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Pacific Heights (1990)—It’s supposed to be a thriller, but it’s more like an executive decision to make a thriller. The director, John Schlesinger, has his professionalism—it shows in the clean, efficient staging. But the fun is missing: he scares you only by making you nervous. Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine are the San Francisco lovers who fix up a Victorian house (on Potrero Hill); Michael Keaton is the sicko scam artist who takes over one of their two rental units and calls the police when they try to evict him. It’s a drag that we’re expected to identify with the dull young couple; the tenant with the perverted legalistic mind and the fiendish cupid’s-bow smile provides the only gleams of interest. A promising cast—it includes the uncredited Beverly D’Angelo, and Laurie Metcalf, Dorian Harewood, Carl Lumbly, Mako, Tracey Walter, Dan Hedaya, Luca Bercovici, Guy Boyd, and Tippi Hedren as rich Florence—is all but thrown away. The screenplay is by Daniel Pyne; the cinematography is by Amir Mokri. A Morgan Creek Production, released by 20th Century-Fox. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Padre Padrone (1977)—The Taviani brothers, who wrote and directed this film version of Gavino Ledda’s 1974 autobiography, have learned to fuse political commitment and artistic commitment into stylized passion. Ledda’s story is about how he was enslaved as a child, imprisoned in a sheepfold, and forced to tend the family flock, and of how he fought his way out of the isolation and silence—how he struggled for words. The spirit of the film isn’t naturalistic—it’s animistic. And the Tavianis’ technique is deliberately barbaric; their vision is on the nightmare side of primitivism, where the elements themselves are the boy’s enemies. The grotesquely natural cruelty is mythological—almost rhapsodic. Though made in 16 mm, for Italian television, this extraordinary work—pungent and carnal, and in faintly psychedelic Romanesque color—took the two top prizes at Cannes (the Golden Palm and the International Critics’ Prize). With Saverio Marconi, Omero Antonutti, Margella Michelangeli, and Ledda, as himself, at the beginning and the end. In Italian. (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Paisan (1946)—Roberto Rossellini made this episodic film after his breakthrough with Open City the year before. Each of the six parts has a story and deals with an aspect of the war that had just ended. The present-tense semi-documentary visual style is innovative, the content less so. Some of the stories have a tidy O. Henry finish, and there’s a lot of sentimentality, though the film gives the impression of being loose and open. The script by Federico Fellini and Rossellini was based on stories they and others had written. (The Florence episode is by Vasco Pratolini, who isn’t credited.) With Maria Michi and Gar Moore in the Roman episode, and Dots M. Johnson as the black soldier in Naples. Cinematography by Otello Martelli. In English, French, Italian, and German. b & w

 

Pal Joey (1957)—Blighted Hollywoodization of the musical by John O‘Hara, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart, with the score purified along with Joey’s character. The heel-hero—a hoofer in the Broadway version—is now a crooner, in line with the talents of Frank Sinatra. His singing helps things along, and he also does the only acting, though Kim Novak’s vacuity is rather touching and isn’t as laborious as Rita Hayworth’s performance. (It is said that the studio was out to break Hayworth; she certainly doesn’t seem to be getting a fair shake here.) This sad botch was directed by George Sidney; choreography by Hermes Pan. The songs include “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” “Bewitched,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” and “There’s a Small Hotel.” With Elizabeth Patterson and Barbara Nichols. Script by Dorothy Kingsley, based on O’Hara’s stage version of his stories in The New Yorker, written as a series of letters, signed “Your Pal Joey.” The singing voice of Novak was dubbed by Trudy Erwin; Hayworth’s singing was dubbed by Jo Ann Greer. Columbia. color

 

Pale Rider (1985)—Clint Eastwood’s art Western, shot in art color—shades of dirt, with gray, brown, and black trimmings, and interiors so dark you can barely see who’s onscreen in the middle of the day. Eastwood himself, a ghost who materializes as the answer to a 14-year-old girl’s prayer for a miracle, seems to be playing some spectral combination of Death, Jesus, Billy Jack, and the Terminator. Set in the California Sierras during the gold-rush era before the Civil War, the movie is full of recycled mythmaking (Shane, High Noon, and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns), but Eastwood goes through his motions like someone exhumed, and in his directing he numbs out what he borrows. There isn’t a gleam of good sense anywhere in this picture. With Michael Moriarty, Carrie Snodgress, Richard Dysart, Christopher Penn, Sydney Penny, Richard Kiel, John Russell, and Doug McGrath. From a script that Eastwood commissioned from Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack, based on his own story idea; filmed in Idaho. Cinematography by Bruce Surtees. A Malpaso Production, for Warners. (See Hooked.)

 

Palm Beach Story (1942)—One of the giddiest and most chaotic of Preston Sturges’s satiric orgies. The romantic problems of the leads (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert) get shoved aside by the secondary characters. Colbert, travelling by train, becomes involved with a bunch of drunken millionaires—members of the “Ale and Quail Club,” on board with their hounds and guns—who stage an informal skeet shoot in the club car and demolish the glassware. Sturges’s comic invention soars, but the picture is too wild to be sustained; still, it’s a joy, despite the lulls of waggish humor. With Mary Astor, Rudy Vallee, and the Sturges stock company, including William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, and Jimmy Conlin. Paramount. b & w

 

Panama Hattie (1942)—A sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing, and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture. The 1940 Broadway musical (which had starred Ethel Merman) underwent the usual Hollywood bowdlerization; the movie still has some energy, but only a couple of the Cole Porter songs remain. Ann Sothern is in the Merman role, supported by Ben Blue, Red Skelton, and Rags Ragland as sailors, as well as by the Berry Brothers, Jackie Horner, Marsha Hunt, Virginia O’Brien, Dan Dailey, Alan Mowbray, and Carl Esmond. The songs (from various sources) include “Did I Get Stinking at the Club Savoy!” by E. Y. Harburg and Walter Donaldson. Directed by Norman Z. McLeod; produced by Arthur Freed, for M-G-M. b & w

 

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)—Certifiably one of a kind. Albert Lewin, who produced, directed, and wrote the story and screenplay, shows more visual feeling than common sense. James Mason, in his gloomily romantic period, is, literally, the doomed sailor, and Ava Gardner (looking unspeakably luscious) is an American playgirl in evening clothes who wanders through exotic, poetic landscapes before sacrificing herself to save him. Lewin’s direction is static, yet his staging is so luxuriantly mad that it’s easy to get fixated on what, if anything, he could have had in mind. Sally Bowles might have called it divinely incoherent—it’s as nutty-fruity as another Ava Gardner film, The Barefoot Contessa, but without as much talk. The English production, shot in Spain, has a mostly British cast—Nigel Patrick, Pamela Kellino (Mason), Marius Goring, and John Laurie. Cinematography by Jack Cardiff. An Anglo-American co-production; released by M-G-M. color

 

Pandora’s Box Die Büchse der Pandora (1928)—Louise Brooks, a great—almost impersonal—beauty who set styles in the flapper period, and whose straight hair and bangs were imitated all over the world (and were used as the model for the Dixie Dugan comic strip), left Hollywood in 1928 at the height of her career and went to Germany for the role of a lifetime. G. W. Pabst had selected her to play Lulu in this film, adapted from the Wedekind plays Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora (the same source material that Alban Berg used for his opera Lulu). Pabst, one of the giants of the screen, is perhaps most famous for his treatment of sex, violence, and abnormal psychology, and Wedekind’s sex tragedy provided startling material. Lulu is the sexually insatiable female, the archetype of voracious, destructive woman. She has no moral sense and no interests beyond sensuality; when a man is exhausted, she leaves him. The film is episodic; it’s in an Expressionist style, with rapid cutting and surprising kinds of almost violent visual tension, particularly in the first half. For sheer erotic dynamism, the backstage scenes on the opening night of a show Lulu is in have never been equalled; the later scenes, in Marseilles, are comparatively drab. Moving through the chiaroscuro, Louise Brooks, with her straight back and strong shoulders, seems to have her own form of sexuality—preconscious yet intuitively all-knowing. She’s like a cool, beautiful, innocently deadly cat that people can’t keep their hands off. With Fritz Kortner as Dr. Schön, Francis Lederer as his son, Alice Roberts as the lesbian Countess Geschwitz, and Gustav Diessl as Jack the Ripper. Adaptation by Ladislaus Vajda. The German censors made extensive cuts in the film (Brooks indicated that they cut about 15 minutes); a reconstituted version was assembled a half-century later. (The Wedekind material was first filmed in 1919 with Asta Nielsen; the most recent version was probably the 1962 Lulu with Nadja Tiller.) Silent. b & w

 

The Panic in Needle Park (1971)—Boy (Al Pacino) meets girl (Kitty Winn), but he is a heroin addict and she becomes one. The New York-set movie doesn’t tell you much you don’t know. Worthy, but a drag—despite the many incidents, it feels undramatic. It shows a lot of care, though. It has an authentic look and a thoughtfully selected cast that includes Richard Bright, Alan Vint, Kiel Martin, Michael McClanathan, Raul Julia, Warren Finnerty, Paul Sorvino, Sully Boyar, and Joe Santos. Directed by Jerry Schatzberg, from the script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, based on a novel by James Mills. Cinematography by Adam Holender; produced by Dominick Dunne. 20th Century-Fox. color

 

Panic in the Streets (1950)—Elia Kazan took a fairly conventional thriller script and made a tense, high-powered movie of it. Seeing this film, one wouldn’t know that he had ever worked in the theatre: everything is kept moving, in a feverish, seething way, yet the performances are never sacrificed to the action. The setting is the New Orleans waterfront; a murder victim is discovered to be carrying plague, and a Public Health doctor (Richard Widmark) and a city detective (Paul Douglas) hunt for everybody who came into contact with him. Mean Jack Palance (then billed as Walter Jack Palance) and frightened, sweaty Zero Mostel are the thugs they’re after. With Barbara Bel Geddes, who is exceedingly likable as Widmark’s wife, Tommy Rettig as their son, and Alexis Minotis. The writers involved were Richard Murphy, Edward and Edna Anhalt, and Daniel Fuchs; Joe MacDonald shot the picture in and on actual bars and wharfs. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

Panique (1946)—Julien Duvivier’s psychological thriller is a devastatingly effective job of visual storytelling. Michel Simon is the stranger in a Paris suburb who is framed for murder; Viviane Romance and her lover, Paul Bernard, are the ones who frame him. The sordid, intriguingly nasty movie—taken, inevitably, from a Simenon novel—has some pretensions toward being a parable of sadistic injustice; on that level, it can’t be taken very seriously. But in terms of how the sequences are planned, and how they build, it’s an unusual, near-perfect piece of film craftsmanship. In French. b & w

 

The Paper Chase (1973)—Blurry Timothy Bottoms, who looks like a romantic anarchist who has lost his bombs, as a first-year law student at Harvard, and John Houseman as the professor he idolizes. Bottoms meets the professor’s daughter (Lindsay Wagner), who’s derisive about everything, and he becomes confused about why he’s studying. The picture, written and directed by James Bridges, tries to be thoughtful and provocative, but it has nothing to say. Houseman shines because he’s the only one who suggests that he was formed by experience. He brings it his air of eminence, and the film led to a TV series featuring him. Cinematography by Gordon Willis; music by John Williams; based on a novel by John Jay Osborn, Jr. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Reeling.)

 

Paperback Hero (1975)—There is an idea behind this Canadian film, set in Saskatchewan: it’s an attempt to show how a small-town hockey hero and womanizing brawler (Keir Dullea) is destroyed by his fantasy that he’s a mythic hero figure as big as the hero of “Gunsmoke.” And the Western Canadian prairie country is an unusual locale. But the film is feebly written, and the director, Peter Pearson, can’t do anything with the scenes involving a college girl (Dayle Haddon) who speaks what are clearly meant to be bitter truths. The film was very successful in Canada, where its view of prairie life and of living on American fantasies probably strikes nerves. Here, the film’s intentions look wobbly: for example, Pearson’s periodic reliance on cut-in reaction shots of the townspeople is an amateurish embarrassment. The film also makes passes at the soft-core porno market in scenes between Dullea and Elizabeth Ashley (his long-suffering, still hopeful girlfriend), but though these scenes are fairly explicit they are so unerotic that it’s difficult to know why they’re there at all. color.

 

Papillon (1973)—A methodical, pointlessly gruelling movie in which Steve McQueen keeps trying to escape from Devil’s Island and fellow-convict Dustin Hoffman keeps financing his attempts. There isn’t a laugh in its 21/2 hours. The moviemakers have approached the subject of Papillon (a French safecracker who was sentenced to prison for life for killing a pimp and who, 30-odd years after he broke out, trumped up his adventures into a best-seller) as if they were making an important historical biography—about a pope, at the very least. The material has been treated not as if it were an escape story but as if it were the escape story. This is a movie Mount Rushmore, though it features only two heads. If ever there was a wrong actor for a man of great spirit, it’s McQueen; as Robert Mitchum once remarked, “Steve doesn’t bring too much to the party.” He seems to inspire Hoffman to underplay, too. Theirs is the only emotional bond in the movie, and there’s hardly any emotion in it. Directed by the immaculately literal-minded Franklin Schaffner; the script, by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple, Jr., is based on the book by Henri Charrière. With Anthony Zerbe and George Coulouris. Cinematography by Fred Koenekamp; music by Jerry Goldsmith. Allied Artists. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Paradine Case (1947)—There are few thrills in this big misconceived courtroom thriller, directed by Hitchcock and ornately produced by David O. Selznick. Talky and stiff, the film never finds the passionate tone that it needs. The story (taken from a Robert Hichens novel) is about a barrister (Gregory Peck) who louses up a murder case because he falls in love with the defendant, his mysterious client, Mrs. Paradine (Alida Valli). The judge is played by Charles Laughton, and Ethel Barrymore (looking very elegant) is his sensitive, mistreated wife. Also with Ann Todd, Louis Jourdan, Charles Coburn, Isobel Elsom, and Leo G. Carroll, who are mostly miserably miscast. The characters and their problems don’t make much imprint on a viewer; if you can’t remember whether you’ve seen the picture or not, chances are that you did and forgot it. The script was pinned on Alma Reville, but probably her husband (Hitchcock) and James Bridie and Selznick himself also struggled with it. Cinematography by Lee Garmes; music by Franz Waxman. Selznick International. b & w

 

Paradise Lagoon Also known as The Admirable Crichton. (1957)—James M. Barrie’s comedy about class distinctions was turned into the epic Male and Female by Cecil B. De Mille in 1919 (the shipwrecked Gloria Swanson looked wonderful in wet satin). The best qualities of this English version derive from Barrie’s original—solid construction, a sense of fun, and well-turned phrases at the expense of the English aristocracy (who seem to be more useful to the theatre than to the country). However, the director, Lewis Gilbert, works somewhat heavily and for rather boisterous effects, as if Barrie’s gentle, expert style could be updated by noise. Kenneth More is “the perfect butler”—stuffy, tyrannical Crichton, and Cecil Parker is the democratic, liberal Lord Loam. Cast on a desert island where there are no classes, where skill and aptitude count, the servant becomes master, the master servant. This will hold few surprises for audiences; still there’s something rather satisfying in the demonstration. Paradise Lagoon is an interesting example of the way movies scavenge on themselves and their theatrical ancestors, and an indication of why: there’s a solid nugget of entertainment in many of the old repertory items. The cast includes Martita Hunt, Sally Ann Howes, and Diane Cilento. color

 

Paramount on Parade (1930)—A lavish “all-star” musical revue, directed by Dorothy Arzner, Ernst Lubitsch, Rowland V. Lee, Edward Sutherland, and others, and supervised by Elsie Janis. The numbers include Ruth Chatterton singing “My Marine” to a quartet that includes Fredric March; Clara Bow, with Jack Oakie and Skeets Gallagher, in “I’m True to the Navy Now”; Helen Kane as a schoolteacher singing “What Did Cleopatra Say?” to the children, who reply “Boop Boopa Doop”; Maurice Chevalier, with his practiced street-urchin charm (he was past 40, but he got by with it), doing a song number while surrounded by a troupe of girls also dressed urchin-style; William Powell as Philo Vance and Clive Brook as Sherlock Holmes in “Murder Will Out.” Among the other stars are Nancy Carroll, Nino Martini, Jean Arthur, Gary Cooper, Fay Wray, Lillian Roth, Dennis King, Kay Francis, and Buddy Rogers. Shows like this, in which the studios showed off their contract players, were a form of institutional advertising that paid for itself. And these revues did actually reveal the distinctive tone and style of the studios—Paramount was the giddiest, the least self-serious. b & w and color

 

Parents (1989)—This first feature directed by the actor Bob Balaban is a stunning début, even though the story, which starts as a satiric comedy about the conformism of the Eisenhower 50s, lapses into gory horror-movie banality. The terrifyingly outsize Nick (Randy Quaid), a defoliation expert, and his adoring, obedient Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) are a lovely-dovey pair of married sweethearts. All’s right with the world—a man’s world—except for their miserable, finicky, little 10-year-old son (Bryan Madorsky), who won’t eat his meat to grow up as big and strong as Daddy. He’s a budding version of the counterculture hippies. The boy’s scenes with Sandy Dennis, as the blowsy school psychologist, go into comedy heaven, and his moments with Juno Mills-Cockell, as his new school friend, are inexplicably flaky. The script is by Christopher Hawthorne; the art direction is by Andris Hausmanis. Vestron. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Les Parents terribles Also known as The Storm Within. (1949)—One of Jean Cocteau’s two or three greatest films, and one of the finest examples of group acting ever photographed. He took his play about the disorderly, unpredictable parents (Marcel André and Yvonne de Bray) who cannot accept the fact that their son (Jean Marais) is growing up and re-created it for the screen with such skill that a true claustrophobic family atmosphere is achieved. In structure, this is a coincidence-ridden boulevard comedy, but Cocteau lifts it to the realm of tragicomic Oedipal fable. The mother screams for the police when she learns that her son has a girl; Yvonne de Bray’s performance is so magically convincing that Marais’s actual mother is said to have developed a jealous hatred of her. Gabrielle Dorziat plays the boy’s aunt, and Josette Day his girl. Designed by Christian Bérard; cinematography by Michel Kelber; music by Georges Auric. In French. b & w

