscious, “modern” manner of the 50s, while the rest of the movie is in the conventional heavy-going style that had always been deemed appropriate for sprawling family sagas. (This one sprawls for 3 hours and 18 minutes.) It’s an example of commercial filmmaking straining for prestige, and the performers can’t blink an eye without announcing that they’re acting—and acting, what’s more, to live up to the scale of the production. Yet Stevens’ craftsmanship is effective at an unsubtle level, and the movie is often entertaining, with the narrative push that Ferber was so skilled at. Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson are the leads; with Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper, Rod Taylor, Mercedes McCambridge, Judith Evelyn, Sal Mineo, Jane Withers, Chill Wills, Alexander Scourby, and Earl Holliman. Screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat; music by Dmitri Tiomkin; cinematography by William C. Mellor; designed by Boris Leven, with Ralph Hurst. (Stills of the huge gothic house standing in a vast bare stretch of ground call up the movie as surely as the mention of “Rosebud” calls up Citizen Kane.) Warners. color

 

Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, see The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

 

La Gifle, see The Slap

 

Gigi (1950)—Danièle Delorme as Colette’s Gigi—offspring of a long line of courtesans. Gigi’s grandmother (Yvonne de Bray) and her great-aunt (Gaby Morlay), both retired from active service, attempt to train her to carry on the tradition, but the virtuous Gigi violates the rules. A pleasant, unexciting movie, with Frank Villard and Jean Tissier. Directed by Jacqueline Audry. In French. b & w

 

Gigi (1958)—A plushy, cheerful, musical version of the Colette story, with Leslie Caron as the adolescent girl who is tutored to be a courtesan but is so enchantingly innocent and eager that she winds up the betrothed of the richest, handsomest young man in Paris. Vincente Minnelli directed, in a confident, confectionery style that carries ali—or almost all—before it. The elderly Maurice Chevalier singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” may give one pause. With Louis Jourdan as Gigi’s catch, and Hermione Gingold, Isabel Jeans, John Abbott, Eva Gabor, Jacques Bergerac, and Monique Van Vooren. Produced by Arthur Freed, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe, and costumes by Cecil Beaton. Ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Director. M-G-M. CinemaScope, color

 

Gilda (1946)—The story is turgid, melodramatic nonsense, but Rita Hayworth is at her most sexy-masochistic, and does a knockout of a fully dressed striptease as she sings “Put the Blame on Mame.” (It’s Anita Ellis’s voice we hear.) With Glenn Ford and George Macready. Directed by Charles Vidor. Columbia. b & w

 

Ginger and Fred Ginger e Fred (1986)—The title of this Fellini movie is alluring, but the picture isn’t about those two tapping, twirling icons. It’s about two mediocre dancers (played by Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni)—small-timers, curiosities—who, in the 1940s, entertained Italian vaudeville audiences by imitating the Astaire-Rogers numbers. Now they are being reunited, in Rome, for an appearance on a Christmas TV special. This situation (which is reminiscent of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys) serves as a pretext for Fellini to vent his disgust at TV. He “flashes” his spoofs of TV programs and commercials as if they were obscene images, and he means them to be obscene. They’re images of piggy abundance—oral and infantile. But Fellini has no zest to energize these skits, or the rest of the material, either. This is a cranky, wobbling movie. Fellini appears to be condemning TV for being a green slime that’s absorbing everything, and denouncing it, too, for passing him by. The film treats Masina’s character with an element of condescension, and Mastroianni is playing the Maestro’s view of himself as an aging, crumbling tower of a man—a drunken bum. With Franco Fabrizi as host for the special and Frederick Ledebur as the old admiral. The score, by Nicola Piovani, has a lovely finesse; the script is by Fellini, Tonino Guerra, and Tullio Pinelli. In Italian. An Italian–French–West German film, produced by Alberto Grimaldi. color (See Hooked.)

 

Una Giornata Particolare, see A Special Day

 

Girl Crazy (1943)—This popular, second movie version of the 1930 Broadway musical with the score by George and Ira Gershwin stars Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney; it’s more freely adapted than the first, a 1932 R K O film that starred Wheeler and Woolsey. This time the company is M-G-M, and the cast includes June Allyson and Nancy Walker, with Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra and nine Gershwin songs, including “Embraceable You” and the great, masochistic “But Not for Me.” Norman Taurog directed; Busby Berkeley staged the song-and-dance sequences, including the killer finale, “I Got Rhythm,” with Garland in white buckskins. (It had been Ethel Merman’s big number in the original show.) With Guy Kibbee, Rags Ragland, Frances Rafferty, and Henry O’Neill. The script by Fred Finklehoffe, based on the play by Guy Bolton and Jack McGowan, has to do with the girl-crazy Rooney being sent to a boys’ college in Arizona; he saves the school by staging a musical rodeo. In its own terms, the movie—the eighth Garland and Rooney had made together—is just about irresistible. (A less buoyant, 1965 M-G-M version, with Connie Francis and Harve Presnell, was called When the Boys Meet the Girls.) b & w

 

A Girl in Black Koritsi me ta Mavra (1955)—The heroine is the classic beauty Ellie Lam-betti, whose thoughtful, passionate Mediterranean face is one of the glories of Greek films. Here she plays the shy daughter of an impoverished, once-genteel family—a family that has become the victim of the meanness, the pettiness, and the harsh sexual standards of the villagers. She’s trapped on an island where everyone knows everyone else and where throngs of children call out the news of her widowed mother’s latest fornication. The young writer-director, Michael Cacoyannis, made A Girl in Black on the island of Hydra on a budget of approximately $60,000, with a single camera in the hands of Walter Lassally. It’s a strongly individual work—the camera moves fluidly over the dark expressive faces and the narrow streets; the Greek sunlight hits the white houses and the whole island seems exposed. Cacoyannis’s script is much smoother than in his earlier Stella, but there is no adequate preparation for the startling last sequence, which may give you the uncomfortable feeling that a group of children are drowned in order to strengthen the character of the hero—a weak Athenian writer (intelligently played by Dimitri Horn). The film has a vibrant simplicity, though, and its defects are, at least, Cacoyannis’s—they’re not the results of compromises and studio edicts. With Georges Foundas as a handsome, loutish fisherman; Notis Pergialis as the writer’s friend; Eleni Zafiriou as the widow; and Anestis Vlachos as her son. In Greek. b & w

 

A Girl in the Mist Kiri no Naka no Shojo (1955)—One of the most artless and most charming Japanese films ever to reach the West, Hideo Suzuki’s 44-minute pastoral comedy is about a college student who has returned to her small-town home for the summer vacation and is visited by her Tokyo boyfriend. She, her younger sister, and the boy are three of the most radiant people ever seen on the screen. At times, they’re so unlike the usual characters in movies that you forget this is a film, and a foreign one, at that. You may feel as if you were watching country neighbors and eavesdropping as the mother and father argue, the grandmother drinks, the adolescent sister worries about propriety. And it appears that intellectual college students have the same gaucherie and pretentiousness the world over. In Japanese. b & w

 

The Girl Was Young, see Young and Innocent

 

Giulietta degli Spiriti, see Juliet of the Spirits

 

Give a Girl a Break (1933)—An unusual M-G-M musical in that it is modest, but it is so modest that it has no particular flavor or distinction, despite the efforts of some talented people. Stanley Donen directed, and the cast includes Marge and Gower Champion, Bob Fosse, Debbie Reynolds, Kurt Kasznar, Helen Wood, Larry Keating, and Richard Anderson. The songs by Ira Gershwin and Burton Lane are remarkably uninspired; the choreography by Donen and Gower Champion is pleasant but not memorable. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett wrote the negligible script—a backstage story. It all reeks of niceness. color

 

The Glass Key (1942)—Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, and Brian Donlevy in a not particularly memorable, though reasonably faithful, version of the Dashiell Hammett novel. Stuart Heisler directed, from Jonathan Latimer’s screenplay. Paramount. b & w

 

The Glass Slipper (1955)—Leslie Caron as an elfin sweater-girl Cinderella, in a musical whimsey concocted by Helen Deutsch and directed by Charles Walters. This follow-up to their box-office hit Lili doesn’t find a tone; the viewer can’t help knowing that he’s watching a flop. With Estelle Winwood as a loony kleptomaniac fairy godmother, Elsa Lanchester as the evil stepmother, Michael Wilding as the prince, Barry Jones his father, and Keenan Wynn his confidant. Also with Liliane Montevecchi, Amanda Blake, and Lurene Tuttle. There are a couple of ballets choreographed by Roland Petit. M-G-M. color

 

The Glenn Miller Story (1954)—Blandly dull big bio, with James Stewart as a pedantic Glenn Miller; with Miller trying to discover “his own sound,” it’s like a Hollywood version of the life of an inventor. June Allyson plays the all-American square Miller marries; right after the ceremony, she is taken up to Harlem, where Gene Krupa and Louis Armstrong get into a jam session (they do “Basin Street Blues”), and it’s typical of the family-films format that we’re expected to identify with her getting tired and sleepy. Most of the music in this film does have a soporific quality. Miller’s famous numbers, such as “Tuxedo Junction” and “Little Brown Jug,” have been re-created (Joe Yukl dubs Stewart on the trombone), and they don’t quite swing. The director, Anthony Mann, seems out of his element. With Henry (later Harry) Morgan, Sig Rumann, George Tobias, Charles Drake, Carleton Young, Frances Langford (as a blonde), and the Modernaires, the Archie Savage Dancers, and the Mello-Men. The script is by Valentine Davies and Oscar Brod-ney. Universal. color

 

Glorifying the American Girl (1929)—The rise of a young girl (Mary Eaton) from the sheet-music department of a big store, through the dilemmas of small-town vaudeville, to her ultimate glorification in the Ziegfeld Follies, where, finally, we get glimpses of Helen Morgan, Rudy Vallee, and Eddie Cantor, as well as Ziegfeld himself (who also supervised the production), and such celebrities as Mayor Jimmy Walker, Ring Lardner, Texas Guinan, Johnny Weissmuller, Otto Kahn, and Adolph Zukor. Along her interminable way, the heroine renounces love (Edward Crandall) for the headdresses and bangles of a showgirl; the moral is that you pay a price for applause. Meanwhile, the moviegoer who wants to see how musical numbers were staged in Ziegfeld’s day pays heavily for a few minutes of pleasure. The songs include “At Sundown,” “Blue Skies,” “What Wouldn’t I Do for That Man,” and “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover.” Millard Webb directed; Ted Shawn choreographed the ballets. The Follies sequences were originally in Technicolor. Paramount Famous Lasky.

