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Lacombe, Lucien (1974)—About a boy who has an empty space where feelings beyond the purely instinctual are expected to be. The time is 1944, and the boy—a French peasant—goes to work each day hunting down and torturing people for the Gestapo. The director, Louis Malle, casts as Lucien a teenage country boy (Pierre Blaise) who can respond to events with his own innocence, apathy, and animal shrewdness. Malle’s gamble is that the cameras will discover what the artist’s imagination can’t, and, steadily, startlingly, the gamble pays off. Without ever mentioning the subject of innocence and guilt, this extraordinary film, in its calm, dispassionate way, addresses it on a very deep level. With Aurore Clement as a Parisian Jewish girl; Holger Löwenadler as her punctilious, cultivated father; Thérèse Giehse as her grandmother; Gilberte Rivet as the boy’s mother; Stephane Bouy; and Jacques Rispal. The script is by Malle and Patrick Modiano. In French. color (See Reeling.)

 

Ladies in Retirement (1941)—An entertainingly hokey murder chiller on the stage, but not very successfully adapted to the screen. With Charles Vidor directing, this lonely-rural-cottage gothic seems to take itself too seriously, as if it were really a psychological study. Ida Lupino works hard as a severe, plain-faced murderess, Isobel Elsom sips her wine and nibbles her bonbons as the woman who innocently befriends her, and Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barrett are Lupino’s loony sisters, who stuff their neat rooms with their collections of crows’ feathers, dead birds, and underbrush. From the play by Reginald Denham and Edward Percy; with Louis Hayward. Columbia. b & w

 

Ladies of Leisure (1930)—Though she came from the theatre, Barbara Stanwyck seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the fluid physical movements that work best on camera; perhaps she had been an unusually “natural” actress even onstage. This was her first big hit in the movies. Under Frank Capra’s direction, she plays a tough “party” girl (euphemism for call girl) who poses for a wealthy young artist (Ralph Graves); he sees in her the spirituality that she attempts to deny. The story is a museum piece of early-talkies sentimentality, but, in a way, that only emphasizes Stanwyck’s remarkable modernism. With Marie Prevost, Lowell Sherman, Juliette Compton, and Nance O’Neil. Beautifully lighted by the cinematographer, Joseph Walker. Columbia. b & w

 

Ladri di Biciclette, see The Bicycle Thief

 

Lady Be Good (1941)—A dispensable plot about the tribulations of a married song-writing team, but some classic numbers by the Gershwins (“Fascinating Rhythm,” “Hang on to Me,” and the great title song) and by Arthur Freed and Roger Edens (“You’ll Never Know”) as well as the slightly sickening Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern effort, “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” The cast includes Red Skelton, Ann Sothern, Eleanor Powell, Virginia O’Brien, Robert Young, Dan Dailey, Phil Silvers, Lionel Barrymore, and Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra. Norman Z. McLeod directed; the choreography is by Busby Berkeley. Based (very remotely) on a 1924 Broadway show. M-G-M. b & w

 

Lady Caroline Lamb (1973)—Robert Bolt, directing for the first time, thrashes about from one style and point of view to another. The film seems to have been made by a square Ken Russell; Bolt tries for romantic excess, but he can’t get anything warmed up. His Caroline Lamb is an hysterical fool but also a misunderstood free spirit struggling against a hypocritical society—a sort of Regency Zelda. Sarah Miles acts like a dizzy shopgirl dreaming of being a great lady, and falling flat even in her dreams; as Byron, Richard Chamberlain scowls and sneers. With Jon Finch as Lamb; Margaret Leighton as his mother; Laurence Olivier as Wellington; and Ralph Richardson as the King. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Lady Eve (1941)—A frivolous masterpiece. Like Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve is a mixture of visual and verbal slapstick, and of high artifice and pratfalls. Barbara Stanwyck keeps sticking out a sensational leg, and Henry Fonda keeps tripping over it. She’s a cardsharp, and he’s a millionaire scientist who knows more about snakes than about women; neither performer has ever been funnier. The film, based on a story by Monckton Hoffe, and with screenplay and direction by Preston Sturges, is full of classic moments and classic lines; it represents the dizzy high point of Sturges’s comedy writing. With Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette, William Demarest, and Eric Blore. (Remade as a musical in 1956—The Birds and the Bees.) Paramount. b & w

 

Lady in the Dark (1944)—Monstrously overproduced musical about the Oedipal hangups and sexual frustrations of a fashion-magazine editor (Ginger Rogers), whose problems are solved when she stops wearing the pants—i.e., gives up her job to a man (Ray Milland). The content is insulting to women; the form is insulting to audiences of both sexes. It’s a real botch. Directed by Mitchell Leisen; adapted from Moss Hart’s Broadway show, with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. With Jon Hall, Warner Baxter, Mischa Auer, Barry Sullivan, Mary Philips, and Don Loper. Paramount. color

 

Lady in the Lake (1947)—A Raymond Chandler murder mystery with the camera functioning as the Private Eye—that is, as the eyes of Philip Marlowe, the narrator-protagonist (Robert Montgomery), who is seen in his entirety only when his reflection is caught in mirrors. This novelty is a nuisance, and is frustrating besides, since Montgomery (who also directed) is the only star; the plot isn’t involving enough to compensate for the absence of star byplay. At one point, the face of Audrey Totter, the feminine lead, comes swimming out at you, lips ajar, as if to honor you with a great big kiss; then she’s lost in shadows. That’s about as close as you get to any fun. With Lloyd Nolan, Leon Ames, and Jayne Meadows. M-G-M. b & w

 

Lady in White (1988)—This ghost movie has an overcomplicated plot, but it has a poetic feeling that makes up for much of the clutter. And its amateurishness often adds to its effectiveness—gives the movie a naive power. It’s a piece of Catholic Americana with a Disney-Spielberg ingenuousness and shafts of horror. Lukas Haas plays the 9-year-old Frankie Scarlatti, who dreams of his dead mother; on Halloween, 1962, he’s locked in the school cloakroom and sees the ghost of a little girl who was murdered by a serial killer. The editing is patchy, and the writer-director Frank LaLoggia, who also composed the score, lingers on actors in a way that exposes their limitations (and his inexperience), but little Lukas Haas has no problem. He loves acting so much that when he’s miming spooked terror he’s tickled to be doing it. As he plays Frankie, the boy’s rapt belief in his visions lends credibility to the events. You get a sense that the horrors that beset him relate to his mother’s having died—that the story has (underdeveloped) psychological roots. And there are visual and nostalgic touches that charm you. The location shooting was done in the upstate New York town of Lyons, near Rochester, where LaLoggia was born. With Jason Presson, who’s amiable as the older brother, and Alex Rocco, Len Cariou, Katherine Helmond, and Jared Rushton. color (See Hooked.)

 

The Lady Is Willing (1942)—Marlene Dietrich, excruciatingly miscast, as an actress who adopts a baby and marries a pediatrician (Fred MacMurray); the baby has a mastoid operation just as she is opening in a new show. Hatted by John-Frederics, Dietrich simpers and suffers; every nuance is inane. Mitchell Leisen directed, in a spirit of hopelessness, from a script by James Edward Grant and Albert McCleery. With Aline MacMahon, Arline Judge, and Stanley Ridges. Columbia. b & w

 

Lady of Burlesque (1943)—Gypsy Rose Lee’s murder-mystery novel, The G-String Murders, cleaned up, and burlesque as an institution considerably tamed. The movie has scenes in which burlesque audiences are stimulated into raucous excitement by the sight of girls clothed practically to the stifling point. Barbara Stanwyck’s bumps and grinds are communicated via her face and a few percussion sounds, but she acts with a hard realism that suggests something of the milieu, and Michael O’Shea, who plays opposite her, has a relaxed show-biz authenticity. With J. Edward Bromberg, Iris Adrian, Marion Martin, Gloria Dickson, Pinky Lee, Frank Conroy, and Frank Fenton. Considering how few of Gypsy Rose Lee’s racy bits are actually left, the director, William Wellman, does a good job of simulating raciness. United Artists. b & w

 

Lady on a Train (1945)—Ugh. A murder mystery that starts from a Leslie Charteris story but never gets anyplace you’d want to go to. Made in the period when the former child star Deanna Durbin was turning into a fairly substantial young matron, the film casts her as a girl who witnesses a murder from a train that is nearing Grand Central and who becomes involved with the friends and relatives of the victim, as well as with a mystery-story writer. (Has that gimmick ever worked?) The film betrays an obvious uncertainty about how the public wants to see its Deanna. One minute she is just a little girl in pigtails lost in a great big raincoat, and the next minute she is a many-curved siren crooning “Give Me a Little Kiss, Will You, Huh?” in a strange, guttural manner evidently intended to suggest that passion has got a stranglehold on her. The cameraman photographs her from so many angles that at any particular moment it’s hard to know whether she’s standing up or lying down. Charles David directed; with Ralph Bellamy, Edward Everett Horton, George Coulouris, Dan Duryea, David Bruce, Allen Jenkins, and Patricia Morison. The script is by Edmund Beloin and Robert O’Brien. Universal. b & w

 

Lady Sings the Blues (1972)—The chemistry of pop vulgarization is all-powerful here; factually, this life of Billie Holiday is a fraud, but emotionally it delivers. That great, dizzy imp Diana Ross gives herself to the role with an all-out physicality that wins the audience over. Regrettably, she sings too much like Billie Holiday, and the songs blur one’s memories. Sidney J. Furie directed. With Richard Pryor as Piano Man, and Billy Dee Williams. Released by Paramount. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Lady Vanishes (1938)—Alfred Hitchcock’s murder mystery about a fussy, jolly old lady who boards a train and disappears on it is directed with such skill and velocity that it has come to represent the quintessence of screen suspense. It provides some of the finest examples of Hitchcock touches—little shocks and perversities of editing and detail. The hero is played by a tall, callow young man making his first major film appearance—Michael Redgrave; the heroine is Margaret Lockwood, and the lady is Dame May Whitty. With Paul Lukas, Cecil Parker, Margaretta Scott, Catherine Lacey, Mary Clare, Linden Travers, Googie Withers, and the team of Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford doing a parody of the “jolly-good-show” type of Britisher. Screenplay by Sidney Gilliat, Frank Launder, and Alma Reville, based on the novel The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White. (A 1979 remake with Elliott Gould, Cybill Shepherd, and Angela Lansbury is good-natured but totally flat; the director, Anthony Page, doesn’t seem to have an instinct for the thriller form.) b & w

 

Ladyhawke (1985)—Set in the Middle Ages, it’s about the romance between Princess Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer) and the noble Navarre (Rutger Hauer), which is cursed by an evil sorcerer-bishop (John Wood). Each sunrise, Isabeau turns into a hawk; each sundown, Navarre turns into a black wolf. The settings and accoutrements have grandeur; just about everything connected with the movie is big except the storytelling instinct of its director, Richard Donner. At almost every point where we might expect a little ping of surprise or mystery, Donner lets us down. It’s a limp and dreary movie. The lovers are helped by a boy thief, played by Matthew Broderick, who is like a contemporary urban-American adolescent placed in medieval France—the effect is something like putting, say, a boy Woody Allen at Robert Taylor’s elbow in Ivanhoe. The device doesn’t feel integral and the boy is made too endearing and impish, yet even when Broderick’s lines are irritating, this happy, ingenious young actor isn’t. Put up on the screen for comic relief, he has more of a fairy-tale quality than anyone else. With Leo McKern as the swillbelly priest, and Ken Hutchinson. The overly fastidious script, which lifts its climax from Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, is by Edward Khmara, Michael Thomas, and Tom Mankiewicz; the cinematography is by Vittorio Storaro; the disco-medieval music is by Andrew Powell. Warners. color (See State of the Art.)

 

The Ladykillers (1956)—This sinister black comedy of murder accelerates until it becomes a grotesque fantasy of murder. The actors seem to be having a boisterous good time getting themselves knocked off. Alec Guinness, almost done in by great, hideous teeth—so enormous they give him master-criminal status—is the leader of a horrendous gang that includes Peter Sellers as Harry, the plump, awkward teddy boy. Katie Johnson is the cheerful old lady who upsets their fiendish plans simply by living in a world of her own. As her victims are, in some ways, even less real than she (she, at least, is as real as a good fairy), the disasters that befall them are extravagantly funny. With Cecil Parker, Herbert Lom, Danny Green, Jack Warner, and Frankie Howerd as the barrow boy. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick; written by William Rose. color

 

A Lady’s Morals (1930)—Originally called The Soul Kiss; neither title indicates what a big, heavy-spirited M-G-M musical tearjerker this is. Grace Moore plays Jenny Lind, who loses her voice while singing in Norma, and Reginald Denny is a young composer who loves her but goes blind. Wallace Beery turns up as P. T. Barnum. Sidney Franklin directed, and Adrian draped Miss Moore, who moved a little less than gracefully. With Jobyna Howland, George F. Marion, Paul Porcasi, Gilbert Emery, and Bodil Rosing. b & w

 

The Landlord (1970)—Hal Ashby’s debut film as a director is one of his best. Based on the novel by Kristin Hunter, a black woman, and adapted by another black writer, William Gunn, it’s about an affable, rich blond bachelor (Beau Bridges) who gets in over his head when he buys a house in a black ghetto, intending to throw out the tenants and turn it into his own handsome townhouse. The tenants include Pearl Bailey, and Diana Sands in probably her finest screen performance—when she becomes sexually and emotionally involved with the new landlord, he starts learning something about passion and terror. The dialogue is crisp and often quite startling, and though the editing may be a little too showy and jumpy, the picture has originality and depth, and it’s full of sharp, absurdist humor. Lee Grant is particularly funny as Beau Bridges’ ditsy mother and Lou Gossett, Jr., is fairly amazing as Diana Sands’ axe-wielding husband. Also with Mel Stewart, Susan Anspach, Marki Bey, Grover Dale, Bob Klein, Walter Brooke, and Douglas Grant. Produced by Norman Jewison; cinematography by Gordon Willis; music by Al Kooper. The distributors may have been frightened off by the tense, interracial byplay—or perhaps the public was; relatively few people saw the picture and it’s rarely revived. United Artists. color

 

Lasky Jedne Plavovlasky, see Loves of a Blonde

 

The Last American Hero (1973)—Jeff Bridges stars in Lamont Johnson’s fine, scrupulous film based on Tom Wolfe’s article about Junior Johnson, the moonshiner’s son who learned to drive by running his daddy’s whiskey on back roads at night, and who, as a racer, beat the expensive cars sponsored by Detroit. The casting, the acting, and the milieu seem effortlessly, inexplicably right. This movie transcends its genre; it isn’t only about stock-car racing, any more than The Hustler was only about shooting pool. With Art Lund, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Ed Lauter, Valerie Perrine, and Gary Busey. Written by William Roberts and the uncredited William Kerby. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Last Days of Dolwyn, see Woman of Dolwyn

 

The Last Detail (1974)—After 14 years in the Navy, Buddusky (Jack Nicholson), the tattooed signalman, lives on ingrained resentment, quick anger, and booze. The screenwriter, Robert Towne, shaped the role to Nicholson’s gift for extremes, and it was the best full-scale part he’d had up to that time. (Some think it’s the best part he’s ever had.) The movie is the record of the beer-soaked journey that Buddusky and a gunner’s mate (Otis Young) take when they’re assigned to escort a morose 18-year-old seaman (Randy Quaid) from the brig in Norfolk, Virginia, to the naval prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The film is distinguished by the fine performances of Nicholson and Quaid, and by remarkably well-orchestrated profane dialogue. It’s often very funny. It’s programmed to wrench your heart, though—it’s about the blasted lives of people who discover their humanity too late. Hal Ashby directed. With Michael Moriarty, Carol Kane, Luana Anders, Clifton James, Nancy Allen, and Gilda Radner. Cinematography (grainy and gloomy) by Michael Chapman. Adapted from Darryl Ponicsan’s book. Columbia. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Last Emperor (1987)—Bernardo Bertolucci tells the story of Pu Yi, who was not quite 3 when, in 1908, he was set on the Dragon Throne in Peking’s Forbidden City and became the titular ruler of a third of the people on earth. After being deposed and then enthroned again in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, he was in Soviet custody for 5 years, and then spent 10 years being “re-educated” in a Chinese war-criminals prison. The movie doesn’t have the juicy absurdity that seems to pour right out of the historical story. And it suppresses the drama. But it has pictorial grace and a dull fascination. Bertolucci presents Pu Yi (John Lone) as a man without will or backbone who lives his life as spectacle—who watches his life go by. And so we’re given a historical pageant without a protagonist. There’s an idea here, but it’s a dippy idea—it results in a passive movie. This epic is meant to be an attack on privilege (and at times it’s like a replay of The Conformist in Manchuria). Bertolucci and Mark Peploe, who wrote the script with his assistance, want us to believe that Pu Yi became a model citizen through the ministrations of the kindly prison governor (Ying Ruocheng), and that in his later years, when he worked as an under-gardener, he experienced freedom for the first time. They want us to believe that what some might disparage as Communist brainwashing actually cleaned away his decadence and healed him. With the gifted Joan Chen as the empress, the likable Wu Jun Mimei as the No. 2 wife, Peter O’Toole as Pu Yi’s tutor, and Maggie Han as the lesbian spy. Cinematography by Vittorio Storaro; sets by Ferdinando Scarfiotti; costumes by James Acheson; music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne, and Cong Su. (The film shows the palaces and courtyards of the 250-acre Forbidden City.) Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing, Score, Sound. Released by Columbia. (166 minutes.) color (See Hooked.)