 

Paris Does Strange Things, see Eléna et les hommes

 

Une Partie de campagne, see A Day in the Country

 

Partner Il Sosia (1968)—Two years before The Conformist, Bernardo Bertolucci made this inventive but bewildering political vaudeville—a modernization of Dostoevski’s The Double, in which a young drama teacher (Pierre Clémenti) has fantasies of extending the theatre of cruelty into political revolution. Clémenti doesn’t convey enough intellectuality for an audience to understand the character, who seems to be a comic-strip Artaud. Visually extraordinary, but the meaning appears to get lost in the vivid pop color, the daring tricks of style, and the profusion of great images—in one scene books are piled up in heaps on the floor of a room, like the Roman ruins outside. (It’s the most Godardian of Bertolucci’s films.) With Stefania Sandrelli, Tina Aumont, and Sergio Tofano. The script is by Bertolucci and Gianni Amico; cinematography by Ugo Piccone. There are versions in French and in Italian. CinemaScope, color

 

The Party (1968)—Peter Sellers plays a bungling actor from New Delhi who accidentally blows up an expensive Hollywood set. Intending to blacklist him, the studio head writes his name down on a slip of paper; a secretary assumes that the name is to be added to a party guest list, and so the actor arrives at the home of the studio head who wants to kill him. It’s a promising beginning—too promising for what follows. Most of this Blake Edwards slapstick farce records the way the Indian innocently destroys the party, and it’s too long for its one-note jokes, and often too obvious to be really funny. But it’s agreeable in tone, though as it goes on, the gags don’t have any particular connection with the touching, maddening Indian character that Sellers plays so wickedly well. With Claudine Longet, Marge Champion, Steve Franken, Gavin MacLeod, Buddy Lester, and Denny Miller; written by Edwards and Tom and Frank Waldman. United Artists. color

 

Pas si méchant que ça, see The Wonderful Crook

 

Pasqualino Settebellezze, see Seven Beauties

 

Pass the Ammo (1988)—Set in an Ozark community, this lampoon of television evangelists is a piece of rollicky backwoods Americana. It was shot in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where the civic auditorium was converted into the studios of the Tower of Bethlehem, a ministry that lays claim to an audience of 20 million people and is systematically bilking them. A young woman (Linda Kozlowski) from the hill country is trying to recover $50,000 that her family was stung for. Her fiance (Bill Paxton) organizes what’s meant to be a small, quiet robbery of the Tower’s counting room but finds himself holding the congregation of a couple of thousand people hostage, and on satellite TV. The movie straggles a bit, but it has a klunky freshness, and it has a whole slew of terrifically talented actors: Tim Curry as the bratty con artist, the charismatic Reverend Ray Porter who dallies with the ladies of the choir; Annie Potts as his exhibitionist wife, Darla, who wiggles like the best cootch dancer in Heaven while delivering a sales pitch for expensive Bibles; Anthony Geary; Glenn Withrow; Dennis Burkley; Leland Crooke; and others. Directed by David Beaird, from a script by Neil Cohen and Joel Cohen (no relation). Cinematography by Mark Irwin. color (See Hooked.)

 

A Passage to India (1984)—This admirable version of E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel about the tragicomedy of British colonial rule was adapted, directed, and edited by David Lean, who knows how to do pomp and the moral hideousness of empire better than practically anybody else around. He enlarges the scale of Forster’s irony, and the characters live in more sumptuous settings than we might have expected. But they do live. Peggy Ashcroft comes through with a transcendent piece of acting as Mrs. Moore, and Judy Davis is close to perfection as the repressed Miss Quested, who longs for adventure; they are the two women whose attempt to get to know the Indians socially results in a charge of attempted rape against Dr. Aziz, played by Victor Banerjee, a fine, fluid actor who’s like a piece of erotic sculpture. If Lean’s technique is to simplify and to spell everything out in block letters, this kind of clarity has its own formal strength. It may not be the highest praise to say that a movie is orderly and dignified or that it’s like a well-cared-for, beautifully oiled machine, but of its kind this Passage to India is awfully good, until the last half hour or so. Having built up to the courtroom drama, Lean isn’t able to regain a narrative flow when it’s over; the emotional focus is gone, and the concluding scenes wobble all over the place. With the exception of Alec Guinness (whose caricature of an inscrutable Brahmin is simply in the wrong movie), the cast is just about irreproachable. It includes James Fox as the dogged liberal Fielding and Nigel Havers as Ronny, and also Art Malik, Michael Culver, Saeed Jaffrey, Roshan Seth, and Sandra Hotz as Stella. Cinematography by Ernest Day; music by Maurice Jarre; production design by John Box. (2 hours and 43 minutes.) Columbia. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Passages from Finnegans Wake (1965)—Not great, certainly, but a pleasant and inoffensive attempt to convey the fun of the jokes and enigmas and metamorphoses of the Joyce dream book. Martin J. Kelley is Finnegan, Peter Haskell is Shem, and Jane Reilly is Anna Livia Plurabelle. Directed by Mary Ellen Bute; based on the play version by Mary Manning. b & w

 

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, see The Passion of Joan of Arc

The Passion of Joan of Arc La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928)—One of the greatest of all movies. The director, Carl Dreyer, based the script on the trial records, and the testimony appears to be given for the first time. (Cocteau wrote that this film “seems like an historical document from an era in which the cinema didn’t exist.”) As the five gruelling cross-examinations follow each other, Dreyer turns the camera on the faces of Joan and the judges, and in giant closeups he reveals his interpretation of their emotions. In this enlargement Joan and her persecutors are shockingly fleshly—isolated with their sweat, warts, spittle, and tears, and (as no one used makeup) with startlingly individual contours, features, and skin. No other film has so subtly linked eroticism with religious persecution. Falconetti’s Joan may be the finest performance ever recorded on film. With Silvain as Cauchon, Michel Simon, André Berley, Maurice Schutz, and the young Antonin Artaud—as Massieu he’s the image of passionate idealism. The staging, and the cinematography by Rudolph Maté, are in a style that suggests the Stations of the Cross. The film is silent but as you often see the (French) words forming you may have the illusion that you’ve heard them. b & w

 

 

Passport to Pimlico (1949)—British comedy with a fine flavor and wonderful details, though the whimsey is rather self-congratulatory. An ancient royal charter ceding Pimlico to the Dukes of Burgundy is unearthed in a London shell hole, and the people of Pimlico are “just British enough to fight for our rights to be Burgundians.” Margaret Rutherford is the historian who gives scholarly sanction to an independent Pimlico; Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne are the protocol-ridden bureaucrats trying to handle the crisis; Stanley Holloway and Hermione Baddeley are shopkeepers. The ingenious author, T.E.B. Clarke, got the idea from a wartime newspaper item: the Canadian government transferred title to the room in which the exiled Princess Juliana was about to bear a child to the Netherlands; in this way the child would technically be born on Dutch soil and thus be a legal heir to the throne. Henry Cornelius directed; music by Georges Auric. With Raymond Huntley, John Slater, Jane Hylton, and Sydney Tafler. b & w

 

Pat and Mike (1952)—Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy play together so expertly that their previous films seem like warmups. The script, by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, isn’t up to the best of Adam’s Rib, but the stars have achieved such teamwork that their sparring is more beautiful than punch lines. Hepburn plays a phenomenal all-around athlete, and in the course of the picture she takes on Gussie Moran, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and other professionals, touching off the comic possibilities in various sports with grace and ease. Tracy, who plays a sports promoter (with a streets-of-the-big-city accent—“cherce” for “choice”) has a lighter, funnier tone than in the other Tracy-Hepburn pictures. With Aldo Ray as a sulky boxer, William Ching, Jim Backus, Phyllis Povah, Sammy White, Chuck Connors, Charles Bronson, and Don Budge. George Cukor directed—beautifully. It’s as close to perfect as you’d want it to be. Produced by Lawrence Weingarten, for M-G-M. b & w

 

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)—Ambitious, erotic, peculiarly unrealized account of how Garrett (James Coburn) hunts down his best friend Billy (Kris Kristofferson), with Bob Dylan (who sings the score, written by him) appearing as a buddy of Billy’s. Sam Peckinpah directed, from a screenplay by Rudolph Wurlitzer. With an amazing cast that includes Jason Robards, Katy Jurado, Rita Coolidge, Emilio Fernandez, Slim Pickens, Chill Wills, John Beck, Richard Jaeckel, Matt Clark, Richard Bright, Jack Elam, Harry Dean Stanton, John Davis Chandler, L. Q. Jones, Peckinpah, Wurlitzer, and Elisha Cook (Jr.). Probably nobody involved was very happy about the results; Dylan doesn’t come off at all. M-G-M. color

 

Pather Panchali (1955)—(Variously translated as “Song of the Road,” “The Lament of the Path,” etc.) This first film by the masterly Satyajit Ray—possibly the most unembarrassed and natural of directors—is a quiet reverie about the life of an impoverished Brahman family in a Bengali village. Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen. Though the central characters are the boy Apu (who is born near the beginning) and his mother and father and sister, the character who makes the strongest impression on you may be the ancient, parasitic, storytelling relative, played by the 80-year-old Chunibala, a performer who apparently enjoyed coming back into the limelight after 30 years of obscurity—her wages paid for the narcotics she used daily. As “auntie,” she is so remarkably likable that you may find the relationship between her and the mother, who is trying to feed her children and worries about how much the old lady eats, very painful. Ray continued the story of Apu in Aparajito and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu), and the three films, all based on a novel by B. B. Bandapaddhay, became known as The Apu Trilogy. (Robin Wood’s study, The Apu Trilogy, does the films justice.) Cinematography by Subrata Mitra; music by Ravi Shankar. In Bengali. b & w

 

Paths of Glory (1957)—Just after he made his racetrack robbery picture The Killing, Stanley Kubrick directed this version of Humphrey Cobb’s novel, photographed in Germany. It is not so much an anti-war film as an attack on the military mind. Some of the press went all out for it (“searing in its intensity,” and that sort of thing), but it wasn’t popular. The movie has a fascinating jittery quality, especially when Timothy Carey, who’s like a precursor of the hipster druggies of the 60s, is on the screen, and the strong, liberal-intellectual pitch makes it genuinely controversial, though it was certainly easier to be anti-militaristic in a film (made in peacetime) set during the First World War than it would have been in a film set during the Second World War. The story is about the class structure within the French army—the aristocratic generals in their spacious, sunlit châteaux and the proletarian soldiers in the dark trenches; trapped between them is Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), who commiserates with the men but is powerless—he carries out the orders of the high command. When the soldiers refuse to fight in a battle that is almost certain death, three of them are selected to be tried for cowardice; Dax has the task of defending them. The film’s rhythm is startling—you can feel the director’s temperament. And there’s an element of relentlessness in the way he sets out to demonstrate the hopeless cruelty of the “system.” (The film was banned in France for some years.) It’s an angry film that seems meant to apply to all armies. Watching it is very frustrating: Kubrick, who wrote the script with Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson, doesn’t leave you with anything. He must have felt this, because he tacks on a scene at a cabaret, with a German girl (Susanne Christian) singing and the soldiers singing along, as they weep. (It just makes you uncomfortable.) With Adolphe Menjou—a cartoon of a wily general, George Macready as another general, and Ralph Meeker, Wayne Morris, Richard Anderson, Joseph Turkel, Bert Freed, Emile Meyer, Peter Capell, and John Stein. Produced by James B. Harris of Harris-Kubrick Productions, for United Artists. b & w

 

Patton (1970)—The film is enormous in scale and runs almost three hours; it was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner in a style that might be described as imperial—incredibly long, wide shots that take in vast areas, with the human figures dwarfed by the terrain. There’s so much land and air—and it’s so clear—that we seem to be looking at the action from God’s point of view. The landscapes are full of men, but they’re all essentially extras—even men like Omar Bradley (Karl Malden), who should be important. There’s really nobody in this movie except George C. Scott’s Patton. He is what people who believe in military values can see as the true military hero—the red-blooded American who loves to fight and whose crude talk is straight talk. He is also what people who despise militarism can see as the worst kind of red-blooded American mystical maniac; for them, Patton can be the symbolic proof of the madness of the whole military complex. The picture, from a script by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North, plays him both ways—crazy and great—and more ways than that, because he’s a comic-strip general, and even those who are anti-war may love comic strips. Patton is treated as if he were the spirit of war, yet the movie begs the fundamental question: Is this the kind of man a country needs when it’s at war? This movie is both a satirical epic and a square celebration, yet the satire backfires. Scott’s Patton is so much stronger than anyone else that he has glamour and appeal. The film’s style itself validates Patton the war lover as a hero. With Karl Michael Vogler as Rommel. Produced by Frank McCarthy, for 20th Century-Fox; adapted from L. Farago’s Patton: Ordeal & Triumph and Bradley’s A Soldier’s Story; cinematography by Fred Koenekamp. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Patty Hearst (1988)—It’s unlikely that this stylized movie of ideas will appeal to a large audience, but on its own terms it’s a lean, impressive piece of work. Directed by Paul Schrader, from a bilge-free script by Nicholas Kazan, it’s a distanced presentation of the kidnapping of the 19-year-old heiress, in 1974, by an eight-member terrorist group that called itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, and of her subsequent participation in the group’s holdups, and of her trial. The whole series of events is like a nightmare that’s all of a piece—a kid’s nightmare that no one is on your side. And it answers the question that people asked before, during, and after the trial: Did Patty Hearst become part of the S.L.A. willingly, out of conviction, or was she simply trying to save her life? The movie shows you that, in the state she was in, there was no difference. Natasha Richardson, who plays Patty, has been handed a big unwritten role; she feels her way into it, and she fills it. We feel how alone and paralyzed Patty is—she retreats to being a hidden observer. Patty is a girl who is raped in mind and body, and no longer knows when it started. The picture seems flat for a long time, but when Patty’s capture by the S.L.A. is followed by her capture by the police, everything starts to add up, and suddenly the film is overwhelming. With William Forsythe, Dana Delany, Jodi Long, and Ving Rhames. The score is by Scott Johnson. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Pauline at the Beach Pauline à la plage (1982)—The writer-director Eric Rohmer serves up this innocuous sex roundelay with exquisite control. It’s all low-key conversation, and there’s a thin veneer of chic over everybody. Rohmer contrasts the belle of the beach, the voluptuous blond divorcee Marion (Arielle Dombasle), with her dark-eyed 15-year-old cousin Pauline (Amanda Langlet). The self-centered, self-deluding Marion flirts and babbles, and Rohmer lets us know what he thinks of her by showing her walking away from the camera in a tight, wet bathing suit that’s squeezing her. Pauline is quiet and intelligent and her bathing suit has nary a wrinkle or a crease. Rohmer has an amazing gift for finding (or creating) actors who embody the tiny, precise psychological observations that he wants to make, and, with the help of the cinematographer Nestor Almendros, he establishes a loose, summery atmosphere that the characters fit right into. But he offers a tedious message (“A wagging tongue bites itself”), and he can’t resist setting up the little girl as our moral instructor. (She and her adolescent lover, played by Simon de la Brosse, are so “natural” they go to bed together without a stab of fear or self-consciousness; does anybody believe this?) The six characters involved in the bedroom-farce misunderstandings include a suave, 40ish stud (Féodor Atkine); a handsome young windsurfer (Pascal Greggory), who’s a ninny; and a girl (Rosette) who sells candy on the beach. In French. color (See State of the Art.)

 

The Pawnbroker (1965)—Rod Steiger plays a benumbed Jewish survivor of the concentration camps who lives on in Harlem running a pawnshop—fat, sagging, past pain, past caring. Adapted from the Edward Lewis Wallant novel and directed by Sidney Lumet, the film is trite, and you can see the big pushes for powerful effects, yet it isn’t negligible. It wrenches audiences, making them fear that they, too, could become like this man. And when events strip off his armor, he doesn’t discover a new, warm humanity, he discovers sharper suffering—just what his armor had protected him from. Most of the intensity comes from Steiger’s performance and from the performance of the great old Juano Hernández, as a man who comes into the shop to talk. With Geraldine Fitzgerald, Brock Peters, and Jaime Sanchez; cinematography by Boris Kaufman; score by Quincy Jones. Released by Allied Artists. b & w

 

Payday (1973)—Shot entirely on location in Alabama, it’s an acrid, hardboiled melodrama with a feeling for authentic characters and details. An exceptionally functional script, by the novelist Don Carpenter, makes it possible for the director, Daryl Duke, to cover the grimy country music scene of a small-time recording star—a goaty, rancidly unromantic third-rate Johnny Cash. Rip Torn, with his smirking satyr grin, will probably never have a role that suits him better than the barnstorming Maury Dann. In the back of his Cadillac between two girls, Maury Dann is a sweating rajah, drinking Coke and beer and bourbon, smoking pot and popping pills. Made by an independent company, with Ralph J. Gleason, the veteran writer on jazz, as executive producer, and financed by Fantasy Records (Saul Zaentz and Gleason), the film didn’t get the distribution it deserved. Its only real flaw is the flaw that’s also present in hardboiled fiction: when a world is this clearly defined, our imagination is frustrated. With Michael C. Gwynne as Maury’s manager, Cliff Emmich as his fat, loyal driver and cook who takes a prison rap for him, Elayne Heilveil as a teen-age groupie who works in a dime store, and Ahna Capri as Maury’s blond mistress who goads him at the wrong moment and is deposited in the middle of the highway. color (See Reeling.)