 

Glory (1989)—This Civil War epic, based on fiery, spirit-stirring material that had never before been tapped for the movies, is emotionally moving even when the scenes falter. It’s about the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first black fighting unit to be formed in the North. Robert Gould Shaw, the 25-year-old son of abolitionists, was the colonel in charge; he was to carry out the visionary plan of proving that black men had the discipline and valor to stand up against the enemy. As the shy idealist Shaw, Matthew Broderick shows us the misery of a softhearted commanding officer who is determined to prepare his men for what’s ahead; it’s a lovely performance, as remote and touching as a daguerreotype. The more flamboyant performances are given by Denzel Washington as an ornery, troublemaking runaway slave, Morgan Freeman as a former gravedigger, and Andre Braugher as a bookish recruit. They’re performers of such skill that they’re vivid, and almost persuasive, as enlistees who bicker and quarrel before they shape up and become fine soldiers. (The actors perform these roles as if they’ve never been played before.) Although the script is a conventional melodrama, the director, Edward Zwick, has made something more thoughtful than that. He doesn’t have the instinct for images that would burst the written framework, but he’s made a good film on a great subject. With Jihmi Kennedy, who is quietly impressive as a backcountry recruit, and Cary Elwes as a white officer. The screenplay, based partly on Shaw’s letters, is by Kevin Jarre. The cinematography is by Freddie Francis, and the score, which features the Boys Choir of Harlem, is by James Horner. Tri-Star. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Go Into Your Dance (1935)—Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler have a terrific number together (“About a Quarter to Nine”), and when he sings “She’s a Latin from Manhattan,” you get a sense of how magnetic he must have been on the stage. The movie isn’t topnotch, though; the script (by Earl Baldwin, from a story by Bradford Ropes) is dreary and things don’t quite come together. But the cast includes Helen Morgan, Glenda Farrell, Patsy Kelly, Akim Tamiroff, Benny Rubin, Phil Regan, Sharon Lynne, and Barton MacLane; the songwriters Al Dubin and Harry Warren also appear. Ruby Keeler had been in many musicals before this one, but she retains her peculiarly appealing (and baffling) amateurishness. Archie Mayo directed, for Warners. b & w

 

Go West (1925)—Not one of the great Buster Keaton comedies. It’s perhaps unique among his films in that it aims for intense pathos; however, it’s sad and funny at the same time—which wasn’t true of Chaplin’s pathos. Keaton plays Friendless—a lonely, buffeted, uncomplaining drifter without home, country, or dime. Having found the city’s heart cold, he hides in a freight train going to Arizona, and there among the cacti he finds his first and only comfort and fellowship in a sad-eyed cow. Together they weather it through storm and sunshine. (The cow has a lot of personality—she may remind you of Daisy, Gene Wilder’s beloved sheep, in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.) Keaton is so unembarrassed and so unself-consciously stoic in adversity that the pathos is never offensive—not even when a dog he tries to pat moves away from him. It’s a strange movie, directed and partly written by Keaton right after the breakup of the team he had been working with since his 2-reeler days. There’s an amazing finale, in which Friendless and Brown Eyes the Cow round up hundreds of steers that are bellowing through the streets of Los Angeles. Silent. M-G-M. b & w

 

Go West (1941)—The Marx Brothers in what is, arguably, their worst picture; Love Happy is possibly even worse. This one—set in the Old West—has a good opening sequence and not much else. The cast includes John Carroll, Walter Woolf King, and Iris Adrian; Edward Buzzell directed; and the script can be blamed on Irving Brecher. M-G-M. b & w

 

The Goddess (1958)—Paddy Chayefsky’s attack on the American dream of stardom centers on an unloved child in the South who grows up incapable of loving and becomes a big empty wreck of a Marilyn Monroe-type star. (It’s a kind of clinical sentimentality.) The film takes a psychiatric and sociological view of her career: she’s a pathetic creature who has been deceived by false values and is destroyed by the bitch-goddess Success. Chayefsky is so concerned with the heroine’s pitifully unformed character that he fails to suggest what would make her stand out from all the other poor, deceived girls—what would make her a star. This is a conscientious, ambitious bad movie, with Chayefsky’s famous ear for dialogue in full cauliflower. John Cromwell directed the high-powered cast. The intense Kim Stanley is in the central role (her compelling over-non-acting makes the bum writing rather painful). Patty Duke plays the heroine as the lonely child with no one to praise her; she informs her cat, “I got promoted today”—a line which became a camp favorite. Betty Lou Holland is the star’s mother. Steven Hill is the star’s first husband; he’s called upon to deliver the author’s prophetic insights—i.e., the lines that should have been cut. Lloyd Bridges gives a fine performance as the prizefighter husband, who feels shut out by his wife’s misery. And Elizabeth Wilson is the final, gorgonlike attendant. The score is by Virgil Thomson. (Collectors of errata may note that Chayefsky has the heroine say she was in Stage Door by “Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman.”) Columbia. b & w

 

The Godfather (1972)—A wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty, in which organized crime becomes an obscene nightmare image of American free enterprise. The movie is a popular melodrama with its roots in the gangster films of the 30s, but it expresses a new tragic realism, and it’s altogether extraordinary. Francis Ford Coppola directed. Marlon Brando is Don Vito Corleone, with Al Pacino, John Cazale, James Caan, and Talia Shire as his children. The cast includes Robert Duvall, Richard Castellano as Clemenza, Diane Keaton, John Marley, Lenny Montana, Richard Conte, Sterling Hayden, Abe Vigoda, Al Lettieri, Alex Rocco, Richard Bright, Simonetta Stefanelli as Apollonia, Gianni Russo, and Al Martino. The script, credited to Mario Puzo and Coppola, is based on Puzo’s best-seller. (The film runs just under 3 hours; the period is 1945 to the mid-50s.) Cinematography by Gordon Willis; production design by Dean Tavoularis; music by Nino Rota. Paramount. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Godfather Part II (1974)—The daring of Part II is that it enlarges the scope and deepens the meaning of the first film. Visually, Part II is far more complexly beautiful than the first, just as it’s thematically richer, more shadowed, fuller. The completed work, contrasting the early manhood of Vito (Robert De Niro) with the life of Michael, his inheritor (Al Pacino), is an epic vision of the corruption of America. (The 3 hours and 20 minutes of Part II span almost 70 years.) Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The script is credited to Coppola and Mario Puzo, from Puzo’s novel. The cast includes Robert Duvall, John Cazale, Lee Strasberg, Michael V. Gazzo, Talia Shire, Troy Donahue, Gianni Russo, Diane Keaton, G. D. Spradlin, Morgana King, Harry Dean Stanton, Joe Spinell, Fay Spain, Danny Aiello, Richard Bright, Gaston Moschin as Fanucci, Abe Vigoda, Tom Rosqui, B. Kirby, Jr., Leopoldo Trieste, and a brief appearance by James Caan, and appearances by Phil Feldman, Roger Corman, and William Bowers as United States senators. Cinematography by Gordon Willis; production design by Dean Tavoularis; music by Nino Rota, conducted by Carmine Coppola. Paramount. color (See Reeling.)

 

Goin’ Down the Road (1970)—There is scarcely a false touch. The Canadian Don Shebib is so good at blending actors into locations that one has to remind oneself that this is an acted film and not a documentary. Shebib has a delicate feeling for the nuances not of traditional “class” but of the class tones that come from different educations, and he uses this gift to put in social perspective the lives of two totally unhip boys from Nova Scotia (Doug McGrath and Paul Bradley) who come to Toronto for the legendary opportunities of the big city. Perceptively acted, though the story is too familiar and the film turns out to be a somewhat hollow triumph of craft. In color (sensitively shot) and blown up from 16 mm; the total cost was $82,000. (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Goin’ South (1978)—Jack Nicholson directed and plays a cackling, scratching, horny, mangy slob in this barnyard comedy set in the Old West. He’s about to be strung up, but the Texas border town he’s in has an unusual ordinance: a condemned outlaw can escape the noose if a woman of property agrees to marry him. A virginal young Miss Muffet type (Mary Steenburgen), who needs a man to work her gold mine, claims him, and the film is about their squabblings and misunderstandings until they find love—it’s a mixture of Blazing Saddles and The African Queen. Nicholson’s fatuous leering performance dominates the movie, and because his prankishness also comes out in the casting and directing, the movie hasn’t any stabilizing force; there’s nothing to balance what he’s doing—no one with a strait jacket. An actor-director who prances about the screen manically can easily fool himself into thinking that his film is jumping; Nicholson jumps, all right, but the movie is inert. With Veronica Cartwright, John Belushi (in his movie début), Christopher Lloyd, Richard Bradford, Luana Anders, Danny DeVito, and Ed Begley, Jr. Cinematography by Nestor Almendros; script by an assortment of writers. Paramount. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Going Places Les Valseuses (1974)—Bertrand Blier’s explosively funny erotic farce is both a celebration and a satire of men’s daydreams. It makes you laugh at things that shock you, and some people find its gusto revolting in much the same way that the bursting comic force of the sexual hyperbole in Henry Miller’s book Tropic of Cancer was thought revolting. The crude energy of the two young roughneck protagonists (Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere) is overwhelming, grungy, joyous. They’re outsiders without jobs or money who want to satisfy their appetites. So they snatch purses, steal cars, swipe things from shops, and make passes at almost every woman they get near. It takes a half hour or so before a viewer grasps that the two pals are guileless raw innocents and that almost everything they do backfires on them. They’re cavemen who give women what in their exuberant male fantasies women want. Brutal, lyrical slapstick connections get made in this movie. With Brigitte Fossey as the nursing mother on the train; Miou-Miou as the scraggly blond waif; Jeanne Moreau as the middle-aged woman who, after 10 years in prison, emerges sex-starved; and Isabelle Huppert as the teen-ager. The screenplay, by Blier and Philippe Dumarcay, is based on Blier’s novel. The cinematography is by Bruno Nuytten; the jazz violin score is by Stephane Grappelli. In French. b & w (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Gold (1974)—A recycling of the old straightforward adventure films: the musty plot is about an international syndicate that floods a South African mine in order to drive up the price of gold. The picture is mindlessly passable, largely because it was shot on location in South African mines and in and around Johannesburg. The director, Peter Hunt, can’t be much more than efficient with this material, but at least he doesn’t try to squeeze us emotionally on behalf of the stock characters, played by bland, dimply Roger Moore, and Simon Sabela, Susannah York, Bradford Dillman, John Gielgud, and Ray Milland, who manages to inject the only note of personality. The script is by Wilbur Smith and Stanley Price. Allied Artists. color (See Reeling.)