 

Last Holiday (1950)—This lovely ironic comedy—an almost perfect “little” picture—stars Alec Guinness as an ordinary sort of fellow who is told that he has only six weeks to live; liberated from anxieties about the future, he finds in that time all the opportunities for wealth, fame, and happiness that he had never found before. The dexterity—the impeccable “rightness”—of J. B. Priestley’s screenplay is close to infuriating: within the genteel, socialist-mystic limits that he has set, he is an unerring master. The film is rounded and complete—in the contentedly banal way of an O. Henry story. With Kay Walsh, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Beatrice Campbell, Grégoire Aslan, Bernard Lee, David McCallum as the blind violinist, Sidney James, and that great asset of English comedy Ernest Thesiger. Henry Cass directed. b & w

 

The Last Hurrah (1958)—John Ford turned into a sentimental faker whenever he got near the Blarney stone, and Edwin O‘Connor’s novel about the final campaign and last days of Frank Skeffington, an old-style Boston mayor (Spencer Tracy), gave him an opportunity he couldn’t resist. The subject is richly comic, and the picture has its moments despite the sprightly foolery, but Skeffington is so full of the milk of human kindness that he almost moos. The extraordinary cast includes James Gleason, Pat O’Brien, Ricardo Cortez, Edmund Lowe, John Carradine, Basil Rathbone, Jeffrey Hunter, Donald Crisp, Anna Lee, and Jane Darwell. Columbia. b & w

 

The Last Laugh Der Letzte Mann (1924)—A breathtaking achievement in silent-film technique, from the German studio UFA. Emil Jannings is the man whose self-esteem and position in society depend on his uniform, in F. W. Murnau’s masterpiece of design and cinematography. The scenario is by Carl Mayer; the camerawork is by Karl Freund. With added musical track. b & w

 

The Last Millionaire Le Dernier Milliardaire (1934)—The queen of the bankrupt mythical kingdom of Casinario, which is modelled somewhat on Monaco and bears a resemblance to the Marx Brothers’ kingdom in Duck Soup, invites the world’s richest banker (Max Dearly) to run things. He becomes dictator, is hit on the head and lapses into childish ways, and the people go on taking his idiotic edicts as signs of genius. Chairs, hats, and cravats are banned, and the new system of barter results in transactions such as a customer who has paid his café bill with a hen and received two chicks and an egg in change leaving the egg as a tip. When the picture came out, the political atmosphere in Europe was so sensitive that this light satirical comedy by René Clair (not quite at his best) was banned in Italy and Germany, and was such a scandalous failure in France that its writer-director left the country. With Raymond Cordy and Annabella. Cinematography by Rudolph Mate and Louis Née; music by Maurice Jaubert. In French. b & w

 

The Last Movie (1971)—Dennis Hopper directed this put-on, knockabout tragedy, in which he stars as a stunt man with an American film company in Peru who becomes a Christ figure when the natives imitate filmmaking. The movie grinds to a painful halt right at the start; it is visually beautiful, but the editing is so self-destructive that it’s as if Hopper had slashed his own canvases. Cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs; screenplay by Stewart Stern. With Julie Adams, Tomas Milian, Samuel Fuller, Sylvia Miles, Rod Cameron, Severn Darden, Peter Fonda, Henry Jaglom, Kris Kristofferson, John Phillip Law, Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell, and Russ Tamblyn. Universal. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Last Picture Show (1971)—This straightforward, involving, narrative picture about growing up in a small town in Texas in the early 50s was Peter Bogdanovich’s first great success. It’s plain and uncondescending in its re-creation of what it means to be a high-school athlete, of what a country dance hall is like, of the necking in cars and movie houses, and of the desolation that follows high-school graduation. Concerned with adolescent experience seen in terms of flatlands anomie—loneliness, ignorance about sex, confusion about one’s aims in life—the movie has a basic decency of feeling, with people relating to one another, sometimes on very simple levels, and becoming miserable when they can’t relate. Robert Surtees’s stylized cinematography is in black and white, and the frequent silhouetting—so that we seem to be looking at a map of life as it was—helps to clarify the subject matter. The film badly needs this stylization, because, of course, its shallow overview of town life is dangerously close to TV, and especially to the “Peyton Place” series. The movie suggests what TV soap opera would be if it looked at ordinary experience in a non-exploitative way, if it had observation and humor. This is perhaps an ideal TV show. From Larry McMurtry’s novel, adapted by McMurtry together with the director. With Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Ellen Burstyn, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Eileen Brennan, and Cloris Leachman. (A sequel, Texasville, also directed by Bogdanovich, was released in 1990.) Columbia. (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Last Run (1971)—A picture that closed so fast (deservedly) that few knew it had ever opened. It’s mostly fast driving over European roads and George C. Scott in a cool, Bogartian role that is exactly wrong for his febrile talents. Scott needs antagonists to taunt and jeer at, needs situations in which he can smolder. Here, as an aging gangster who comes out of retirement for one last job, he never finds a character. The script, by Alan Sharp, is pseudo-Hemingway; the direction, by Richard Fleischer, is so bland and mechanical that even Sven Nykvist’s cinematography doesn’t help much. With Tony Musante as a hood, Trish Van Devere miscast as a moll, and Colleen Dewhurst stupefyingly miscast as a whore in a Mediterranean village. M-G-M. color

 

Last Tango in Paris Ultimo Tango a Parigi Dernier Tango à Paris (1972)—Exploitation films had been supplying mechanized sex—sex as physical stimulant but without passion or emotional violence. Then, in this film, Bernardo Bertolucci used sex to express the characters’ drives. Marlon Brando, as the aging American, Paul, is working out his aggression on the young bourgeois French girl, Jeanne (Maria Schneider), and the physical menace of sexuality that is emotionally charged is such a departure from everything that audiences had come to expect at the movies that the film created a sensation. It’s a bold and imaginative work—a great work. When Brando improvises within Bertolucci’s structure, his full art is realized; his performance is intuitive, rapt, princely. Working with Brando, Bertolucci achieves realism with the terror of actual experience still alive on the screen. With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Massimo Girotti, Catherine Allegret, and Maria Michi. Script by Bertolucci and the editor, Franco Arcalli; cinematography by Vittorio Storaro; music by Gato Barbieri; production design by Ferdinando Scarfiotti; produced by Alberto Grimaldi. (The film has been subjected to many varieties of legal prosecution, particularly in Italy. The version circulated in the U.S. with an R rating is severely cut.) In French and English. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Last Ten Days Der Letzte Akt (1955)—G. W. Pabst, who directed this account of the last 10 days in Hitler’s headquarters, employs a restrained style that makes the collapse of discipline and the final disintegration seem like an enveloping nightmare. Erich Maria Remarque’s script, based on Judge Michael A. Musmanno’s chronicle Ten Days to Die, perhaps errs in systematically constructing little episodes to illuminate chaos; the atmosphere is so compelling that these vignettes seem trite and unnecessary. Albin Skoda’s Hitler is an intelligent approach to a terribly difficult part; Oskar Werner’s heroic role as a liaison officer from one of the Army corps is a flamboyant invention, and he gives it a fine flourish. Surrounding Hitler are Lotte Tobisch as Eva Braun, Willi Krause as Goebbels, and, of course, the generals of all kinds and attitudes: General Krebs, for example, who asks if God exists, and General Burgdorf, who replies, “If He did, we wouldn’t.” Whatever your judgment of the picture’s value as historical interpretation, it is an experience to spend two hours in this claustrophobic bunker with Pabst and his actors. Made in Austria. In German. b & w

 

The Last Tycoon (1976)—Harold Pinter adapted Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel about Hollywood, and Elia Kazan directed the picture, which was produced by Sam Spiegel and stars Robert De Niro as the artist-businessman Monroe Stahr. The result is so enervated that it’s like a vampire movie after the vampires have left. De Niro gives an authentic interpretation of a New York—Jewish Hollywood intellectual giant of the 30s, but he might be acting under a blanket. He stands around waiting while Ingrid Boulting, who plays Kathleen, loiters over inane remarks. (Of all Fitzgerald’s implausible heroines, Kathleen—the runaway mistress of a European king—is the most vaporous.) Probably the first mistake was to approach the book cap in hand, and the next was to hire Pinter; the film needed a writer who would fill in what’s missing—Pinter’s art is the art of taking away. With Jack Nicholson, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Ray Milland, Donald Pleasence, Theresa Russell, Dana Andrews, and Tony Curtis—the only one who shows any vitality. Paramount. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Last Valley (1971)—Michael Caine as an intelligent man of action in a large-scale historical adventure story set in Germany during the Thirty Years War. He leads his band of brutal mercenaries into a hidden valley; it’s as if the men from Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai had discovered Shangri-La. The director, James Clavell, is a good storyteller, and the film, which looks at the conflicts in the world outside the valley and at the quality of the life of fat burghers and bigots inside the valley, has a core of feeling. With Omar Sharif, Florinda Bolkan, Nigel Davenport, Per Oscarsson, and Arthur O’Connell, who is unmistakably an actor in makeup, even at a distance in a crowd. Written and produced by Clavell. The picture deserves a simpler score than the thick, rich musical sludge dredged up by John Barry. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Last Waltz (1978)—Arguably, the best of all rock-concert documentaries. Martin Scorsese’s film of The Band’s Thanksgiving, 1976, performance in San Francisco is even-tempered and intensely satisfying. Scorsese, who shot it while he was still working on New York, New York, seems in complete control of his talent and of the material. Visually, it’s dark-toned and rich and classically simple. The sound (if one has the good luck to catch it in a theatre equipped with a Dolby system) is so clear that the instruments have the distinctness that one hears on the most crafts-manlike recordings. And the casual interviews have a musical, rhythmic ease; Scorsese’s conversations with the men give us a sense of the pressures that strain their feelings of community. With Band members—Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Rick Danko. Also with performers who represent the different styles of rock and the traditions that have fueled it—Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Neil Young, Ronnie Hawkins, Dr. John, the Staples, Ringo Starr, Paul Butterfield, Emmylou Harris, Neil Diamond, and others. It’s a relief to see a rock film without whizzing-around, catch-as-catch-can cinematography; Scorsese planned the camera cues like a general deploying his troops, and Michael Chapman, Vilmos Zsigmond, Laszlo Kovacs, David Myers, and several other cinematographers are responsible for the serene imagery and its inner excitement. United Artists. color

 

The Last Wave (1977)—The plot of this Australian film is a throwback to the B-movies of the 30s and early 40s, and the dialogue—by the young director Peter Weir and his two co-scriptwriters, Tony Morphett and Peter Popescu—is vintage R K O and Universal. Weir provides apparitions holding sacred stones, frog noises in the night, shadows in slow motion, and the kind of haunted-house acting that many of us have a certain affection for. But it’s hokum without the fun of hokum; despite all the scare-movie apparatus, this film fairly aches to be called profound. The occult manifestations are linked to the white Australians’ guilt over their treatment of the aborigines. The decadent white race is represented by a sickly paleface corporate lawyer (Richard Chamberlain), and the aborigines by a lithe, graceful young man (Gulpilil) and a dignified wily shaman (Nandjiwarra Amagula). The aborigine actors, with their deep-set eyes, are by far the most vital element, yet they’re kept on the margins and used as supernatural forces. Weir, who has apparently studied Nicolas Roeg’s films, knows how to create an allusive, ominous atmosphere. But the film is overdeliberate and sluggish, and Chamberlain can’t stop quivering his lips to connote sensitivity and contracting his nostrils for apprehensiveness and pulling in his cheek muscles for ineffable sorrow. He keeps us conscious that he’s acting all the time. His toes act in his shoes. With Olivia Hamnett as the lawyer’s wife. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Last Year at Marienbad L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961)—The characters, or rather figures, in this Alain Resnais movie are a tony variant of the undead of vampire movies—“We live as in coffins frozen side by side in a garden.” This high-fashion puzzle movie, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, is set in what is described to us as an “enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel—where corridors succeed endless corridors.” The mood is set by climaxes of organ music and this distended narration; it’s all solemn and expectant—like High Mass. The dialogue about whether the characters met the year before is like a parody of wealthy indolence. The settings and costumes seem to be waiting for a high romantic theme or fantasy; the people, pawns who are manipulated into shifting positions, seem to be placed for wit, or for irony. But all we get are pretty pictures. Robbe-Grillet says that the film is a pure construction, an object without reference to anything outside itself, and that the existence of the two characters begins when the film begins and ends 93 minutes later. It has a hypnotic effect on some people; others may be tempted to end it sooner. With Delphine Seyrig, Sacha Pitoeff, and Giorgio Albertazzi. The cinematography is by Sacha Vierny. The exteriors were shot at the chateaus of Nymphenburg, Schleissheim, and at other Munich locations; the interiors were shot in a Paris studio. In French. Distributed in the U.S. by Astor Pictures. b & w (See I Lost it at the Movies.)

 

The Late Show (1977)—The writer-director, Robert Benton, has followed the rules of the detective-movie genre, but he’s also added something: the detective (Art Carney) is overweight, old, and scared. None of this prevents the heroine (Lily Tomlin), who hires him, from perceiving that he’s different from the other men she knows. This one-of-a-kind murder mystery pays off in atmosphere, spooking us by the flip, greedy ordinariness of evil. Eugene Roche is a fence who loves his stolen goodies; Bill Macy is a scrounging bartender; Joanna Cassidy is a lying, cheating charmer; Howard Duff is a penny-ante detective who dies muttering about the money he’s going to make; and John Considine is a sleekly handsome strong-arm man. They’re all originals. Warners. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Laughing Policeman (1973)—Standard, gory imitation of Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and Bullitt. There isn’t much acting honor to be had from it, but Walter Matthau, playing a black-haired police detective, loses what little there is to Bruce Dern, who plays his partner. Matthau does the ancient obvious, while Dern’s contentious, muffled manner is the latest in fey one-upmanship. The choppy film makes practically no sense; Stuart Rosenberg’s direction features massacres, cadavers, and close inspection of wounds. Adapted from the popular Stockholm-set novel by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö and moved to San Francisco. (Once again the mad mass murderer is some implausible sort of fancy homosexual.) With Joanna Cassidy, Louis Gossett, Jr., and Anthony Zerbe. 20th Century-Fox. color

 

Laughter (1930)—Just before his death, Herman J. Mankiewicz, who produced this film, said that of all the movies he’d worked on, it was his favorite. A lovely, sophisticated comedy, an ode to impracticality, it failed commercially but its attitudes and spirit influenced the screwball hits of the 30s. (Even the famous Bogart exchange with Claude Rains about coming to Casablanca for the waters is paraphrased from Laughter.) Fredric March is the composer-hero who returns to New York after some expatriate years in Paris; he finds that the Follies beauty (Nancy Carroll) whom he loved has married for money and lost her gift of laughter. The pacing of the director, H. d’Abbadie d’Arrast, is a little leisurely, and he dawdles just when he should move faster, but he has visual style, especially when he works in interiors or in deliberately artificial sets. (Nature throws him off balance.) The Art Deco sets here are elegant, and the enchanting Nancy Carroll wears perhaps the best clothes ever seen on the screen (with the possible exception of Garbo’s in A Woman of Affairs). And there’s a simple scene with March at the piano and Carroll and another girl (Diane Ellis) jazz dancing that is one of the loveliest, happiest moments in the movies of the period. The writing was mostly by Donald Ogden Stewart, though d‘Abbadie d’Arrast and Douglas Doty had a share in it, and Mankiewicz probably set the tone; the script bogs down a little in conventional melodrama. With Frank Morgan as the beauty’s millionaire husband and Glenn Anders in the boggy subplot. Paramount. b & w