 

Payment on Demand (1951)—This Bette Davis picture—the story of a hideously bad marriage—was made just before All About Eve, though it wasn’t released until afterward. Davis plays a wrong-headed, treacherous, racist wife who drives her husband (Barry Sullivan) to success and into the arms of another woman (Frances Dee). Davis has so many outbursts that Sullivan, who has to listen to them, looks benumbed. By the time the celebrated stage actress Jane Cowl turns up, as a broken-down divorcee who is reduced to sharing her life with a grubby poet—a spectacle that shatters Davis’s wicked complacency and causes her to reform—the special damp rot of dull “women’s pictures” has set in. With Kent Taylor, John Sutton, Otto Kruger, Natalie Schaefer, Richard Anderson, and, in the flashback sequence, Davis’s own daughter, playing her child. Directed by Curtis Bernhardt; screenplay by Bruce Manning and Bernhardt. R K O. b & w

 

The Pearls of the Crown Les Perles de la couronne (1937)—The writer-director-actor Sacha Guitry made one-of-a-kind movies, and he made them one after another—quickly, tossing them off. They’re glittering trifles; they reek of boulevard insouciance, of chic. And they’re among the wittiest and most innovative movies ever made. This one is a comic pageant, a casual succession of jokes and incidents, shifting from ironic high style to low-down put-ons. The picture follows the career of a group of matching pearls over several centuries and several continents; it involves such personages as Mary of Scotland, Empress Eugenie, Napoleon, Henry VIII, Madame DuBarry, and the Queen of Abyssinia—seeing it is rather like flipping the pages of a history book while drinking champagne. Guitry himself plays four roles and is assisted by Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Marguerite Moreno, Cecile Sorel, Jacqueline Delubac, and Jean Coquelin (many of them also play more than one role). Pearls isn’t as simply made as, say, Guitry’s 1936 The Story of a Cheat or even his very last film, the 1956 Lovers and Thieves; it’s a 2-hour spectacle (Christian-Jaque served as co-director) and it’s slower and plushier. But it has some of his farthest-out campy jokes. (As the Queen of Abyssinia, Arletty wears black-face and black-body, too; she also screeches in “Abyssinian.”) A trilingual production in French, Italian, and English. b & w

 

Peccato che Sia una Canaglia, see Too Bad She’s Bad

 

The Pedestrian Der Fussgänger (1974)—Maximilian Schell takes the year’s Stanley Kramer Prize for a Movie on the Theme of War Guilt Which Confuses More Issues Than It Raises. The protagonist (Gustav Rudolf Sellner) is a powerful industrialist who is exposed as the man responsible for the massacre of an entire Greek village during the Second World War. In writer-director Schell’s hazy reasoning, however, the industrialist shouldn’t really feel bad; nobody in particular is guilty, because everybody is guilty. The film has been praised in the U.S. as if it were a deep probe into serious issues; no doubt, it can be praised in Germany as a very comforting view. Schell loves fanciness and abstractions and imprecision; this film is about so many things that it’s finally not about anything. Sellner has a strong presence and holds the camera; Schell turns up in a minor role, and so does the English director Peter Hall. In one clumsy, gratuitous sequence, Peggy Ashcroft, Elisabeth Bergner, and Françoise Rosay appear, along with several other famous actresses, and are shamefully wasted. In German. color

 

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)—This slapstick novelty starring the grown-up yet prepubescent Pee-wee Herman—a Peter Pan of the shopping-mall era—is somewhere between a parody of kitsch and a celebration of it, and it has the bouncing-along inventiveness of a good cartoon. It’s set in a candy-colored period of its own—a 50s-80s Twilight Zone, where you might not be surprised to bump into Harry (the baby) Langdon or Steve Martin as the Jerk. When Pee-wee’s bike—the love of his life—is stolen, his search to recover it takes him from L.A. to Texas, to the Alamo, and back. Hitching rides, he encounters a series of American-movie archetypes (an escaped convict, a waitress out of The Petrified Forest who dreams of going to Paris, truckers, hoboes, rodeo riders, a mean, wild motorcycle gang) and the 26-year-old director Tim Burton shows his flair for the silly-surreal. The movie is full of slobby, hairy giants—they make you think of Paul Bunyan or Bluto—and you see them from Pee-wee’s point of view. He looks at the dirty, uncouth, threatening men and would rather remain a 10-year-old. With Jan Hooks, who has a juicy comedy routine as the tour guide at the Alamo; Mark Holton as Pee-wee’s rival Francis; Judd Omen as the convict; Elizabeth Daily as Dottie; Alice Nunn as Large Marge; Diane Salinger as the waitress; Tony Bill; and, as movie stars, James Brolin and Morgan Fairchild. Pee-wee Herman shares the writing credit (with Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol) under his own name, Paul Reubens. Warners. color (See Hooked.)

 

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)—Distressed by her marital troubles, Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner), the mother of two grown-up children, collapses at the 25th reunion of her high-school class, and when she wakes up she discovers that she has gone back in time to the spring of 1960. Directed by Francis Coppola, this is a dream movie that asks whether Peggy Sue, knowing what she does at 43, should marry the same boy—passionate Charlie (Nicolas Cage), the only man she ever dated, and the one who got her pregnant on her 18th birthday—knowing that he won’t go on to have the singing career he talks about, that he’ll go into his father’s business and turn into the man who introduces himself on television as Crazy Charlie, the Appliance King. (It’s perfectly clear what Peggy Sue will do because, of course, if she doesn’t marry Charlie her children will never be born.) The underlying question is: Should Peggy Sue reconcile with her husband or go ahead and get a divorce? And the picture answers it the way Hollywood movies used to, by showing us that as teen-agers Peggy Sue and Charlie were physically attracted to each other—as if that meant that they were destined to live together forever, in the best of all possible worlds. The script, by Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner, lacks the mechanical ingenuity of a Back to the Future, yet the characters are almost as superficial, and Coppola’s efforts to bring depth to this material that has no depth make the picture seem groggy. It’s as if he were trying to reach through a veil of fog, trying to direct the actors to bring something out of themselves when neither he nor anyone else knows what’s wanted. (Cage does bring something touching and desperate to Charlie the small-town hotshot.) With Barbara Harris, Barry Miller, Kevin J. O‘Connor, Catherine Hicks, Joan Allen, Don Murray, Maureen O’Sullivan, Sofia Coppola, Leon Ames, and John Carradine. Cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth. A Rastar Production, released by Tri-Star. color (See Hooked.)

 

Penn & Teller Get Killed (1989)—There’s a terrific opening sequence with the pair of prankster magicians on a live late-night talk show; the screen is full of hoopla and graphics, and it’s as if some new kind of bludgeoning, hip comedy were being invented—as if the Three Stooges had taken over “Saturday Night Live.” But when the TV show is over, the snap goes out of the movie. It’s meant to take off from Penn’s remark that it would be fun if a killer were stalking him, but basically it’s about the two magicians playing murderous practical jokes on each other, and it’s extremely laborious. Caitlin Clarke does appealing backup work as the team’s manager, and Christopher Durang turns up as a sneaky nut with a gun concealed in a hollowed-out Bible. Directed by Arthur Penn (no relation), from a script by Penn and Teller. Shot mostly in Atlantic City, by the Danish cinematographer Jan Weincke, who’s great on black backgrounds. Warners. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Pennies from Heaven (1936)—The cheerful tone of this Bing Crosby film grates on one like canned laughter. Sample dialogue: “Are you married?” “No, I’m sane.” The story has something to do with an orphanage, and Madge Evans plays a welfare worker. There are some pleasant, mostly inconsequential songs, though, and Louis Armstrong turns up, with his orchestra, and Lionel Hampton is around. Directed by Norman Z. McLeod; with Edith Fellows. Columbia, b & w

 

Pennies from Heaven (1981)—A startling, stylized big M-G-M musical, set in the mythology of the Depression. When the characters can’t say how they feel, they open their mouths, and the voices on hit records of the 30s come out of them. And as they lip-sync the lyrics their obsessed eyes are burning bright. Their souls are in those voices, and they see themselves dancing just like the stars in movie musicals. The dance numbers are funny, amazing, and beautiful all at once; several of them are just about perfection. And though some of the dialogue scenes are awkwardly paced and almost static, they still have a rapt, gripping quality. There’s something new going on—something thrilling—when the characters in a musical are archetypes yet are intensely alive. Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Christopher Walken, Vernel Bagneris, Jessica Harper, Tommy Rall, Robert Fitch, and Jay Garner all seem to be working at their highest capacities. This is also true of Danny Daniels, who did the choreography; Ken Adam, who designed the production; Bob Mackie, who did the costumes; Gordon Willis, who was the cinematographer; and Dennis Potter, who wrote the script, which is adapted from his six-segment BBC series. The film was directed by Herbert Ross, who took a plunge but didn’t go far enough. The material is conceived in terms of extremes—melodrama and pathos on one side and the dream world on the other. Normal life is excluded. Yet Ross keeps trying to sneak normal life back in: he treats the piled-on sentimental gloom tenderly, as if it were meant to be real. As a result, the picture doesn’t come together (as Cabaret did). But it’s extraordinary. (There are breathtaking recreations of paintings by Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh and of famous photographs of the 30s.) color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Penny Serenade (1941)—Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, who had made audiences laugh in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife, jerked tears this time. They play a childless couple who adopt an infant, learn to love it and then lose it. The director, George Stevens, dragged his feet (the picture is over 2 hours long) and he wasn’t very subtle; it’s “sincere” in an inert and horribly pristine way. Yet he made the sentimental story convincing to a wide audience; many people talk about this picture as if it had really been deeply moving. It may be that the unrealistic casting does the trick: the appeal to the audience is that two glamorous stars play an ordinary couple and suffer the calamities that do in fact happen to ordinary people. When tragedy strikes Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, it hurts the audience in a special way. (And Grant could hardly have been better. Using his dark eyes and his sensuous, clouded handsomeness as a romantic mask, he gave his role a defensive, not quite forthright quality, and he brought out everything that it was possible to bring out of his warmed-over lines, weighing them perfectly, so that they almost seemed felt.) With Edgar Buchanan, Beulah Bondi, and Ann Doran; the screenplay is by Morrie Ryskind. Columbia. b & w (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Pépé le Moko (1937)—Superb entertainment. A classic romantic melodrama of the 30s, and one of the most compelling of all the fatalistic French screen romances, yet seen by few Americans because it was remade in Hollywood two years later as Algiers, starring Charles Boyer and “introducing” Hedy Lamarr. Algiers was so closely copied from Pépé le Moko that look-alikes were cast in many of the roles, and some sequences were followed shot by shot. But Algiers is glamorous pop that doesn’t compare to the original, directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Jean Gabin as the gangster who finds love but can’t find his freedom. No one who saw Pépé is likely to forget the scene in which the homesick-for-Paris Gabin looks at a Métro ticket and recites the names of the stations. Ironically, Duvivier had hoped to make an American-style gangster film and had drawn some of his characters from Scarface. With Mireille Balin, Marcel Dalio, Gaston Modot, Gabriel Gabrio, Line Noro, Saturnin Fabre, and Charpin. The script by Henri Jeanson is based on a novel by Ashelbé (Henri La Barthe), at one time commissioner of the Paris police. (The American version was remade as the musical Casbah in 1948.) In French. b & w

 

Perfect Friday (1970)—A modish trifle from England—a suspense film about how an amoral trio (Ursula Andress, and David Warner, her husband, and Stanley Baker, her lover) rob a bank. It’s rather humdrum. The only thing it has going for it is that the Swiss Ursula Andress, who was always sensational looking and also indicated a certain amount of humor, improved her English and she comes across as a witty deadpan comedienne. With her face and figure, the addition of technique makes her dazzling—she’s seductive and funny, like the larcenous Dietrich of Desire, but the director, Peter Hall, doesn’t know how to set her off. The script is by Anthony Greville-Bell and J. Scott Forbes; the music is by Johnny Dankworth. color

 

Les Perles de la couronne, see The Pearls of the Crown

 

Persona (1967)—In this film, as in his very early Prison, the writer-director Ingmar Bergman involves us in the making of a movie. He gives us a movie within a movie, but he seems hardly to have made the enclosing movie, and then he throws away the inner one. (You can feel it go—at the repeated passage, when the director seems to be trying an alternate way of shooting a sequence.) It’s a pity, because the inner movie had begun to involve us in marvellous possibilities: an actress (Liv Ullmann) who has abandoned the power of speech is put in the care of a nurse (Bibi Andersson), and the nurse, like an analysand who becomes furious at the silence of the analyst, begins to vent her own emotional disturbances. The two women look very much alike, and Bergman plays with this resemblance photographically by suggestive combinations and superimpositions. Most movies give so little that it seems almost barbarous to object to Bergman’s not giving us more in Persona, but it is just because of the expressiveness and fascination of what we are given that the movie is so frustrating. There is, however, great intensity in many of the images, and there’s one great passage: the nurse talks about a day and night of sex on a beach, and as she goes on talking, with memories of summer and nakedness and pleasure in her voice and the emptiness of her present life in her face, viewers may begin to hold their breath in fear that the director won’t be able to sustain this almost intolerably difficult sequence. But he does, and it builds and builds and is completed. It’s one of the rare truly erotic sequences in movie history. With Gunnar Björnstrand, and Jörgen Lindström as the boy. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. In Swedish. b & w (See Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.)

 

Personal Best (1982)—There has probably never been a growing-up story presented on the screen so freely and uninhibitedly. Set in the world of women athletes, this film, written, produced, and directed by Robert Towne, tells most of the story non-verbally and character is revealed in movement. When Towne shows the two heroines—Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly—armwrestling, he concentrates on their throbbing veins and their sinews and how the muscles play off one another. He breaks down athletic events into specific details; you watch the athletes’ calves or some other part of them, and you get an exact sense of how their bodies work—it’s sensual and sexual, and it’s informative, too. There’s an undercurrent of flabbergasted awe in this celebration of women’s bodies, and everything in the movie is physically charged. The women athletes are all great looking and all funny, because they have advanced so much faster than men’s thinking about them has. They razz men flirtatiously, flaunting their own strength. This is a very smart and super-subtle movie, in which the authenticity of the details draws us in. It should be one of the best dating movies of all time, because it pares away all traces of self-consciousness. With Scott Glenn and Kenny Moore; cinematography by Michael Chapman, with a few scenes by Caleb Deschanel. Warners. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Personal Services (1987)—An astonishingly cheerful high and low comedy, starring Julie Walters as a London brothelkeeper. Walters is a human carnival; at times, she’s as spirited as Mel Brooks on a good day. When this madam, called Christine Painter, thinks about the undignified actions that her dignified old gentlemen like to engage in, she giggles, and she carries you along with her. Her giddy hysteria seems the only appropriate response to the sexual habits of the English—it seems a higher normality. Christine Painter, grounded on Cynthia Payne, London’s famous Mme. Cyn (who acted as consultant to the film), is a great subject for the director, Terry Jones, of the Monty Python group, and the writer, David Leland (who co-wrote the 1986 Mona Lisa). With Julie Walters at the center of things, the soft spots don’t matter much. She seems to energize the whole film—to give it a rare kind of screwball fizziness—though she actually gets a lot of help from Alec McCowen, Shirley Stelfox, and Danny Schiller (as Dolly, the elderly maid at the brothel). Cinematography by Roger Deakins. (The film Wish You Were Here is loosely based on Cynthia Payne’s earlier life.) Released by Vestron. color (See Hooked.)

 

Pete ‘n’ Tillie (1972)—Carol Burnett and Walter Matthau in a low-key modern equivalent of old semi-forgettable, semi-memorable pictures like Penny Serenade, about decent people trying to live their lives somewhat rationally. Pete and Tillie speak in an epigrammatic style derived from the Peter De Vries short novel Witch’s Milk, on which the movie is based, but their good life together is so aseptically the middle-class ideal that it looks like death. Martin Ritt directed, from Julius J. Epstein’s screenplay. With Geraldine Page, René Auberjonois, and Barry Nelson. Universal. color (See Reeling.)