 

Gold Diggers of 1933—A funny, good-natured backstage musical, and a Depression period piece as well. It sums up what is meant by the phrase “pure thirties.” Ginger Rogers wears a costume made of big coins and sings “We’re in the Money” in pig Latin, and 60 electrically wired chorus girls, singing “In the shadows let me come and sing to you” while waltzing and playing violins, merge to form one great big neon fiddle. Warners advertised that this film would “surpass the glories of 42nd Street” (which had come out earlier in the year) and the geometric choreographer Busby Berkeley and the songwriters Harry Warren and Al Dubin all tried to top themselves. Mervyn LeRoy directed this time, and the plot is something about Dick Powell as a blueblood songwriter trying to raise money for a show he has written. The cast is a Who’s Who of Warners types: the prim, awesomely untalented Ruby Keeler, and Joan Blondell, Warren William, Aline MacMahon, Ned Sparks, Guy Kibbee, Sterling Holloway, Ferdinand Gottschalk, and Billy Barty as the infant who winks at Dick Powell and hands him a can opener to use on Ruby Keeler’s shiny tin costume, in the “Pettin’ in the Park” sequence. Busby Berkeley appears in a bit part as the backstage call-boy (can this really be the correct term?) shouting such directions as “On stage for the Forgotten Man number!” The black singer in this number is Etta Moten. The script by Erwin Gelsey and James Seymour is based on an Avery Hopwood play; cinematography by Sol Polito. b & w

 

Gold Diggers of 1935—Dick Powell is hired by Alice Brady to escort her daughter, Gloria Stuart, while Gloria’s fiance, Hugh Herbert, completes his book on snuffboxes. Guess what happens. The score is good, even though the picture is terrible—in a pleasant sort of way. Busby Berkeley, who usually only choreographed, did the directing, too, and everything seems labored. With Glenda Farrell, Wini Shaw, Adolphe Menjou, Frank McHugh, and Grant Mitchell. The songs by Al Dubin and Harry Warren include “The Lullaby of Broadway” and “The Words Are in My Heart.” Script by Manuel Seff, Peter Milne, and the producer, Robert Lord; cinematography by George Barnes. First National. b & w

 

The Gold of Naples L’Oro di Napoli (1956)—Vittorio De Sica directed this collection of Neapolitan episodes, featuring Totò as a little clown imposed on by a bullying racketeer, Silvana Mangano as a prostitute, Sophia Loren in her celebrated comic turn as a pizza seller, and De Sica himself as a gambler—which the whole world knows he was. He was also a director who could combine melancholy and wit. It’s an uneven film, but Loren walking and De Sica gambling are works of art. In Italian. b & w

 

The Gold Rush (1925)—He enters, “pursued by a bear”—the man who for generations of filmgoers has been the embodiment of “the little fellow”: humanity. In this extraordinarily sweet and graceful comedy, Chaplin is the weak and helpless perfect gentleman in the Klondike world of bears and brutes; yet his gallantry wins him the gold and the girl, too. In 1958 an international jury at Brussels selected this work as the second greatest film of all time (after Potemkin). With Mack Swain as Big Jim, Georgia Hale, Tom Murray, and Henry Bergman. Produced, written, and directed by Chaplin; the assisting directors were Charles Riesner and H. d‘Abbadie d’Arrast; the cinematographer was Rollie Totheroh. (The snowy exteriors were filmed in Nevada.) Silent; Chaplin later added music and a narration. b & w

 

The Golden Age of Comedy (1957)—These sequences from Mack Sennett and Hal Roach 2-reelers made between 1923 and 1928 show off the talents of Ben Turpin, Harry Langdon, Will Rogers, the Keystone Cops, the Sennett Bathing Beauties, etc., and best of all, they exhibit Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in several classics of demolition-style silent comedy. Their custard pie sequence is perhaps the high point of the collection—a demonstration that throwing a pie can be both art and science. In The Cosmological Eye Henry Miller called it “the ultimate in burlesque” and “the greatest comic film ever made—because it brought pie-throwing to apotheosis.” Their paintbrush routine is a beauty, and there is also a methodical, fatalistic car-wrecking ritual. Jean Harlow makes a stunning appearance in black teddies, but Carole Lombard is, unfortunately, not at her best. Robert Youngson compiled these clips (the original directors include Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, and George Stevens); Youngson added a tireless narrator who lards the clips with a layer of sentiment about how “beloved” these players were, and what “tragic” fates they met, and explanations of gags that are perfectly clear to the eye. But the irritations are minor when you are looking at what is possibly the best collection of sight gags ever brought together. b & w

 

Golden Boy (1939)—William Holden—young, sensitive, and handsome—as the violinist turned prizefighter, in an only semi-reprehensible version of the Clifford Odets play, directed by Rouben Mamoulian. The role of Lorna Moon was built up to be large enough for Barbara Stanwyck, and the play was softened, rearranged, and wrenched around to provide for a happy ending. Yet the Odets material still has its dramatic pull, and Lee J. Cobb as the boy’s father, Sam Levene as his taxi-driver brother-in-law, and Joseph Calleia as the slimy gangster out to corrupt him bring back some of the ambiance of the New York theatre in Odets’ impassioned heyday. Adolphe Menjou plays the prizefight manager; with Don Beddoe, Edward S. Brophy, Frank Jenks, and Clinton Rosemond. Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca and Karl Freund. Produced by William Perlberg, for Columbia. b & w

 

The Golden Coach (1953)—At his greatest, Jean Renoir expressed the beauty in our common humanity; that’s what Anna Magnani at her greatest expressed. This movie—his tribute to the commedia dell’arte—is also a tribute to her fabulous gifts, and she gives the film its gusto. We see her here not only as a sensual, earthy “woman of the people” but as an artist who exhausts her resources in creating the illusion of volcanic reality. Though Renoir has taken Prosper Mérimée’s vehicle and shaped it for her, it will be forever debatable whether it contains her or she explodes it. But as this puzzle is parallel with the theme—a Pirandellian confusion of theatre and everyday life—it adds another layer to the ironic comedy. The film is set in a dusty frontier in Renaissance Peru: a band of Italian strolling players is attempting to bring art to South America. The movie has been compared to Così Fan Tutte—it is light and serious, cynical and beautiful, a blend of color, wit, and Vivaldi music. Though Magnani, in her first English-speaking role, is vocally magnificent, some of the other actors speak in dreary tones and some of the minor characters appear to be dubbed. Duncan Lamont, as the Spanish viceroy, and Riccardo Rioli, as the bullfighter, are just fine, but Paul Campbell, as the Castilian nobleman, is inept and his scenes go limp. This was Renoir’s second color film (after The River), and his directorial rhythm seems to falter in his work in color, but in the glow and warmth of The Golden Coach this defect, like the others, is trifling. The cinematography is by Claude Renoir. (See I Lost it at the Movies.)

 

The Good Earth (1937)—Having purchased Pearl S. Buck’s prestigious Chinese-family saga, M-G-M sent an expedition to China which brought back two million feet of atmospheric shots and 18 tons of costumes, native animals, dismantled farmhouses, and a village shrine. Then 500 California acres were landscaped and terraced to simulate a Chinese farm, locusts were rented for a scourge, and Occidentals were chosen for the leads, with Orientals in the supporting roles, and as the babies. Luise Rainer, who had taken an Academy Award for her Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld, won another for her monotonous yet affecting performance as the stoic O-Lan, the wife of the peasant Wang (Paul Muni); during the looting of a manor house, she picks up the jewels which raise her family out of starvation into prosperity. But spoiled by wealth, Wang loses contact with the good earth; he becomes infatuated with Lotus, the dancer (Tilly Losch, who does a lot of finger-twirling), and takes her as his second wife, and his lust almost destroys the family. The locust plague brings him to his senses. It’s a melodramatic sermon—a glorification of the passive, selfless, suffering mother, O-Lan. (There isn’t a shred of sympathy for Lotus, who is bought and sold.) The film domesticates exoticism: it’s as predictable as an Andy Hardy picture, but much more sober, and much, much longer. With Walter Connolly as the scoundrelly uncle, Charley Grapewin as the family patriarch, Keye Luke and Roland Lui as the sons, Jessie Ralph, and Harold Huber. The script by Talbot Jennings, Tess Slesinger, and Claudine West was partly based on a stage version by Owen and Donald Davis. This film, which was four years in the making, is dedicated to its producer, Irving Thalberg, who died in 1936; his associate, Albert Lewin, completed it. The first director, George Hill, who had supervised shooting the background footage in China, committed suicide, and the project was taken over by Sidney Franklin, who directed with his usual lack of imagination, individuality, style. He was the M-G-M heavyweight champ. Herbert Sto-thart was in charge of the music; the montage work is by Slavko Vorkapich; Arnold Gillespie headed the special effects department that produced the visually exciting locust attack. The cinematographer was the great Karl Freund. In sepia.

 

The Good Fairy (1935)—Hired to sanitize one of Ferenc Molnár’s lesser plays, Preston Sturges embroidered the whimsical comedy until it was almost worthy of the talents of Margaret Sullavan. (He also managed to work in one of the movie-within-a-movie scenes that later bacame one of his trademarks.) Sullavan plays a naive, unworldly orphan who becomes an usher in a movie theatre; she’s so helplessly innocent that various men (Herbert Marshall, Frank Morgan, Reginald Owen) come to her aid, and their lives get turned upside down. William Wyler, who directed, has told the story of how he quarrelled with Margaret Sullavan at first, and the tension between them made her look nervous and strained in the rushes. In order to improve her appearance he took her out to dinner to make peace, and was so successful that they were married two weeks before the picture was finished. With Cesar Romero, Alan Hale, Beulah Bondi, Eric Blore, and Hugh O’Connell. Cinematography by Norbert Brodine. Universal. b & w

 

The Good Father (1986)—Directed by Mike Newell, it has the festering gloom and dissatisfied-with-itself hatefulness that seem to be the mid-80s English badge of integrity. Anthony Hopkins plays Bill Hooper, who was once a college radical and aspiring writer, and is now a grimy-souled marketing executive with a publishing house. He came of age in the 60s, believing in equal rights for women; he’s still pro-feminist but when he thinks of the wife he has left he hears himself muttering “Bloody bitch.” (And he has horrible, guilty dreams of murdering his tiny son.) Based on the 1983 novel by Peter Prince, this is an attempt to get at the new complications in the sex wars and perhaps at the whole modern English muddle. There are glimmers of truth in this movie, and it holds you, yet everything seems blue and damp and constricted. If Newell has a goal, it seems to be to leave you with a sense of impacted bleakness. You never see Bill Hooper (or the director) take pleasure in anything. Newell keeps showing you what lice Englishmen are. (Englishwomen seem exempt from the moral pollution—they’ve been made a shade too tender and decent.) With Jim Broadbent, Fanny Viner, Harriet Walter, and bravura turns by Simon Callow as a beady-eyed little devil of a barrister and Miriam Margolyes as a feminist lawyer up against a reactionary judge. Screenplay by Christopher Hampton. Financed by British television (Group Four). Released in the U.S. by Skouras Pictures. color (See Hooked.)

 

Good Morning, Babylon (1987)—The first film made in English by the Taviani brothers tells the story of two teen-age Tuscan workmen (Vincent Spano and Joaquim de Almeida), from a family of church builders and restorers, who go off to seek their fortune in the New World. Eventually they find jobs as plasterers in San Francisco, working on the Italian Pavilion of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, and then in Hollywood, working for D. W. Griffith (Charles Dance), building the elephants for the Babylonian set of Intolerance. But it takes them too dismally long to get to the West Coast: the film’s poetic, storybook style slumps into masochism during their hardships in this country, when they work at bizarre, humiliating jobs along the way. And even after they reach L.A. and meet the people associated with Griffith they seem pitiable, and it takes forever (and more humiliation) before the great man gives them the nod. There are some lovely effects, but the attempt to show that the magic of movies comes out of anonymous, egalitarian teamwork makes your tongue feel coated. With Greta Scacchi, Desiree Becker, Omero Antonutti, and Margarita Lozano. Based on an idea by Lloyd Fonvielle, the screenplay is by the Tavianis and Tonino Guerra. The music is by Nicola Piovani; the cinematography is by Giuseppe Lanci. Early L.A. was re-created in Italy and the Grand Canyon sequence was shot in Spain. (The Tavianis don’t speak English.) An Italian-French-U.S. production. color (See Hooked.)