 

Laughter in Paradise (1951)—A charming, neatly contrived English comedy. An old prankster (Hugh Griffith) dies, leaving a will that outlines the tasks his relatives must complete before receiving their inheritance—such tasks as robbery, marriage, etc. Alastair Sim has a classic comic sequence trying to get arrested, and a classic fiancée—Joyce Grenfell, a W.A.A.F. whom he describes as “an officer and lady.” Mario Zampi’s direction is not all it should be, but the cast is so good it hardly matters: George Cole, A. E. Matthews, Beatrice Campbell, John Laurie, Fay Compton, Guy Middleton, Ernest Thesiger, Anthony Steel, and, in a tiny role, Audrey Hepburn. The ingenious script is by Michael Pertwee and Jack Davies. b & w

 

Laura (1944)—Everybody’s favorite chic murder mystery. Gene Tierney is the dead girl who ends up as the heroine; Clifton Webb and Vincent Price are her suitors; Dana Andrews is the charmingly necrophiliac detective; and Judith Anderson is modishly contemptible. (Speaking of Price, she says, “He’s no good, but he’s what I want. I’m not a nice person, neither is he … . We’re both weak and can’t seem to help it.”) Produced and directed by Otto Preminger; adapted from the novel by Vera Caspary; script credited to Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt—but it was Hoffenstein’s work that saved it. With Dorothy Adams as Bessie. Music by David Raksin. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)—As the prim, innocuous civil servant with a hidden spark of nonconformity, Alec Guinness carries out a dream of larcenous glory: robbing the Bank of England. A man who steals three million in gold bullion may be permitted to coin a word: Guinness describes his gleaming-eyed, bowler-hatted little man as the “fubsy” type, and he’s an image of Everyman. T.E.B. Clarke’s script, Charles Crichton’s direction, and Georges Auric’s music contribute to what is probably the most nearly perfect fubsy comedy of all time. It’s a minor classic, a charmer. Stanley Holloway is the genteel, artistic accomplice; Alfie Bass and Sidney James the professional assistants, and one of the beneficiaries of Guinness’s wrongdoing is a bit player, Audrey Hepburn. b & w

 

Law and Disorder (1974)—While you’re watching this comedy about the frustrations and foul-ups of New Yorkers Carroll O‘Connor and Ernest Borgnine as they try to protect their families by organizing an auxiliary-police unit, you can tell how the scenes were meant to play and why they don’t. You can see that the gifted Czech director, Ivan Passer, doesn’t have the unconscious equipment for the look and feel of ordinary American life, and that he is trying to strike a compromise between his feelings and the demands of the American marketing system—and satisfying neither. O’Connor has some fine restrained moments, and Allan Arbus contributes an entertaining bit as a gooney-bird psychologist (in a tight whiny voice he gives a lecture on how to prevent rape), but the film is a painful failure—lumpish and crude. Passer is trying to do the sort of thing that gets louder laughs than his own kind of comedy, and he doesn’t really know how. With Ann Wedgeworth, Karen Black, Jack Kehoe, Pat Corley, Anita Dangler, David Spielberg, and Joseph Ragno. Produced by William Richert; screenplay by Passer, Richert, and Kenneth Harris Fishman. Columbia. color (See Reeling.)

 

Law of Desire La Ley del Deseo (1987)—This flamboyantly glamorous homosexual fantasy by Madrid’s gagster-artist Pedro Almodóvar is satirical, romantic, metaphorical; it has wonderful jokes and the exaggerated plot of an absurdist Hollywood melodrama. It doesn’t disguise its narcissism; it turns it into bright-colored tragicomedy. And even when it loses its beat (after a murder) there’s always something happening. Carmen Maura, a powerful actress in the manner of the early Anna Magnani, with the trippiness and self-mockery of Bette Midler, plays Tina, a transsexual who has a hot, roiling temperament. Tina’s celebrity brother Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) directs classy homoerotic films. One night, Pablo takes home Antonio (Antonio Banderas), a government minister’s son, who has been stalking him; by morning, Antonio loves him, is determined to possess him completely, and refuses to get out of his life. This is one of the rare movies that’s sensually exciting at the same time that it’s funny. With Miguel Molina as Pablo’s true love, Manuela Velasco as little Ada, and the male transvestite Bibi Andersen as Tina’s lesbian ex-lover. Cinematography by Angel Luis Fernández. Released by Cinevista. In Spanish. color (See Hooked.)

 

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)—If you went to see it under the delusion that it was going to be about T. E. Lawrence, you probably stayed to enjoy the vastness of the desert and the pleasures of the senses that a huge movie epic can provide. Directed by David Lean, from a script by Robert Bolt, loosely based on Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, this picture fails to give an acceptable interpretation of Lawrence, or to keep its action intelligible, but it is one of the most literate and tasteful and exciting of expensive spectacles. The central figure is played quite stunningly by Peter O’Toole, though he seems to be doing Lord Jim—which he was cast in a couple of years later (and then it looked as if he were doing Lawrence all over again). Bolt and Lean turn the hero into such a flamboyant poetic enigma that he is displaced in the film by a simpler hero—Omar Sharif’s Ali, a handsome sheik with liquid brown eyes and conventionally sympathetic lines to speak. Ali, an old-fashioned movie hero, was more at home in what, despite the literacy, was a big action movie. And as it became apparent that most people in the audience hadn’t the remotest idea of what the Arabs and the Turks were doing in the First World War, or which was which, or why the English cared, the question raised by the movie was: can complicated historical events and a complex hero really get across in a spectacle? Fortunately for this particular spectacle, audiences seemed to be satisfied with the explanation that the Turks were more cruel than the Arabs, and although the movie’s Lawrence became cruel, too, there was warmhearted Ali to take over. (When Bolt and Lean cast Sharif as their poetic enigma in their next film, Dr. Zhivago, they forgot to provide a simpler fellow as a standby.) With Alec Guinness, José Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Arthur Kennedy, Jack Hawkins, Claude Rains, Anthony Quayle, and Donald Wolfit. Cinematography by Freddie Young; music by Maurice Jarre; produced by Sam Spiegel. (221 minutes.) color (See Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.)

 

Leap Into the Void Salto Nel Vuoto (1979)—The Italian director Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket, China Is Near) has a feral sense of the ridiculous and a snake charmer’s style. This film is poised between farce and tragedy, and he keeps it in slippery chiaroscuro—it all might be taking place in a dark dream. Michel Piccoli gives a mesmerizing performance as an Italian judge who’s a worm—a spoiled worm wriggling in its comfortable nest; he’s a craven fraud—a distant cousin to the characters W. C. Fields used to play. Anouk Aimée is the judge’s older sister, a menopausal virgin who has spent her life keeping the nest cozy for him; now she has begun to rebel—she has been having fits of hysteria. This film about family entanglements and the functions of madness is perverse, horrifying, and funny. Bellocchio is probably the only director (with the big exception of Buñuel) whose morbidity is exhilarating. With Michele Placido, as a dashing bearded outlaw (and sociopath), and the director’s small son, Piergiorgio. Written by Bellocchio, Piero Natoli, and Vincenzo Cerami. In Italian. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Leave Her to Heaven (1945)—Gothic pyschologizing melodrama, so preposterously full-blown and straight-faced that it’s a juicy entertainment. Evil, beautiful Ellen (Gene Tierney) hoards her father’s ashes and has a penchant for eliminating people who clutter up her life. There are scenes to cherish: Ellen impassively watching her brother-in-law drown; Ellen flinging herself down a flight of stairs to terminate an annoying pregnancy; Ellen going lickety-split on a charger, tossing father’s remains around the Technicolored New Mexico landscape; Ellen’s long-suffering writer-husband (Cornel Wilde) remarking, “While I was watching you, exotic words drifted across the mirror of my mind as summer clouds drift across the sky.” John M. Stahl directed; Jo Swerling did the adaptation of the Ben Ames Williams best-seller. With Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Ray Collins, Gene Lockhart, Reed Hadley, Mary Philips, and Chill Wills. 20th Century-Fox.

 

Léda Also known as Web of Passion and À double tour. (1959)—This ingenious thriller by Claude Chabrol was made directly after The Cousins. Shot by Henri Decaë and featuring peacocks and fields of scarlet poppies, as well as a murderer who conducts Berlioz, it is perhaps the most richly detailed and overripe of Chabrol’s films. With Jean-Paul Belmondo, Madeleine Robinson, Bernadette Lafont, Jeanne Valerie, and—as Léda—Antonella Lualdi. In French. color

 

The Left Handed Gun (1958)—Arthur Penn’s first film, adapted by Leslie Stevens from a television play by Gore Vidal, has some of the violent, legendary, nostalgic qualities of his later Bonnie and Clyde. A young, great-looking Paul Newman plays Billy the Kid as an ignorant boy in the sex-starved Old West. There’s a foreshadowing of the sensibility that shaped Bonnie and Clyde when Billy’s shotgun blasts a man right out of one of his boots. The man falls in the street, but his boot remains upright; a little girl starts to giggle at the boot and doesn’t get very far—her mother slaps her, and that slap is the seal of the awareness of horror. It says that even children must learn that some things that look funny are not only funny. It says that only idiots would laugh at pain and death. The slap is itself funny, and yet we suck in our breath; we don’t dare to laugh. With Hurd Hatfield, Lita Milan, John Dehner, Denver Pyle, Nestor Paiva, John Dierkes, and James Congdon. Warners. b & w

 

Legal Eagles (1986)—As a New York assistant district attorney, Robert Redford bestirs himself more than he did in The Natural and Out of Africa, and he reminds you of what made him a star—but his affable performance is no more than a reminder. Debra Winger is confined in the prim, tailored-suit role of a dedicated young defense lawer; she has glimmers of humor, but the part is an emotional strait jacket, and she’s practically deadpan. And Daryl Hannah, who is charged with stealing one of her dead artist father’s paintings, and then with murder, has no character to play—she goes through the movie pouting, her long blond hair flowing, her eyes blank. Except for David Clennon as a bug-eyed assistant D.A. who’s a complete stinker, everybody is unformed or only partly formed. The cast includes Terence Stamp (more assured every year and looking great), Brian Dennehy, Roscoe Lee Browne, Christine Baranski, Sara Botsford, Steven Hill, and many other gifted performers who flit onscreen and off, with nothing to do but push the engine-less plot uphill. Directed by Ivan Reitman, from a script credited to Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr., the movie, which is set in the art world, seems to have taken the scandal of how Mark Rothko’s estate was managed and scrambled it up with pieces of romantic comedy-thrillers such as Charade and courtroom comedies such as Adam’s Rib. It’s all plot, and the plot is all holes; it’s not just that it doesn’t add up right—most of the episodes don’t quite make sense. About all that carries the movie along is the functional—and occasionally smooth, bright—dialogue. This was the wrong kind of movie for Ivan Reitman to have attempted; it needed a director with style. Reitman endows it with the visual excitement of a Rotary Club lunch, and the most you can say for the square cinematography (by Laszlo Kovacs) is that it’s instantly scannable. Also with John McMartin and Jennie Dundas. Story by Reitman, Cash, and Epps. Universal. color (See Hooked.)

 

The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968)—Heavy-handed camp about Hollywood—an attempt to fuse Sunset Boulevard, Vertigo, The Barefoot Contessa, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Peter Finch plays a Svengali-like movie director. His great star, the glamorous foreigner Lylah Clare, died mysteriously a few hours after marrying him, and now he is turning a young American actress (Kim Novak) into Lylah. The stale, gaudy script (from a teleplay by Robert Thom and Edward De Blasio) provides roles for Coral Browne as a bitch columnist, Rossella Falk as a predatory European lesbian, and Valentina Cortese as a designer. Maybe an amusing macabre pastiche could have been made of it if the director, Robert Aldrich, hadn’t been so clumsy; it’s a static piece of filmmaking. With Michael Murphy, George Kennedy, and Ernest Borgnine, who has rarely been worse—he demonstrates his shouting range. Cinematography by Joseph Biroc; adaptation by Hugo Butler and Jean Rouverol. M-G-M. color

 

En Lektion i Kärlek, see A Lesson in Love

 

Lenny (1974)—This earnest Bob Fosse film starring Dustin Hoffman is for those who want to believe that Lenny Bruce was a saintly gadfly who was martyred only because he lived before their time. Working from a weak script by Julian Barry, Fosse accepts the view that Bruce’s motivating force was to cleanse society of hypocrisy, and, having swallowed that, he can only defuse Bruce’s humor. So when you hear Hoffman doing Bruce’s shticks you don’t even feel like laughing. Despite the fluent editing and the close-in documentary techniques and the sophisticated graphics, the picture is a later version of the one-to-one correlation of an artist’s life and his art which we used to get in movies about painters and songwriters. Hoffman makes a serious, honorable try, but his Lenny is a nice boy. Lenny Bruce was uncompromisingly not nice; the movie turns a teasing, seductive hipster into a putz. As Honey, Valerie Perrine does a dazzling strip and gives an affecting, if limited, performance. With Gary Morton, Jan Miner, and Stanley Beck. United Artists. b & w (See Reeling.)

 

The Leopard Il Gattopardo (1963)—It had been cut to 2 hours and 41 minutes when it opened in the U.S., in a dubbed-into-English version that didn’t always seem in sync, and with the color brightened in highly variable and disorienting ways. The new version, not released here until September, 1983, is in Italian, with subtitles, and at its full length—3 hours and 5 minutes. And it’s magnificent—a sweeping popular epic, with obvious similarities to Gone with the Wind, and with an almost Chekhovian sensibility. Based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, an impoverished Sicilian prince, it has a hero on a grand scale—Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, played superlatively by Burt Lancaster, who has acknowledged that he modelled his performance on the nobleman director, Luchino Visconti. The film is set in the 1860s, when Italy was in the middle of a revolution, but it’s essentially about the Prince himself—the aging Leopard—and how he reacts to the social changes. We couldn’t be any closer to Lancaster’s Prince if we were inside his skin—which in a way we are. We see what he sees, feel what he feels, and, in the last hour, set at a splendid ball that marks the aristocrats’ acceptance of the Mafia-dominated parvenus who are taking over their wealth and power, we’re inside his mind as he relives his life, experiences regret, and accepts the dying of his class and his own death. It’s one of the greatest of all passages in movies. With Alain Delon as the Prince’s sly nephew; Claudia Cardinale as a shrewd, sensual heiress; Paolo Stoppa as her beady-eyed, land-grabbing father; Rina Morelli as the Prince’s repressed, whimpering wife; and Romolo Valli, Serge Reggiani, Leslie French, and Pierre Clementi. (Both Paolo Stoppa and Rina Morelli give superb performances; Alain Delon is perhaps too airy for his role.) The score is by Nino Rota; the cinematography is by the justly celebrated Giuseppe Rotunno. (See State of the Art.)

 

Les Girls (1957)—George Cukor directed this backstage-story musical (it’s about a lawsuit over a former showgirl’s memoirs), and the color consultant, George Hoyningen-Huené, gave it a classy look, but, with one exception, nobody connected with it was really at his best—not Gene Kelly, who was the star, or the scenarist, John Patrick, and certainly not the choreographer, Jack Cole. (He hit rock bottom, with horrible quasi-cultured numbers.) Even the Cole Porter score is weak, and the whole picture is overproduced. The exception is the tall, blithe, and beautiful comedienne Kay Kendall, who does a funny, drunk “La Habanera” and has a number with Kelly in which she seems to be outdancing him and having an easy, amused time of it. Her role isn’t large enough, though. The cast includes Henry Daniell, Taina Elg, Jacques Bergerac, Patrick Macnee, Leslie Phillips, and a bane of 50s movie musicals—the movie executives’ idea of “adorable” —Mitzi Gaynor. From a story by Vera Caspary. M-G-M.

 

A Lesson in Love En Lektion i Kärlek (1953)—The burnt-out marriage of Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand is rekindled when he becomes jealous of her. This is a rather more middle-class marital comedy than one expects from Ingmar Bergman. (He wrote and directed.) With Harriet Andersson. In Swedish. b & w

 

Let’s Do It Again (1975)—This innocent, cheerful farce about an Atlanta milkman (Sidney Poitier) and a factory worker (Bill Cosby) who go to New Orleans and pull off a great scam is like a black child’s version of The Sting. The con involves hypnotizing a spindly prizefighter, played by Jimmie Walker, of TV’s “Good Times,” in his first screen role. Cosby looks spaced out on his own innocent amiability, and he floats away with the show; Poitier, who directed, plays straight man to him and gives an embarrassed, unfunny performance. It’s crude slapstick, but the people on the screen are very likable. The cast includes Ossie Davis, Julius Harris, Mel Stewart, John Amos, Lee Chamberlin, Denise Nicholas, and Calvin Lockhart. Warners. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Let’s Get Lost (1988)—This documentary, by Bruce Weber, isn’t primarily about Chet Baker the jazz trumpeter and singer: it’s about Chet Baker the love object, the fetish. And maybe because Weber, despite his lifelong fixation on this charmer, knew him only as a battered, treacherous wreck, in the two years before his death, it’s one of the most suggestive (and unresolved) films ever made. The soundtrack is made up of Baker recordings that span more than three decades—the idealized essence of the man. The 16 mm black-and-white cinematography (by Jeff Preiss) is reticent yet expressive, impassioned; the film has a great look. (See Movie Love.)