 

Peter Ibbetson (1935)—A romantic fantasy in which the hero (Gary Cooper) is visited by his dead beloved (Ann Harding, as Mary, Duchess of Towers), who comes drifting down from Heaven. The five screenwriters failed to lick the datedness of the material (a George Du Maurier story, filmed as a silent, in 1921). This is an essentially sickly gothic, and yet the director, Henry Hathaway, brings off some of the ethereal moments, and the film tends to stay in the memory. With Ida Lupino, John Halliday, Douglass Dumbrille, Donald Meek, and Leonid Kinskey. Paramount. b & w

 

Le Petit Soldat (1960)—Jean-Luc Godard’s first foray into politics, with romance and political extremism and torture and talk of cinema all suspended in an existential mixture. Technically an innovative work, but humanly a baffling one. With Anna Karina and Michel Subor; cinematography by Raoul Coutard. In French. b & w

 

The Petrified Forest (1936)—Leslie Howard is all forehead as a world-weary, desiccated intellectual who arrives on foot at a gas station and Bar-B-Q in the Arizona desert; Bette Davis is an ardent, fresh American girl, eager for experience, who lives there with her grandfather (Charley Grapewin). For a guy who’s supposed to be burnt out, Howard sure has a lot of talk in him, and it’s fancy and poetic as all getout. (“All this evening I’ve had the feeling of destiny closing in,” and so on.) There’s no way to say this stuff without sounding affected, and every now and then Howard hits really embarrassing false notes—but who else could embody this Robert E. Sherwood literary conceit and do it as well? Davis, surprisingly, plays her part very simply and doesn’t overdo it. In a jumper with a white blouse, wearing bobby-sox and a ribbon in her hair, she’s very appealing, and she says her lines as if for the first time—she’s almost the only one in the cast (except for Grapewin) who does. The movie is famous for Humphrey Bogart’s “dangerous” performance as Duke Mantee, the gangster who is using the Bar-B-Q to rendezvous with his moll and the members of his mob, and who, out of mercy, gives the exhausted, idealistic intellectual the peace of death that he seeks. Bogart does look great, but you feel that his performance was worked out for the stage (he had played the part on Broadway). His moves are almost stylized from repetition, and he gives some of his lines overstated, overscaled readings—particularly his laugh lines, when this public enemy expresses conventional moral sentiments by reprimanding the intellectual for talking to an old man without sufficient respect. As moviemaking, this is a pedestrian piece of work; the director, Archie Mayo, gives you the feeling that he has even retained the stage blocking. Every move seems rehearsed, and the Sherwood play loses its stage vitality without losing its talkiness. But the actors in minor roles are a considerable asset, and there’s a tense exchange between a black mobster and a black chauffeur. The cast includes Genevieve Tobin, Joe Sawyer, Porter Hall, Dick Foran, Slim Thompson, Eddie Acuff, Paul Harvey, John Alexander, Adrian Morris, and Nina Campana. Adapted by Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves. This melodrama spawned a whole genre of imitations (such as When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder, from the play by Mark Medoff ) and was also remade in 1945 as Escape in the Desert. Warners. b & w

 

Phaedra (1962)—Jules Dassin’s glossy, novelettish version, set in modern Greece, of the classic story that was dramatized by Euripides, Seneca, Racine, and many others. Here, it’s undermined by a lunatic piece of miscasting: when Melina Mercouri leaves her rich, powerful bull of a husband, Raf Vallone, to run away with his skinny young son, Anthony Perkins, the audience can’t imagine why. She scoops him up in her arms, like a toy. With its snazzy cars and fabulous jewels that can be casually thrown into the sea, this is like a Joan Crawford picture, only more so. Dassin appears as Christo. b & w

 

The Phantom Baron Le Baron fantôme (1943)—Somehow or other, Cocteau got involved in writing the script for this silly romantic adventure, which was directed by Serge de Poligny and has little connection to Cocteau’s own screen work. Set in the early 19th century, it’s about a hidden treasure. Cocteau played the title role; possibly he inveigled Gabrielle Dorziat into appearing in it also; in any case, she looks as if she’s not sure what she’s doing here. With Alain Cuny and Jany Holt. In French. b & w

 

Phantom Lady (1944)—The mood and pacing lift this low-budget thriller out of its class, but the ideas, the dialogue, and the ending that the studio insisted on prevent it from being a first-rate B-picture. Ella Raines is the girl in danger, Franchot Tone is the psychopathic killer, Alan Curtis is the man wrongly convicted of murder, Thomas Gomez is the police inspector, and Elisha Cook, Jr., is the drummer in the jam session that is the film’s high point of excitement. Robert Siodmak directed, and the producer was Joan Harrison, who had worked as an assistant to Hitchcock. From a William Irish novel, adapted by Bernard C. Schoenfeld; with Fay Helm, Regis Toomey, Virginia Brissac, and Doris Lloyd. (The drumming was actually done by Dave Coleman.) Universal. b & w

 

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)—If you’re in a temple of the arts and see someone looking up furtively at the chandelier with a faint shudder, you can be fairly sure he has seen this tacky yet unforgettable piece of Guignol claptrap—or, at least, one of the remakes of it. The story is from a French penny dreadful (by Gaston Leroux); the first half is a botch and dreary, but then the mixture of the morbid, the gaudy, the ornate, and the rotted becomes scary and, in a way that may be peculiar to movies, thrilling. Lon Chaney is the diabolical genius, Erik, who lives in the dripping cellars of the Paris opera house; hypnotically, he lures the young singer (Mary Philbin) he loves into his bedroom in the sewers and shows her his coffin bed. Norman Kerry is the blundering, deadhead hero, Arthur Edmund Carewe is the Persian, and Snitz Edwards, John Miljan, and Gibson Gowland are in the cast. The director was Rupert Julian, but things were not going well, and Edward Sedgwick was brought in to finish the film; Chaney himself directed some of his own sequences. (He must have cut quite a figure on the set, giving orders to the crew while in his grisly, cadaverous makeup.) Universal. Silent. b & w, with color sequences

 

The Phantom of the Opera (1943)—Someone at Universal had the brainstorm of redoing the 1925 silent Lon Chaney horror picture and taking advantage of the fact that it was set in an opera house to make it not only a sound picture but a high-toned musical. The result is this flaccid, sedate version, directed by Arthur Lubin, with Claude Rains as the faceless horror and Nelson Eddy and Susanna Foster as the singing pretty people. Even masked, Rains is more expressive than they are; they seem too polite, too nice to show a trace of personality. But there’s something in the morbid kitschy material that really hooks people, and there was a surprisingly scared, enthusiastic response to this bummer. With Edgar Barrier, Leo Carrillo, J. Edward Bromberg, and Hume Cronyn. The Gaston Leroux novel was served up this time by Erich Taylor and Samuel Hoffenstein. (An English remake, by Hammer in 1962, starred Herbert Lom.) color

 

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)—This satire of horror movies is also a rock musical comedy. The writer-director, Brian De Palma, has an original comic temperament; he’s drawn to rabid visual exaggeration and to sophisticated slapstick comedy. William Finley is the idealistic young composer who is robbed of his music, busted for drugs, and sent to Sing Sing, all at the instigation of Swan (creepy Paul Williams), the entrepreneur of Death Records, who has made a pact with the Devil for eternal youth. The composer escapes from prison, is maimed by a record-pressing machine, and becomes the Phantom, who haunts Swan’s new rock place, the Paradise, where the girl he loves (Jessica Harper) becomes a star. This mixture of The Phantom of the Opera and Faust isn’t enough for De Palma. He heaps on layers of acid-rock satire and parodies of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Psycho, and The Picture of Dorian Gray—and the impacted plots actually function for him. The film is a one-of-a-kind entertainment, with a kinetic, breakneck wit. The cinematographer, Larry Pizer, keeps the images full to overflowing, and the set designer, Jack Fisk, supplies striking takeoffs of the frenzied decor of German silent films. The singer, Beef, is played by Gerrit Graham, who gives the single funniest performance; Harold Oblong, Jeffrey Comanor, and Archie Hahn turn up as three different groups—the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums, and, with black-and-white expressionist faces, the Undeads. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Phantom President (1932)—This musical political satire was George M. Cohan’s first talking picture; for anyone who cares about American theatrical history it’s an indispensable record of Cohan’s style—which is almost nothing like the styles of James Cagney and Joel Grey when they played Cohan (on the screen and the stage, respectively). Cohan is dapper and bland; he seems to wear a mask of ordinariness, and only the droopy-lidded eyes, and sometimes the awareness in the smile, clue us in to the theatrical instinct at work. One doesn’t know quite what to make of him or his smooth technique. There’s a good satirical idea here: Cohan plays a double role—a quiet Presidential candidate and the extroverted look-alike who campaigns for him. With Claudette Colbert, Jimmy Durante, Alan Mowbray, George Barbier, Sidney Toler, and Jameson Thomas. Norman Taurog directed, for Paramount. The songs are by Cohan, except for Rodgers and Hart’s “Give Her a Kiss.” Walter De Leon and Harlan Thompson did the screenplay, based on a novel by George F. Worts. b & w

 

Phèdre (1968)—Marie Bell has been acclaimed as the greatest Phèdre since Bernhardt. Most Americans must take this judgment on faith, but at least it’s possible to see her legendary performance and to glean an idea of the sound and look of the classic French style of acting from this somewhat shortened version of the Racine tragedy in Alexandrine verse, directed by Pierre Jourdan. In French. color

 

The Philadelphia Story (1940)—Philip Barry wrote this romantic comedy for Katharine Hepburn, shaping it for her tense patrician beauty and her eccentricities, and she had her greatest popular triumph in it on Broadway (in 1939) and on the screen. There’s conventional Broadway shoddiness at its center: the material plays off Hepburn’s public personality, pulling her down from her pedestal. As Tracy Lord, a snow maiden and a phony—which is how the movie public regarded Hepburn, according to the exhibitors who in 1938 had declared her “box-office poison”—she gets her comeuppance. The priggish, snooty Tracy is contemptuous of everyone who doesn’t live up to her high standards (and that includes her father, played by John Halliday, and her ex-husband, played by Cary Grant); in the course of the action, she slips from those standards herself, learns to be tolerant of other people’s lapses, and discovers her own “humanity.” Shiny and unfelt and smart-aleck-commercial as the movie is, it’s almost irresistibly entertaining—one of the high spots of M-G-M professionalism. There isn’t much real wit in the lines, and there’s no feeling of spontaneity, yet the engineering is so astute that the laughs keep coming. This is a paste diamond with more flash and sparkle than a true one. The director, George Cukor, has never been more heartlessly sure of himself. With James Stewart, who took the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as the journalist who has a sudden romantic fling with Tracy, and Ruth Hussey, John Howard, Roland Young, Mary Nash, Henry Daniell, and Virginia Weidler. The additions by the adaptor, Donald Ogden Stewart, are brief and witty; Hepburn’s gowns are by Adrian. Produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. b & w

 

The Pick-up Artist (1987)—An airy romantic comedy with Robert Downey, Jr., as a buoyant young New Yorker who races through his days, chasing women compulsively, as if he were under a spell and could never relax. Then he propositions a long-legged, nimble-witted redhead (Molly Ringwald), who’s only 19 but is a few leaps ahead of him. Downey, whose soul is floppy-eared, gives the movie a fairy-tale sunniness, and Ringwald, who has acquired lusher, deeper colors, is essentially a girl in distress. They match up like Pierrot and Pierrette. The film doesn’t build the rush of excitement that’s needed when the action moves to Atlantic City, but it’s bright and blithe, like the sound of the 60s girl groups on the track; the flimsy plot hardly matters, because new, undreamed-of characters turn up, and they keep things bubbling. The cast includes Victoria Jackson, Bob Gunton, Christine Baranski, Mildred Dunnock, Robert Towne, Dennis Hopper, Harvey Keitel, Danny Aiello, Lorraine Bracco, and Tom Signorelli (as a used-car salesman). Among the women the hero tries to pick up are Anne Marie Bobby, who tells him she’s studying for the priesthood, and Vanessa Williams, whose dog gives him the brushoff. Written and directed by James To-back; the cinematography is by Gordon Willis. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Hooked.)

 

Pickup on South Street (1953)—Richard Widmark as a scroungy petty gangster who sneaks a look into a woman’s handbag, turns up some microfilm, and finds himself dealing with Communist agents. Samuel Fuller wrote the script (adapted from Dwight Taylor’s story written for the screen) and directed, in his fast, flashy, essentially empty-minded style. The film isn’t boring—there’s always something going on—but you come away with nothing. (It isn’t that Fuller’s insensitive, exactly; it’s that he’s totally unconcerned with sensitivity—it would get in his way.) With Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Richard Kiley, Murvyn Vye, Milburn Stone, and George E. Stone. 20th Century-Fox. b & w

 

The Pickwick Papers (1953)—Dickens’ episodic book almost defies a simple continuity, but the adaptor-director, Noel Langley, has been surprisingly successful at cutting through the labyrinth and keeping the enormous collection of characters rattling along. The best is Nigel Patrick’s Jingle—swaggering, staccato, outrageously amoral, and finally, because of Patrick’s creative characterization, the most sympathetic of the company. As the duelling Winkle, James Donald has moments so ethereally absurd that he seems to have emerged from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. James Hayter’s Pickwick is more of a reasonable facsimile than a person, but the only really bad casting is the lamentably immodest Harry Fowler as Sam Weller. With Donald Wolfit, Hermione Gingold, and Joyce Grenfell. This is one of the most enjoyable of the films derived from Dickens. b & w

 

Picnic on the Grass Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1959)—Jean Renoir, but at neither his best nor even his second best. His themes are reduced to crotchets in this story about a scientist (Paul Meurisse) who preaches artificial insemination until he catches sight of Catherine Rouvel bathing nude. Some sequences were filmed at Les Collettes, the home where Auguste Renoir spent his last years. Cinematography by Georges Leclerc; music by Joseph Kosma. In French. color

 

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)—It has its ludicrous side. Hurd Hatfield’s Dorian (who sells his soul to keep his youth) doesn’t look fresh; he looks glacéed. And the other characters don’t seem to age with the years either, so there’s no contrast with him. But the Oscar Wilde story has its compelling gimmick and its cheap thrills, and despite the failings of Albert Lewin as writer and director, he has an appetite for decadence and plushy decor. Neither Hatfield, who tries scrupulously hard, nor George Sanders, who plays the epigrammatic Wilde figure, Lord Henry Wotton, rises above Lewin’s chic gothic conception, but as Dorian’s victim, gullible Sibyl Vane, the young Angela Lansbury gives her scenes true depth of feeling. This may be her most intuitive and original screen performance. When she sings “Little Yellow Bird” in a pure, sweet voice, the viewer grasps that the man who would destroy this girl really is evil. With Donna Reed, Lowell Gilmore, and Peter Lawford. The cinematography is by Harry Stradling; the Albright brothers—Ivan and Zsissly—painted the series of portraits. (A 1970 version, starring Helmut Berger and released by A.I.P. under the name Dorian Gray, is more like Fanny Hill.) M-G-M. b & w, with color for the portrait.

 

Picture Snatcher (1933)—A B-picture starring James Cagney; he plays a cocky ex-con turned reporter. The story is lifted from the exploit of the newspaper photographer of the 20s who sneaked a picture of Ruth Snyder’s electrocution. In the movie, the reporter goes back to the prison where he served time and does a comparable dirty deed. Lloyd Bacon directed, from a script by Allen Rivkin and P. J. Wolfson; it’s all fairly snappy until the reporter has to expiate his crime. Chesty Patricia Ellis is the heroine; also with Ralph Bellamy, Alice White, and Ralf Harolde. Warners. b & w

 

Pierrot le fou (1965)—Jean-Luc Godard’s unresolved, disturbing film: it gets to you. The narrative encompasses a satire of advertising, an existential stalemate, political violence, and romance, all shot—in color—in a hard-edge style. With Jean-Paul Belmondo as Ferdinand, who leaves his rich wife in Paris and goes off to the South of France with the restless Marianne (Anna Karina); he comes to an unforgettably explosive end. Also with Jimmy Karoubi as the dwarf, and Samuel Fuller as himself, and a glimpse of Jean-Pierre Léaud. The cinematography is by Raoul Coutard; the script (by Godard) has its origins in the novel Obsession, by Lionel White. In French. Released by Pathe Contemporary.

 

Pig Across Paris, see Four Bags Full

 

Pigeons (1971)—It has been said that this movie about an alienated youth turned New York cab-driver improves as it goes along, but who wants to stick around long enough to find out? Static direction by John Dexter. The cast includes Jordan Christopher, Jill O’Hara, Kate Reid, and William Redfield. Produced by Richard Lewis. color

Pigskin Parade (1936)—It’s beyond belief—atrocious and yet funny and enjoyable. A 20th Century-Fox musical—and that’s not exactly a recommendation, as anyone who went to musicals knows. But there was often a lot going on in them, and this one centers on a rowdy (if somewhat extended) football game and features the young, pudgy, budding talent, Judy Garland (three years before The Wizard of Oz), as a farm girl. (This was her feature film début.) Also, Patsy Kelly, Betty Grable, Stuart Erwin, Dixie Dunbar, Johnny Downs, Jack Haley, and the Yacht Club Boys. David Butler directed; the songs include “Balboa.” b & w

 

 

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)—Inspector Clouseau’s clenched-jaws politesse is a joke that had already run its course. Playing Clouseau for the fourth time, Peter Sellers is required to imitate himself, and his fish-eyed deadpan is joyless. In this one Herbert Lom as Dreyfus (Clouseau’s former boss, the Chief Inspector of the Sûreté, who was driven to nervous collapse in both A Shot in the Dark and The Return of the Pink Panther) turns into a criminal mastermind and threatens to destroy the world if the major powers don’t hand Clouseau over to him. The director, Blake Edwards, sets up promising slapstick situations, and then the payoffs are out of step (and, worse, repeated); after the first half hour or so, the film loses momentum. Edwards seems to be flipping through the pages of the script (which he himself wrote, with Frank Waldman). The picture was a hit, though. The cast includes Burt Kwouk as Cato, Lesley-Anne Down, Colin Blakely, Michael Robbins, Leonard Rossiter, Marne Maitland, Richard Vernon, and Dick Crockett (as Gerald Ford) and Byron Kane (as Kissinger). Omar Sharif, who turns up for a gag, shows more spirit than he does in his starring roles. United Artists. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

Pinky (1949)—Pinky is so light-skinned she passed for white while studying nursing in Boston; when she returns to her washerwoman grandmother’s Southern shack, she is terrified and enraged by a fresh awakening to what she has almost forgotten—what it’s like to be treated as a Negro, not only by contemptuous whites but by self-hating Negroes. Elia Kazan directs this material with a fine eye for the vicious undercurrents of Southern decay. The film garnered a little too much praise for its courage; it isn’t overwhelmingly courageous—Pinky isn’t played by a Negro actress, she’s played by petite, delicate-faced Jeanne Crain, and at the end Pinky renounces her white fiancé, William Lundigan, thereby sparing 20th Century-Fox no end of awkwardnesses. But the film hasn’t been given its due for the tense dramatic sequences and the pressures we’re made to feel. Pinky is slick and Hollywoodized, but it’s also pretty good. Under Kazan’s direction, Jeanne Crain is vibrant; she lacks conflict, but she shows qualities that don’t turn up in her romantic comedy performances. And though Ethel Barrymore plays her image of herself as a wise liberal (not her best role), Ethel Waters, Nina Mae McKinney, and Frederick O’Neal have compelling moments. Also with Evelyn Varden, Kenny Washington, and Basil Ruysdael. The screenplay, by Philip Dunne and Dudley Nichols, is based on the novel Quality, by Cid Ricketts Sumner; the cinematography is by Joe MacDonald; produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. b & w