 

Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)—It sounded like a first-rate idea: Robin Williams doing his manic free-association comedy as a disc jockey, Adrian Cronauer, on Armed Forces Radio in Saigon in 1965. But the picture makes the character out to be a vulnerable, compassionate, respectful-of-the-Vietnamese wonderful guy, and the director, Barry Levinson, has a numbing sense of rhythm. Williams’ riffs are chopped short, and the film keeps cutting to soldiers breaking up over his spiel before it’s out of his mouth. There is an Adrian Cronauer, and the movie is very loosely based on his exploits, but the way the story line (from the script by Mitch Markowitz) has been directed it’s a clumsier version of the plots of 50s musicals. With Forest Whitaker, Bruno Kirby, J. T. Walsh, Uikey Kuay as the elderly student of English, and Richard Edson. (People who want to see Williams running wild within a character ought to take a look at the 1983 The Survivors or the 1986 The Best of Times.) Touchstone (Disney). color (See Hooked.)

 

The Good Mother (1988)—When Anna (Diane Keaton), the divorced mother of a 6-year-old daughter, discovers sexual pleasure with an Irish sculptor (Liam Neeson) and begins to live a more bohemian existence, her ex-husband sues for the child’s custody. The director, Leonard Nimoy, and the screenwriter, Michael Bortman, who adapted the 1986 Sue Miller novel, ask us to see Anna as a victim of generations of patriarchal domination. She has been recklessly happy with the Irishman, but now she goes limp. For the sake of her child, she accepts the limited role in her daughter’s future which the court grants her. She learns to live with her loss. And though this is what her character has been rigged to do from the start, it’s a letdown for the audience. Since the movie is the story of Anna’s meek, uncomprehending acceptance of defeat and her effort to make the best of it, women can feel it’s saying, “That’s how it is, folks. Resign yourselves.” The big clinker in this victimization fantasy (losing her child is the price a woman pays for an orgasm) is that it’s a few decades too late. You sit in the audience thinking that a different judge would have made all the difference, or that the case might have been won by an attorney less hidebound than the fogey she hires—Jason Robards, in a gloomy brown office that seems to say “All hope abandon.” And so the whole structure seems shaky; it provides an inevitability that you can’t accept. The movie has a sickly passivity. (Elmer Bernstein provides oozing, sad music.) But Neeson comes through strongly, the child is well played by Asia Vieira, and Diane Keaton, whose daring is in her spontaneity, has a gift for making even closed-in characters like Anna transparent. She’s extraordinary. With Joe Morton, Tracy Griffith, and shamefully poorly directed performances by Ralph Bellamy, Teresa Wright, and James Naughton. Touchstone (Disney). color (See Movie Love.)

 

Good News (1947)—One of the best of the lighthearted rah-rah collegiate musicals. The affable young Peter Lawford and goofy, blithe June Allyson are the leads and do the number “The French Lesson,” by Comden and Green and Roger Edens, and Joan McCracken, with a gleeful look in her eyes, dances and sings the memorable novelty “Pass That Peace Pipe,” by Edens and Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin. The rest of the score, including “The Varsity Drag,” “Lucky in Love,” and “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” is from the original 1927 Broadway show by DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson (which was filmed once before, in 1930). This was the first film directed by the choreographer Charles Walters, and the first movie script by Comden and Green. The cast includes Mel Tormé, Ray McDonald, Patricia Marshall, Donald MacBride, Clinton Sundberg, Morris Ankrum, Tom Dugan, and Connie Gilchrist. Produced by Arthur Freed, for M-G-M. color

 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Il Buono il Brutto il Cattivo (1966)—In this Sergio Leone spaghetti Western, if a man crosses a street in Santa Fe, the street looks half a mile wide; a farmer’s hut has rooms opening into rooms into the distance, like the Metropolitan Museum; a cowtown hotel has a plush lobby big enough for a political convention. The movie is like High Noon and The Ox-Bow Incident and a dozen others all scrambled together and playing in a giant echo chamber. The bad men are enormously, preposterously evil—larger-than-life parodies—and each wound they inflict is insanely garish. The change of scale is rather fascinating. This Western, set in our Civil War period but shot in Spain, looks more foreign to us than an ordinary Italian film. With Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef. Score by Ennio Morricone. color

 

Goodbye, Children, see Au revoir les enfants

 

The Goodbye Girl (1977)—The prolific Neil Simon at it again; this time it’s a tearful comedy that he wrote directly for the screen, and for Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss. She’s a 30ish former chorus girl who has been deserted by an actor husband and then by an actor lover, and has become so defensive that she’s hostile toward a new actor (Dreyfuss) who, through elaborately contrived circumstances, comes to share the apartment she and her 10-year-old daughter (Quinn Cummings) live in. So she says gratuitously abrasive things to him, and he prisses his lips and tells her off. The forced snappiness of the exchanges suggests two woodpeckers clicking at each other’s heads. Irritability provides the rhythm in Neil Simon’s universe. The only relief comes when Dreyfuss is rehearsing in Richard III—Shakespeare’s dialogue is a blessed sound. Simon’s idea of depth is a tug at your heartstrings, and Marsha Mason’s chin keeps quivering—her face is either squinched up to cry or crinkled up to laugh. This may be the bravest, teariest, most crumpled-face performance since the days of Janet Gaynor. Another hit. Herbert Ross directed; the cast includes Paul Benedict, Barbara Rhoades, Theresa Merritt, and Marilyn Sokol. (Dreyfuss won the Academy Award for Best Actor.) Produced by Ray Stark; Warners. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)—James Hilton’s gentle tribute to his schoolmaster father became an American best-seller when that old sentimentalist Alexander Woollcott touted it on the radio. M-G-M bought the novel and sent Sam Wood to England to film it. Robert Donat’s portrait of the frightened young junior master, rigid and forbidding in his twenties, who is humanized by marriage and mellowed by 60 years of contact with youth, won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Greer Garson, in her screen début, played his warm and gracious wife. An overripe little boy named Terry Kilburn played the ubiquitous Little Colley. It’s an ingratiating, bittersweet record of a good life, though the movie clogs the nose more than necessary. b & w

 

Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969)—An overblown version of James Hilton’s tearstained little gold mine of a book, with songs where they are not needed (and Leslie Bricusse’s songs are never needed), yet there’s still charm in the story, and Peter O‘Toole gives a romantic performance of great distinction as the schoolmaster whose life is transformed by the Cinderella touch of an actress, played now by Petula Clark. (She isn’t good at the beginning but she has a lovely glow in the Second World War period of the film.) Terence Rattigan, who did the new adaptation, has added a character—an actress named Ursula Mossbank; as played by Sian Phillips she’s a witty Beardsley vamp who gives her scenes an edge. This new picture is far from being a good one, and every time a music cue starts up your heart may sink, but the first-time director, Herbert Ross (who was formerly a choreographer), has managed to keep parts of it fairly buoyant. And O’Toole’s performance may help sustain you through the songs, though there are 11 of them, as distinct one from another as sections of beige wall-to-wall carpet, and while they’re being sung, mostly offscreen, you’re treated to “mood” visuals—providing enough redundancy to pad the movie out to 2 hours and 31 minutes. M-G-M. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

GoodFellas (1990)—The director, Martin Scorsese, gives you a lift. He loves the Brooklyn organized-crime milieu, because it’s where distortion, hyperbole, and exuberance all commingle. His mobsters are high on having a wad of cash in their pockets. The movie is about being cock of the walk, with banners flying and crowds cheering. Based on Nicholas Pileggi’s non-fiction book Wiseguy, it’s a triumphant piece of filmmaking—journalism and sociology presented with the brio of drama. But the three major hoods, played by Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci, don’t have a strong enough presence, and the movie lacks the juice and richness that come with major performances. (It’s like the Howard Hawks Scarface without Scarface.) What you respond to is Scorsese’s bravura: the filmmaking process becomes the subject of the movie. Watching it is like getting strung out on pure sensation. Paul Sorvino as Paulie and Lorraine Bracco as Karen both come through, and Tony Darrow as a restaurant owner, Welker White as a drug courier who needs her lucky hat to make a coke delivery, and other performers in minor roles give the movie a frenzied, funny texture. Christopher Serrone plays the boy who turns into Liotta. The screenplay is by Pileggi and Scorsese; the cinematography is by Michael Ballhaus; the editing is by Thelma Schoonmaker. Warners. color (See Movie Love.)

 

The Goonies (1985)—A group of kids in a seaport town in Oregon search in the caves along the coast, looking for the buried treasure left by One-Eyed Willie, a 17th-century pirate, and find his ship floating in an underground lagoon. With its echoes of Peter Pan and Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer and Becky caught in the caves, this adventure comedy should be wonderful fun. Produced by Steven Spielberg, who also wrote the story, it’s full of slapstick cliff-hangers, like a junior edition of 1941 and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and some of the sets designed by J. Michael Riva have a magical aura. But it was directed by Richard Donner, who doesn’t invite the audience in or shape the scenes—there’s all this stuff going on and none of it stands out. And with the kids’ constant jabbering, the clutter, the hyperexcited rushing about, and the many scenes shot in the claustrophobic darkness of the caves, the movie can really give you a case of the heebie-jeebies. With Ke Huy Quan as Data, who devises contraptions, Sean Astin as Mikey, Josh Brolin as Brand, Jeff Cohen as Chunk, Corey Feldman as Mouth, Martha Plimpton as Stef, Kerri Green as Andy, and Anne Ramsey as Mama Fratelli, Robert Davi as her son Jake, Joe Pantoliano as her son Francis, and John Matuszak as the amiable monster Sloth. The script is by Chris Columbus; the cinematography is by Nick McLean. Warners. color

 

The Gorgeous Hussy (1936)—The title is deceptive. The film is about Andrew Jackson (Lionel Barrymore) and his Presidential problems. Specifically, it deals with his dissolving his Cabinet because the wives of the members had cut a certain Mrs. Eaton (Joan Crawford). Something like this actually happened, though the picture will never convince anyone of it. Beulah Bondi smokes a corncob with the assurance befitting a First Lady, Melvyn Douglas plays dreary, gentlemanly John Randolph, and Robert Taylor and Franchot Tone are the handsome young men. Clarence Brown directed. M-G-M. b & w

 

Gorillas in the Mist (1988)—Sigourney Weaver as the anthropologist Dian Fossey, in what seems meant to be a triumphant epic about an activist heroine who made a difference. (A title at the close tells us that Fossey saved the mountain gorillas from extinction.) Weaver’s physical strength alone is inspiring here, and there’s a new freedom in her acting. She’s so vivid that you immediately feel Fossey’s will and drive. But Michael Apted, who directed, has an indeterminate approach to some of the key incidents; he doesn’t locate a dramatic core in Anna Hamilton Phelan’s script. The movie is reasonably faithful to Fossey’s ruthless, half-crazed side and it’s quite watchable, but it’s disappointing. It belongs to the past of movies rather than to the modern era. The Maurice Jarre music is a definite negative factor; another is the use of the head tracker as the symbolic dignity and conscience of Africa. Despite the subject, the movie can’t be taken seriously. It’s a feminist version of King Kong—now it’s the gorillas who do the screaming. With Bryan Brown, Julie Harris, John Omirah Miluwi as the tracker, and Iain Cuthbertson, who’s casual and rather humorous as Dr. Louis Leakey. Released by Warners and Universal. color (See Movie Love.)