 

The Letter (1940)—Bette Davis’s 43rd movie; it marked her 10th year in films, and it is one of her few good vehicles. Somerset Maugham’s melodrama (generally believed to be based on an actual incident) had been a Broadway success for Katharine Cornell and was filmed—memorably—in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels. (Those blessed with movie-loving parents may still retain images of Eagels’ corrupt beauty, and of her frenzied big scene when the heroine tells off her husband.) The central figure is the wife of a rubber-plantation owner—a woman of such unimpeachable respectability that she can empty a gun into her lover and get away with it (in the courts, at least, because in Singapore the white ruling class must stick together). Davis gives what is very likely the best study of female sexual hypocrisy in film history. Cold and proper, she yet manages to suggest the passion of a woman who’d kill a man for trying to leave her. She is helped by an excellent script (by Howard Koch) and by two unusually charged performances—James Stephenson as her lawyer and Herbert Marshall as her husband. The cast also includes two formidable women—Frieda Inescort, who seems ineffably absurd as the lawyer’s wife, and Gale Sondergaard, whose performance as the Eurasian woman was actually taken very seriously by many people. With Bruce Lester, Cecil Kellaway, Victor Sen Yung, Willie Fung, Tetsu Komai, and Doris Lloyd. The insistent music is pure, adulterated Max Steiner. It demeans William Wyler’s clear, taut direction and the erotic awareness he brings to the material. Warners. b & w

 

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)—Joan Fontaine suffers and suffers, but so exquisitely in this romantic evocation of late-19th-century Vienna that one doesn’t know whether to clobber the poor, wronged creature or to give in and weep. Max Ophuls made this film in Hollywood but its Vienna is as romantically stylized and as beautifully textured as his European work. His theme (it was almost always his theme) is the difference in approaches to love. A pianist, Louis Jourdan, seduces the impressionable adolescent Joan and promptly forgets her; years later he meets her again, and, thinking her a fresh conquest, seduces her again. But in the intervening years she has borne him a child and remained hopelessly in love with him. This ironic love story, which is probably the toniest “woman’s picture” ever made, is based on Stefan Zweig’s “Brief Einer Unbekannten” and was written for the screen by Howard Koch. With Mady Christians. Cinematography by Franz Planer; art direction by Alexander Golitzen; produced by John Houseman, for Universal. b & w

 

A Letter to Jane (1972)—A 45-minute-long lecture demonstration that is a movie only in a marginal sense. A single news photograph appears on the screen; it is of tall Jane Fonda towering above some Vietnamese, and on the track Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin discuss the implications of the photograph. Their talk is didactic, condescending, and offensively inhuman. In French.

 

A Letter to Three Wives (1949)—Joseph L. Mankiewicz won Academy Awards for Best Screenplay and Best Director for this satirical comedy on American social and marital conventions. The letter is from the town seductress informing the three wives that she has taken away one of their husbands: as each threatened wife reviews her marriage, we get, at best, a sharp, frequently hilarious look at suburbia, and, at worst, a slick series of bright remarks. Mankiewicz coaxed good performances out of Jeanne Crain and Linda Darnell, and the others certainly didn’t need coaxing—Paul Douglas is pretty close to magnificent, and Ann Sothern, Kirk Douglas, Florence Bates, Thelma Ritter, and Connie Gilchrist are first-rate. Also with Barbara Lawrence, Jeffrey Lynn, and Hobart Cavanaugh, and narration by Celeste Holm. From a story by John Klempner. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

Letyat Zhuravli, see The Cranes Are Flying

 

Der Letzte Akt, see The Last Ten Days

 

Der Letzte Mann, see The Last Laugh

 

La Ley del Deseo, see Law of Desire

 

Les Liaisons dangereuses (1959)—Valmont and Juliette, the 18th-century characters in the Laclos novel, are former lovers who, writing to each other about their strategies, targets, and fresh conquests, turn love into something as studied and calculated as war. They take the love out of love. Modernizing the story, the director Roger Vadim ties things up rather neatly by having Valmont (in a tired, too-sweet performance by Gérard Philipe—his last) and Juliette (Jeanne Moreau at her ravaged best) married. In Laclos the pleasure seems to be in carrying out the plan, achieving the victory—a triumph of austere, rational conquest; in Vadim’s version a sensuous aura surrounds and permeates the objects. The first scene of Marianne (Annette Stroyberg) in the snow, her mouth open in laughter for a romantic eternity, isn’t on a much higher level than the Playboy bunnies of the month; Vadim also uses jazz and Negroes and sex all mixed together in a cheap and sensational way that was probably exotic for the French in the 50s. But, using these elements, he attempts to give them a rhythm and feeling that are, at least, unusually high-class commercialism. Vadim’s erotic cleverness is so transparent and shoddy that it verges on the comic; yet the snowflower lyric innocence about Marianne does have pathos and there’s a suggestion of spirituality to Valmont’s feeling for her. It is Juliette’s independence when Valmont wants to halt their activities that gives the film its character. She is not, then, pursuing this life of conquest merely to hold her husband: she has developed a passion that, once he has softened and reneged, can only destroy them both. When Valmont and Juliette declare their war on each other, the film becomes less corrupt, more interesting. Though it is he who wants to give up the game, it is she who breaks the rules by using his letters against him. They were both talented at long, drawn-out military maneuvers, but when it comes to the passions of war, they finish each other off as viciously and destructively as if they had never heard of finesse. (If you’ve read the novel, in which Juliette, at the end, is disfigured by smallpox, you may get a turn when you see the vaccination mark on Moreau’s arm.) With Jeanne Valerie, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Simone Renant. Background music by Thelonious Monk; party music by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, with Kenny Clarke. In French. b & w

 

Libeled Lady (1936)—A wisecracking newspaper comedy, from M-G-M, with Spencer Tracy as the editor whose paper is being sued for libel, Jean Harlow as his fiancée, Myrna Loy as the maligned heiress who is suing, and William Powell as the man Tracy hires to put Loy in a compromising position, so she’ll drop the suit. And, in order to give Powell the married status necessary for the plan, he asks Harlow to marry Powell—just for a few weeks. That’s only the beginning of the complications. The director, Jack Conway, keeps up the fast pace by a lot of shouting and busywork—people are always rushing in and out, and practically every line is meant to be funny. Some of them are, and the others are, at least, perky. The picture isn’t bad—it’s enjoyable, but it’s rather charmless. It’s constructed like a 70s sit-com, and it has the same kind of forced atmosphere of hilarity; it looks and sounds factory-made. The stars (and the supporting players, too) do their patented characters—the ones they’d invented some years earlier. (Almost nothing seems to be happening for the first time.) Loy is assured and levelheaded; Harlow is a tough cookie—loud and shrill but sentimental at heart; Tracy is a solid man’s man; Powell is a suave ladies’ man. With Charley Grapewin as the owner of the paper (he gives perhaps the best performance, but there isn’t enough of it); Walter Connolly as Loy’s father; Cora Witherspoon; George Chandler in a bit; and E. E. Clive as a fishing specialist. (Powell has a fly-fishing scene that Howard Hawks must have liked, because in 1964 he did his version of it in Man’s Favorite Sport?) Written by Maurine Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers, and George Oppenheimer. b & w

 

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)—Nihilism plus sentimentality about the rugged-individualist hero—Paul Newman. A mock-epic Western that cannibalizes old movies and mixes an enthusiasm for slaughter with a tacky geniality. John Huston directed this logy, thick-skinned movie from a brutal, jokey script by John Milius, whose imagination appears to have been fed by John Ford, Kurosawa, and a heavy dose of Jodorowsky’s El Topo. The big scenes don’t grow out of anything, and there are no characters—just mannerisms. Newman, his voice lowered to a gruff, non-musical level, sounds like Huston; hiding in a beard throughout, he goes in for a lot of beer-drinking. With Stacy Keach, who has a funny bit as a wild albino, and Ava Gardner as Lily Langtry, and Jacqueline Bisset, Roddy McDowall, Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter, Victoria Principal, Ned Beatty, Anthony Zerbe, and Huston. (The 1940 Gary Cooper movie The Westerner also dealt with Roy Bean, who was played by Walter Brennan.) A First Artists Production. color (See Reeling.)

 

Life with Father (1947)—The director, Michael Curtiz, seems to be totally out of his element in this careful, deadly version of the celebrated, long-running Broadway comedy—a piece of starched Americana—by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, based on Clarence Day’s stories. William Powell plays the crotchety head of a large, tumultuous upper-middle-class New York household in the 1880s; this must have seemed like a plum of a role, yet Powell’s timing (usually impeccable) is way off, and the comic expressions freeze on his face. Everybody seems to be trying too hard. With Irene Dunne, Elizabeth Taylor, Edmund Gwenn, ZaSu Pitts, Jimmy Lydon, Monte Blue, Emma Dunn, and Martin Milner. The script is by Donald Ogden Stewart. Warners. color

 

Lifeboat (1944)—Ham-handed, wartime Hitchcock, highly regarded by many, and a big hit. John Steinbeck and Jo Swerling concocted the symbol-laden script about the ordeal of a group of survivors of a torpedoed ship; the script’s chief virtue is that it provides a raucous opportunity for Tallulah Bankhead to strut her comic sexiness. The picture made her, for the first time, a popular movie star. She plays a famous mink-coated journalist who develops a yen for John Hodiak, an oiler from the ship’s engine room. Others aboard the small boat include Canada Lee as a pickpocket, Henry Hull as a millionaire manufacturer, Heather Angel as a simpleton mother with a new baby, Mary Anderson as a nurse, Hume Cronyn as the ship’s radio operator, and regrettably, in terms of the didactic uses they are put to, Walter Slezak as the U-boat captain, and William Bendix as a wounded seaman. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

Lifeguard (1976)—A low-key account of the life of a Southern California star high-school athlete (Sam Elliott) who goes on working as a lifeguard, clinging to the pleasures of adolescence rather than joining the money-grubbing world of his old classmates. Well thought out and with a feeling for ordinary American talk, but too mechanical, too blandly sensitive, too cool to be popular; it’s the sort of small-scale picture that’s a drag in a theatre but shines on Home Box Office. The athlete happens to meet his high-school sweetheart (Anne Archer) of 15 years before and they have a fling. (That must be the fulfillment of a widespread male fantasy.) Kathleen Quinlan gives an unusually appealing unconventional performance as a teen-ager drawn to the overage lifeguard. Directed by Daniel Petrie, from Ron Koslow’s script. With Parker Stevenson. Paramount. color

 

The Light That Failed (1940)—This faithful adaptation of the Kipling novel jerks cultured tears. Ronald Colman plays Heldar, the great painter, who is injured by a spear in the Sudan and later goes blind, so he doesn’t know that his masterpiece has been destroyed—splashed with turpentine—by his spiteful Cockney model, Bessie Broke (Ida Lupino). When he learns the truth, he goes back to the Sudan, bent on suicide. The director, William Wellman, said of Colman, “He didn’t like me; I didn’t like him—the only two things we agreed fully on.” Fortunately, Wellman seems to have got along well with Lupino (it was her big entry in the Bette Davis—slut sweepstakes) and Walter Huston, who plays the painter’s friend. With Muriel Angelus, Dudley Digges, and Ernest Cossart. Paramount. b & w

 

Lili (1953)—Millions of schoolchildren chirruped “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” when this sickly musical whimsey from M-G-M was released. Mel Ferrer smiles his narcissistic, masochistic smiles as the crippled puppeteer who can speak his love to the 16-year-old orphan girl Lili (Leslie Caron) only through his marionettes. Caron is much too good for him, but the movie doesn’t know it. With Jean-Pierre Aumont, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Kurt Kasznar. Charles Walters choreographed and directed, from Helen Deutsch’s script, based on a Paul Gallico novel. Bronislau Kaper was given an Academy Award for that infernal score; Hollywood is shameless. color

 

Lilith (1964)—Jean Seberg is the demonic, corrupt Lilith, a patient in an elegant Maryland asylum who wants to “leave the mark of her desire on every living creature in the world”; Warren Beatty is the trainee therapist who finds her madness seductive. This high-toned, humorless attempt to create a mystic enigma was the last work of Robert Rossen, who adapted the J. P. Salamanca novel and directed; it’s an unusual sort of disaster—full of symbols, chitchat about schizophrenic spiders, and exquisite cinematography (by Eugen Schüfftan), and utterly lacking in energy and depth. Beatty gives his most irritating performance: he broods over each bit of dialogue for an eternity, his heavy eyelids flickering. With Peter Fonda, Kim Hunter, Gene Hackman, Jessica Walter, Anne Meacham, and René Auberjonois; the score is by Kenyon Hopkins. Columbia. b & w

 

Lillian Russell (1940)—Alice Faye, overblown to vacuous perfection, and likable despite it all, wears gigantic hats; the headgear is about the only connection this scrubbed-up bio has with the actual Lillian Russell. In this heavily mounted version, the child Lillian is overheard singing by Tony Pastor (Leo Carrillo), a fatherly type in theatre business; he immediately makes her a star, and she becomes the rage of London and New York. All sorts of generous people—Diamond Jim Brady (Edward Arnold) among them—just keep sending her diamonds and emeralds. Love comes into her life when Henry Fonda rescues her and her Grandma (Helen Westley) from a team of runaway horses. This is the sort of movie in which Lillian the celebrity can never think of Grandma without getting tears in her eyes. A mixture of musical numbers; with Weber and Fields as themselves, Eddie Foy, Jr., as Eddie Foy, Sr. (who, one hopes, was better). 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

Limelight (1952)—Chaplin’s sentimental and high-minded view of theatre and himself. His exhortations about life, courage, consciousness, and “truth” are set in a self-pitying, self-glorifying story. As Calvero the old, impoverished English clown, he appears at a gala benefit and shows the unbelievers who think him finished that he is still the greatest, and then dies in the wings as the applause fades; this is surely the richest hunk of self-gratification since Huck and Tom attended their own funeral—and Chaplin serves it up straight. The mediocrity of Calvero’s stage routines may be the result of Chaplin’s aiming at greatness. At one point Calvero awaits a young ballerina (acted with considerable charm by Claire Bloom, and danced with authority by Melissa Hayden). In the darkened theatre after she has performed, he says to her, “My dear, you are a true artist, a true artist,” and the emphasis is on his eyes, his depth of feeling. And is it because Chaplin didn’t talk on screen until late in his career that he doesn’t seem to have a dramatic instinct for language? (He talks high-mindedly and incessantly.) With Sydney Chaplin, Nigel Bruce, Norman Lloyd, André Eglevsky, and, all too briefly, Buster Keaton. United Artists. b & w

 

The Lion in Winter (1968)—Imitation wit and imitation poetry at the 12th-century court of the Plantagenets. Anthony Harvey directed James Goldman’s adaptation of his own 1966 play. On the Broadway stage this play seemed to be an entertaining melodrama about the Plantagenets as a family of monsters playing Freudian games of sex and power, but it was brought to the screen as if it were poetic drama of a very high order, and the point of view is too limited and anachronistic to justify all this howling and sobbing and carrying on. Peter O’Toole is in great voice and good spirits as Henry II—he’s so robust he almost carries the role off. Not a small feat when you have to deliver lines such as “Well, what shall we hang? The holly or each other?” and “The sky is pocked with stars.” Goldman’s dialogue can’t bear the weight of the film’s aspirations to grandeur, and, as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Katharine Hepburn does a gallant-ravaged-great-lady number. She draws upon our feelings for her, not for the character she’s playing, and the self-exploitation is hard to take. With Timothy Dalton as King Philip of France, Anthony Hopkins as Prince Richard, and Jane Merrow, John Castle, Nigel Stock, Kenneth Griffith, and Nigel Terry. The cinematography is by Douglas Slocombe; the music was composed and conducted by John Barry; the costumes are by Margaret Furse. This British production has some location scenes but was mostly shot at Ardmore Studios in Dublin. Martin Poll was the producer. color (See Going Steady.)