 

The Pirate (1948)—Judy Garland is a 19th-century maiden on a Caribbean island, dreaming of a famous pirate, and Gene Kelly, bouncing with élan in the manner of Fairbanks, is a travelling actor who pretends to be that pirate. This Vincente Minnelli musical, based on an S. N. Behrman play that the Lunts performed, is flamboyant in an innocent and lively way. Though it doesn’t quite work, and it’s all a bit broad, it doesn’t sour in the memory. The Nicholas Brothers join Garland and Kelly in the celebrated “Be a Clown” number. The score is by Cole Porter. With Walter Slezak, Reginald Owen, Gladys Cooper, and George Zucco. M-G-M. color

 

Pit of Loneliness Olivia (1951)—The American title for this study of lesbianism was an obvious attempt to connect it to the then still scandalous novel by Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness. The period is fin-de-siècle. Edwige Feuillère and Simone Simon play two unmarried women who run a finishing school; the students adore the more elegant and seductive Feuillère, and she takes a “special” interest in the lovely young English girl, Olivia (Marie-Claire Olivia). The film doesn’t compare with that earlier study of lesbianism at school, Mädchen in Uniform. Born in 1908, the director, Jacqueline Audry, worked her way up from script girl and made a number of popular films, including two based on material by Colette (Mitsou and the French non-musical version of Gigi), and Colette wrote this script, adapted from the English novel Olivia. But Audry was more adept at light comedy than at this sort of subtle sensuousness. Feuillère has superb presence but the movie is so determinedly “delicate” that it seems to move at a snail’s pace. With Yvonne de Bray. In French. b & w

 

Pixote (198)—A shockingly lyrical Brazilian film about the life of abandoned children who learn to pick pockets and grab purses and hustle—it’s their only way of surviving. Thrown into a reformatory, the 10-year-old Pixote watches as several of the larger boys gang-rape a kid not much older than he is, and his truculent baby face is indifferent, but he’s a little camera taking it all in. A group of boys, including Pixote, break out, and he and three others snatch enough purses and wallets to make their way to Rio de Janeiro and begin dealing cocaine. Outsmarted by the adult criminals, the kids buy an aging, drunken prostitute from a pimp and go into business with her: she brings men home, and they rob them at gunpoint. As the director, Hector Babenco (who appears in a prologue), sees it, Pixote is a snub-nosed infant asserting his wants, and when they’re denied he changes into a baby gangster—a runt Scarface, who kills innocently, in the sense that he doesn’t understand the enormity of the crime. The thesis is too pat, but two of the characters—Lilica (Jorge Juliao), a flamingly nelly 17-year-old transvestite homosexual, and the whore Sueli, the whoriest whore imaginable (Marília Pera)—transcend it. Dusky and aquiline-faced, Marília Pera has an Anna Magnani-like presence—horrifying and great. Her display of passion wipes the little non-actor kids off the screen. She’s the whore spawned out of men’s darkest imaginings, and in her scenes the movie achieves a raw garish splendor. The script by Babenco and Jorge Duran is based on the novel Infância dos Mortos by Jose Louzeiro; cinematography by Rodolfo Sanchez. In Portuguese. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

The Pizza Triangle Dramma della Gelosia Also known as A Drama of Jealousy. (1970)—A genial mutt of a movie—an extroverted romantic satire with sight gags, jokes about the pollution in Rome and modern sex mores. As Oreste, a moon-faced, bushy-haired Communist bricklayer who doesn’t always smell good, Marcello Mastroianni holds it all together. Married to a battle-axe, a fat hag with a topknot, Oreste falls in love with a young flower seller, whom Monica Vitti plays with a soulful silliness that is a parody of generations of comic waifs and neo-realist heroines. When she betrays him with his best friend, a Tuscan pizza cook (Giancarlo Giannini), he becomes obsessed with the idea that there’s a class basis for the betrayal, and the movie turns into a slapstick tragedy. Oreste, the great stupido, whose face reflects a mind that has been emptied of everything but fluky ideas, commits a crime of passion and becomes a comic-strip parody of an operatic figure—the crazed lover. (This is one of Mastroianni’s least-known great performances.) The color is warm and bright, the music is light and nostalgic, and the cutting has a quick rhythm. There’s an original comic temperament here. The director, Ettore Scola, doesn’t seem to be anxious; the picture is spotty but nothing is forced, so one can relax even when the ideas misfire. From a script by Age and Scarpelli, and Scola. In Italian. (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

A Place in the Sun (1951)—This George Stevens version of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, updated to the 50s, features Elizabeth Taylor—in one of her most sensitive (yet steamy) performances—as the rich girl whom a poor, rather weak young man (Montgomery Clift) is drawn to. Perhaps because Stevens’ methods here are studied, slow, and accumulative, the work was acclaimed as “realistic,” though it’s full of murky psychological overtones, darkening landscapes, the eerie sounds of a loon, and overlapping dissolves designed to affect you emotionally without your conscious awareness. Stevens and his scriptwriters (Michael Wilson and Harry Brown) pre-interpret everything, turning the basically simple story into something portentous and “deep.” The film is mannered enough for a gothic murder mystery, while its sleek capitalists and oppressed workers seem to come out of a Depression cartoon; the industrial town is an arrangement of symbols of wealth, glamour, and power versus symbols of poor, drab helplessness. The hero’s jilted working-class girlfriend (Shelley Winters) is not allowed even to be attractive; part of the horror of the 1931 von Sternberg version, in which Sylvia Sidney was the victim, was that despite her beauty, her poverty made her, finally, undesirable. If Elizabeth Taylor had played the working girl in this production, then the poor could at least be shown to have some natural assets. But Shelley Winters makes the victim so horrifyingly, naggingly pathetic that when Clift thinks of killing her he hardly seems to be contemplating a crime: it’s more like euthanasia. (And Clift himself is perhaps a shade too soft and shrinking—an over-directed pawn.) The conclusion of the film in which the hero (and presumably the audience) is supposed to be convinced that a man should pay with his life for a murder he didn’t commit—but wanted to commit—is bizarre. “Who doesn’t desire his father’s death?” asked Ivan Karamazov. Stevens and company would send us all up for it. But whatever one’s reservations about this famous film, it is impressive, and in the love scene between Taylor and Clift, physical desire seems palpable. With Raymond Burr, Fred Clark, Keefe Brasselle, Shepperd Strudwick, and Ted de Corsia. Academy Awards for Best Director, Screenplay, Cinematography (William C. Mellor), Editing (William Hornbeck), Score (Franz Waxman), Costume Design (Edith Head). Paramount. b & w

 

Places in the Heart (1984)—The title refers to the places where our roots are, and this inspirational film, written and directed by Robert Benton, is set in his home town, Waxahachie, Texas, in 1935. Sally Field plays a good Christian woman, secure in her faith. A homebody with two children, she is suddenly widowed and left without enough money to meet the next mortgage payment; she holds her family together and hangs on to her house and 40 acres by, of course, grit and total determination. (The story actually centers on a cotton-pickin’ contest.) The film isn’t just about the widow—it’s about family, community, America, and Christian love. It’s about decency, which this mean town is very short of. But Benton’s gentle, nostalgic presentation muffles this. His craftsmanship is like an armor built up around his refusal to outrage or offend anyone; it’s an encrusted gentility. Danny Glover gives a humorous eccentric force to the all-too-endearing role of Moze, an itinerant, black laborer whose efforts on the widow’s behalf get him in trouble with the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan, and John Malkovich gives a hushed performance as Mr. Will, a blind First World War veteran who becomes the widow’s boarder. Benton has conceived Mr. Will as if blindness purified him and drove out ordinary faults; blackness does the same for Moze. The cast includes Amy Madigan (she brings a passionate delicacy to the role of a married schoolteacher who’s having a guilt-ridden affair), Lindsay Crouse, Ed Harris, Lane Smith, and Bert Remsen as a country singer—he lipsyncs “Cotton-Eyed Joe” to a Doc Watson record. Cinematography by Nestor Almendros. Academy Awards: Best Actress (Field), Original Screenplay. Tri-Star. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Le Plaisir (1952)—This Max Ophuls omnibus film, based on three de Maupassant stories, sounds better than it is; the stories allow Ophuls to display his virtuoso technique, but two of the three turn out too thin and hokey. The first, “The Mask,” famous for the Palais de la Danse sequence, is about a man trying to retain the illusion of youth; Gaby Morlay and Claude Dauphin are in it. “The Model” is about an artist (Daniel Gelin) who quarrels with his mistress-model (Simone Simon). The most satisfying, “The House of Madame Tellier,” is about the temporary closing of a brothel when the madam (Madeleine Renaud) and her girls go to the country to attend the first Communion of the madam’s niece. The cast includes Jean Gabin, Danielle Darrieux, Pierre Brasseur, Ginette Leclerc, Mila Parély, and Louis Seigner. In French. b & w

 

Planet of the Apes (1968)—This is a slick commercial picture, with its elements carefully engineered—pretty girl (who unfortunately doesn’t seem to have had acting training), comic relief, thrills, chases—but when expensive Hollywood engineering works, the results can be impressive. This is one of the most entertaining science-fiction fantasies ever to come out of Hollywood. The writing, by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, who adapted Pierre Boulle’s novel Monkey Planet, is often fancy-ironic in the old school of poetic disillusion, but the construction is first-rate. An American astronaut finds himself in the future, on a planet run by apes; the audience is rushed along with this hero, who keeps going as fast as possible to avoid being castrated or lobotomized. All this wouldn’t be so forceful or so funny if it weren’t for the use of Charlton Heston in the role. With his perfect, lean-hipped, powerful body, Heston is a godlike hero; built for strength, he’s an archetype of what makes Americans win. He doesn’t play a nice guy; he’s harsh and hostile, self-centered and hot-tempered. Yet we don’t hate him because he’s so magnetically strong; he represents American power—and he has the profile of an eagle. The director, Franklin Schaffner, has thought out the action in terms of the wide screen, and he uses space and distance dramatically. The makeup (there is said to be a million dollars’ worth) and the costuming of the actors playing the apes are rather witty, and the apes have a wonderful nervous, hopping walk. The best little hopper is Kim Hunter, as an ape lady doctor; she somehow manages to give a distinctive, charming performance in this makeup. With Roddy McDowall, Maurice Evans, James Whitmore, James Daly, and Linda Harrison. The movie spawned four sequels and a TV series. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Going Steady.)

 

Platinum Blonde (1931)—Frank Capra’s early talkie about a glib newspaper reporter (Robert Williams) who marries an aristocratic heiress (Jean Harlow, ludicrously miscast but fun to watch anyway). Almost a catalogue of the movie conventions of the period, complete to an effete valet (Claude Allister) and a comic butler (Halliwell Hobbes). The film’s considerable attractions include Robert Riskin’s uninhibited dialogue and ravishing Loretta Young, who, as a tough-minded girl reporter (prototype of the later Jean Arthur roles), is a natural aristocrat. With Louise Closser Hale, Reginald Owen, and Walter Catlett. From a story by Harry E. Chandlee and Douglas W. Churchill, which had been adapted by Jo Swerling, with continuity by Dorothy Howell; Riskin, a former playwright, livened it all up, and went on to do a series of hits with Capra. (The central performer, Robert Williams, whose style suggests that of Lee Tracy, was on the verge of stardom, but this was his last film; he died of a ruptured appendix.) Columbia, b & w

 

Platoon (1986)—Vietnam, as seen by the writer-director Oliver Stone, who dropped out of Yale and, feeling, he says, that he needed to be an anonymous common soldier, enlisted and saw action with the 25th Infantry along the Cambodian border. The film has been widely acclaimed, but some may feel that Stone takes too many melodramatic shortcuts, and that there’s too much filtered light, too much poetic license, and too damn much romanticized insanity. Charlie Sheen plays Chris, the autobiographical figure (who, regrettably, narrates the movie by reading aloud the letters he writes home to his grandmother). Chris finds two authority figures in two sergeants who represent good and evil. Willem Dafoe’s Sergeant Elias is a supersensitive hippie pothead, who cares about the men—he’s a veteran fighter who’s kept his soul. Tom Berenger’s Sergeant Barnes is a kickass boozer—a psycho, whose scarred, dead-eyed face suggests the spirit of war. There are fine, scary scenes, but there are others where you think, It’s a bit much. The movie crowds you; it doesn’t give you room to have an honest emotion. And when Chris calmly, deliberately shoots a fellow soldier, and the murder is presented as an unambiguous justified execution you may wonder at the mixture of war elegy and pulp revenge fantasy. With Keith David, Forest Whitaker, and Kevin Dillon. The score, by Georges Delerue, includes a soupy orchestration of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” Cinematography by Robert Richardson; editing by Claire Simpson. Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Film Editing, Sound. Orion-Hemdale. color (See Hooked.)

 

Play It As It Lays (1972)—About empty lives, acute anguish, Hollywood and Hell. As Joan Didion’s hurting waif-heroine who has discovered the nothingness of life, Tuesday Weld wanders around numbly, looking like a great pumpkin-headed doll. The movie is a touchstone, like the book: people have different levels of tolerance for stories celebrating soulless high life, and catatonic alienation has never been more poshly narcissistic than in this one. Frank Perry directed; it’s visually handsome but a peculiarly passive viewing experience. With Tony Perkins, Tammy Grimes, Adam Roarke, and Ruth Ford. Universal. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Pleasure Garden (1925)—The first film that Alfred Hitchcock (previously a movie designer and writer) directed. It’s about two chorus girls from the Pleasure Garden Theatre; the parts are played by two American actresses—Virginia Valli is the virtuous one, Carmelita Geraghty the villainous one. The picture has ingenious sequences, and it’s good to look at, though the story is vintage melodramatic hokum; actually, some of that hokum is hilariously campy now, such as the sequence about a depraved white man in the tropics. With another American, Nita Naldi, and Miles Mander. Silent. b & w

 

Plein Soleil, see Purple Noon

 

Plenty (1985)—David Hare’s sick-soul-of-England play, which he adapted for the screen and Fred Schepisi directed, turns his own preachiness into the intellectual clarity of an abrasive woman. After serving courageously as a British courier for the French Resistance, Susan Traherne (Meryl Streep) has her youthful idealism destroyed by the hypocrisy and materialism of postwar life. She keeps exercising her gift for cultured, sardonic invective, and her outspokenness turns her into a scourge, and eventually into a basket case. Schepisi works with his usual team—the cinematographer Ian Baker and the composer Bruce Smeaton—and also with the celebrated production designer Richard MacDonald; together they give the movie a lustrous, sensuous texture. Their craftsmanship is superb. But Hare’s means in this movie are every bit as constricted as what he’s attacking. Angry Young Manhood has become mannerism. And as Streep plays Susan there’s no imploded energy in her rudeness and no force in the film. She just isn’t there. With John Gielgud, Tracey Ullman, Charles Dance, Ian McKellen, Sam Neill, Burt Kwouk, and Sting. color (See Hooked.)

 

Poil de carotte (1932)—(It could be translated as “Carrot Top.”) Julien Duvivier established his mastery of the sound film with this remake of his 1925 silent about the desperate estrangement of a young red-headed boy. Harry Baur plays the father and skinny little Robert Lynen is the boy who tries to hang himself; their performances are delicate and psychologically complex, but the film achieves its lyric intensity largely through the rhythmic use of imagery. (There’s none of the didactic dialogue that might have marred an American film of the period, with a doctor or analyst explaining that the mother felt unloved and so she rejected the child, and so on.) Here, Duvivier isn’t the masterly entertainer that he became a few years later; this film is more exploratory, more searching. From a novel by Jules Renard, adapted by the director. In French. b & w

 

Point Blank (1967)—Showoffy, brutal, somewhat inexplicable account of a crook (Lee Marvin) who seeks justice on his own murderous terms. But it’s director John Boorman’s virtuosity that is the star. Intermittently dazzling, the film has more energy and invention than Boorman seems to know what to do with. He appears to take the title literally; one comes out exhilarated but bewildered. With Angie Dickinson (she has her best scene slapping Marvin repeatedly—to no effect), Carroll O’Connor, Keenan Wynn, Michael Strong, and John Vernon. The West Coast settings include the actual (though no longer in use) prison on Alcatraz. Cinematography by Philip Lathrop. M-G-M. color

 

Poltergeist (1982)—Steven Spielberg’s suburban gothic about a family besieged by nasty, prankish ghosts is no more than an entertaining hash designed to spook you. It’s The Exorcist without morbidity, or, more exactly, it’s The Amityville Horror done with insouciance and high-toned special effects. Because Spielberg is a dedicated craftsman and a wit, he can make a much better low-grade, adolescent entertainment than most directors. But he isn’t really thinking in this film—he’s just throwing ideas and effects at us, and there’s no rationale for the forms that the poltergeists (there seem to be multitudes of them) take on or for what they do. If the picture succeeds to a degree, it’s because of the warmth of the family itself in its tract home, full of toys, in a fast-expanding new subdivision. The cool, jazzy mother (JoBeth Williams) and the blandly handsome father (Craig T. Nelson) are terrific, groovy people—they’re kids at heart. When the ghostly manifestations start in the kitchen, what happens seems so benign that the mother reacts as if her household objects were staging a vaudeville show for her—she’s turned on by it. The 4-foot-3-inch actress Zelda Rubinstein, as the psychic Tangina who comes to “cleanse” the house, gives the movie new life and makes a large chunk of it work. With Beatrice Straight, who, as a doctor of parapsychology, bores the audience blind and brings the film to a momentary halt, and, as the two younger kids, Oliver Robins and Heather O’Rourke. The credits indicate that Tobe Hooper is the director, but Steven Spielberg wrote the initial story, rewrote the other writers’ work on the script, storyboarded the shots, produced the picture, and supervised the final edit. It appears that he also took over, in considerable part, on the set. M-G-M. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Poor Cow (1967)—An English film with Carol White as Joy, a young London barmaid who learns about life as she drifts from one thief to another. But she doesn’t learn enough to keep one’s attention from drifting in this ambitious but flat version of Nell Dunn’s novel, directed by Kenneth Loach in a semi-documentary style. He uses the poor cow Joy as an example of modern urban anomie. Joy is having a baby pulled out of her and is crying in pain as the movie opens, and Donovan is singing Christopher Logue’s words: “Be not too hard/For life is short/And nothing is given to man … Be not too hard/For soon he’ll die/Often no wiser than he began.” So you can’t say Loach hasn’t warned you. Adapted by Dunn and Loach. With John Bindon as the cloddish burglar who impregnates her, and Terence Stamp as the thief she takes up. color (See Going Steady.)