 

The Gospel According to St. Matthew Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (1964)—Pier Paolo Pasolini’s interpretation features the rocky settings of Southern Italy, an eclectic score, and a rigid Jesus who demands obedience. Some find the slow rhythm fascinating, others think it punishing. (There’s a funny description of the film in the opening pages of Iris Owens’ novel After Claude.) In Italian. b & w

 

The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939)—S.S. Van Dine, the author of the Philo Vance detective novels, wrote Gracie into one of them, and Paramount very sensibly decided to film it. (George Burns figured in the story, but he was dropped in the film version and Gracie thus made her first solo movie appearance.) It’s a casual, entertaining absurdity; Gracie’s peculiarly uncorseted mind is a wonderful corrective to Warren William’s usual stuffiness as Philo Vance; he hardly gets a word in edgewise. Alfred E. Green directed a good cast, including Donald MacBride, Kent Taylor, Ellen Drew, H. B. Warner, Horace McMahon, and William Demarest. b & w

 

The Graduate (1967)—One of the most talked about hits of the 60s, it was a formative influence on the counterculture, and it was the movie that made Dustin Hoffman a star. He plays Benjamin Braddock, who returns to his swank L.A. home after graduating from college, and feels alienated from his insensitive, self-indulgent parents and their whole set of lewd, money-making friends. As Mrs. Robinson (whose name was used for the title of one of the Simon and Garfunkel songs on the soundtrack), Anne Bancroft is tremendous fun, at first. She’s the amusingly voracious middle-aged woman who seduces the naive Benjamin, and when he’s in bed with her and wants to talk about art, the comic moments click along with the rhythm of a hit Broadway show. But then the movie deliberately undercuts its own hip expertise and begins to pander to youth. Benjamin falls in love with Mrs. Robinson’s fresh, wide-eyed daughter (Katharine Ross), and the mother is turned into a vindictive witch. (And the comedy turns into melodrama.) Commercially, this worked: the rejection of upper-middle-class values had a special appeal for upper-middle-class college students. The inarticulate Benjamin became a romantic hero for the audience to project onto. The movie functioned as a psychodrama: the graduate stood for truth; the older people stood for sham and for corrupt sexuality. And this “generation-gap” view of youth and age entered the national bloodstream; many moviegoers went to see the picture over and over again. Mike Nichols directed, from a script by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on the novel by Charles Webb. With William Daniels and Elizabeth Wilson as Benjamin’s parents, and Murray Hamilton as Mr. Robinson. Buck Henry is the hotel clerk. The cinematography is by Robert Surtees; the production design is by Richard Sylbert. Academy Award for Best Director. Embassy. color (See Going Steady.)

 

Grand Hotel (1932)—From her first line, “I have never been so tired in my life,” Greta Garbo sets the movie in vibration with her extraordinary sensual presence. (“Mademoiselle Hamlet,” Alice B. Toklas called her.) Garbo plays a première danseuse whose career is fading—a weary, disillusioned woman briefly reconciled to life by a passion for a shady nobleman: John Barrymore. Garbo was only 26 when she played this role (Barrymore was 50), but the fatigue, the despair, seem genuine. There is every reason to reject Grand Hotel as an elaborate chunk of artifice; there are no redeeming qualities in Vicki Baum’s excruciating concepts of character and fate, and anyone who goes to see this movie expecting an intelligent script, or even “good acting,” should have his head examined. Most of the players give impossibly bad performances—they chew up the camera. But if you want to see what screen glamour used to be, and what, originally, “stars” were, this is perhaps the best example of all time. Grand Hotel is still entertaining because of the same factor that made it a huge hit in its day (it even won the Academy Award as Best Picture): the force of the personalities involved in the omnibus story. As a secretary working in the hotel, there is a startlingly sexy minx named Joan Crawford, who bears only a slight resemblance to the later zombie of that name; at about 26 also, she still connected with other actors, and her scenes with Lionel Barrymore (in one of his rare likable performances: he’s a dying man spending his life savings on a last fling) show a real rapport. The fifth star is Wallace Beery, as a brutal, crooked tycoon; he overacts mightily and charmlessly. Also in the cast are Lewis Stone, Jean Hersholt, Rafaela Ottiano, Ferdinand Gottschalk, Frank Conroy, Tully Marshall, Purnell Pratt, Morgan Wallace, Robert McWade, and Edwin Maxwell. Striding through it all is a living legend of the screen: Garbo, in her chinchilla polo coat, with her drawn face and wrinkled forehead and her anguished “I want to be alone.” (Her clothes seem to get in her way, and there’s a ridiculous little bobby pin that keeps her hair firmly in place during her big love scenes with Barrymore.) Directed by Edmund Goulding, from William A. Drake’s adaptation of Vicki Baum’s Menschen im Hotel; cinematography by William Daniels; art direction by Cedric Gibbons; gowns by Adrian. (A 1945 remake was called Weekend at the Waldorf.) M-G-M. b & w

 

The Grand Maneuver Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1956)—As the director René Clair described it, what begins as a comedy of seduction ends as a tragedy of love. Just before the outbreak of war in 1914, a bored young cavalry officer (Gérard Philipe), stationed in a provincial town, bets his fellow officers that within a month he can seduce any woman in the town. They draw a name out of a hat and it turns out to be a milliner from Paris (Michele Morgan). She resists and resists, but she falls in love with him and he with her. Her resistance is almost at an end when she learns of the bet. The soldiers are leaving to go on maneuvers: if she forgives him she will open her window. But he leaves and the window remains closed. Whether Clair failed to resolve his conception, or whether his conception is simply too cold for the audience to accept, the film (which was much praised in the press) has tended to alienate people. To Clair it’s an illustration of “the disadvantages of the human condition,” and certainly it’s an elegant expression of the triumph of pride over love, but the film’s tone—dry, forlorn, disenchanted—isn’t very pleasing. In French. color

 

La Grande Illusion (1937)—In form, La Grande Illusion is an escape story; yet who would think of it in this way? It’s like saying that Oedipus Rex is a detective story. Among other things, this film is a study of human needs and the subtle barriers of class among a group of prisoners and their captors during the First World War. The two aristocrats—the German prison commander von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) and his prisoner the French officer de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) —share a common world of memories and sentiments. Though their class is doomed by the changes that produced the war, they must act out the rituals of noblesse oblige and serve a nationalism they don’t believe in. The Frenchman sacrifices his life for men he doesn’t really approve of—the plebeian Marechal (Jean Gabin) and the Jew Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio). Jean Renoir directed this elegy for the death of the old European aristocracy, and it is one of the true masterpieces of the screen. Von Rauffenstein and de Boeldieu are in a great romantic tradition; Cyrano has his plume, they draw on their white gloves. Maréchal, the mechanic who has become an officer, is uneasy in the presence of urbanity and polish, but he has natural gallantry, and he’s the one with survival power. The performances of von Stroheim, Fresnay, and Gabin are in three different styles of acting, and they illuminate one another. With Gabin, you’re not aware of any performance; with von Stroheim and Fresnay, you are—and you should be: they represent a way of life that is dedicated to superbly controlled outer appearances. With Dita Parlo, Gaston Modot, Julien Carette, Jean Dasté, Georges Péclet, and Jacques Becker (who was the assistant director). Written by Charles Spaak and Renoir; the music is by Kosma; the camerawork is by Christian Matras and Claude Renoir. In French, with the German and English characters speaking in their own languages. b & w (see I Lost it at the Movies.)

 

Les Grandes Manoeuvres, see The Grand Maneuver

 

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)—In the years right after the worst of the Depression, the John Steinbeck book was compared with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Les Misérables and widely, if not very astutely, regarded as the greatest novel ever written by an American. It deals with the Joads, a family of sharecroppers who leave their eroded, dust-bowl farm in Oklahoma and come to the promised land of California, where they become the lowest of the low—migratory farm laborers. The movie version is full of the “They can’t keep us down, we’re the people” sort of thing, and a viewer’s outrage at the terrible social injustices the film deals with is blurred by its gross sentimentality. This famous film, high on most lists of the great films of all time, seems all wrong—phony when it should ring true. Yet, because of the material, it is often moving in spite of the acting, the directing, and the pseudo-Biblical pore-people talk. In some externals, the production is as authentic as a documentary; the cast includes Henry Fonda as Tom, John Carradine as Casey, Charley Grapewin as Grampa, John Qualen as Muley, Eddie Quillan as Connie, Dorris Bowdon as Rosasharn, Russell Simpson as Pa, Zeffie Tilbury as Granma, Darryl Hickman as Winfield, and Ward Bond, Grant Mitchell, Joe Sawyer, Frank Faylen. Screenplay by Nunnally Johnson; cinematography by Gregg Toland. Academy Awards: Best Director—John Ford; Best Supporting Actress—Jane Darwell as Ma Joad. She’s impossibly fraudulent, though there’s a memorable scene with Ma burning her old postcards. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

The Great Adventure Det Stora Aventyret (1953)—One of the handful of great nature films, Arne Sucksdorff’s feature-length documentary is a sensuous mixture of beauty and cruelty. Refusing, as he says, “to rape reality,” Sucksdorff waits until he gets the shot he wants—lynx and otter, fox and wood grouse, framed in dazzling compositions. In Swedish. b & w

 

The Great Bank Robbery (1969)—A haphazard mixture of two genres—the big heist and the Western spoof. It isn’t as funny as the people engaged in it try to convince you it is: you keep remembering earlier movies that did these jokes better. Hy Averback directed, from William Peter Blatty’s script, based on a novel by Frank O’Rourke. With Zero Mostel, Kim Novak, Clint Walker (who’s not bad), Akim Tamiroff, Ruth Warrick, Sam Jaffe, Claude Akins, Larry Storch, and Elisha Cook, Jr. Warners. color

 

Great Expectations (1946)—David Lean directed this handsome British production from J. Arthur Rank; it takes us back to that period in English letters when heroes had nice manners, a story had sweep and flourish, and all the stray subplots were gathered up and “rhymed.” The rather creamy look (like an expensive gift edition of a classic) is not particularly appropriate to Dickens, but the film has a strong style that is very different from Lean’s earlier work. He seems finally to have let go—to have pulled out all the stops. The film is emotional, exciting, full of action; sequences are planned in terms of heightened dramatic contrasts and sudden, scary tensions. This hyperbolic style rushes us past the awkward bits of staging and the slight dissatisfaction we may feel about the boy Pip (Anthony Wager) turning into John Mills, who plays his role very tentatively—almost as if he were trying out for it. Jean Simmons is the young girl, Estella, and then Valerie Hobson takes over the part, though it’s inconceivable that one could grow into the other, and despite Hobson’s dignity and beauty something seems to be lost. The rest of the cast, though, is close to miraculous: Alec Guinness is Herbert Pocket; Finlay Currie is Magwitch; Martita Hunt is Miss Havisham; Bernard Miles is Joe Gargery; Freda Jackson is Mrs. Gargery; Ivor Barnard is Wemmick; Torin Thatcher is Bentley Drummle; Eileen Erskine is Biddy; O. B. Clarence is The Aged Parent; and Francis L. Sullivan (who had played the same role in the 1934 Hollywood version) is that most alarming upholder of the law Jaggers. The producer, Ronald Neame, collaborated with Lean on the adaptation. Guy Green took the Academy Award for Best Black-and-White Cinematography; John Bryan and Wilfred Shingleton also won for Black-and-White Art Direction and Set Decoration.