 

Lions Love (1969)—Agnès Varda is probably the finest technician among women movie directors and her first American feature (financed independently, it cost less than a quarter of a million dollars) is pleasantly loose, and with a sunny, lyrical quality. But it’s short of substance—and what there is makes you regret that there’s any. Set in Los Angeles, it’s about make-believe and would-be movie stars (Viva, the wilted flower of the underground, and Gerome Ragni and James Rado, the authors of Hair). They play house, cuddle in bed, watch the television coverage of Robert Kennedy’s death, and murmur inanities. The film is occasionally funny but it lacks a sense of the fitness of things: we don’t want to hear Viva make vacuous little remarks about how sorry she feels for the orphaned Kennedy children. With Shirley Clarke. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The List of Adrian Messenger (1963)—This detective-story film has many of the pleasures of the genre—phonetic clues, some fancy murder methods, a fox hunt, a war-hero detective. The leading roles are played by George C. Scott and Kirk Douglas, and there are several guest stars who appear, or were advertised as appearing, in disguise (Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Burt Lancaster). They’re rather like those maddening suspicious characters in detective novels who seem to be introduced for the sole purpose of throwing dust in our eyes; the stardust is slightly irritating—you find yourself trying to clear up the incidental mystery and losing track of the action. Still, it’s a fairly sophisticated diversion. There’s a joker in the disguised pack: Mitchum, who defies makeup—when he peels off the layers, the wonder is that he could be wearing so much to so little purpose. There was also a hoax on the audience: Lancaster and Sinatra were seen stripping off their disguises at the end, but other performers played their roles. John Huston directed, from Anthony Veiller’s screenplay, based on Philip MacDonald’s novel. The cast includes Clive Brook, Gladys Cooper, Marcel Dalio, Dana Wynter, Jacques Roux, John Merivale, Herbert Marshall, Bernard Archard, Noel Purcell, and a couple of Hustons. Cinematography by Joe MacDonald. Universal. b & w

 

Lisztomania (1975)—In a couple of sequences, it erupts successfully with a wholehearted, controlled comic-strip craziness, but, for all his lashing himself into a slapstick fury, the director, Ken Russell, can’t seem to pull the elements of filmmaking together. Roger Daltrey is Liszt, Paul Nicholas and Veronica Quilligan are Richard and Cosima Wagner, and Sara Kestelman is Princess Carolyne SaynWittgenstein. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Little Big Man (1970)—Thomas Berger’s comic, picaresque novel about the events that led up to Custer’s Last Stand was brought to the screen by Arthur Penn during the anti— Vietnam war period, and he put white murderousness and racism at the center of the narrative. Dustin Hoffman has the leading role of Jack Crabb, an American Candide whose adventures take him back and forth between the red man’s culture and the white man’s culture. For roughly an hour, the comic tone is pleasantly askew, and throughout the film amusing characters turn up and disappear and turn up again. They include Faye Dunaway as a preacher’s wife, Jeff Corey as Wild Bill Hickok, Martin Balsam as a swindler getting cheerfully dismantled limb by limb, and Chief Dan George as an Indian chief who is part patriarch, part Jewish mother. But after the first hour the massacres start coming, and the speeches, too. Thomas Berger suggested that the Indians looked like Orientals, but when you notice that Jack Crabb’s lovely Indian bride looks Vietnamese you start waiting uneasily for more slaughter. And long before you get to Custer’s Last Stand you’ve heard the little click in your brain that says, “Enough.” For a tall tale to function as an epic form, the violence must be wry and only half believable—insane, as it is in the book, and not conventionally bloody like this. To be successful, the picture should deepen by comic means, and when Penn goes for seriousness he collapses the form of the movie. It proceeds from hip to straight, and one cancels the other out. In scenes such as a raid on the Indians with one of the leaders of the raid leering with genocidal delight as he goes in for the killing, Penn loses any claim to sensitivity: this is just crude, ideological filmmaking. With Richard Mulligan as General Custer, Carol Androsky as Caroline, Amy Eccles, and Thayer David. Script by Calder Willingham; cinematography by Harry Stradling, Jr.; production design by Dean Tavoularis; edited by Dede Allen. Produced by Stuart Millar, for Cinema Center Films. (21/2 hours.) color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Little Boy Lost (1953)—This postwar story of an American journalist’s efforts to determine whether the child he locates in a French orphanage is his lost son is drawn out and lacklustre, yet the material isn’t easily forgotten. Bing Crosby is inoffensive in the lead, though he lacks an actor’s tension; he’s colorlessly “natural.” And the director, George Seaton, who adapted Marghanita Laski’s novel, is also rather gray and low-key. The movie is relentlessly worthy and life-affirming; the script is full of lessons. And there are peculiarities: speaking in English, the great Gabrielle Dorziat overdoes her role—her elocutionary style is too grand for a woman who runs a convent orphanage. And Claude Dauphin and Nicole Maurey don’t contribute a great deal. Perhaps the picture is as effective as it is partly because the little boy (Christian Fourcade) is so totally unlike American children that we can see how Crosby would find it impossible to believe that this was his son. And there is a heartbreaker of a gimmick to effect the father’s acceptance of the boy. Maybe George Seaton’s lack of slickness helps. It should be a stinker and it isn’t, quite—the movie’s lameness and dullness seem to make it more touching. Paramount. b & w

 

Little Caesar (1930)—Edward G. Robinson’s Rico is one of the major prototypes of the movie gangster, but Mervyn LeRoy’s direction is sluggish, and the actors seem to be transfixed by the microphone. With Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Glenda Farrell, George E. Stone, Sidney Blackmer, William Collier, Jr., and Stanley Fields. From a novel by W. R. Burnett, adapted by Francis Faragoh.

 

The Little Drummer Girl (1984)—Directed by George Roy Hill, this suspense movie, based on John le Carré’s novel, is set in 1981 during a rash of Palestinian terrorist bombings of Israeli institutions around the world. The tragedy of these two peoples, killing each other because each has just claims to the same plot of ground, is presented with efficient, impersonal evenhandedness, so that we care about neither of them. The film centers on Charlie (Diane Keaton), an American actress working in a small, third-rate repertory company in England; a left-wing pro-Palestinian, she is recruited by an Israeli intelligence unit that turns her thinking around and uses her to infiltrate the Palestinians and trap their chief terrorist (Sami Frey, who gives the film a bit of bravura). The conception of Charlie is a modern cliché: she’s an actress looking for a role to play that will make her feel “real.” But Keaton takes this conception so far that she gives it a painful, shrill validity; initially off-putting, she leaps right over likability and crowd-pleasing—she’s out there all alone doing something daring. It’s maddening that this performance can’t carry the dead weight put on it. With Klaus Kinski as Kurtz, Yorgo Voyagis as Joseph, Moti Shirin as Michel, Michael Cristofer as Tayeh, and Anna Massey as the chairlady. The screenplay is by Loring Mandel. Warners. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970)—As buddy-buddy motorcycle racers, Michael J. Pollard does an extended version of his runty, nasal pixie bit and Robert Redford makes the mistake of acting raunchy. He’s symbolically wounded, and has a great big scar running down his spine to prove it. The scar is much in evidence, because Redford, playing a swaggering oaf, rarely wears a shirt. (This will not, however, do as much for his career as it did for Paul Newman’s.) Redford can’t seem to keep his pants up, either, and he’s constantly fiddling with his zipper and juggling his genitals (on one occasion, in what is possibly a movie first, in a close shot). He also flashes his teeth, keeps a toothbrush stuck in his mouth, wears funny hats, and wiggles his behind. The heroine, Lauren Hutton, enters naked, running toward the camera for no particular reason. Sidney J. Furie directed, from a script by Charles Eastman that’s trying to tell us about people’s quests for something or other—it isn’t clear what. Big Halsy Redford appears to be the stud as loser. The picture is truly terrible; Johnny Cash is on the soundtrack with messages such as “It takes nerve to take a curve.” With Lucille Benson and Noah Beery. Produced by Albert S. Ruddy; the racing leathers were designed by Pierre Cardin. Paramount. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Little Foxes (1941)—Bette Davis’s tight, dry performance was probably a mistake; her Regina is so villainous that this version of Lillian Hellman’s play about a Southern family of predators doesn’t have the temperament and drive that Tallulah Bankhead gave it on the stage. But it’s a handsome movie melodrama, well contrived and showily acted. William Wyler directed; with Herbert Marshall, Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge, Richard Carlson, Charles Dingle, and Dan Duryea, overdoing the whinnying weakling. A Samuel Goldwyn Production; released by RKO. b & w

 

The Little Mermaid (1989)—Disney-style kitsch. It’s technologically sophisticated, but with just about all the simpering old Disney values in place. They’re just slightly updated: the Little Mermaid—a teen-age tootsie in a flirty seashell bra—is like Sleeping Beauty plus tomboy spunk. The film does have a cheerful calypso number (“Under the Sea,” by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken), and the color is bright—at least, until the mermaid goes on land, when everything seems to dull out. Pat Carroll provides the voice of Ursula, the Sea Witch; Samuel E. Wright provides the voice of Sebastian. (See Movie Love.)

 

The Little Minister (1934)—This R K O picture was one of the movies that helped make Katharine Hepburn box-office poison in the mid-30s. Five writers are credited with adapting the James M. Barrie material (which probably means that at least 25 worked on it), and there’s no consistency to the results, but for about a third of the picture Hepburn pretends to be a wild gypsy girl, and she’s enchanting in this section. The rest is barely tolerable. Richard Wallace directed. John Beal is the hero; with Donald Crisp, Andy Clyde, and Beryl Mercer. b & w

 

Little Miss Marker (1934)—People hadn’t seen anything like it; that doesn’t mean they needed to. Tiny tot Shirley Temple is left as a “marker” with a bunch of gambler-racketeers, who talk in the coy Broadway lowlife argot invented by Damon Runyon, on whose story the film is based. Adolphe Menjou is the head hoodlum; he and the others bedeck themselves as King Arthur’s knights in order to please wee Shirley, and at her instigation he also recites “Now I lay me.” No one can deny that the infant Shirley Temple was a trouper; she delivers her lines with a killer instinct, and she sings, natch. Alexander Hall directed this exceedingly popular whimsey. With Charles Bickford, Dorothy Dell, and Lynne Overman. (Remade as Sorrowful Jones in 1949, reworked as 40 Pounds of Trouble in 1962, and remade with the original title in 1980.) Paramount. b & w

 

Little Murders (1971)—Jules Feiffer’s 1967 play was a wisp of a satirical comedy about the American adjustment to random violence—to assassinations on the national level and on the level of local snipers. In this movie version, which Feiffer also wrote, and which was directed by Alan Arkin, the dialogue has comic authority, and there are some strong scenes of rabid farce, yet things keep going out of kilter and the humor slides into something ugly and slightly rancid. The film seems to be a collection of ideological points—it’s pious about its anti-Establishment attitudes. With Elliott Gould as the catatonic hero—a saintly dropout; and Marcia Rodd, Vincent Gardenia, Elizabeth Wilson, Lou Jacobi, Jon Korkes, Doris Roberts, John Randolph, and Arkin, and Donald Sutherland in a funny turn as an all-accepting minister. Cinematography by Gordon Willis; produced by Jack Brodsky. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

A Little Night Music (1978)—You know what you’re in for near the beginning, when the hero (Len Cariou) is greeted with “Good afternoon, Lawyer Egerman.” This film is a cut above Song of Norway and The Blue Bird, but it’s in that general sylvan-settings category. It’s an adaptation of the Broadway show, which was a reworking, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler, of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night. What was lyrical farce in the Bergman film has now become clodhopping operetta. This picture has been made as if the director (Harold Prince) had never seen a movie. With Diana Rigg and Lesley-Anne Down, who manage to get a performance rhythm going in some of their scenes, and with Elizabeth Taylor. New World. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Little Prince (1974)—The Saint-Exupéry book, the first of the modern mystic-quest books to become a pop hit, is a distillation of melancholy, and it comes close to being self-glorifying, masochistic mush. Possibly something might have been made of the material if Alan Jay Lerner, who wrote the movie script, along with the lyrics for Frederick Loewe’s music, had a more delicate feeling for spiritual yearning. The director, Stanley Donen, is handicapped by the intractably graceless writing and by the Big Broadway sound of the Lerner-Loewe score. Bob Fosse’s snake-in-the-grass dance number is the film’s high spot, and Gene Wilder, as a red fox, triumphs over some of his material. As the child Prince, Steven Warner holds the screen affectingly; as the author-aviator, Richard Kiley is pleasant enough but colorless. Paramount. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)—Amateurish yet funny, in a gross way. A simpleton (Jonathan Haze) who works in a florist shop has a prize plant that becomes a voracious, blood-seeking man-eater. It cries, “Feed me! Feed me!” The film is notable for the performance that Jack Nicholson gives in a minor role; as a pain freak who is in ecstasy in a dentist’s chair, he shows the comic intensity that later made him a star. Produced and directed by Roger Corman, from a script by Charles B. Griffith. b & w

 

Little Shop of Horrors (1986)—Jivey, senseless fun. This musical is taken from the off-Broadway show that was based on Roger Corman’s 1960 quickie—a junky travesty of sci-fi genetic-mutation pictures (from a script that Charles B. Griffith threw together). Rick Moranis plays Seymour, the assistant in a skid-row flower shop, circa 1960, who tends the ravenous little flowering cactus that he names after the sexpot clerk Audrey (Ellen Greene). Her steady date is a sadistic biker-dentist (Steve Martin), and Bill Murray plays this brute’s pain-freak patient. The Martin-Murray sequence is a classic encounter: a piece of transcendent slapstick. Levi Stubbs provides the deep, rumbling basso of Audrey II, and Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell, and Michelle Weeks are the streetwise teen-age girl group who serve as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action. Also with Vincent Gardenia, John Candy, Christopher Guest, and James Belushi. The director, Frank Oz, keeps the action right smack in front of your face and the movie is nothing but blown-up cartoon-style friskiness, but it makes you feel as inexplicably sappy and contented as a kid used to feel on Sunday morning lying on his stomach reading the funnies. Only, this is bigger, brasher, with its own kind of higgledy-piggledy ecstasy. The script and the lyrics are by Howard Ashman; the music is by Alan Menken. Produced by the Geffen Company; released by Warners. color (See Hooked.)