 

Popcorn (1969)—It’s a trap: hardly enough footage of the Rolling Stones and a few other groups to make a short has been stretched to feature length with surfing, shots of Twiggy, a disc jockey mugging for the camera, a sickeningly cheery singer named Johnny Farnham, a Western gundown, fictional shorts, travelogs, and documentary footage of a cremation in India. The rock footage is intercut with animals being butchered and views of Vietnam and the atomic bomb—you’d have to be a real ninny to accept the film’s claims to significance. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984)—An entertaining but shallow movie that gives itself heavyweight airs. Based on Vincent Patrick’s adaptation of his own 1979 novel about the ties among small-time Italian and Irish hoods, it’s a candied Mean Streets, evenly and impersonally directed by Stuart Rosenberg. It has no temperament—it doesn’t even have any get-up-and-go. But Patrick supplies colorful “ethnic” dialogue, and the actors run with it. As the two young pals who get into trouble together, Mickey Rourke is fatherly and protective (and a little repetitive), while Eric Roberts tries for something outre—he brings off some wild, androgynous effects, and gives the film whatever drive and point it has. As a crooked cop’s tough old mother, Geraldine Page gives an enthrallingly hammy performance—smoking, boozing, and picking horses. As her son, Jack Kehoe has just the right kind of cagey, sallow anonymity. Kenneth McMillan is sly and astute as an ex-con safecracker. Playing a detestable Mafia boss, Burt Young has mad little porcine eyes. And Tony Musante, M. Emmet Walsh, Philip Bosco, and several other actors have big moments. Daryl Hannah plays Rourke’s girlfriend—the one Wasp in the picture. The cinematography (which has a shine) is by John Bailey. M-G-M/United Artists. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Popeye (1980)—Sometimes the components of a picture seem miraculously right and you go to it expecting a magical interaction. That’s the case with Popeye, with Robin Williams as the squinting sailor, and Shelley Duvall as the persnickety Olive Oyl, and Robert Altman directing, from a screenplay by Jules Feiffer. The picture doesn’t come together, though, and much of it is cluttered, squawky, and eerily unfunny. But there are lovely moments—especially when Olive is loping along or singing, and when she and Popeye are gazing adoringly at the foundling Swee’Pea (Wesley Ivan Hurt). The songs—an uneven collection—are by Harry Nilsson. With Paul Dooley as Wimpy, Paul L. Smith as Bluto, and, as Pappy, Ray Walston, whose rambunctious Broadway pizzazz cheapens everything. A Paramount and Walt Disney Presentation; released by Paramount. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Poppy (1936)—W. C. Fields did not write this script on the back of an envelope. It was a play first, and Fields himself had had a hit with it on Broadway in 1923—how could he miss in the role of the con man Eustace McGargle? He had even appeared in a silent movie version in 1925, directed by D. W. Griffith, with Poppy, the title of the original play by Dorothy Donnelly, changed to Sally of the Sawdust. (It was Fields’ first success with the movie public.) But the talkie version doesn’t allow for the way Fields had developed: the public now enjoyed him because he snarled at sentimentality. He was given sticky-sweet, cow-eyed Rochelle Hudson for his ward, and she was given sticky-sweet, cow-eyed Richard Cromwell for a sweetheart, and really they’re not the sort of people Fields should be mucking around with. Or maybe he should—if he could just show us how he really feels about them. With Fields, you want any indication of virtue in his character to be a fraud or a momentary aberration; damned if this picture doesn’t make him just a scowling angel. The adaptors, Waldemar Young and Virginia Van Upp, and the director, Eddie Sutherland, give the old heart-of-gold stuff a workout, and Fields never gets a chance to cut loose and be mean and dirty-minded. With Lynne Overman, Maude Eburne, and Catherine Doucet. Paramount. b & w

 

Port of Shadows Quai des brumes (1938)—This film was the first of the three major collaborations of director Marcel Carné and writer Jacques Prévert—followed by the infinitely superior Daybreak in 1939 and by Children of Paradise in 1944—the movies which helped to create the French film style of poetic fatalism. In Port of Shadows, which is a drearily predictable film, the central figure of the French movies of the period was, nevertheless, created—the hopelessly rebellious hero, the decent man trapped by society; it was the beginning of the Jean Gabin era. A man (Gabin) is running away from the police; he arrives at a dock-side backstreet looking for a ship in which to escape. He meets a girl, the exquisite, raincoated Michèle Morgan, and tries to free her from her disreputable guardian (Michel Simon) and his crony (Pierre Brasseur). He doesn’t escape. Port of Shadows, rather like Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest, is gloomy and shallow, but at the time the defeatism of the film was like a breath of fresh air to American filmgoers saturated with empty optimism. In French. b & w

 

Porte des lilas Gates of Paris (1957)—An easygoing idler (Pierre Brasseur) lives off his mother and whiles away his time with drink; suddenly, he is a reformed man, busy and self-important—he has found a purpose in life. The purpose is hiding a gangster-killer (Henri Vidal) from the police. René Clair’s small, ironic film is set in an ancient quarter of Paris; it’s almost a reverie on loneliness, and it’s rather languorous, but the change in Brasseur is entertaining, and there’s one marvellous scene, in which the children in the street outside the hideout re-enact a crime at the same time that it’s of central importance inside. With the popular French singer Georges Brassens, Dany Carrel, and Raymond Bussières. Written by Clair and Jean Aurel, from René Fallet’s novel La Grande Ceinture. In French. b & w

 

Portrait of Jason (1967)—A monologue film, in which a black homosexual hustler and sometime entertainer (Jason Holliday) talks directly to Shirley Clarke’s camera crew. The idea is that, faced with the camera, his defenses will be stripped away and the “inner” man revealed—an idea both sadistic and naïve. b & w

 

Portrait of Jennie (1949)—At the start, a glorious con of a preface, designed to soften the audience for the fantasy to come, states, “Since the beginning, Man has looked into the awesome reaches of infinity … . Out of the shadows of knowledge, and out of a painting that hung on a museum wall comes our story, the truth of which lies not on our screen but in your heart.” What follows is a story about a painter (Joseph Cotten) who spends his life in love with the spirit of a dead girl (Jennifer Jones). David O. Selznick’s deluxe exercise in mystical romanticism was taken from a Robert Nathan novel. William Dieterle directed, but Selznick poured on the gloppy grandeur—a Dmitri Tiomkin score based on themes from Debussy, an impressively large-scale skating scene, a hyperdramatic hurricane sequence—and though the story may not make much sense, the pyrotechnics, joined to the dumbfounding silliness, keep one watching. Cinematography by Joseph August; with Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Cecil Kellaway, David Wayne, Florence Bates, Henry Hull, and Felix Bressart. b & w, with sepia and color

 

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)—Expensive pop disaster epic, manufactured for the market that made Airport a hit. An ocean liner turns turtle, and the logistics of getting out of an upside-down ship are fairly entertaining; the script is the true cataclysm in this waterlogged Grand Hotel. The writers (Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes) achieve real camp only once: just before the ship capsizes, a crewman says to the captain (Leslie Nielsen), “I never saw anything like it—an enormous wall of water coming toward us.” With Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Stella Stevens, Red Buttons, Carol Lynley, and Arthur O’Connell. There’s also a lot of Shelley Winters, who yearns to see her grandson in Israel and makes endless jokes about her bloated appearance. (She’s so enormously fat she goes way beyond the intention to create a warm, sympathetic Jewish character. It’s like having a whale tell you you should love her because she’s Jewish.) Ronald Neame directed, with dull efficiency. Based on a novel by Paul Gallico; the score is by John Williams. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Reeling.)

 

Possessed (1947)—“‘I love you’ is such an inadequate way of saying I love you,” the impassioned Joan Crawford murmurs to her sweetheart (Van Heflin). When Heflin, who is an engineer as well as a cold-hearted lady-killer, points out, in a passage of technological ecstasy, that he finds a girder he has devised more beautiful than Miss Crawford, she whimpers, “Why don’t you love me like that? I’m a lot nicer than a girder.” Heflin can’t see it her way, and presently, in despair, she marries Raymond Massey, a big oil man with a lively daughter (Geraldine Brooks). Watching Heflin fall in love with her stepdaughter proves too much for Crawford, who comes down with a case of schizophrenia that really rattles the walls of the Massey homestead. Then psychiatrists take her in tow. In terms of suspense, this picture, directed by Curtis Bernhardt, is often very striking, and, clearly, he and the cast are doing their damnedest. Insanity is used, in the usual 40s Hollywood manner, to provide an excuse for high-on-the-hog melodrama; there isn’t a trace of believability—that’s part of what makes it enjoyable. With Stanley Ridges, Moroni Olsen, John Ridgely, and Monte Blue. Cinematography by Joseph Valentine; music by Franz Waxman; art direction by Anton Grot; editing by Rudi Fehr. The script by Sylvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall is based on Rita Weiman’s One Man’s Secret. Jerry Wald produced, for Warners. b & w

 

Postcards from the Edge (1990)—This tale of a sorrowful, wisecracking starlet (Meryl Streep) whose brassy, boozing former-star mother (Shirley MacLaine) started her on sleeping pills when she was 9 is camp without the zest of camp. It’s camp played borderline straight—a druggy-Cinderella movie about an unformed girl who has to go past despair to find herself. The director, Mike Nichols, is a parodist who feigns sincerity, and his tone keeps slipping around. What’s clear is that we’re meant to be enthralled by the daughter’s radiant face, her refinement, her honesty. Nichols keeps the camera on Streep as if to prove that he can make her a popular big star—a new Crawford or Bette Davis. (She remains distant, emotionally atonal.) The tacky, bright-colored film—a near-plotless version of a woman’s picture—is weightless, yet it’s watchable. Its jadedness appeals to the narcissism of show-biz insiders and to the would-be insider in the rest of us. (Nichols is acclaimed for being hip to the Zeitgeist.) There are a lot of people to look at: Gene Hackman, Dennis Quaid, Richard Dreyfuss, Annette Bening, Robin Bartlett, C. C. H. Pounder, Oliver Platt, Gary Morton, Mary Wickes, Rob Reiner, Simon Callow, Michael Ontkean, Pepe Serna, and Dana Ivey. The screenplay, by Carrie Fisher (with Nichols’ uncredited collaboration), is based on her novel; cinematography by Michael Ballhaus. Columbia. color (See Movie Love.)

 

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)—Entertaining, though overlong. The director, Tay Garnett, knew almost enough tricks to sustain this glossily bowdlerized version of the James M. Cain novel, and he used Lana Turner maybe better than any other director did. Cain’s women are, typically, calculating, hot little animals, and his men doom-ridden victims. Here, Lana Turner’s Cora—infantile in a bored, helpless, pre-moral way—is dressed in impeccable white, as if to conceal her sweaty passions and murderous impulses; John Garfield plays the drifter who becomes her lover. Cora’s harmless husband (Cecil Kellaway) seems a nuisance to have around, so they decide to finish him off while he’s relaxing in the bathtub. The shoddy, ironic twist signified in the title is that the killers get away with their crime but retribution comes anyway. As opposing lawyers, Hume Cronyn and Leon Ames have a showoffy courtroom clash. With Audrey Totter. The script is by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch. (A French version, Le Dernier Tournant, was directed by Pierre Chenal in 1939 with Fernand Gravet, Corinne Luchaire, and Michel Simon; Visconti made an Italian version, Ossessione, in 1942.) M-G-M. b & w

 

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981)—Taste and craftsmanship have gone into this Bob Rafelson version of James M. Cain’s hot tabloid novel, but Rafelson’s detached, meditative tone is about as far from Cain’s American tough-guy vernacular as you can get. The impulsiveness and raw flamboyance that make the book exciting are missing, and the cool, elegant visuals (Sven Nykvist is the cinematographer) outclass the characters right from the start. As Frank, the drifter whose passion for Cora leads him to kill her husband, Jack Nicholson does a run-through of his overdeliberate, sly, malevolent expressions from The Shining while still lobotomized from Cuckoo’s Nest. (His performance could have been given by a Nicholson impersonator.) As Cora, who does the cooking at her husband’s roadside café, Jessica Lange is the best reason to see the movie. She looks good-sized—muscular but rounded—and with her short, curly blond hair, a Japanese silk wrapper pulled tight, and a lewd, speculative smile, she’s both seraphic and steamy. The film needs to be propelled by a growing intensity in the sex scenes, but the first sex, on the table in the café kitchen, is the hottest. So things go downhill. With John Colicos as greasy Nick, the husband; Michael Lerner as Katz, the lawyer; and a highly expendable episode that features Anjelica Huston as a lion tamer. The sparse yet maundering script is by David Mamet. An international co-production; released by Paramount. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

Pot-Bouille Also known as Lovers of Paris and The House of Lovers. (1957)—Julien Duvivier’s lavish satire on the triumph of business values over bourgeois morals was only a moderate success in the United States. Perhaps art-house audiences, still recovering from the anguish of Gervaise, were reluctant to face more Zola. But, Mendelian that he was, Zola allowed the Rougon-Macquart series one sport: an unscrupulous young fortune hunter from the provinces who climbs to respectability over the beds of satisfied bourgeois ladies. Duvivier’s re-creation of Paris in the overstuffed 1880s is one of the most unusual historical evocations in movies: ugly, ludicrous, conspicuous expenditure dominates the enormous apartment house, the shops, the streets. In the best sequence, a group of merchants gather to discuss a matter of honor and load themselves with food and drink. Duvivier keeps his balance on the tightrope over the dangerous material—human mediocrity, bad taste, the middle-class man as animal—but sometimes you may get the feeling that the tightrope is suspended much too low. Gérard Philipe is the dimply, curly-haired seducer, the man who accepts venality so simply and instinctively that he has no need of hypocrisy. With Danielle Darrieux, Dany Carrel, Anouk Aimée, Claude Nollier, Henri Vilbert, and Jane Marken. In French. b & w

 

Potemkin Bronenosets Potyomkin Also known as The Battleship Potemkin. (1925)—Voted the greatest film of all time by an international panel of critics in Brussels in 1958, as it had been in 1950, Potemkin (Russians and purists pronounce it Po-tyom-kin) has achieved such an unholy eminence that few people any longer dispute its merits. Great as it undoubtedly is, it’s not really a likable film; it’s amazing, though—it keeps its freshness and its excitement, even if you resist its cartoon message. Perhaps no other movie has ever had such graphic strength in its images, and the young director Sergei Eisenstein opened up a new technique of psychological stimulation by means of rhythmic editing—“montage.” The Odessa Steps sequence, the most celebrated single sequence in film history, has been imitated in one way or another in countless television news programs and movies with crowd scenes; it has also been parodied endlessly. And yet the power of the original is undiminished. Montage is used in this film for revolutionary political purposes: the subject is the 1905 mutiny of the sailors of the battleship Potemkin, and the massacre of the people who sympathized with them. But policies in the U.S.S.R. changed: mutiny could no longer be sanctioned, nor could experimental film techniques, and under Stalin, Eisenstein was purged, partially reinstated, and then fell from grace over and over. Potemkin looks astonishingly like a newsreel, and the politically naive have often taken it as a “documentary.” The more knowing have a graceful euphemism: Eisenstein, they say, “sacrificed historical facts for dramatic effect.” Silent, with added musical soundtrack. b & w

 

The Power (1968)—Sci-fi about a couple of men with superhuman mental powers; they can think somebody to death. Naturally, one of them is the villain and the other the hero, but the film is so lacklustre you don’t care which one wins. Byron Haskin directed this George Pal production, based on a novel by Frank M. Robinson. The cast includes George Hamilton, Nehemiah Persoff, Yvonne De Carlo, Aldo Ray, Gary Merrill, Earl Holliman, and Arthur O’Connell. M-G-M. CinemaScope, color

 

The Power and the Glory (1933)—Preston Sturges wrote the script (which is sentimental and heavy-handed but is nevertheless almost a warmup for Citizen Kane), and the producer, Jesse L. Lasky, who considered it “the most perfect script” he’d ever seen, insisted that the director, William K. Howard, shoot it word for word. Spencer Tracy is the railroad tycoon who has killed himself, and the story is told from his funeral by Ralph Morgan. With Colleen Moore and slinky Helen Vinson. Cinematography by James Wong Howe. Fox. b & w

 

Practically Yours (1945)—Fred MacMurray, a presumably doomed aviator in the Pacific, broadcasts a last message to the other members of his combat group. “I wish I could walk with Peggy through Central Park again and kiss the tip of her nose,” he says. His friends naturally assume that he is talking about a girl, although the Peggy he has in mind is a little dog (with a passionate disposition). Norman Krasna wrote this comedy of confusion in his usual pushy madcap style; when MacMurray gets back, he finds he is engaged to Claudette Colbert, who’s a complete stranger to him. There’s one funny sequence with a self-inflating boat inflating in the subway. Mitchell Leisen directed; with Robert Benchley, Cecil Kellaway, Gil Lamb, Rosemary DeCamp, and Tom Powers. Paramount. b & w

 

Prenom: Carmen, see First Name: Carmen

 

Préparez vos mouchoirs, see Get Out Your Handkerchiefs

 

The President’s Analyst (1967)—James Coburn, as the psychoanalyst to the President of the United States, is pursued by a Russian spy (Severn Darden), an American agent (Godfrey Cambridge), and everybody else. This erratic political spoof, written and directed by Theodore Flicker, has sly, ingenious sequences (one involves a super-automated phone company) and sour sequences (William Daniels as the head of an upper-middle-class liberal family obsessed with the threat of right-wing neighbors). Very lively when Flicker is just making sophomoric jokes, but he doesn’t seem to know what he’s good at, or how to stick to it. Paramount. color

Pretty in Pink (1986)—Molly Ringwald is enshrined as the teen-age ideal in this romantic movie for kids—it’s slight and vapid, with the consistency of watery Jell-O. The spoiled-rotten richies are mean to Ringwald’s Andie, a poor-girl high-school senior who lives in a dinky, rattletrap house on the wrong side of the tracks. But she’s the opposite of trashy: blessed with quiet good taste, she’s proudly conventional. And so she wins both a college scholarship and the rich boy of her dreams. John Hughes, who wrote the script and supervised the work of the first-time director, Howard Deutch, never goes beyond a kid’s point of view; this picture isn’t actually about teen-agers—it’s closer to being a pre-teen’s idea of what it will be like to be a teen-ager. In its sociological details, it might have been made by little guys from Mars. With the winsome comedienne Annie Potts as Andie’s closest friend, Andrew McCarthy as her rather passive young prince, Jon Cryer as the smartmouth nerd who follows her around, Harry Dean Stanton as her daddy, and James Spader as a snobby hunk. Cinematography by Tak Fujimoto. A John Hughes Production, for Paramount. color (See Hooked.)