 

The Great Gabbo (1929)—After the picture he was directing—Queen Kelly—was cancelled, Erich von Stroheim turned to acting and had a popular success as a megalomaniac ventriloquist who expresses his sensitive feelings only through his grotesque little dummy, Otto. Directed by James Cruze, from a Ben Hecht story, the film is effective only in a few bits. When the ventriloquist gets into the Follies, his story gets lost between mediocre musical-comedy numbers (which were originally in color). With the talented Betty Compson. b & w

 

The Great McGinty (1940)—After writing a series of successful pictures, Preston Sturges offered Paramount this script (which was to win an Academy Award) for peanuts, on condition that he be allowed to direct it. Given a three-week shooting schedule and a budget of less than $350,000, he made his début as a director (thus preparing the way for other writer-directors, such as John Huston and Billy Wilder). In this satire of American political corruption, the lowlife hero (Brian Donlevy) gets in solid with the local boss (Akim Tamiroff) by voting 37 times in one day. He rises to be alderman, then mayor, and, finally, governor, but having fallen in love, he tries to go straight, and his career is wrecked. Not up to the classic Sturges comedies that followed, partly because of Donlevy’s lack of personality (the viewer can’t see what would attract the competent, worldly woman—played by Muriel Angelus—who marries him), and partly because of the uneven pacing. There are wonderful patches, though, with the slapstick reversals on Horatio Alger success themes that became the Sturges specialty, and Akim Tamiroff peps up every scene he’s in. With Allyn Joslyn, William Demarest, Libby Taylor, Thurston Hall, Arthur Hoyt, Steffi Duna, Esther Howard, Jimmy Conlin, Harry Rosenthal, Robert Warwick, Frank C. Moran, and Dewey Robinson; many of them were to become members of the Sturges “stock company.” b & w

 

The Great Man (1956)—“The great man,” a popular and influential radio-television personality, has died; it is the task of a commentator (Jose Ferrer) to prepare a memorial broadcast. If it is successful, he may become the great man’s replacement. Though the outcome of the research is predictable, the further step in the plot is so efficiently cynical that the venality we have explored appears to be merely a childish prelude to a new venality. These inside-story ironies are too neat, though—the film has no resonance. But Ferrer, who directed, holds to a good, even pace and a suspenseful tone, and the picture is almost over before one realizes how bare and shallow it is. Structurally, it’s mostly a series of two-person sequences, as the commentator (Citizen Kane–style) interviews the people closest to the dead man; this series might have been very mechanical if the director-star hadn’t been so generous and tactful in the way he presents each of the other actors. The most memorable of them is Ed Wynn, playing a kind, thoughtful man who knows that he appears to be ridiculous; Wynn brought off his six-minute scene, which is virtually a monologue, in a single take, and it was reported that when he finished, the technicians applauded and the director wept. Momentarily, Ed Wynn gives the picture something close to a soul. And his son Keenan Wynn, playing a despicably soulless character, momentarily provides some uncouth ruthlessness and energy; he stirs things up. With Julie London as a boozing, second-rate singer, and Dean Jagger, Joanne Gilbert, Russ Morgan, Jim Backus, Henny Backus, and Lyle Talbot. From the novel by Al Morgan, who wrote the script, with Ferrer. (The picture failed commercially; Ferrer tried again, in 1958, with The High Cost of Loving, which also failed.) Universal. b & w

 

The Great Profile (1940)—In his later years, the boozing John Barrymore kept his career going by buffoonery and self-caricature. A lot of people found this film’s exploitation of his fallen reputation offensive, but his antics and his wordplay are very funny. This cynical burlesque (in which he performs with a troupe of acrobats) has some low, wild moments. He enjoys horsing around. Directed by Walter Lang, from a script by Milton Sperling and Hilary Lynn. With Mary Beth Hughes, Anne Baxter, Gregory Ratoff, John Payne, Lionel Atwill, Willie Fung, and Edward Brophy. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

The Great Santini Also known as The Ace. (1980)—This slice-of-family-life melodrama features Robert Duvall as the military-psychopath father and Michael O’Keefe as the sensitive, thoughtful teen-age son. There’s a sequence that is a strong metaphor for the ugly competitiveness inside a father’s determination to toughen up a son: a one-on-one basketball game between them. Refusing to accept his defeat, the father follows the boy inside the house and demands another game; walking up the stairs right behind the boy, he tries to goad him by bouncing the ball, hard, off the boy’s head and calling him “my sweetest little girl.” This is the only sequence that hits home, though. Adapted from Pat Conroy’s autobiographical novel The Great Santini, the movie is set in 1962 in Beaufort, South Carolina, where Conroy grew up, but (as written for the screen and directed by Lewis John Carlino) it takes place in the TV land of predictability—that plain of dowdy realism where a boy finds his manhood by developing the courage to stick to his principles and stand up to his father. Almost inevitably, since this is the South, the principles involve friendship with a saintly black (Stan Shaw), who is crippled and has a stammer, or at least a hesitation, and is martyred by redneck stupidity and cruelty. With Blythe Danner, who comes close to creating a believable woman out of an idealized mother figure, and brings in shadings that help to suggest a real family, though she doesn’t have a single scene that is really hers. Also with Lisa Jane Persky as the family comic, Theresa Merritt as the housekeeper, David Keith as the redneck so mean he shoots the black’s dawg, and Paul Mantee. Music by Elmer Bernstein. A Bing Crosby Production; released by Orion Pictures. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

The Great Train Robbery (1979)—Handsome re-creations of mid-Victorian England. The year is 1855, and Sean Connery plays a thief who masquerades as a wealthy businessman in order to plan the theft of gold bullion that is being shipped by train to pay the British troops in the Crimea; the film is a fictionalized version of what, according to Michael Crichton, who directed, and adapted from his own novel, was the first train robbery. There’s a total absence of personal obsession—even moviemaking obsession—in the way Crichton works; he never excites us emotionally or imaginatively, but the film has a satisfying, tame luxuriousness, like a super episode of “Masterpiece Theatre.” With Lesley-Anne Down, Donald Sutherland, Alan Webb, Gabrielle Lloyd as his daughter, Malcolm Terris as a bank manager, Robert Lang as a Scotland Yard inspector, Pamela Salem, and Wayne Sleep. Cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)—100% pure-plastic adolescent male fantasy. It’s set in the 20s, with Robert Redford as a First World War aviator who spends time barnstorming in the Midwest and then goes to Hollywood, where he lives out his dream of fighting the No. 1 Imperial German ace. Scene after scene ends with a snapper. William Goldman’s cold-hearted, clever script and the cool, fresh-painted storytelling of the director, George Roy Hill, almost amount to a style: total inauthenticity. With Susan Sarandon, Bo Svenson, Bo Brundin, Geoffrey Lewis, Margot Kidder, Edward Herrmann, Philip Bruns, and Roderick Cook. Cinematography by Robert Surtees. Universal. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Great Waltz (1938)—The passion of Johann Strauss according to M-G-M. Fernand Gravet—talented enough in French films—seems horror-stricken and depressed as Strauss, and Luise Rainer, as his sniffling, suffering wife, and the soprano Miliza Korjus, as the other woman, are not exactly cures for melancholia. A big, overdressed bore, directed by Julien Duvivier, with musical arrangements by Dmitri Tiomkin. There’s a great howler of a sequence in which Strauss, riding in a carriage with Korjus, hears the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves, hunters’ horns, and the chirping of the birds, and he composes “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” which she proceeds to sing. The cast includes Lionel Atwill, Herman Bing, Hugh Herbert, Minna Gombell, Henry Hull, and Curt Bois. The script is by Walter Reisch and Samuel Hof-fenstein, from Gottfried Reinhardt’s story. b & w

 

The Great Waltz (1972)—Written and directed by Andrew L. Stone, the foremost primitive at work in the musical form. (This is not a compliment.) An atrocity, with Horst Buchholz as Johann Strauss. Also with Mary Costa, Rossano Brazzi, Yvonne Mitchell, and Nigel Patrick. The choreography is by Onna White. M-G-M. color

 

The Great White Hope (1970)—How a black prizefighter (James Earl Jones) is brought down because of white men’s fear of the strength of blacks. Martin Ritt’s big, noisy production clunks along like a disjointed play; it defeats Jones, and along the way it also inadvertently exposes the clobber-them-with-guilt tactics of the dramatist, Howard Sackler. When it was done on the stage did audiences really accept the beware-the-ides-of-March doom crier and the rag-doll-Ophelia finish of the heroine? In the movie, all this grandiosity makes you squirm. Based on the life of Jack Johnson (called Jack Jefferson here). With Jane Alexander and Lou Gilbert. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Great Ziegfeld (1936)—William Powell plays Ziegfeld, and the two Mrs. Ziegfelds are played by Myrna Loy, as Billie Burke, and Luise Rainer, as Anna Held. Fanny Brice is herself, though she isn’t on screen enough to vitalize this lavish, tedious musical biography; it goes on for a whopping 3 hours, but through some insane editing decision she’s cut off in the middle of singing “My Man.” Inexplicably, this thing won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Rainer, who did her heartbreak specialty—smiling through tears and looking irresistibly fragile—was given the Best Actress award. With Ray Bolger, who has a few redemptive moments, and Gilda Gray, Harriet Hoctor, Frank Morgan, Reginald Owen, William Demarest, Leon Errol, Stanley Morner (who became the singing star Dennis Morgan, though here his “Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” is dubbed by Allan Jones), and Virginia Bruce, who gets glorified to the tune of “You Never Looked So Beautiful Before.” Directed by Robert Z. Leonard, from a script by William Anthony McGuire, who had worked for Ziegfeld, as had the set designer, John Harkrider, and the choreographer, Seymour Felix. Produced by Hunt Stromberg, for M-G-M. b & w

 

The Greatest Question (1919)—Lillian Gish has said that she can’t remember working on this one, and probably D. W. Griffith wanted to forget it, too. The rural surroundings are lovely, but the story is about Miss Gish’s being saved from rape, with Robert Harron coming to the rescue this time, and there are also a mother communicating with her son after his death, a ghost appearing at midnight in answer to a prayer, and, as the capper, the discovery of oil—provided by a kind Lord. Griffith seems to have got into this potboiling mess because of the interest in spiritualism that Sir Oliver Lodge had just stirred up. Silent. b & w

 