 

Little Women (1933)—There are small flaws—a few naive and cloying scenes, some obvious dramatic contrivances—but it’s a lovely, graceful film, and surprisingly faithful to the atmosphere, the Victorian sentiments, and the Victorian strengths of the Louisa May Alcott novel. Katharine Hepburn gives an inspired performance as willful Jo; she has a joyous tomboy abandon when she first enters Laurie’s mansionlike home, and cries out, “What richness!” She strikes absurdly romantic poses, and they’re enchanting. Joan Bennett is very amusing as vain, selfish, pretentious Amy; Frances Dee is Meg (she’s charmingly funny when she’s being proposed to by John Lodge, as the tutor); Edna May Oliver is Aunt March; Douglass Montgomery is Laurie (at times, full face, he resembles John Updike; too bad his bright lipstick makes his teeth look an uncanny white); Paul Lukas is the gentle, older man who courts Jo. The cast also includes Henry Stephenson, Samuel Hinds, Mabel Colcord as Hannah, and Nydia Westman. Directed by George Cukor, for the most part imaginatively and with unusual delicacy (the sequence with the play that Jo stages is particularly fine), and produced by David O. Selznick, for R K O. The dismal score is by Max Steiner, and Spring Byington as Marmee is sugary and sacrificial (she’s a pain), and Jean Parker, as frail Beth, is not the world’s greatest actress—she simpers a lot, though she’s very touching when she goes to thank her gruff benefactor (Stephenson) for the piano he has sent her. Screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman. (Remade in 1949, at M-G-M. ) b & w

 

The Little World of Don Camillo Le Retour de Don Camillo (1953)—In a village in North Italy, an ingenuously devout and militant priest, Fernandel, and a godless Communist mayor, Gino Cervi, battle it out with guile, charm, words, and fists. Julien Duvivier directed this popular version of Giovanni Guareschi’s novel; it was a big art-house success. In French. b & w

 

The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)—Sticks were driven under Gary Cooper’s fingernails and set on fire, but he wouldn’t betray his comrades-at-arms. This was one of the movies that put audiences into a Victorian boys’-adventure, rites-of-manhood universe where war and military service are a test of a man’s courage. We’re supposed to feel pride in the imperial British gallantry of the Lancers (as they put down an uprising on the Indian frontier), and at some level we do, despite our more knowledgeable, disgusted selves. The adolescent boys’ fantasy atmosphere is very powerful; the director, Henry Hathaway, gives us an empathic identification with all the high-minded stuff that’s going on inside Cooper and his buddy, Franchot Tone. At the same time, part of the picture’s romantic charge is its underlying homoeroticism, which comes out in Cooper and Tone’s comic camaraderie. And the film works on an adolescent’s fear of showing cowardice by supplying a weakling character (Richard Cromwell). But if the movie is morally repugnant, it’s also a terrific piece of Hollywood Victoriana. With Sir Guy Standing, C. Aubrey Smith, Douglass Dumbrille, Akim Tamiroff, Monte Blue, Kathleen Burke, Noble Johnson, J. Carrol Naish, and Leonid Kinskey. Five writers are credited; the source is a book by Francis Yeats-Brown. The cinematography is by Charles Lang, with Indian location footage shot by Ernest B. Schoedsack. Paramount. b & w

 

The Lizards I Basilischi (1963)—Earlier in the year Lina Wertmüller worked as an assistant to Fellini; then she wrote and directed this film, in which she observes the loves of three aimless young men in a Southern Italian town; it’s like a feminine view of the overage “adolescents” who were the subject of Fellini’s I Vitelloni. It’s very sensitive (especially in the fragmentary scenes that show the lives of the women) and if it doesn’t come to quite enough (it lacks depth and excitement), it is still a remarkably poised and intelligent début film (beautifully shot by Gianni Di Venanzo). Despite the smooth technique, this film isn’t at all commercial. It gives promise of something very different from the noisy, slam-bang theatricality Wertmüller became famous for in the 70s, Music by Ennio Morricone. In Italian. b & w

 

Local Hero (1983)—A magical comedy by the Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth, who observes the people in the movie as if they were one-of-a-kind creatures in a peculiarly haphazard zoo. The story (which involves a rabbit that doesn’t turn into anything but a dinner) is about an American mergers-and-acquisitions executive—played by Peter Riegert—who is sent to Scotland to buy a fishing village and experiences something new to him, happiness. He never formulates his infatuation with the villagers, the crescent of beach, the glistening bay, the starlight, and the good, dark beer; we see the effect it all has on him in his wistful, stupefied face. Forsyth is rarely explicit about anything—the picture is like one of those lovely Elizabethan songs that are full of tra-la-la-la-la-las. Denis Lawson—the most relaxed actor of a large, relaxed cast—is Gordon, the village innkeeper, pub owner, accountant, unofficial mayor, and great lover, and he makes each of Gordon’s functions funny in a suavely different high style. (Each has its own form of self-satisfaction.) Burt Lancaster brings an imperial, romantic aura to the role of Riegert’s boss—an oil tycoon whose penthouse includes a private planetarium. Also with Peter Capaldi as Danny, Jenny Seagrove as the marine biologist who seems to live in the water and has a hint of iridescence about her, Fulton Mackay as the hermit, Chris Rozyki as the Russian, and Jennifer Black as Gordon’s bride. The opening sequence, set in a Houston skyscraper, is heavy-handed and coy, and most of the other Houston scenes falter, but the rest of the film has an original, feathery charm. The score is by Mark Knopfler. Produced by David Puttnam, for Goldcrest; released by Warners. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Lola (1961)—This first film by Jacques Demy is like an adolescent’s dream of romance, formed from old movies. Lola (Anouk Aimée) is simple and open, an untalented and not too bright cabaret dancer, a vulnerable, sentimental girl. The film gives us life rose-tinted—a lovely, quirky mixture of French-movie worldliness circa 1939 and the innocent cheerfulness of the Gene Kelly-Frank Sinatra M-G-M musicals of the 40s (Anchors Aweigh, On the Town), with their generous, shy sailors, kind to kids and looking for love. Demy gently mocks romantic movie effects, which he employs more romantically than ever. Characters suddenly get rich or are stranded on an island, and Lola’s dreams come true—and not just her dreams but her illusions. This is a poetic world in which illusions are vindicated. Lola, abandoned by her sailor lover, brings up their son in the best sentimental, goodhearted-bad-girl movie tradition, believing all the time that her man will return, and, because she sustains her faith in this illusion, he does return, fabulously rich and still in love with her, and they drive off into a bright future as the other cabaret girls weep in unison at the soul-satisfying beauty of it all. Lola, in top hat and boa for her nightclub act, is herself a quotation—an homage to Dietrich’s “Lola Lola” of The Blue Angel, but only to the effervescent and harmless half. (In Demy’s 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the melancholy diamond merchant who sings “Once, I Loved a Woman Named Lola” is played by the actor who was the young drifter who loved her and lost her in this film, and Demy continued the story of Lola in his 1969 American film Model Shop.) With Marc Michel and Elina Labourdette; cinematography by Raoul Coutard; score by Michel Legrand. In French. b & w

 

Lola Montès (1955)—This ambitious phantasmagorical treatment of the scandalous life of the 19th-century courtesan and dancer Lola Montès is a reflection on the ephemeral nature of fame, beauty, and pleasure. It was the last film completed by Max Ophuls; as he lay dying, his producers were shortening and re-editing his version (it was cut from 140 minutes to 110 to 90) in the hope of recouping their investment, which had been large. (The film was shot in CinemaScope and color and was made on an opulent scale.) But even in a restored form, it’s disappointing—poorly acted and too shallow for its melancholy tone and its rich decor and elaborate structure. Lola (Martine Carol), far past her prime, is seen being exhibited and humiliated in a circus in New Orleans; the ringmaster—Peter Ustinov—tells the audience that it will see Lola’s life story, and her early conquests and adventures are shown in flashbacks. Regrettably, Martine Carol couldn’t manage to look young enough for Lola’s radiant early days, and she was too bad a dancer even to play a bad dancer—she was a non-dancer. There is nothing unusual about her Lola—nothing that would explain why men are going mad over her. The center of the movie seems to be missing, and this isn’t just the fault of the actress. The swirling, rococo camera movement at the circus is surprisingly elegant (though presumably the circus is meant to be tawdry). The movement suggests that this rather dumpy little woman has had an extraordinary emotional life, yet nothing seems to happen in those flashbacks—which don’t gain in depth from our knowing what Lola has come down to. And she loiters so long with the king in Bavaria that one wants to give her carriage a push. What makes this folly so poignant and so painful to watch is that its virtuoso director didn’t allow himself any middle ground: the film had to be his greatest masterpiece to be any good at all. According to his script girl, he died knowing he had failed. (The film was also one of the worst box-office disasters of its era.) With Anton Walbrook as King Ludwig I, Oskar Werner, Ivan Desny, and Will Quadflieg as Liszt. Ophuls and three others worked on the shockingly empty script, adapted from a French best-seller by Cecil St. Laurent. Sets by Jean d’Eaubonne and Willy Schatz; costumes by Georges Annekov; cinematography by Christian Matras; music by Georges Auric. In French.

 

Lolita (1962)—Wild, marvellously enjoyable comedy, adapted from Nabokov’s novel. James Mason is the lover of little girls, the smiling, obsequious, phony Humbert Humbert; Shelley Winters is Charlotte Haze, the culture vulture rampant; Sue Lyon is her sexy daughter, Lolita; and Peter Sellers (at his most inspired) is Quilty, Humbert Humbert’s walking paranoia. Stanley Kubrick directed. M-G-M. b & w (See I Lost it at the Movies.)

 

The Lonely Guy (1984)—Thrown out by his girlfriend, Steve Martin falls into a subculture of Lonely Guys, a secret society of men who recognize each other. (It’s like the closeted gay subculture of the 50s.) Adapted from Bruce Jay Friedman’s 1978 The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life, this comedy has some wonderful gags and a lot of other good ideas for gags, but it was directed by Arthur Hiller, who is the opposite of a perfectionist, and it makes you feel as if you were watching television. Steve Martin has his moments, though, and he and Charles Grodin (as a veteran Lonely Guy) do a series of partly improvised sketches; they’re a great manic-depressive team—Martin is starry-eyed and hopeful, Grodin is droopy and negative. With Judith Ivey, Steve Lawrence, Robyn Douglass, and pointless guest appearances by Loni Anderson, Merv Griffin, and Dr. Joyce Brothers. The adaptation is by Neil Simon; the script is by Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels. The atrocious cinematography is by Victor J. Kemper. Universal. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Lonely Hearts (1982)—This movie is very casually strung together. It’s an Australian variant of the comfy-cozy Ealing comedies of the 50s, but it doesn’t have their precise construction—it moves from one small slapstick diversion to the next. As the timid, sexually repressed heroine, Wendy Hughes is lovely in the standard fine-actress-playing-dowdy-aging-virgin performance. As the piano tuner who courts her, Norman Kaye has a furtive, childlike prankishness, and that’s what keeps the movie alive. The core idea is moist, but the film’s humor is dry and sometimes darting and sneaky. Directed by Paul Cox, who wrote the script with John Clarke, the film has a cheerless look and dreary, crabbed cinematography. You have to settle for the flyspeck jokes, and the acting; it’s all mildly satirical, mildly romantic, and mildly engaging. With Jonathan Hardy as the piano tuner’s amiable, innocent brother-in-law and Jon Finlayson as the flamboyant director of an amateur theatrical group. color (See State of the Art.)

 

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987)—A spinster in spite of her sensual nature, Judy Hearne, who lives in Dublin, is all pretension. Everybody sees through her, and she knows it, but she can’t get rid of her own mealymouthed phoniness: it’s ingrained in her. Maggie Smith, who plays the part, lets you read every shade of feeling in Judy’s face; she makes you feel the ghastliness of knowing you’re a figure of fun. Taken from Brian Moore’s novel (a work of surpassing empathy written in 1955, when he was only 27), the movie, directed by Jack Clayton, is a phenomenal piece of work. It’s about Judy’s misunderstanding the attentions of her landlady’s brother (Bob Hoskins) and thinking herself to be in the midst of a romance; it’s about her isolation, her secret drinking, and her rage against the Church for her wasted life. There has probably never been another movie in which a woman rejected the Church fathers’ ready-made answers. Maggie Smith and Wendy Hiller (who plays Judy’s tyrannical aunt) are magnificent together, and the cast includes Ian McNeice, who, as the landlady’s son, gives the film a baroque touch that helps offset the shallow, virtuous ending, Marie Kean as the landlady, and Rudi Davies as a young slavey. The adaptation is by Peter Nelson. color (See Hooked.)

 

Long Ago, Tomorrow (1971)—Doomed love between paraplegics, who must go through considerable wheelchair wiggling even to kiss. For people who want to be turned on by the sadness of it. With Malcolm McDowell and Nanette Newman; directed by Bryan Forbes. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962)—This portrait of the artist as an Irish-American has the worst American failings: it’s obvious, sprawling, yet crabbed. But if you respond at all, you may go all the way to exaltation. Perhaps just because of its naked familiarity, its grinding, ludicrous wrestling with expressiveness, Journey is, at last, an American family classic; the usual embarrassments are transcended, and the family theme is raised to mythic heights. This is the best film ever made from an O’Neill play (and it’s O’Neill’s greatest play). Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, Jr., and Dean Stockwell are the quartet. Hepburn’s transitions here—the way she can look 18 or 80 at will—seem iridescent. She surpasses herself: the most beautiful screen comedienne of the 30s and 40s becomes our greatest screen tragedienne. Sidney Lumet directed; Boris Kaufman did the cinematography. The complete film runs 170 minutes; frequently, a version 34 minutes shorter is shown, which seriously damages the structure and omits several of Robards’ finest scenes. Produced by Ely Landau; released by Embassy Pictures. b & w

 

The Long Goodbye (1973)—In his novel, set in 1953, Raymond Chandler situated his incorruptible knight Philip Marlowe in Los Angeles, the city famed as the place where you go to sell out. And Chandler wrote to his agent that what he cared about in this book was “how any man who tried to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish.” Chandler’s sentimental foolishness is the taking-off place for Robert Altman’s heady, whirling sideshow of a movie, set in the early 70s L.A. of the stoned sensibility. Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is a wryly forlorn knight, just slogging along; still driving a 1948 Lincoln Continental and trying to behave like Bogart, he’s the gallant fool in a corrupt world—the innocent eye. Even the police know more about the case he’s involved in than he does. Yet he’s the only one who cares. Altman kisses off the private-eye form as gracefully as Beat the Devil parodied the international-intrigue thriller. Less accidental than Beat the Devil, this picture is just about as funny, though quicker-witted and dreamier, in soft, mellow color and volatile images. Altman tells a detective story all right, but he does it through a spree—a highflying rap on Chandler and the movies and L.A. The film drives you a little crazy, turns you on the way some musicals (Singin’ in the Rain, Cabaret) and some comedies (M*A*S*H, parts of Bananas and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex) do. Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance. With Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, Jim Bouton, Henry Gibson, Jack Riley, and Ken Sansom. Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality); John Williams’ score is a witty series of variations on the title song; the script is credited to Leigh Brackett, but when you hear the Altman-style improvisatory dialogue you know you can’t take that too literally. United Artists. (See Reeling.)

 

The Long, Hot Summer (1958)—This amalgam of Faulkner’s stories “Barn Burning” and “Spotted Horses” (which is part of his novel The Hamlet) turned out to be highly commercial and hugely entertaining. The setting is a Mississippi town run by Will Varner (Orson Welles); Paul Newman plays Ben Quick, the stud drifter who comes into town and makes a deal with Varner to marry his tough-minded, virgin schoolteacher daughter (Joanne Woodward). Ben Quick is one of those arrogant-on-the-outside, vulnerable-on-the-inside roles that Newman could do better than any other movie actor, and he and Woodward have some electric, strong scenes together. Martin Ritt directed from a crackerjack popular screenplay by Irving Ravetch and his wife, Harriet Frank, Jr. (In 1945 Faulkner had worked on a screen treatment of “Barn Burning” but nothing came of it.) With Angela Lansbury, Lee Remick, Anthony Franciosa, and Richard Anderson. 20th Century-Fox. CinemaScope, color

 

Long Pants (1927)—This Harry Langdon comedy, directed by Frank Capra, wasn’t up to The Strong Man of the year before; it has its dull side, but it has some inventive moments. Langdon, with his ineffectual, fluttering gestures, is a creepy mixture of the infantile and the effete. He isn’t funny, exactly—he’s fixating. Here, he plays a meek small-town adolescent who yearns for romance and finds it with his first pair of long pants. When he sees the scheming dame he falls for, she’s sitting in an open car, and he circles around her on his bicycle, helplessly infatuated and trying to impress her by trick riding. He leaves his family and the girl next door and follows this vamp (Alma Bennett) to the city. (She turns out to be nothing less than a murderer.) Frankie Darro plays Harry as a small boy. Written by Arthur Ripley. Distributed by First National. Silent. b & w, with (originally) a dream sequence in color

 

The Long Voyage Home (1940)—One of the finest of all the movies that deal with life at sea, and one of the most successful of all attempts to put Eugene O’Neill on film—per—haps because the director, John Ford, and the adaptor, Dudley Nichols, were so free in their approach to O’Neill’s material. The young Mildred Natwick has a memorable scene in a café with John Wayne, and Barry Fitzgerald’s return to the ship (shrunken and chastened) is a truly great moment. Gregg Toland did the cinematography (which includes some early experiments in deep focus); with Thomas Mitchell, Wilfrid Lawson, Ward Bond, John Qualen, and Joe Sawyer. Produced by Walter Wanger; released by United Artists. b & w

 

The Longest Yard (1974)—Burt Reynolds, as a sellout quarterback turned superstud gigolo, lands in prison; he rediscovers his manhood through helping a bunch of convicts fight for theirs. The picture is a brutal bash, but the laughter at the brutality has no meanness in it; everybody knows that the blood isn’t real. Robert Aldrich directed this comic fantasy, centering on a football game between crazily ruthless convicts and crazily ruthless guards; for all its bone-crunching collisions, it’s almost irresistibly good-natured and funny. With Ed Lauter, Eddie Albert, and Bernadette Peters. Paramount. color (See Reeling.)

 

Look After Amelia, see Oh, Amelia!