 

 

Pretty Poison (1968)—An unobtrusive little psychological thriller, subtle and very smart. Anthony Perkins gives what may be his most sensitively conceived performance; he’s a character who develops from a quirky, sneaky, funny boy into a decent, sympathetic man. He toys with fantasies but knows they’re fantasies. Tuesday Weld plays a small-town girl, crazy for excitement, who accepts his fantasies in a matter-of-fact way and proceeds to act on them. Lorenzo Semple, Jr., wrote a beauty of a script (based on Stephen Geller’s novel She Let Him Continue); the horror in the movie isn’t just in the revelation of what the pretty young girl is capable of—it’s in your awareness that the man’s future is being destroyed. Directed by Noel Black. With John Randolph and Beverly Garland. Shot on location in Western Massachusetts; the river that is carrying poisonous red dye is the once “mighty” Housatonic. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Going Steady.)

 

Prick Up Your Ears (1987)—Joe Orton wrote some of the most highly regarded farces of the English-speaking theatre in this century, but you could come out of this movie about him without any sense of their vengeful, bawdy originality. Directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Alan Bennett, based on the literary biography of the same name by John Lahr, the film is honest and watchable. But, unlike Orton, it takes no real delight in misbehaving. And though the moviemakers don’t try to conceal the facts of the 16 years that Orton (Gary Oldman) spent with Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina), who bludgeoned him to death and then killed himself, the relationship between the two hasn’t been made convincing. What you come out with is some modern-style psychosexual moralizing about how Orton’s pansexuality liberated his talent whereas the inhibited Halliwell was driven to murder. You don’t feel Orton’s pulse, but Vanessa Redgrave, who plays his smart, ribald agent, has never been sexier or more spontaneous. With Wallace Shawn as Lahr, Lindsay Duncan as Anthea Lahr, Margaret Tyzack as the elocution teacher, Janet Dale as Mrs. Sugden, and Julie Walters as Orton’s mother. Cinematography by Oliver Stapleton. Released by the Samuel Goldwyn Company. color (See Hooked.)

 

Pride and Prejudice (1940)—This literate movie is a reasonably faithful transcription of Jane Austen’s sparkling comedy of manners, adapted from Helen Jerome’s play by Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin. But when Jane Austen’s characters are brought to life at M-G-M, everything is changed—broadened. Animated and bouncing, the movie is more Dickens than Austen; once one adjusts to this, it’s a happy and carefree viewing experience. The movie belongs to Laurence Olivier, who plays Darcy, and to that great old dragon Edna May Oliver, as Lady Catherine. In the role of Elizabeth Bennet, Greer Garson is not as intolerably noble as she became later. She’s effective and has nice diction, though she’s arch and incapable of subtlety, and a viewer can get weary watching that eyebrow that goes up like the gold curtain at the old Met. The cast includes Mary Boland, Edmund Gwenn, Melville Cooper, E. E. Clive, Bruce Lester, and a batch of girls in overstarched dresses (Marsha Hunt, Maureen O’Sullivan, Karen Morley, Ann Rutherford, Heather Angel), and a villain (Edward Ashley) and a villainess (Frieda Inescort, of the slurpy voice). Directed by Robert Z. Leonard. (Those dresses, which are plastered with ribbons and bows, look as if they were designed for an operetta.) b & w

 

Prima della Rivoluzione, see Before the Revolution

 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)—Maggie Smith as Muriel Spark’s witty caricature of a romantic crackpot teacher in an Edinburgh school in the 30s. She wants to inspire the girls rather than teach them—she’s the kind of teacher little girls get crushes on. The movie has been too conventionally directed by Ronald Neame, but Maggie Smith, with her gift for mimicry and her talent for mannered comedy, makes Jean Brodie very funny—snobbish, full of affectations, and with a jumble shop of a mind. Miss Brodie is so entertaining that you can’t accept it when the plot becomes melodramatic and you’re asked to take her seriously as a dangerous influence. Celia Johnson has a genuine triumph as her implacable adversary, Miss Mackay, and Robert Stephens does a lot with the role of her lover, the art instructor. The script is by Jay Presson Allen, who also wrote the stage version. With Pamela Franklin (her big confrontation scene is a clinker, but the fault isn’t hers—it goes back to the novel) and Gordon Jackson. Made in London and Edinburgh. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Going Steady.)

 

The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)—This Ruritanian romance, directed by Laurence Olivier, is slanted to show off the talents of Marilyn Monroe as an innocent abroad. Olivier, perhaps with excess gallantry, makes his prince something of a cold cod, but even in this uningratiating role he has a high gloss—an irony that shines. Monroe’s breathy little-girl voice and polymorphous-perverse non-acting have a special mock-innocent charm that none of her imitators seem able to capture. With Sybil Thorndike, Richard Wattis, and Daphne Anderson. The drawback of the film is that Terence Rattigan’s script, though it improves on his play The Sleeping Prince, still lacks invention and wit. Warners. color

 

Prince of the City (1981)—Treat Williams has a very closed face—the kind of opaque face that is like a brick wall in front of the camera. And that may be why Williams, as a New York City police officer who agrees to be wired and to obtain evidence about corruption in his unit, plays each scene as an acting exercise—going through so much teary, spiritual agony that you want to throw something at him. He acts all over the place yet the movie—2 hours and 47 minutes of pseudo-documentary seriousness—is so poorly structured that you keep wondering what’s going on and why he has agreed to inform on his friends. Things don’t begin to come together until you’re heading into the third hour, when the cross suspended from Williams’ neck lights up, like a balloon above his head, announcing “Penance! Absolution!” There’s one remarkable performance (it’s mostly in the last section): Jerry Orbach, as the tough-minded cop, Gus Levy, acts with such sureness and economy that while Williams is flailing about Orbach magnetizes the camera. Directed by Sidney Lumet, the film has a super-realistic overall gloom, and the people are so “ethnic” and yell so much that you begin to long for the sight of a cool blond in bright sunshine. Lumet and Jay Presson Allen wrote the screenplay, based on the book by Robert Daley about the New York City police officer Bob Leuci. With Lindsay Crouse, who’s stuck with one of those speeches about how we’re all guilty, Bob Balaban, and Ron Maccone as Nick. The cinematography is by Andrzej Bartkowiak; the music, by Paul Chihara, suggests an existentialist fugue by Schubert. Orion; released by Warners. color

 

The Princess and the Pirate (1944)—This elaborate Technicolor romp that Bob Hope did with Virginia Mayo isn’t the best setting for his casual wit; the situations are too strained, the fooling around is too buffoonish. Kids probably enjoy this Hope movie more than adults do. It’s set in the early 19th century. Hope is Sylvester the Great, a quick-change artist, Mayo is a princess travelling incognito, and they get kidnapped by pirates. Victor McLaglen and Walter Slezak are the sinister villains; also with Maude Eburne, Hugo Haas, Walter Brennan, and Marc Lawrence. A whole slew of writers were involved; David Butler directed. A Samuel Goldwyn Production, for R K O.

 

The Princess Bride (1987)—The director Rob Reiner doesn’t have the craft to bring off the kinetic daredeviltry he tries for, and the movie is ungainly—you can almost see the chalk marks it’s not hitting. But it has a loose, likable slobbiness. Set in the late Middle Ages in the mythical kingdom of Florin, the picture, from a script written in 1973 by William Goldman, and based on the 1973 novel that he wrote for his children, is an affectionate composite parody of the high points in adventure movies: the duels, the feats of strength, the rope climbing, the black-masked heroes, the swamps, the dungeons with medieval Rube Goldberg torture machines. Cary Elwes, who has a gift for giddy slapstick, is Westley, the blond farm boy who goes to seek his fortune so that he can claim his true love, blond Buttercup (Robin Wright). Westley is captured by pirates, and Buttercup, selected by Crown Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon) to be his bride, is abducted by a trio of ruffians: Wallace Shawn, Mandy Patinkin, and all 7 feet 5 and 525 pounds of the French-born wrestler André the Giant. The cast includes Christopher Guest as a smarmy six-fingered sadist, Mel Smith as the Albino, Margery Mason as the ancient woman who boos the royal family, and, in scenes that are show-biz bliss, Billy Crystal and Carol Kane, wearing makeup that adds centuries to them, as the retired Miracle Max and his nagging crone, Valerie. These two give the movie a lift that puts it all into perspective. It’s shtick softened by childlike infatuation. Peter Falk appears in the framing device. Photographed partly on locations in England and Ireland; Florin Castle is actually Haddon Hall, parts of which date back to the 12th century. 20th Century-Fox. color (See Hooked).

 

The Prisoner (1955)—As the proud cardinal induced to make a false confession of treason (in an unnamed Communist country), Alec Guinness gives a powerful, almost agonized performance. (It was probably the most intense acting he had done in movies up to that time.) Though Bridget Boland’s script (from her play) and Peter Glenville’s direction leave a great deal to be desired, Guinness achieves what they inadequately reach for. This English film is really nothing but his performance—which is perhaps enough. With Jack Hawkins as the interrogator, Wilfrid Lawson as the warden, and Kenneth Griffith and Raymond Huntley. b & w

 

The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975)—Jack Lemmon, as a New York advertising executive, gets fired, feels worthless, and has a nervous breakdown; Anne Bancroft is his devoted wife. Vaguely about urban despair, full of bad jokes. From Neil Simon’s adaptation of his own play. Melvin Frank directed in his usual sagging, 50s style, but probably there isn’t a filmmaker in the world who could substantially improve this picture except by throwing out the play altogether. With Gene Saks and Elizabeth Wilson. Warners. color (See Reeling.)

 

The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)—Amiable, though familiar, romantic swashbuckler, set in a mythical country, with Ronald Colman in the double role of the King and the smiling, gentlemanly look-alike who takes his place for a while, and plushy Madeleine Carroll as the sweetly dutiful Princess Flavia, who puts crown before love. Lewis Stone and Alice Terry played the roles in 1922, and Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr did them in 1952, but this 1937 version has the advantage of dashing, grinning Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as the naughty Rupert of Hentzau. Fairbanks steals the show from the restrained Colman. It’s a well-paced production, directed by John Cromwell and W. S. Van Dyke, and shot by James Wong Howe, with banter supplied by Donald Ogden Stewart, among others. With Raymond Massey, David Niven, Mary Astor, and C. Aubrey Smith. (Peter Sellers did a feeble parody version in 1979, playing the King as a twit and giving the look-alike a Cockney accent that made him sound exactly like Michael Caine.) Produced by David O. Selznick; released by United Artists. b & w

 

The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947)—Albert Lewin, a writer who became head of Irving Thalberg’s story department and then functioned as a producer for Thalberg, seemed to stand for the same values as his boss: carefully mounted, prestigious entertainment. But when he turned director, in 1942 (writing his own scripts as well), he showed a predilection for ultra-literary material, and his style—a mixture of sophistication, romanticism, and stiff, awkward staging—finally led him to the visual poetry and high camp of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and the peerless, posh silliness of Saadia. The Newark-born director suffered from an almost obsequious lust for everything European and an excess of taste that resulted in tastelessness. Bel Ami, taken from a de Maupassant story that had been filmed in Germany in 1938, is a flaccid, overdressed production about a 19th-century cad who makes his way in the world by taking advantage of women. Lewin got an interesting ambivalence out of George Sanders in The Moon and Sixpence, and then typecast him amusingly as Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but here Sanders seems heavy and monotonous. With Angela Lansbury, Ann Dvorak, Frances Dee, Marie Wilson, Katherine Emery, Albert Basserman, Hugo Haas, and John Carradine. The score is by Darius Milhaud; cinematography by Russell Metty. United Artists. b & w

 

Private Benjamin (1980)—A women’s-liberation service comedy, in which Goldie Hawn plays a spoiled honey bunch—a rich blond Jewish girl from Philadelphia—who becomes a real woman in the Army. The script goes from one formula to the next, and it reworks the pranks of generations of male service comedies, but the director, Howard Zieff, refurbishes the stale material with smart small touches, and Goldie Hawn has such infectious frothy charm that she manages to get laughs out of ancient routines about a tenderfoot going through the rigors of basic training. Her likableness makes the picture moderately amusing until the last third, when she gets involved with a dream prince (Armand Assante) who turns out to be a thickheaded chauvinist, and she has to be liberated all over again; the picture seems to be stuck in a revolving door. This is the sort of feminist movie in which almost every man is an insensitive boor or a fool, yet the heroine gets what she wants by manipulation and the shrewd use of sexual blackmail—which we’re meant to find adorable. Basically, it’s just Daffy Duck-TV sit-com. With Albert Brooks, Eileen Brennan, Harry Dean Stanton, Hal Williams, Toni Kalem, Damita Jo Freeman, Mary Kay Place, P. J. Soles, Robert Webber, and Sam Wanamaker and Barbara Barrie as the heroine’s parents. Written by Nancy Meyers, Charles Shyer, and Harvey Miller. Released by Warners. color (See Taking It All In.)

 

A Private Function (1984)—This joint début film by the celebrated British television playwright Alan Bennett and the young director Malcolm Mowbray keeps adding greedy eccentrics and scatological jokes until everything is interconnected and the action seems on the verge of exploding into lewd farce. It never quite makes the final leap, but it’s pretty funny anyway. The action is set in a small Yorkshire town in 1947, during the worst of the postwar austerity, and the plot involves the efforts of the local pillars of society (Denholm Elliott, John Normington, Richard Griffiths) to fatten a hidden, “unlicensed” pig for a banquet celebrating the nuptials of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. The run into trouble when the pig is stolen by a mild-mannered chiropodist (Michael Palin), who is encouraged by his Lady Macbeth of a wife (Maggie Smith). The movie is trivial, but alive and unruly; the characters cheat and conspire on such a low level that it suggests Volpone set in a cabbage patch. Maggie Smith can bring you up short with a devastating inflection, and as her aged mother, Liz Smith (no relation) is like a bleary, befuddled mirror image of the daughter’s pretensions. Also with Bill Paterson as the inspector for the Ministry of Food and Rachel Davies as his seductive landlady. A HandMade Film. color (See State of the Art.)