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)—A huge, mawkish, trite circus movie directed by Cecil B. De Mille in a neo-Biblical style. It suggests that the rivalry and love affairs of a couple of trapeze artists (Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde), an assistant (Gloria Grahame) to an elephant trainer, the circus manager (Charlton Heston), and a clown (James Stewart) are awesome. Life under this particular big top is also awesomely clean and awesomely melodramatic; Stewart isn’t just a clown—he’s a doctor who has disguised himself as a clown. Also with Dorothy Lamour, Lyle Bettger, Henry Wilcoxon, Lawrence Tierney, Emmett Kelly, and John Ringling North. This cornball enterprise won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Paramount. color

 

The Greeks Had a Word for Them Also known as Three Broadway Girls. (1932)—An enormously likable sophisticated comedy about three gold-diggers, played by Madge Evans, Joan Blondell, and the great sophisticate herself—Ina Claire. This is one of the few movies in which she was able to show some of the tricky high style that made her the most fashionable stage comedienne of her time. The three actresses play contrasting types: Madge Evans is the elegant and tasteful one; Joan Blondell is, of course, good-humored and wisecracking; and Ina Claire is naughty and determined—she sets out to tantalize a man by going out in a fur coat with nothing worn under it. With David Manners, and Lowell Sherman, who also directed. Sidney Howard wrote the adaptation of Zoe Akins’ play, The Greeks Had a Word for It. Produced by Samuel Goldwyn, for United Artists. b & w

 

Green Dolphin Street (1947)—The actors in this stupefyingly flimsy epic seem to be in competition for booby prizes. Richard Hart is the New Zealander who gets stewed and doesn’t remember whether the girl who took his fancy on an island off the Newfoundland coast was named Marianne or Marguerite. He writes to Marianne (Lana Turner), proposing marriage, although it was her sister, Marguerite (Donna Reed), he wanted; when Marianne arrives he marries her, and Marguerite, naturally upset, hies off to a nunnery. The married couple raise sheep, reproduce, go through a fierce earthquake, and almost get killed when the Maoris go on an anti-Caucasian rampage; fortunately the couple have an influential pal (Van Heflin) who sees to it that the aborigines keep their distance. Adapted from a piece of unleavened dough kneaded into a best-selling novel by Elizabeth Goudge, and directed by Victor Saville, from Samson Raphaelson’s script. Also with Edmund Gwenn. M-G-M. b & w

 

Green for Danger (1946)—Alastair Sim, as Inspector Cockrill of Scotland Yard, uses humor, ingenuity, and skill to solve a batch of murders among a group of doctors and nurses. This suspense comedy is almost a classic of its pleasant, minor genre: you meet the characters, learn that one of them is going to kill two of the others, and you spend an hour and a half guessing. The director, Sidney Gilliat, shows a neat light touch. With Trevor Howard, Leo Genn, Rosamund John, and Sally Gray. From Christianna Brand’s novel, adapted by Gilliat and Claud Gurney; produced by Launder and Gilliat. b & w

 

The Green Light (1937)—An inspirational movie, based on a Lloyd C. Douglas novel. As a man of God, Cedric Hardwicke wears white hair and pious expressions; he dominates the film by the sheer awfulness of his performance. The hero, Errol Flynn, is so noble that only Anita Louise could play opposite him. (Nobody else would look pure enough.) He’s a doctor who is inspired by the spirituality of a dying patient (Spring Byington); he risks everything to develop a serum to combat spotted fever. The director, Frank Borzage, actually got by with this sickly uplift. With Margaret Lindsay, Henry O’Neill, Walter Abel, and Erin O’Brien-Moore. The script is by Milton Krims; the music is by Max Steiner. Hal B. Wallis produced, for Cosmopolitan Productions; released by Warners. b & w

 

The Green Man (1956)—Alastair Sim is so limpid of eye, so arch in speech, and so gentle, unctuous, and tragic of demeanor, that he suggests the modern epitome of agonized courtesy: the undertaker. In this macabre farce, he is cast just one jump away: as an assassin with the soul of an aesthete. It’s unlikely that anybody in the history of movies has ever matched Sim’s peculiar feat of flipping expressions from benign innocence to bloodcurdling menace in one devastating instant. As the assassin, he dispatches an assortment of expendable types: headmasters, businessmen, dictators, et al., but gets snarled up while trying to liquidate a distasteful cabinet minister. The picture isn’t genteel: it has the virtues of English comedy combined with the more energetic style of satirical American comedy—it makes you laugh out loud. With George Cole, Terry-Thomas, Jill Adams, Dora Bryan, Raymond Huntley, and a string trio of ladies right out of a George Price cartoon. Written by the producers, Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, from their play, Meet a Body; directed by Robert Day. b & w

 

The Green Pastures (1936)—The Angel Gabriel calls, “Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!” and then, more humbly, “Ten cent seegar, Lawd?” In this pop-folk fantasy of the Old Testament stories as a Negro child in the South (of an earlier period) might imagine them, Southern idiom, delicious fish fries, and naive theology are fused with awe and wonder. Marc Connelly’s adaptation of Roark Bradford’s stories was perhaps the most famous and most popular of Negro stage productions; the screen version (which was also successful) was directed by William Keighley and Connelly, with Rex Ingram as De Lawd, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and Oscar Polk; the music is by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Warners. b & w

 

The Greene Murder Case (1929)—William Powell again as Philo Vance, in the second of the films based on S. S. Van Dine mysteries; it’s tolerably enjoyable, which puts it way ahead of the book (published in 1928). The Greenes are an unlucky, hateful family who live in a big mansion on the East River; despite Philo Vance’s best efforts, there are fewer of them at the end of the picture than there were at the start. With Jean Arthur, Florence Eldridge, Eugene Pallette, E. H. Calvert, Gertrude Norman, Ullrich Haupt, Lowell Drew, Brandon Hurst, and Shep Camp. Directed by Frank Tuttle; the writers were Louise Long, Bartlett Cormack, and Richard H. Digges. Paramount. b & w

 

The Greengage Summer, see Loss of Innocence

 

Greetings (1968)—A pleasantly tawdry mixture of an underground film, a skin-flick, and a college revue, with a draft-evader hero and good-humored, casually obscene performances from a whole gallery of talented actors, including Robert De Niro, Jonathan Warden, Gerrit Graham, and Allen Garfield. Directed, edited, and co-written by Brian De Palma, who made it on a shoestring of less than $40,000, and in color. The other writer was Charles Hirsch, who was also the producer; cinematography by Robert Fiore.

 

Gremlins (1984)—The director Joe Dante has the sensibility of a freaked-out greeting-card poet. This whimsical pop shocker is set in a sleepy small town at Christmastime. The hero Billy (Zach Galligan), a young bank teller, is given a mogwai—a tiny creature who nests in a box and makes gentle cooing sounds; when the instructions that Billy is given for its care are inadvertently disobeyed, the mogwai multiplies, and its progeny turn into greedy, demonic little gargoyles. The picture is a black humorist’s parody of Steven Spielberg’s E.T.—a demonstration that the underside of E.T. is like the monster in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Billy’s mogwai is a good child; the other mogwai are its aggressively vulgar, beer-guzzling brothers—children of the night. When one of them blows his snout on a drape, he’s like Jean Renoir’s Boudu expressing his contempt for bourgeois life by wiping his shoes on a bedspread. These demons are like bad pets making messes. The movie never comes together, but Dante is a genuine eccentric talent with a flair for malice, and it’s certainly clear why Spielberg, whose production company made the film, believes in him—there are some crack sequences. At one point the lewd hipster dragons take over the town movie theatre, where Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is playing; they pad up and down the aisles, eating, laughing, tearing up the place. And when the Seven Dwarfs on the screen start to sing “Heigh-Ho,” they join in the singing. In their enthusiasm, they spin around on the projectors, and rip the screen to shreds. It’s a delirious, kitschy travesty—a kiddy matinee in Hell. With Frances Lee McCain as Billy’s mother, Polly Holliday as the town’s Wicked Witch–Scrooge, Dick Miller as the town drunk, and Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton, Keye Luke, Glynn Turman, Judge Reinhold, Edward Andrews, and Chuck Jones as Mr. Jones. Written by Chris Columbus; the critters were designed by Chris Walas. (A sequel, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, was released in 1990.) Warners. color (See State of the Art.)

 

The Grey Fox (1983)—The story of a legendary gentleman bandit, Bill Miner (Richard Farnsworth), who served 33 years in San Quentin for robbing stagecoaches and then, when he got out, took up robbing trains. There may never have been photographs of trains more exultant than the shots here of the old Northern Pacific steaming through mountain forests. This first feature, directed by the Canadian Phillip Borsos at 27, after a number of highly regarded documentaries, has spectacular work by the British cinematographer Frank Tidy; the images are dense and ceremonious, and the picture has the most lovingly photographed rain since McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Farnsworth is a superb camera subject, with a lulling sexual presence, and he and Jackie Burroughs, who plays a red-haired suffragette, do some highly photogenic flirting. The movie is like the book Wisconsin Death Trip with a romantic bandit at its center. Robbery here is the only honorable profession for a man with Bill Miner’s courtliness and sense of style. Borsos appears to have a dandy’s approach to crime and social injustice, but he’s an inspired image-maker, and the film manages to be an art Western without making you hate it. Based on a script by John Hunter that stays fairly close to the historical accounts and leaves a lot of gaps—we never find out how Miner, who’d been in prison most of his life, became a civilized, sensitive man and a lover who admired a flamboyant, free-thinking woman. With Wayne Robson as the little boozer Shorty. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984)—The director Hugh Hudson brings his unique mixture of pomposity and ineptitude to this expensively mounted version of the Edgar Rice Burroughs material. The first half, in the jungle, is fairly absorbing; the actors playing the apes are very well made up (so that each has distinguishing features), and they comport themselves convincingly. But it’s unlikely that anyone will ever congratulate Hudson for seamless moviemaking. When he sets something up, chances are there won’t be any follow-through. Men who look like villains appear and are never seen again; the hero is given portentous advice that never has any application. After a while you lose that sense of expectation which is one of the glories of big adventure films. And Hudson has his child Tarzan experiencing so much physical torment and humiliation—the apes are constantly batting him around—that young kids are likely to be horrified. From infancy to adulthood, this Tarzan is more sufferer than hero. The young Frenchman Christopher Lambert, who plays the adult, has a fine physique—muscular yet graceful—but he’s a charmless, unmagnetic Tarzan; he’s never allowed to be playful. The only performer who clearly enjoys himself is that old prankster, Ralph Richardson, in his last screen appearance, as Tarzan’s grandfather, Lord Greystoke; he comes up with one emotional flourish after another. In the film’s second half, Hudson twists the story into knots in order to deliver his “statement” that apes are more civilized than people; the movie simply loses its mind, and dribbles to a pathetically indecisive conclusion. Andie MacDowell is a softly enticing Jane, and Nigel Davenport makes a strong visual impression as a gun-happy British major. Also with Ian Holm, James Fox, Ian Charleson, Paul Geoffrey, and Cheryl Campbell. The first script, by Robert Towne, was trimmed and rewritten by Michael Austin. (Towne uses a pseudonym in the credits—P. H. Vazak, the kennel name of the dog he loved, who died.) The cinematography is by John Alcott. Warners. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Il Grido (1957)—Just before his international breakthrough with L’Avventura, Antonioni made this flawed yet affecting, mournful, wintry film about the neurotic apathy of a working-class man. It’s poetic without being believable. The American actor Steve Cochran plays Aldo, a skilled worker in a sugar refinery; when the woman he has been living with (Alida Valli) no longer wants him, he falls into a numb despair and wanders around with his small daughter. He meets other women, but they don’t make enough impression on him for him to get a grip on life. Without the moneyed decadence of the characters in Antonioni’s later films, the atmospheric gloom seems less chic, more purely depressive. Set in the muddy Po Valley. With Betsy Blair, Dorian Gray, and Lyn Shaw. In Italian. b & w