 

Look Back in Anger (1959)—The English “angry young man” bursts onto the screen—an intellectual “wild one” and “rebel without a cause”—delivering some of the most electrifying dialogue of the era. Jimmy Porter (Richard Burton) is a blazingly articulate hero with passion and power, and no place in life, or cause or goal. He is an artist with no art to practice. As rancorous as Hamlet, he rages at his pale, zombie-like wife (Mary Ure), at his foxy mistress (Claire Bloom), at his good friend (Gary Raymond), and at all the dismal English life around him. The movie is uneven, and, at the end, damp and foggy as a postwar Winterset. But it has fire. Jimmy paces like a tiger caged in the welfare state, and even if you think that the movie is basically incoherent and that he’s an exhibitionist whose scorn of the heritage of the previous generation is infantile ranting, you’ll have to admit that he has a voice—his abusive shouts and epigrams have the authentic ring of drama. British understatement is gone; the case is marvellously overstated. And Claire Bloom gives a wickedly smart performance; in her own way she’s as sensual and knowing as Simone Signoret is in her much more sympathetic role in Room at the Top. Also with Edith Evans, George Devine, and Donald Pleasence. Directed by Tony Richardson, from Nigel Kneale’s adaptation of the landmark play by John Osborne, it’s something of a mess, but this mess—and The Entertainer, also a mess—are possibly the most exciting films to have come out of England in this period. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. b & w (See I Lost it at the Movies.)

 

Looker (1981)—Pseudo-scientific piffle about the machinations of the head of a conglomerate, played by James Coburn in the desiccated-amoral-old-bastard manner of John Huston. This rascal’s laboratories are developing computer-generated images to make hypnotic TV commercials for political as well as economic use. To the rescue of civilization as we know it comes Albert Finney, like a lame tortoise; boredom seems to have seeped into Finney’s muscles and cells—he’s sinking under the weight of it, and the only part of him still alert is his wiry hair. He plays an eminent plastic surgeon who has “perfected” several women models according to mathematically correct specifications supplied by Coburn’s lab; a couple of them come to mystifying violent ends—which are, unfortunately, still mystifying when the picture is over. (We never learn why the models were marked for destruction.) Written and directed by Michael Crichton in his untouched-by-human-hands style. The picture seems ingenious at the start, but Crichton can’t write people, and he directs like a technocrat. This is the emptiest of his pictures to date. With Susan Dey, Dorian Harewood, Leigh Taylor-Young, Terri Welles, Darryl Hickman, and Terrence McNally. A Ladd Company Release, for Warners. color (See Taking It All In.)

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)—Diane Keaton as Theresa Dunn, the teacher who cruises singles bars and is murdered by a man she picks up. Richard Brooks, who adapted the novel by Judith Rossner and directed, has laid a windy jeremiad about our permissive society on top of fractured film syntax. He’s lost the erotic, pulpy morbidity that made the novel a compulsive read; the film is splintered, moralistic, tedious. With Tuesday Weld, William Atherton, Richard Kiley, Alan Feinstein, Richard Gere, and Tom Berenger. Cinematography by William A. Fraker. Paramount. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

 

Lord Jim (1964)—Peter O’Toole, looking pale-blue eyed and pale-pink skinned, is the only Englishman among the officers of the Patna who save themselves, leaving the passengers (400 Moslems) to drown. But the ship survives, and Jim, devoured by the shame of his cowardice, faces an investigation. Written and directed by Richard Brooks, this adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel is hugely ambitious and almost totally unrealized. Brooks didn’t find a way to dramatize the themes; the narration tells us what the movie is meant to be about, and the characters (such as the ones played by Curt Jurgens and Eli Wallach) discuss their own character defects, and have literary-sounding exchanges. Trying to be a saint in order to expiate his guilt, Jim seems weak when he should be strong. O’Toole’s wide-eyed stare is too mannered, and he has a special problem: he already played Lord Jim when he did Lawrence of Arabia, so this seems repetitive. (After a stretch, though, you do begin to feel for his Jim.) The talk of destiny and fate seems a mistake (it always seems a mistake). The film is most effective as a simple adventure story—the account of a revolutionary uprising by hideously mistreated natives. With James Mason, whose well-paced delivery and sheer professionalism help his scenes, and Jack Hawkins, Paul Lukas, Akim Tamiroff, Daliah Lavi, Marne Maitland, Christian Marquand, and many others. Cinematography by Freddie Young; music by Bronislau Kaper. Columbia. color

 

Lord Love a Duck (1966)—This satire on teen-age culture, modern education, psychoanalysis, and what have you was the best American comedy of its year, and yet it’s mostly terrible. The picture is bright and inventive, but it’s also a hate letter to America that selects the easiest, most grotesque targets and keeps screaming at us to enjoy how funny-awful everything is. Finally we’re preached at for our tiny minds and our family spray deodorants. Tuesday Weld has a wonderful blank, childlike quality as a Los Angeles high-school student who lusts after cashmere sweaters and wants everybody to love her. The director, George Axelrod, drew upon the novel Candy, which he beat to the movie post, as well as What’s New, Pussycat? and the Richard Lester movies; there is eating à la Tom Jones and there are other tidbits from all over, even from Nights of Cabiria. Roddy McDowall plays a genie; Lola Albright is spectacularly effective as Tuesday’s cocktail-waitress mother; and Ruth Gordon does her special brand of dementia. Several of the other performers—Max Showalter (sometimes known as Casey Adams), Sarah Marshall, Martin West—are in good form until they’re made to slaver and shout. Also with Harvey Korman, Lynn Carey, Martin Gabel, and Joseph Mell. From Al Hine’s novel, adapted by Larry H. Johnson and Axelrod. United Artists. b & w

 

Lord Mountdrago (1954)—(Originally one of the three unrelated stories in the English film Three Cases of Murder.) Orson Welles, when he was a magnificent figure and playing at his top flamboyant form. Nobody seems to enjoy the sheer physical pleasure of acting as much as he does in roles like this. As the proud, brilliant Foreign Secretary of the Somerset Maugham story, he’s neatly matched against Alan Badel as Owen, a lowborn member of the opposition. There’s a supernatural element here that sneaks up on you so cleverly that the analyst (André Morell) chatters along smugly and very convincingly until you realize that his explanations explain nothing. George More O’Ferrall directed this skillful mixture of comedy and horror; the cinematography is by Georges Périnal. With Helen Cherry as Lady Mountdrago and Zena Marshall as the blonde in the nightclub scene. b & w

 

Lords of the Forest Also known as Masters of the Congo Jungle. (1959)—This elegant record of the interrelations of man, animal, bird, and volcano was made by an international group of cameramen and scientists (international is a euphemism for German) under the sponsorship of Leopold of Belgium. The finest African documentary of its period, it has one truly superb sequence—young Watutsi girls performing a ritual dance in imitation of the courtship of the Crowned Cranes. The film could do with more facts and fewer of the poetic legends that Orson Welles and William Warfield narrate. color

 

Loss of Innocence (1961)—The original English title, The Greengage Summer, is the title of the 1958 Rumer Godden novel it’s based on. The remarkable 22-year-old Susannah York plays a well-brought-up (i.e., inexperienced) 16-year-old English girl who sets out with her mother and the three younger children for a summer holiday at a pension in the country; the mother takes ill and is hospitalized and the girl seems to grow up before our eyes, as she practices her wiles on a shady, dashing boarder (Kenneth More), who plays uncle to the delighted children. The film takes for granted, without any heavy breathing, the lesbian relationship of two Frenchwomen—Claude Nollier and Danielle Darrieux, the mistress of the establishment, who also has a close relationship with her star boarder, More. The girl goes from her experimental flirtation to situations that she can’t control; jealous and piqued, she betrays More to the police. The director, Lewis Gilbert, handles the children skillfully (the little boy is so beautiful he brings tears of delight to the eyes), and the camera is up close to the girl, revealing her confused shades of feeling so that she seems both mysterious and stripped bare. The whole thing doesn’t quite come off, though, and we’re always too aware of the sensitive qualities it’s aiming at. It’s a reasonably good picture that misses being a really memorable one. But York, Darrieux, and More are everything they should be. With Maurice Denham, Jane Asher, and David Saire. Adapted by Howard Koch; cinematography by Freddie Young. color

 

Lost Horizon (1937)—The original version of the James Hilton novel, directed by Frank Capra, from Robert Riskin’s script—part popular adventure and part prissy, high-flown cracker-barrel sentimentality. The early trip through the icy waste is exciting, and Ronald Colman speaks in his charmingly cadenced manner, but Shangri-La, the genteel Himalayan utopia of peace, health, and eternal life, resembles, as Graham Greene pointed out, a film star’s luxurious estate in Beverly Hills. With Sam Jaffe as the High Lama, Edward Everett Horton, Thomas Mitchell, Isabel Jewell, H. B. Warner, John Howard, Margo, and Jane Wyatt. Score by Dmitri Tiomkin. Columbia. b & w

 

Lost Horizon (1973)—This version, produced by Ross Hunter and directed by Charles Jarrott, is in color and is padded out with a wan operetta score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. It retains James Hilton’s inspired gimmick—longevity—and his invincibly banal ideas, but it was a box-office fiasco. You can’t help laughing at it—its Shangri-La, a cheery-goody haven where you can live indefinitely, lounging and puttering about for hundreds of years, is about as alluring as Forest Lawn. Inhabitants might be driven to slide down the mountains to the nearest Sin City. The leads—Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann—are pitilessly miscast. Finch’s shrouded performance consists of a series of sickly, noble little smiles, as if to reassure himself and his fellow actors that this role, too, will pass. The generally embarrassed residents include Charles Boyer, John Gielgud, Michael York, Sally Kellerman, Olivia Hussey, Bobby Van, James Shigeta, and George Kennedy. The narrative has no energy, and the pauses for the pedagogic songs are so awkward you may feel that the director’s wheelchair needs oiling. The script is by Larry Kramer; the musical numbers were staged by Hermes Pan. Columbia. (See Reeling.)

 

Lost in America (1985)—Original and pleasantly snappy. It lacks the fullness of a major comedy, but Albert Brooks, who stars in it and directed, is on to something: satirizing the upper middle class from within, he shows the nagging terror along with the complacency. And he keeps you laughing fairly steadily. As David, an L.A. advertising whiz, he’s an only slightly exaggerated specimen of a large number of rising young businessmen and professional men—the insecure successes, the swollen-headed worriers. He’s an anxious wreck who tortures himself and his wife over every detail of his existence. With her little-girl breathiness and her look of panic, Julie Hagerty is an ideal choice for the timid, depressed woman who puts up with him. The picture is about what happens when these two buy a luxury motor home, and, with the security of a nest egg of roughly $145,000, set out to find themselves and get in touch with the real America. With Garry Marshall as the pit boss of the Desert Inn Casino, and Art Frankel and Michael Greene. The script is by Brooks and Monica Johnson. Warners. color (See State of the Art.)

 

The Lost Weekend (1945)—Charles Jackson’s novel about a well-brought-up, frustrated, dipsomaniacal writer who goes on a five-day binge that lands him in Bellevue was turned into an unusually daring popular melodrama by the writing team of Charles Brackett (who produced) and Billy Wilder (who directed). As the star, Ray Milland, reprieved from his usual lightweight leading-man roles, surprised the public with his tautness and irony. The picture lacks fluidity, and the slowly paced scenes seem overcalculated, with each colorful character and tense vignette standing out too sharply; everything is nailed down to a meaning for us. The whole thing is short on imaginative resonance; what it has is the Brackett-and-Wilder specialty—a distinctive cruel (and sometimes cruelly funny) edge. And there are some famous sequences: the hero’s lust for a drink during “Libiamo,” the opening aria of La Traviata; his long, plodding walk along Third Avenue in an attempt to hawk his typewriter when the pawnshops are closed for Yom Kippur. With Frank Faylen as a spiteful, supercilious male nurse, Howard Da Silva as a harsh-voiced bartender, Jane Wyman as a Time researcher, Doris Dowling as the girl who says “natch,” Phillip Terry as the hero’s brother, Clarence Muse, and Lillian Fontaine. Filmed partly on locations in New York, such as Bellevue. Academy Awards: Best Picture, Actor, Screenplay. Paramount. b & w

 

Lot in Sodom (1933)—This avant-garde effort (by Dr. James S. Watson and Melville Webber) certainly didn’t point movies in any direction that sensible people wanted to follow, but it keeps coming back, so perhaps it has attained some sort of classic status. It’s a symbolic interpretation of the Biblical story, with bodies writhing and swaying in poetic debauchery. 2 reels. b & w

 

Love and Anarchy D’Amore e d’Anarchia 1973)—Lina Wertmüller’s large, epic film is set mostly in a 30s brothel; there, a young country bumpkin (Giancarlo Giannini, looking like a freckled young chicken), who intends to assassinate Mussolini, falls in love and botches his plans. The movie is uneven; it often seems like a silent film, and sometimes it is extravagant and operatic. But when Wertmüller concentrates on the whores’ faces and attitudes it can be very beautiful. With Mariangela Melato, Lina Polito, Elena Fiore, and Eros Pagni. Cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno; music by Nino Rota. In Italian. color

 

Love at First Bite (1979)—A rowdy burlesque of the Dracula movies, set in Manhattan, with dilapidated stuffed bats and a large assortment of gags; some of them are funny in a low-grade, moldy way, and some are even stupidly racist, but many are weirdly hip, with a true flaky wit. The scriptwriter, Robert Kaufman, will never be called a man of fine discrimination: he takes equal-almost obscene—relish in them all. Yet it’s this relish—which the director, Stan Dragoti, seems to share—that fuels the movie, and, except for a wearying chase sequence toward the end, it bumps along entertainingly. As Count Dracula, George Hamilton uses the self-parody he first demonstrated in Once Is Not Enough; his Dracula is a swooningly romantic, ingenuously prurient gigolo with an indeterminate Transylvanian accent—his declaration of love sounds like “I lob you.” His lady is a famous model, played by Susan Saint James; she isn’t well photographed, but she has such great inflections that she hits her lines for every nuance of wacked-out comedy that’s in them. And in the Van Helsing role, Richard Benjamin has some good silly moments as the model’s whiny-voiced psychiatrist. With Dick Shawn as a cop, Arte Johnson as Renfield, and Ronnie Schell in a bit. Score by Charles Bernstein; from a story by Kaufman and Mark Gindes; produced by Joel Freeman, with Kaufman and Hamilton as the executive producers. A Melvin Simon Production, released by A.I.P. color

 

Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938)—Immensely entertaining. The fourth and perhaps the most charming of the Andy Hardy series, Louis B. Mayer’s make-believe vision of Middle America. There’s a sweet sly joke: Judy Garland, saying softly and tentatively to Mickey Rooney, “I sing, you know.” In addition to Judy (who sings “In-Between”), the girls in Mickey’s life include the teen-aged Lana Turner, and Ann Rutherford and Cecilia Parker, as his sister. Lewis Stone is Judge Hardy, and Fay Holden his wife. George B. Seitz directed, from William Ludwig’s script. The songs include “It Never Rains But It Pours.” With Gene Reynolds and Raymond Hatton. M-G-M. b & w

 

Love from a Stranger (1937)—A neat little thriller, featuring Basil Rathbone as a cold-eyed killer with charming drawing-room manners. This variation on the Landru theme is taken from Frank Vosper’s play, based on Agatha Christie’s Philomel Cottage. The opening is stage-bound and too leisurely, but by the time the killer’s bride (Ann Harding) realizes what she has married, and sits down to dinner with her husband knowing that the servant has been sent off, the doors are locked, and they are alone together in a remote cottage, it is very scary. Made in England, with Rowland V. Lee directing. (A remake in 1947 featured John Hodiak.) b&w

The Love Game Les Jeux de l’amour (1960)—Philippe de Broca’s wayward, featherweight comedy, one of the rare carefree films that came out of the early French New Wave, and blessedly trivial. Geneviève Cluny, who provided the story idea, is the girl who wants to get married; the spinning, dancing actor Jean-Pierre Cassel is the man trying to keep his freedom. They’re so frivolous that at first they appear almost ridiculous, but they know how to seize the joys of the world about them, and in their hands small pleasures come to seem enormous. De Broca’s style has a choreographic bounce, and the film is full of surprises and casual incongruities. With Jean-Louis Maury as the slavishly proper friend of the “family,” and Claude Chabrol in a bit part. (This is the film that Godard used as the basis for A Woman Is a Woman, but the original has more charm.) In French. b & w

 

 

Love in the Afternoon (1957)—Wide-eyed Audrey Hepburn as the Parisian schoolgirl whom Elisabeth Bergner played in Ariane. A student of the cello, this Ariane falls in love with an aging American roué ensconced in the Paris Ritz—Gary Cooper, looking as if he knows how unappealing he is in the role. The director, Billy Wilder, and his co-scenarist, I.A.L. Diamond, have made her the daughter of a detective (Maurice Chevalier), who is then hired by Cooper to investigate her. It’s all meant to be airy and bubbly, but it’s obvious, overextended (2 hours plus), and overproduced. It was shot in France, and much of it is location work, but the art director, Alexander Trauner, built the first floor of the Paris Conservatoire in a studio, as well as the second floor of the Ritz full-scale, with actual, operating elevators. For the performance of Tristan and Isolde, Wilder engaged 960 extras in full evening dress. At the end, there’s a fine view of a smoking, chugging locomotive in a splendid, vaulted railroad station—and for a moment one wonders if this, too, is a set. Allied Artists. b & w

 

Love Is a Dog from Hell Also known as Crazy Love. (1987)—A low-key sexual reverie from Belgium about young Harry, who loves women but is rejected by them, and is able to show his tenderness only to a corpse. Adapted from Charles Bukowski’s tales, principally “The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California,” this is a Flemish-language art film with its own erotic tone—faintly ironic, faintly queasy. Its softness gets to you. The 31-year-old director, Dominique Deruddere, made the final episode, which is set in 1976, as a half-hour short, and then (with his co-writer, Marc Didden) worked up the two episodes of Harry’s earlier life, set in 1955 and 1962, in order to make a feature—his first. The final necrophiliac section is too poetic—it’s just a few tones away from being a parody of an adolescent fantasy. (It might work better without the prehistory that explains it so neatly.) But the middle episode—Harry’s high-school graduation dance and his torment over being covered with acne and boils and pustules—has a masochistic potency, and some humor and rage. The band plays American pop tunes, such as “Love Hurts,” and the girl vocalist has a wonderfully vacuous, self-absorbed sexiness. This is a movie for people with a perverse sense of humor or a persistent sexual acne. With Geert Hunaerts as Harry at 12, and Josse De Pauw as Harry at 19 (a bit like the young Alec Guinness) and at 33 (a bit like Nicol Williamson). color (See Hooked.)

