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By now, given the mass defections from the already thinned ranks of the Fellini camp that have been caused by Fellini's Casanova, the "sociology" of Fellini's reputation has almost replaced the film itself as a subject of interest.
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May 1977 |
William S. Pechter |
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By common consent, last year was the worst year for movies within recent memory-that is, unless one remembers the year before, and the year before that.
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March 1977 |
William S. Pechter |
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Some fifteen years ago, I interviewed a director, Abraham Polonsky, whose first film, Force of Evil (he'd previously written Body and Soul), merits inclusion, I think, with Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon in any mention of the handful of most remarkable directorial debuts in American movies.
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January 1977 |
William S. Pechter |
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I'm usually skeptical about the authenticity of remarks some critics have a knack for overhearing in an audience, but then the comment I actually overheard from the audience at the conclusion of Obsession left me, at first, bewildered.
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November 1976 |
William S. Pechter |
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There's a sense in which, had Robert Altman's new film been better, I probably would have liked it less.
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October 1976 |
William S. Pechter |
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Some years before Richard Nixon became President, Robert Osborn drew a picture of him that remains to this day a masterpiece of political caricature.
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July 1976 |
William S. Pechter |
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I fidgeted my way through at least two-thirds of The Story of Adele H., waiting for it to get off the ground.
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May 1976 |
William S. Pechter |
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I went to Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon with less than great expectations: Kubrick's last film was A Clockwork Orange, which I detested, and the fact that this one's cast was headed by a soap-opera graduate and an ex-fashion model seemed a bad-news bonus.
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March 1976 |
William S. Pechter |
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Like many members of Lina Wertmuller's American audience, I saw Love and Anarchy before seeing any of her other films, though it wasn't the first film she'd made.
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January 1976 |
William S. Pechter |
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If the fact that Jaws has now surpassed the U.S. earnings (it's not yet been released abroad) of any film before tempts one to consider the social significance of its phenomenal success, a little contact with the film itself should put a break on all such cogitation.
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November 1975 |
William S. Pechter |
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Why make a film about-and full of-country music, if you don't like it?
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September 1975 |
William S. Pechter |
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Ambiguous clues point to a murder having taken place, and a photographer sets out to establish if it has. A young man, sought by the police for his involvement in a campus protest which has erupted into violence, steals an airplane to make his getaway.
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August 1975 |
William S. Pechter |
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IT SEEMS I waited too long to write my obligatory piece on "The Vanishing Heroine in Amer- ican Movies,"
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May 1975 |
William S. Pechter |
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I had some substantial reservations about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, though they were outweighed by my admiration for it.
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March 1975 |
William S. Pechter |
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Caveat emptor. Around 1960, when the Bergman bandwagon was gathering full steam, this writer made room for one more convert to climb aboard by jumping off. Since then, I've admired some of Bergman's films, and loathed some others.
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January 1975 |
William S. Pechter |
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The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a lumpy, styleless film made from a lumpy, styleless novel, yet it seems to me important.
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November 1974 |
William S. Pechter |
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Some months ago, in a generally unenthusiastic survey of the highly acclaimed work of some young American directors, I mentioned Terrence Malick's Badlands, one of the great successes of the last New York Film Festival, and a film I hadn't the seen.
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September 1974 |
William S. Pechter |
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The Conversation is Francis Ford Coppola's sixth film as a director, and something of a departure in a career which seems to grow not more but less easy to pin down.
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July 1974 |
William S. Pechter |
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He moved more gracefully than any other actor in Hollywood," Kenneth Tynan said of him, and excluding only Chaplin, Keaton, and Astaire, he couldn't have been speaking about anyone but James Cagney.
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May 1974 |
William S. Pechter |
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Though I saw The Exorcist before it opened, I saw it with an audience which filled a large theater, and I was aware while the film was being shown of sharing in a rare experience: the experience of seeing a film which has its audience reacting as one, completely in the palm of its hand.
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March 1974 |
William S. Pechter |
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Around September every year, I begin to recognize the symptoms. My palms sweat. I'm nervous, irritable. Above all, I'm filled with a powerful premonition that I'll soon be seeing more movies than I want to, and enjoying them less.
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January 1974 |
William S. Pechter |
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"Where were you in '62?" the ads for "American Graffiti" ask. Wherever I was I recall doing my best to stay out of earshot of the kind of Alan Freed-style music which washes over the film from start to finish as pervasively as the very air that's breathed.
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November 1973 |
William S. Pechter |
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It is the climax of "The Day of the Jackal," and the paid political assassin, code name "Jackal," brilliantly disguised as an elderly, one-legged, French army veteran, closes in on his target of General de Gaulle at a populous location where the General is to make a public appearance.
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September 1973 |
William S. Pechter |
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The meaning of the sensation caused by "Last Tango in Paris," of the febrile character of its reception quite apart from the character of the film itself, seems to me unmistakably clear: we want pornography.
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July 1973 |
William S. Pechter |
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Midway through "The Passion of Anna," the first half of which seems to me as good as anything Bergman has done and enormously impressive, we suddenly become aware of a gap in our information.
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May 1973 |
William S. Pechter |
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I thought when I wrote about "Bed and Board" that I wouldn't want to be writing about Truffaut again for the foreseeable future, but then the future has a peculiar disposition to be unforeseeable.
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March 1973 |
William S. Pechter |
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The "Emigrants" is an almost three-hour-long Swedish saga about a mid-19th-century migration of peasants to America, made by a director, Jan Troell, who is his own photographer, and who composes each shot with the care an artist might give to his canvas.
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January 1973 |
William S. Pechter |
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I'd very much like to like John Huston's new film, and, to judge by many of the reviews, so would a lot of other people.
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November 1972 |
William S. Pechter |
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With "Frenzy," its director, Alfred Hitchcock, is said to have returned to form, but to what form has he returned?
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September 1972 |
William S. Pechter |
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In one of my earliest appearances in COMMENTARY, I wrote in praise of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Rain People," a film I had little company in finding favor with. And "The Godfather" is, furthermore, and by critical consensus, a stunning confirmation of my claims for Coppola's talents.
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July 1972 |
William S. Pechter |