 

The Groove Tube (1974)—Inoffensively scatological revue, lampooning TV, Kubrick’s 2001, and American culture. About half of the grungy, manic skits are very funny; the others might have been funny, too, if their timing had been better. At the end, the talented director and star, Ken Shapiro, does a lovely, flaked-out dance through rush-hour crowds along Park Avenue. With Chevy Chase, Richard Belzer, Buzzy Linhart, Christine Nazareth; and Lane Sarasohn, who also wrote the material, with Shapiro; animation by Linda Taylor and Pat O’Neill. Made for $400,000; it started as a video-theatre entertainment. color

 

The Group (1966)—Sidney Lumet turns Mary McCarthy’s novel about the Vassar girls of ’33 into a carelessly busy, likable, energetic film. In the big cast are Joan Hackett, Shirley Knight, Joanna Pettet, Elizabeth Hartman, Candice Bergen, Kathleen Widdoes, Mary-Robin Redd, Carrie Nye, Jessica Walter, James Broderick, Larry Hagman, Richard Mulligan, Robert Emhardt, and Hal Holbrook. The script is by Sidney Buchman; cinematography by Boris Kaufman. United Artists. color (See Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.)

 

Groupies (1970)—The baby rock-band molls here are a spooky bunch of junior hookers and hardened name-droppers. Because of their extreme youth, brazen parasitism, and specialized shallowness, they’re fascinating; they’re gutsy little girls, but like all hangers-on, they’re depressing. The subject is so good that this documentary holds one’s speculative interest even though the crew didn’t bring much skill or depth to the project. Directed by Ron Dorfman and Peter Nevard. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Gruppo di Famiglia in un Interno, see Conversation Piece

 

The Guardsman (1931)—More like a photographed play than a movie adaptation, but a memento of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne at work; they appear to be having a wonderful time mugging and grinning. They play an acting couple, and for a good part of the film the jealous husband (in disguise from his flirtatious wife) wears something stuck under his lower lip, which gives him a beefy, puffed-out-jaw that is irresistibly ridiculous. Sidney Franklin directed this early-talkie version of the Ferenc Molnar play, which Lunt and Fontanne had done on Broadway in 1924. (In 1941 it was turned into a movie musical, The Chocolate Soldier.) The cast includes Roland Young as a critic, Ann Dvorak as a fan, ZaSu Pitts, Maude Eburne, and Herman Bing. The adaptation is by Ernest Vajda and Claudine West. M-G-M. b & w

 

La Guerre des boutons Generals Without Buttons (1938)—This polished little parable on man’s folly used to be considered a film classic, but it’s the sort of classic that makes you yawn. The children of Longeverne pray for rain to ripen their cabbages; their neighbors, the children of Valrans, pray for sunshine to ripen their grapes. The dispute is bitter and the children organize for battle, with heroes, sacrifices, and all the accoutrements of war except the longed-for buttons of real generals. Jacques Daroy directed, using a mixture of professional and nonprofessional children, as well as Jean Murat and Saturnin Fabre. From the novel by Louis Pergand. (Remade by Yves Robert in 1961.) In French. b & w

 

La Guerre est finie (1966)—Yves Montand as the Spaniard Diego, a professional (i.e., paid) revolutionary, a courier in the Communist underground, who goes on stoically carrying out policies he knows are futile. Alain Resnais directed this attempt at an elegy on the themes of exile and of living on old ideals—living in the past. The courier is like a weary commuter who has been through it all so many times that he can see what’s coming; past and future are one. It’s easy to satirize force of habit—as W. C. Fields demonstrated when he blew the head off an ice-cream soda. But Resnais, although he allows most of Diego’s associates to appear ridiculous, protects Diego very tenderly. He isn’t presented as a Party hack or a tool—he’s noble. His melancholy is glamourized, and when he goes to bed with his mistress (Ingrid Thulin) he has such high-quality sex that we actually hear the soprano vocalizing of a heavenly choir. The film, from a script by Jorge Sem-prun, is ambivalent and smooth and chic, with an overexposed semi-abstract sex scene between Diego and a pouting kitten (Genevieve Bujold) and anticipatory flash-forwards. The political material has been subjected to the French equivalent of Holly-woodization; it’s soaked in romantic defeatism, in existentialism used decoratively to make a hero of a numb, apathetic man. With Michel Piccoli, Jean Daste, Bernard Fresson, and Jean Bouise. In French. b & w (See Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.)

 

A Guide for the Married Man (1967)—A series of dumb skits on how to cheat on your wife. It’s hard to know what’s more tiresome about this picture: the camera’s fixation on bottoms (and on bosoms that look like bottoms), or the this-movie-is-moral-after-all finish, with the common man at the higher income level (Walter Matthau) deciding he loves his wife too much to be unfaithful after all. There are a few pleasant pantomime bits by Art Carney and Ben Blue. Directed by Gene Kelly, from a script by Frank Tarloff. The cast includes Robert Morse, Lucille Ball, Phil Silvers, Carl Reiner, Jack Benny, Inger Stevens, Sid Caesar, Terry-Thomas, Wally Cox, Jayne Mansfield, Sue Ane Langdon, and many others; what they do is no more memorable than the plugs for brand-name products that are scattered throughout. 20th Century-Fox. color

 

Gun Crazy Originally called Deadly Is the Female. (1949)—Peggy Cummins and John Dall in a tawdry version of the Bonnie and Clyde story. Cummins is a really mean broad, whose partner is her desperately eager victim. In its B-picture way, it has a fascinating crumminess. With Morris Carnovsky, Berry Kroeger, Annabel Shaw, and Don Beddoe. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, from a screenplay based on MacKinlay Kantor’s SatEvePost story, and credited to Kantor and Millard Kaufman. Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted at the time, later revealed that he wrote the script and persuaded Kaufman to let his name be used. Produced by Frank and Maurice King; released by United Artists. b & w

 

Gunga Din (1939)—One of the most enjoyable nonsense-adventure movies of all time—full of slapstick and heroism and high spirits. R K O intended to make one of those trouble-in-the-colonies films, and it was supposedly to be “inspired” by the Rudyard Kipling poem. Howard Hawks was set to direct; he brought in Hecht and MacArthur, who stole the plot of their own The Front Page and threw some wonderful hokum together. Then Hawks brought in William Faulkner for some rewriting. R K O soon decided that the project was becoming too expensive, got rid of Hawks, and put George Stevens, who was under contract, in charge. Stevens brought in Fred Guiol, a gagwriting buddy from Stevens’ Laurel & Hardy days, and at some point Joel Sayre also did some rewriting. The result of these combined labors is a unique pastiche—exhilarating in an unself-consciously happy, silly way. The stars are a rousing trio: Cary Grant, having the time of his life as a clowning roughneck; the dapper, gentlemanly Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; and the eternal vulgarian, Victor McLaglen. Who has forgotten Eduardo Ciannelli in dark makeup as some sort of mad high priest, or Sam Jaffe as Gunga Din, the essence, the soul of loyalty? Who remembers Joan Fontaine as the pallid and proper heroine? With Abner Biberman, Montagu Love, Cecil Kellaway, Lumsden Hare, and Robert Coote. The superb cinematography is by Joseph H. August; the art direction is by Van Nest Polglase; the music is by Alfred Newman. b & w (See When the Lights Go Down).

 

Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969)—The third of three cowboys-and-bandits movies based on Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai; the other two—The Magnificent Seven of 1960 and Return of the Seven of 1966—starred Yul Brynner as Chris. This time George Kennedy, normally and literally a heavy, is the noble Chris. Trying to play a nice fellow seems way beyond his range here, and his attempts at athleticism make the John Wayne of True Grit seem a model of agility. The miscasting is only the first mistake of this movie: from there you can take your pick of watching people being trampled to death or twitching to death. Paul Wendkos directed this shambles, set in Mexico, shot in Spain. With James Whitmore, Monte Markham, Bernie Casey, Reni Santoni, Joe Don Baker, and Frank Silvera. United Artists. color

 

Guys and Dolls (1955)—Samuel Goldwyn’s big, beribboned version of the Broadway musical which Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows took from Damon Runyon’s stories about lovable lowlifes, with a score by Frank Loesser. The director-scenarist Joseph L. Mankiewicz seems to have fallen in love with Damon Runyon’s cute, stilted locutions; the camera stands still while the actors mince through lines like “This is no way for a gentleman to act and could lead to irritation on the part of Harry the Horse.” Frank Sinatra is the crap-game proprietor who bets Marlon Brando that he can’t lure straitlaced Jean Simmons, a mission worker, into going to Havana with him. Sinatra sings pleasantly, and Brando and Simmons are ingratiatingly uneasy when they burst into song and dance, but the movie is extended and rather tedious. The Broadway version is legendary; the movie provides no clue as to why. With Vivian Blaine, Stubby Kaye, Sheldon Leonard, and the Goldwyn Girls. Michael Kidd did the choreography, Oliver Smith the self-conscious sets. M-G-M. color

 

Gycklarnas Afton, see The Naked Night

 

Gypsy (1962)—An extremely unpleasant version of the Broadway musical based on Gypsy Rose Lee’s memoirs. Rosalind Russell is the psychopathic stage mother who uses and destroys everyone within reach of her excruciatingly loud voice. Natalie Wood (almost pitifully miscast) is the daughter Russell rants at, and Karl Malden gets it, too. Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim wrote the songs. Mervyn LeRoy’s direction is heavy and coarse, and the script (by Leonard Spigelgass, from the Arthur Laurents play) and the other credits match. With Ann Jillian as Baby June, and an unbilled appearance by Jack Benny. (Rosalind Russell’s songs were partially dubbed by Lisa Kirk.) Warners. color

 

Gypsy Wildcat (1944)—One more celebration of the wriggling topography of Maria Montez and the manly opacity of Jon Hall. In earlier pairings, Montez and Hall made contact at the bottom of a swimming pool and on a desert; this time they snuggle in a Transylvanian forest. She is the gypsy dancer, Carla, taken captive by the lewd villain, Douglass Dumbrille, before being restored to her rightful title (Countess) and her castle. The picture tries hard but it never rises to the wild camp of her Cobra Woman earlier that year; it’s just opéra bouffe without music. With Gale Sondergaard, Leo Carrillo, Curt Bois, and Nigel Bruce. Directed by Roy William Neill, from a script that James M. Cain had a hand in. Produced by George Waggner. (Neill and Waggner were given parody homage in the 1981 The Howling.) Universal. color