 

Love Me Forever (1935)—Far from sophisticated, but this Grace Moore hit has a sprightly good humor that helps to redeem the tale of a racketeer (Leo Carrillo) who has a passion for music and falls in love with a poor, unknown soprano; builds a café (“La Margerita”) in her honor; and eventually arranges for her to sing La Bohème at the Met. The movie drips a few too many tears, but it features such curiosities as a mockup of the old Met, an impersonation of Gatti-Casazza, and the quartet from Rigoletto expanded for 40 voices. Victor Schertzinger wrote the story, directed, and had a big hand in the music. With Luis Alberni, Douglass Dumbrille, and Spring Byington. Columbia. b & w

 

Love Me or Leave Me (1955)—Doris Day as Ruth Etting. A lot of people were deeply impressed with this melodramatic, musical bio, which tries for an authentic show-business tawdriness; it’s certainly better than most movie bios of popular entertainers, but that’s not saying all that much. Doris Day is a little less butch than usual, though you can’t tell what makes her Ruth Etting a star. (From the evidence of her movie appearances and her records, the young, soft, and sensual Ruth Etting was just about the opposite of this cold woman.) The script by Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart is several notches above the usual, and James Cagney brings frightening strength to his role as the singer’s vicious lover. Their relationship is horrifying, yet your sympathy may go out to the scummy little guy beating her up. Some good songs, including “Mean to Me” and “Ten Cents a Dance.” With Cameron Mitchell, Robert Keith, Tom Tully, Harry Bellaver, and Richard Gaines. Directed by Charles Vidor; produced by Joe Pasternak, for M-G-M. CinemaScope, color

 

Love on the Run (1936)—One of the big-star pictures nobody ever talks about. Not for the first time, Joan Crawford appears as an heiress. Clark Gable and Franchot Tone are antic reporters pursuing her, and there are international spies. The whole movie is on the run—London, the Riviera, Fontainebleau, Continental trains, and airplanes. Joseph L. Mankiewicz produced and W. S. Van Dyke directed, from a script that John Lee Mahin and others worked on. You can see how hard everybody is trying to make this a slick sexy hit. With Mona Barrie, Ivan Lebedeff, William Demarest, and Reginald Owen. M-G-M. b & w

 

The Loved One (1965)—In 1947 Evelyn Waugh went to Hollywood to clear up censorial objections to the script for his Brideshead Revisited; after seven weeks he simply withdrew the book and went back to England. Out of his experiences he wrote the essay “Death in Hollywood” on Forest Lawn Memorial Park, and in 1948, The Loved One, a short satirical novel about one of the last outposts of empire—the British colony in the movie business and its renegade poet who goes to work in a cemetery for pets. Bought for the movies, the novel became a Hollywood legend through the efforts of various writers (including Luis Buñuel and Elaine May) to get an acceptable film script out of material that was considered too naughty and macabre for the screen. By the time Tony Richardson was signed to direct the film, from Christopher Isherwood’s script, movies had changed so much that Terry Southern was brought in to juice the material up. (Waugh tried, but was unable, to withdraw The Loved One.) From the look of the film Richardson shot every plausible idea that came to him, and then, as the footage had no flow, no development, he choppd it up and slapped it together hard, trying to use overlapping sound to plug up the holes. But it’s funny anyway. Although the picture has lost its center (the poet—played by Robert Morse—has become as quirky and crazy as everybody else), some of the fragments are good and jagged. This botched picture is a triumphant disaster—a sinking ship that makes it to port because everybody on board is too giddy to panic. Milton Berle and Margaret Leighton—who might seem the world’s most unlikely married couple—are quite amazing together; Rod Steiger is an embalmer; Ayllene Gibbons is his bedridden fat mother (who has orgasms from looking at the food in TV commercials); Jonathan Winters is a charlatan; and Liberace is a casket salesman. Also with James Coburn, John Gielgud, Robert Morley, Roddy McDowall, Anjanette Comer, Tab Hunter, Lionel Stander, and Paul Williams, as a child scientist. Cinematography by Haskell Wexler. (Brideshead Revisited was finally turned into an 11-part TV series in England, in 1981.) M-G-M. b & w

 

Lovers and Thieves Assassins et voleurs (1957)—In the year he died, Sacha Guitry, who was 72, made a couple of films. This sly detective comedy, which he wrote and then directed from a wheelchair, is one of them. The old master of casual, ironic wit had intended to play the leading role himself, but old age had at last caught up with him, and he appeared only in a bit part. In 1936, in Guitry’s The Story of a Cheat, the narrator provided a cynical and witty counterpoint to the action. (The technique was to become familiar to a later generation through the English comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets.) This approach, to which Guitry returned in Lovers and Thieves, permitted him to treat the film medium with nonchalant intimacy—there are freakish interruptions, changes of subject and pace. He teases the classic unities as well as the classic virtues: in his offhand way, he seems to say, “Look how easy it is to make a movie—one just begins and then improvises.” He directed an extended romantic sequence that is one of the most impudent ever filmed: Magali Noel, the enchanting, stylish murder victim, loathes her husband so much that she and her lover make love all over Paris, so that everyone will know the husband is a cuckold. The lover, who is also the narrator (Jean Poiret), inadvertently commits a murder for which an innocent thief (Michel Serrault) is sent to prison. Conscience-stricken, the lover takes over the occupation of the thief. But all this is only the loose framework; Guitry makes a sortie into a great loony bin, provides an audacious painting theft, and stops everything while a mad beatnik (Darry Cowl) addresses a courtroom. It’s a fresh, lovely movie. Clement Duhour helped on the directing. (Jean Poiret later wrote the play La Cage aux folles and Michel Serrault appeared in it as the female impersonator, on the stage and in the movie.) In French. b & w

 

Lover Come Back (1962)—Broadly played, in the 50s telegraphing-every-thought comic style. It was a big hit. Doris Day is an ethical advertising woman; Rock Hudson is a smart, unscrupulous advertising man—a roué. He knows how to manipulate dumb-broad sexpots, such as a Southern-belle redhead (Edie Adams, bulging like Marilyn Monroe) and he knows how to goad Day, who’s a virgin. As Hudson’s neurotic ad-agency boss, Tony Randall uses a lot of vocal tricks, and gives the movie some energy. Also with Jack Oakie in a cameo as a tycoon who plays the bull fiddle, and Jack Kruschen and Jack Albertson. Directed by Delbert Mann, from a script by Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning. Universal. color

 

Lovers of Paris, see Pot-Bouille

 

The Lovers of Teruel Les Amants de Teruel (1962)—An elaborate ballet-drama of romantic tragedy. Ludmilla Tcherina dances the role of a doomed, demented girl, and then finds that life has cast her in the same role. More than a bit much, with dialogue such as “What good is my body if you cannot have my soul?” (Especially silly, because Miss Tcherina isn’t much of a dancer but has a sensational body.) The director, Raymond Rouleau, is in love with colored lights. Cinematography by Claude Renoir; music by Mikis Theodorakis. In French. color

 

Lovers of Verona Les Amants de Vérone (1948)—Two young understudies for the stars making a film of Romeo and Juliet fall in love and, as star-crossed as Shakespeare’s lovers, they re-enact the drama. The film’s sensuous, poetic elegance contrasts with the seamy elements it encompasses (the aging film stars, the young girl’s decadent, fascistic family). You may feel you’ve been made too aware of the film’s artistic intentions, and the romanticism can drive you a little nuts. Serge Reggiani and Anouk Aimée are the lovers. Directed by André Cayatte; screenplay by Jacques Prévert. With Martine Carol, Pierre Brasseur, Marcel Dalio, Marianne Oswald, and Louis Salou. Photographed in Verona and Venice by Henri Alekan. In French. b & w

 

Loves of a Blonde Lasky Jedne Plavovlasky Also known as A Blonde in Love. (1965)—A dreamily romantic young girl who is depressed and lost in her regimented factory milieu mistakes the casual interest of a young musician for a serious interest, and follows him to his home. The Miloš Forman picture is a comedy, and yet it’s too painful and desolate to be funny; it reveals a horribly petty middle-class world within the Socialist economy. With Hana Brejchova and Vladimir Pucholt. In Czech. b & w

 

Lovesick (1983)—Among the many psychoanalyst characters are the hero Dudley Moore, his crony Wallace Shawn, and Selma Diamond, John Huston, Alan King, Stefan Schnabel, Richard B. Shull, and Alec Guinness (as the shade of a trim, urbane Sigmund Freud). The writer-director, Marshall Brickman, has a dapper, weird precision of tone that’s funny, and he starts with a promising (if flimsy) situation: Moore inherits a patient, a young playwright (Elizabeth McGovern), from Shawn, who has fallen in love with her and died of guilt; of course, Moore falls in love with her, too. But Brickman’s attention seems to wander away, and the dramatic tension dribbles out. The film’s tasteful sprightliness keeps it from being about anything, but there are some terrific comedy performances by Anne DeSalvo, Kent Broadhurst, David Strathairn, Gene Saks, and Renée Taylor. Also with the painter Larry Rivers, his great-bird head held high, as a painter, and Ron Silver as a Hollywood star (who resembles Al Pacino). A Ladd Company Release, through Warners. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Loving (1970)—A beautifully sustained piece of moviemaking by Irvin Kershner. It’s an unusual American movie in that it has the sensibility and humor and feeling for character generally associated with Czech films or prewar French films. It looks at the failures of middle-class life without despising the people; it understands that they already despise themselves. There’s a decency—almost a tenderness—in the way that Kershner is fair to everyone; he never allows us to feel superior to the characters. George Segal is a free-lance illustrator who makes good money but never makes enough money; he wriggles this way and that because he doesn’t like his life. He’s trying to do right by his wife (Eva Marie Saint) and his children, and still keep the possibility open that he could yet be a dashing, gifted artist. The new girl he longs to run away with is not very different from his wife—only younger, and not bound down by his children. Eva Marie Saint gives a stunning performance as a tough, gallant woman who doesn’t have many illusions about her husband or herself, and Segal has a loose, informal sense of irony—he radiates likable human weakness. There are some wonderful scenes: the couple going to see a house that has come on the market because of a divorce, Segal just standing and looking at his two daughters through the window of a suburban dress shop—children who are simultaneously alien to their father’s life and at the center of it. With Keenan Wynn, Sterling Hayden, Nancie Phillips, Janis Young, Andrew Duncan, Sherry Lansing, and Roy Scheider. Produced and written by Don Devlin, from J. M. Ryan’s novel Brooks Wilson, Ltd. Cinematography by Gordon Willis; music by Bernardo Segall. Columbia. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Lower Depths Les Bas-Fonds (1936)—Jean Renoir’s version of the Maxim Gorky play features those two magnetic poles of French acting—Louis Jouvet as the gambling baron who sinks to living in a flophouse, and Jean Gabin as the thief trying to climb up to a different life. Their scenes together are gems of the French film tradition. The fine cast includes Le Vigan as an actor, Jany Holt as a prostitute with aspirations toward love with sentiment, and Junie Astor, Suzy Prim, and Vladimir Sokoloff. This movie has one of those emblematic moments that people talk about for years afterward: Jouvet, having lost everything, comes away from the gaming tables and can’t light his cigarette. This scene was, for the 30s, what Belmondo rubbing his lips in Breathless was for the 60s. In French. b & w

 

Luci del Varietà, see Variety Lights

 

Lucky Lady (1975)—Liza Minnelli is a blond floozy-singer, and Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds are her competing lovers; they’re all rumrunners in the early 30s, and meant to be adorable. This is a big, expensive movie for people who don’t mind being treated like hicks: the audience is expected to shudder with delight every time it hears an obscenity or sees a big movie-star grin. Hackman keeps a low profile and comes off better than the others, but it’s not much of a contest. Reynolds does his simp act; he’s willing to play a twit, but he plays it a little cute, so you’ll know Burt Reynolds could never be convincing as a twit. There’s nothing to be done with the role anyway, and he isn’t obstreperously offensive. What is is the way Liza Minnelli is presented as a strident, selfish bitch, and is then sentimentalized, as if her viciousness and rasping out at everything were really delightful. The film specializes in fancy destruction scenes—boats exploding, burning, sinking, people shot up, blown to bits. Directed by Stanley Donen, from a script by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. 20th Century-Fox. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Lucky Partners (1940)—Sacha Guitry’s film Bonne Chance, adapted by Allan Scott and John van Druten, provides a moderately naughty script for Ginger Rogers and Ronald Colman. Colman plays an artist who makes a deal with a businessman (Jack Carson) to substitute for him on his honeymoon (with Rogers, of course). The first two-thirds of the film rank with the good, lively Hollywood comedies; though the last third is too arch the spirit is still genial. With Harry Davenport, Spring Byington, and Cecilia Loftus. Directed by Lewis Milestone. R K O. b & w

 

Ludwig (1973)—The Luchino Visconti film has been trimmed since its opening, but it’s still footage in search of a style. The continuity is a splatter of choppy, confused scenes, and the relationships of the characters are never made clear. As Ludwig II of Bavaria, the supreme childish fantasist among kings, Helmut Berger is a tense, prissy-mouthed, gloomy cuckoo, and it isn’t until he begins to lose his teeth (from overindulgence in sweets) that the picture becomes fitfully amusing. With Romy Schneider, Trevor Howard, and Silvana Mangano. color (See Reeling.)

 

Lumière (1976)—Jeanne Moreau wrote, directed, and stars in this elevated daydream about the life of an actress. The picture is delicately dissociated; it nibbles around the edges of its subject. And it shares a weakness of many other high-flown junk movies: it is less interested in pace than in culture. With Francine Racette, Bruno Ganz, François Simon, Caroline Cartier, and Lucia Bose. In French. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

La Lune dans le caniveau, see The Moon in the Gutter

 

Lust for Life (1956)—Unlike the usual Hollywood lives of artists, this biographical movie about Vincent van Gogh (Kirk Douglas) and his loneliness and frustrated attempt at friendship with Gauguin (Anthony Quinn) is thoughtful, ambitious in a dedicated way, and remarkably free of howlers. Perhaps just because it is so concerned with fidelity to the facts it’s less exciting than one might hope; something seems to be missing (a unifying dramatic idea, perhaps), but it’s far from a disgrace, and the performers are never an embarrassment. The cast includes James Donald as Theo, Pamela Brown, Henry Daniell, Lionel Jeffries, Jill Bennett, Everett Sloane, Niall MacGinnis, Isobel Elsom, Laurence Naismith, Madge Kennedy, and Noel Purcell. The team of art directors worked out locations (in France and Holland) and interiors that relate to the paintings, many of which are shown. Vincente Minnelli directed for M-G-M, in CinemaScope and color; John Houseman produced; Norman Corwin adapted Irving Stone’s best-selling biography; Freddie Young and Russell Harlan were the cinematographers; Miklós Rózsa did the music. Quinn took the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.