 

The Private Life of Don Juan (1934)—A relatively motionless Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in a rueful, satirical movie analogy to his then domestic problems. His Don Juan, past his heyday, is in his 40S and has to watch his diet and sneak in a masseur. The story is about how he frees himself from the demands of philandering. It’s one of those films that lumbers along and never really takes off, though the gimmick—he is believed dead and comes back in disguise—appears promising. With Merle Oberon, Benita Hume, Binnie Barnes, Melville Cooper, Joan Gardner, and Athene Seyler. Directed by Alexander Korda, from a script by Lajos Biro and Frederick Lonsdale, based on a play by Henri Bataille. The picture features sumptuous Spanish costumes; some look cribbed from Goya. b & w

 

The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)—Charles Laughton as the robust, gluttonous monarch; among the ladies he marries are Merle Oberon, Binnie Barnes, Wendy Barrie, and Elsa Lanchester. Alexander Korda directed this war-horse of the movie repertory, which is still alive and in good spirits. With Robert Donat and John Loder. b & w

 

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)—Billy Wilder’s detective picture is meant to be a put-on of the Sherlock Holmes mythology, concentrating on a case that Holmes (Robert Stephens) fouls up, because he’s distracted by the treachery of a smart charmer (Geneviève Page). But for this idea to have bounce and suspense we need to see the clues and draw our own inferences, so that we can spot where Holmes is going wrong and enjoy his mistakes. And for it to be somewhat romantic, as it’s intended to be, we need to see much more of how the woman deceives him. Instead, one must content oneself with the occasional archly amusing lines, the handsome Victorian decor, and Christopher Challis’s lovely (if somewhat dark) tinted-looking cinematography. It’s a graceful picture, but it dawdles, and Stephens doesn’t seem to have the star presence that Holmes requires. Made in England. With Colin Blakely, Christopher Lee, Clive Revill, Stanley Holloway, and Catherine Lacey. Written by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond; art direction by Alexander Trauner; music by Miklós Rózsa. United Artists. color

 

Private Lives (1931)—Early talkie attempt at glittering theatrical sophistication, and, somehow, in its own terms, it works. This M-G-M version of the Noel Coward play was made soon after the play came out, and perhaps the play’s style and excitement carries the cast along. Norma Shearer isn’t so bad, and Robert Montgomery is very, very good. It was a dazzling success. A performance of the play was filmed so that the stars, the director, Sidney Franklin, and a raft of adaptors would get the idea; that may explain Franklin’s showing a little zip, for a change, and Shearer’s acting halfway human. With Reginald Denny, Una Merkel, and, in a role added in the film, Jean Hersholt. b & w

 

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)—Bette Davis, well painted and dressed for the role of the shrewd old Queen, looks the part and gives a magnetic, tough performance, but an impossible task was set for her, since as Essex, Errol Flynn couldn’t come halfway to meet her. His talents were in other directions; the role was totally outside his range, and the poor man seemed to know it. Davis’s performance is bound to suffer from comparison with Glenda Jackson’s multifaceted Elizabeth on television, but Davis’s Elizabeth is a precursor of Jackson’s—it might almost be a sketch for the Jackson portrait. Michael Curtiz directed this adaptation of the Maxwell Anderson play. With Olivia de Havilland, Henry Daniell, Leo G. Carroll, James Stephenson, Vincent Price, Donald Crisp, and Ralph Forbes. Music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Warners. color

 

The Prize (1964)—It opens badly but then becomes a lively, blatant entertainment—cheerful in a shameless sort of way. (It’s the sort of movie you may not want to own up to enjoying.) Paul Newman plays an American writer (with oddly slurry diction) who wins the Nobel Prize, goes to Stockholm for the ceremonies, and gets caught up in a spy plot. Ernest Lehman wrote the script, based on the Irving Wallace novel; the movie may remind you of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, which Lehman also wrote. Pieces of that earlier script turn up here, transposed only slightly. Mark Robson directed, and the cast includes Edward G. Robinson (in a dual role), Elke Sommer puckering up, and Leo G. Carroll, Kevin McCarthy, Diane Baker, Micheline Presle, Gerard Oury, John Qualen, and the sinister Sacha Pitoëff. Produced by Pandro S. Berman, for M-G-M. color

 

Prizzi’s Honor (1985)—Adapted from Richard Condon’s prankish satire of American corruption, this John Huston picture has a ripe and daring comic tone. It revels voluptuously in the murderous finagling of the members of a Brooklyn Mafia family, and rejoices in their scams. It’s like The Godfather acted out by The Munsters. Jack Nicholson’s average-guyness as Charley, the clan’s enforcer, is the film’s touchstone: this is a baroque comedy about people who behave in ordinary ways in grotesque circumstances, and it has the juice of everyday family craziness in it. Everything in this picture works with everything else—which is to say that John Huston has it all in the palm of his big, bony hand. With William Hickey as the shrunken old Don Corrado, ghouly and wormy, with tiny, shocking bright eyes; Anjelica Huston as the don’s scheming granddaughter, a high-fashion Vampira who moves like a swooping bird and talks in a honking Brooklynese that comes out of the corner of her twisted mouth; Kathleen Turner as Charley’s ravishingly pretty bride; John Randolph as Pop, the Prizzis’ consigliere and Charley’s beaming, proud father; and Lee Richardson and Robert Loggia as the don’s two sons, and Lawrence Tierney as a corrupt cop, Tomasina Baratta as an opera singer, and Alexandra Ivanoff as the soprano in the wedding scene. The script is by Condon and Janet Roach; the cinematography is by Andrzej Bartkowiak. Alex North’s score, with its lush, parodistic use of Puccini, and some Rossini, a little Verdi, and a dash of Donizetti, too, actively contributes to the whirling texture of the scenes. An ABC Production, released through 20th Century-Fox. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, see Trial of Joan of Arc

 

The Producers (1968)—Zero Mostel as a producer who sells 25,000 per cent of a play, intending to produce a flop so that he won’t have to pay the backers anything. Naturally, he produces a hit. Some of the material is funny in an original way, but Mel Brooks, who wrote and directed (both for the first time), doesn’t get the timing right and good gags fall apart or become gross or just don’t develop. The sequence consisting of tryouts for the role of Hitler in the play, which is called “Springtime for Hitler,” is potentially so great that what he does with it lets you down. Still, terrible as this picture is, a lot of it is very enjoyable. For satire of the theatre as inspired as Brooks’ gags at their best, it’s not hard to put up with the ineptitude and the amateurish camera angles. It’s even possible to put up with Zero Mostel in closeup. (He was not one to tone his effects down for the camera.) With Dick Shawn, Estelle Winwood, Renée Taylor, Kenneth Mars, and Gene Wilder, whose whining, strangled-voice bit is almost a shtick of genius. Produced by Sidney Glazier; released by Embassy Pictures. color (See Going Steady.)

 

The Professionals (1966)—The title is accurate. This action-Western, written and directed by Richard Brooks, with Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Woody Strode, Jack Palance, and Claudia Cardinale, has the expertise of a cold old whore with practiced hands and no thoughts of love. There’s something to be said for this kind of professionalism: the moviemakers know how to provide excitement and they work us over. We’re not always in the mood for love or for art, and this film makes no demands, raises no questions, doesn’t confuse the emotions. It’s as modern a product as a new car; it may be no accident that Ryan, the man in this Western who loves horses, is treated as some sort of weakling. Cinematography by Conrad Hall; music by Maurice Jarre; based on Frank O’Rourke’s novel A Mule for the Marquesa. Columbia. color

 

Promise at Dawn (1971)—Jules Dassin has tried to turn Romain Gary’s nostalgic celebration of his loving mother into a vehicle for Melina Mercouri. But she seems, as usual, to be playing a normal hearty, hot nymphomaniac. The different parts of the past run together in a blur in this generally unsatisfying film, but there are a few good satirical sequences with Dassin acting the role of a silent-movie idol. With Assaf Dayan; cinematography by Jean Badal; music by Georges Delerue. Avco. color

 

The Promoter Also known as The Card. (1952)—Denry the audacious, the opportunist who rises from washerwoman’s son to town mayor through devious and ingenious scheming, is one of Alec Guinness’s most winning roles—he even gets the girl (Petula Clark, looking very pretty at this stage in her career, though she doesn’t sing). His performance is neatly matched against Glynis Johns’s portrait of a female opportunist—a babyfaced, husky-voiced dancing teacher who latches on to wealth and a title. Eric Ambler adapted Arnold Bennett’s 1911 satire on business methods and class barriers; it makes a blithe, wonderfully satisfying comedy. Directed by Ronald Neame; cinematography by Oswald Morris. With Valerie Hobson as the Countess of Chell. b & w

 

The Proud and the Beautiful, see Les Orgueilleux

 

Providence (1977)—Alain Resnais, working in English, directed this intricately planned Freudian-puzzle movie, mostly set inside the mind of a dying writer (John Gielgud). Alone at night, in pain, the elderly writer drunkenly plots a novel about the members of his family (Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner, Elaine Stritch). The effect of the pearl-gray tones and the swift, smooth cutting is peculiarly fastidious and static; you feel as if the movie, with all its technique and culture, were going to dry up and blow away. With a longer death scene than Camille’s, Gielgud is the only one who looks alive. He’s lean and wiry, turkey-faced, a tough old bird; he bounces through his bitchy role, savoring every mean syllable. David Mercer wrote the script, which is impossibly elocutionary. Gielgud delivers himself of flourishes like “How darkness creeps into the blood—darkness , the chill obsidian fingers.” No doubt Mercer intended this writer’s thoughts to have an edge of florid fatuity. But when Bogarde—a barrister—is asked (by his mistress) how he and his wife live, he answers, “In a state of unacknowledged mutual exhaustion, behind which we scream silently.” Is this, too, only part of the old man’s second-rate novel? Some people have a surprising tolerance for this sort of thing; the movie is widely regarded as a masterpiece, and it was chosen as the greatest film of the 70s by an international jury of critics. Music by Miklós Rózsa. color (See When the Lights Go Down.)

 

The Public Enemy (1931)—William Wellman’s gangster classic, with James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Joan Blondell, and Mae Clarke as the girl who gets the grapefruit shoved in her kisser. A good picture, even if the theme music is “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Warners. b & w

 

The Public Eye (1972)—Traipsing around London followed by a private detective, Mia Farrow is the most graceful, romantic comedienne one could hope for. She has a sure light touch, and so does the director, Carol Reed, who comes up with visual gags that fill out Peter Shaffer’s script, based on his one-act play. As the accountant husband who hires the detective, because he can’t believe his American wife simply enjoys poking about in the city, Michael Jayston is too tight-faced and stagey (he’s a priss). The conception would probably have worked better if he’d played a charming man gone dry; instead, he seems a dry man trying to act charming. But as the Greek detective, Topol gets to play his own age (35), and he’s likably bearish—he’s warm. Looking for the wife’s concealed lover, this private eye watches the wife—a young woman with expressive wandering hands, a woman with poetry in her and a tender, slightly forlorn humor—and soon he’s in love. This triangle comedy is totally artificial, yet it has a lovely, small, carefree quality. The cinematography, by Christopher Challis, is a happy love letter to London. A (British) Hal B. Wallis Production, released by Universal. color

 

I Pugni in Tasca, see Fists in the Pocket

 

Pumping Iron (1977)—Competently made documentary about the grotesque, comic subculture of bodybuilding. It holds the viewer’s interest, but it does so by setting up the bodybuilding champions for you to react to in a certain way, and then congratulating you for seeing them in that psychologically facile way. The directors, George Butler and Robert Fiore, treat Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mike Katz, Franco Columbu, and Louis Ferrigno and his parents as if they were fictional characters, and there are elements of presumption, cruelty, and condescension in this. The film never transcends its own slickness. color

 

The Pumpkin Eater (1964)—Jack Clayton’s underrated version of the Penelope Mortimer novel, with a script by Harold Pinter and a fine cast headed by Anne Bancroft. Her performance as the (compulsive childbearing) Englishwoman whose nerves are giving out has an unusual tentative, exploratory quality. (It ranks with her more straightforward acting in The Miracle Worker.) With Peter Finch as the screenwriter husband who plays around, and James Mason, Maggie Smith, Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Webb, Richard Johnson, and Yootha Joyce. It’s a stunning, high-style film—fragmented yet flowing. The murky sexual tensions have a fascination, and there are memorable moments: Bancroft’s crackup in Harrods; glimpses of Mason being prurient and vindictive, and Maggie Smith being a troublemaking “other woman.” The cinematography is by Oswald Morris; the music is by Georges Delerue. Released in the U.S. by Columbia. b & w

 

Punchline (1988)—Pop-psych moral uplift, about standup comics. The writer-director, David Seltzer, wants us to see Steven Gold, the compulsive young spritzer, played by Tom Hanks, as “troubled”; Seltzer points up Steven’s hostility, his inability to relate to other people, his not understanding what love is. And everything that Seltzer points up is soggy and only partway believable. Sally Field plays Lilah, a New Jersey housewife and mother of three who hopes to become a comic: Lilah looks at the restless, driven Steven and sees the soft, suffering child within. The movie gives Lilah an insipid radiance while it pulls back from Steven’s aggressive twisted smile and his stabbing vocal rhythms. (These two are Lenny Bruce and Erma Bombeck.) We’re supposed to dislike Steven’s brashness and desperation, and approve of Lilah because she has a wholesome, normal outlook. We’re also supposed to be charmed by the naughty vibrator jokes that pop out of her little head and “embarrass” her. Seltzer’s sit-com style of humor is just like Lilah’s. The bedraggled plotting forces Hanks into maudlin situations, but he manages to get under some of his material and darken it. He’s what keeps you watching. Good performances by John Goodman, Mark Rydell, and Kim Greist. Columbia. color (See Movie Love.)

 

Le Puritain, see The Puritan

 

The Puritan Le Puritain (1939)—Jean-Louis Barrault was not yet an internationally known actor, and those of us who saw this unheralded young man in The Puritan experienced a sense of discovery. His bony, thin young face was perfect for Liam O’Flaherty’s psychological study of the murderer Ferriter, a righteous reformer and sexually obsessed religious fanatic. Barrault’s acting was so unusually objective that one respected this poor devil even at his most hopelessly self-deceived. The film, condemned by New York’s State Board of Censors in toto as “indecent, immoral, sacrilegious, tending to incite to crime and corrupt morals,” is in perfectly good taste, but the censors had a reason for their stand: Ferriter is not only conceived as a censor type, he’s actually engaged in this work in the film. The production, which also features Pierre Fresnay and Viviane Romance, was made in Paris by the director, Jeff Musso, for a total cost of $27,000. In French. b & w

 

Purple Noon Plein Soleil (1960)—Maurice Ronet and Alain Delon as decadent Americans loafing in Italy—Ronet rich and vicious, Delon poor, amoral, and murderous. When Delon tries on Ronet’s clothes, it’s clear that they look better on him. The director, René Clement, keeps this thriller in the sun-drenched-holiday style of travel posters, with homosexual hatred and envy festering. All it has going for it is this sensuous, kicky atmosphere; you feel as if you’re breathing something beautiful and rotten. With Marie Laforêt as the shared girlfriend. Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Cinematography by Henri Decae; music by Nino Rota. In French. color

 

Purple Rain (1984)—In this fictional bio, Prince, the 26-year-old pansexual rock star, appears as the Kid, a vulnerable loner and struggling musician. The son of a self-pitying black man who beats his white wife, because he blames her for his failure to achieve success as a composer, the moody Kid is a tortured soul. When he falls in love with Apollonia (the overpoweringly sultry Patty Apollonia Kotero), he begins to repeat the pattern, but, of course, the love that is the source of his torment is also the source of his redemption. It’s not difficult to see the attraction that the picture has for adolescents: Prince’s songs are a cry for the free expression of sexual energy, and his suffering is a supercharged version of what made James Dean the idol of young moviegoers—this Kid is “hurting.” And this picture knows no restraint. It was directed by Albert Magnoli (who also wrote the final script and was the co-editor), but Prince is in charge, and he knows how he wants to appear—like Dionysus crossed with a convent girl on her first bender. And his instinct is right: if he had performed the role more realistically, the picture would be really sodden. This way, his impudent pranks make the audience laugh and his musical numbers keep giving the picture a lift. It’s pretty terrible (there are no real scenes—just flashy, fractured rock-video moments), but those willing to accept Prince as a sexual messiah aren’t likely to mind. The film introduces a full-fledged young comedian, Morris Day, the lead singer of The Time, who suggests a Richard Pryor without the genius and the complications. When the giggling Day and his handsome sidekick, Jerome Benton, dance to The Time’s funk rock they have a loose, floppy grace. There’s also a good straight performance by Clarence Williams III as the Kid’s father. Cinematography by Donald Thorin; shot in Minneapolis. Released by Warners. color (See State of the Art.)

 

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)—The 13th movie that Woody Allen directed, this comedy has a small, rapt quality; he wrote it for Mia Farrow, and it seems scaled to her cheekbones. The time is 1935; and she is Cecilia, who lives in a small town in New Jersey and can’t hold a job for long because her thoughts wander away to the glamorous worlds she sees on the screen at the Jewel Theater. This is the first Woody Allen movie in which a whole batch of actors really interact and spark each other. Jeff Daniels plays a dashing young screen character who bounds down from the black-and-white image and into color, and takes Cecilia out of the theatre with him; he’s also the ambitious actor who arrives in the town to try to persuade the character to go back up on the screen where he belongs. Also with Danny Aiello, Stephanie Farrow, Zoe Caldwell, John Wood, Edward Herrmann, Van Johnson, Deborah Rush, Annie Joe Edwards, Karen Akers, Irving Metzman, Milo O’Shea, Alexander H. Cohen, and, in a spectacular cameo, Dianne Wiest. Cinematography by Gordon Willis; the original music is by Dick Hyman. Orion. color (See State of the Art.)

 

Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1971)—The title is enough to warn you that this is going to be literary in the worst sense, and it turns out to be about the anguished life of a high-fashion model (Faye Dunaway)—a lapsed Catholic, striving for grace and sleeping with strangers. The script by Carol Eastman (under the pseudonym Adrian Joyce) is reminiscent of her script for Five Easy Pieces; it’s another tribute to alienation. Jerry Schatzberg has directed it in a fractured, prismatic style. Put them together and you’ve got the high-flown chic of soullessness. After you’ve looked at the heroine’s teeny marble features for almost two hours, you’re offered the conceit that perhaps she’s an empty wreck because every time someone takes a picture of her she loses a piece of her soul. (At 24 frames a second, this movie must have devastated Dunaway.) With Barry Primus, Emerick Bronson, Roy Scheider, and Viveca Lindfors. Cinematography by Adam Holender; music by Michael Small. Universal. color (See Deeper into Movies.)

 

Pygmalion (1938)—First-rate romantic comedy, and certainly the best G.B.S. picture ever done. It doesn’t seem weighted down with talk, like most of the others, and though a trifle slow in spots, it has a very satisfying tempo. Wendy Hiller is triumphant in the role of Eliza, the Covent Garden flower girl, and Leslie Howard is marvellously high-spirited and combative as the smug Professor Higgins, who trains Eliza to speak like a lady. Gabriel Pascal produced, Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard directed, David Lean edited, Arthur Honegger did the score, and Harry Stradling shot it. The costumes are by Czettell, Worth, and Schiaparelli. The cast includes Wilfrid Lawson as Doolittle, Marie Lohr as Mrs. Higgins, Scott Sunderland as Colonel Pickering, Jean Cadell as Mrs. Pearce, David Tree as Freddy, Esmé Percy as Count Karpathy, and Leueen MacGrath, Everley Gregg, Violet Vanbrugh, Iris Hoey, Stephen Murray, Irene Brown, Cathleen Nesbitt, and Ivor Barnard. Though several writers worked on the adaptation (and received an Academy Award for it), the award for the screenplay was given to Shaw (who wrote some new scenes for the movie). (The play was later turned into the musical-comedy My Fair Lady, which was filmed in 1964.) b & w