Visions of Eight (1973)

          Rather than providing conventional historical contextualization or even straightforward reportage, this arty documentary project from megaproducer David L. Wolper lets eight internationally acclaimed filmmakers offer cinematic sketches of the Olympics, with the 1972 summer games in Munich as their canvas. The terrorist attacks that left 11 Israeli athletes dead receive only passing mention, not out of disrespect but rather because Wolper’s film was designed to celebrate timeless aspects of the Olympics. As with most anthology pictures, Visions of Eight is a hit-or-miss affair, but even the iffy sequences are imaginative, so as a total viewing experience, Visions of Eight is offbeat, unpredictable, and, just as Woper intended, inspirational. Given a clear shape thanks to well-crafted introductory and closing segments overseen by Mel Stewart (who directed Wolper’s beloved 1971 theatrical feature Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory), the film moves gracefully between quasi-narrative sequences and experimental passages.

          Yuri Ozerov’s “The Beginning” is among the merely serviceable vignettes. Mai Zetterling’s weight-lifting sequence “The Strongest” loses focus despite flashy cinematography and editing, because Zetterling drifts into random stats (Olympians ate 1.1 million eggs over the course of the ’72 games) and images of computers processing data. Infusing “The Decathalon” with his characteristically antiauthoritarian humor, Milos Forman juxtaposes pageantry with mundane details such as officials yawning between events, and he tips his hand by narrating, “I got to see the Olympics for free and had the best seats.” Arguably the best sequence is Claude Lelouch’s “The Losers,” which offers a poignant alternative to familiar views of triumphant athletes. Innovative Hollywood director Arthur Penn gets a bit carried away with “The Highest,” employing artsy audio drops, slow motion, and soft focus to transform high jumps into audiovisual abstractions, though it must be said that parts of “The Highest” are quite beautiful.

          While Michael Pfleghar’s “The Women” and Kon Ichikawa’s “The Fastest” underwhelm, the former offers a look at celebrated gymnast Olga Korbut in her prime, and the latter celebrates its own technical complexity, since the narration for “The Fastest” explains how 24 cameras and 20,000 feet of film were used to record a 100-yard-dash in granular detail. The final segment, John Schlesinger’s “The Longest,” lives up to its title, offering a repetitive look at an English marathoner.

         Still, Visions of Eight amply rewards the viewer’s attention. The best sequences are terrific, the cumulative abundance of atmosphere and information is impressive, and the license Wolper gave to his collaborators resulted in great stylistic variety. Never lost amid the directorial flourishes is the sincere theme of the piece, which has to do with extolling the values of achievement and community.

Visions of Eight: GROOVY

Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)

          While I can easily recognize the film’s intelligence, relevance, and sensitivity, I’ve never been able to penetrate Sunday Bloody Sunday. The problem is not the story, which depicts the strained civility of three people participating in an unusual romantic triangle. What blocks me is the picture’s style, which I find to be cold, opaque, and pretentious. Mine is clearly a minority opinion, however, since the picture received accolades including four Oscar nominations and is now considered one of director John Schlesinger’s crowning achievements.

          In any event, the movie, which is set in England, opens by introducing viewers to Dr. Daniel Hirsh, a middle-aged man who puts on a good show of being contented but clearly hides layers of internal anguish. Next, the movie introduces freespirited couple Alexandra Greville (Glenda Jackson) and Bob Elkin (Murray Head). These two seem happy with each other, because Bob is a good surrogate dad to the kids Alex brought into the relationship from her failed marriage, and because the two share a robust physical relationship. Yet one day during an argument, Bob slips away from Alexandra for a tryst with his other lover—Daniel. Written by Penelope Gilliatt, who won numerous awards for her script, Sunday Bloody Sunday explores the odd dynamics of this three-way romance. Both Alexandra and Daniel are aware that they share a lover, but they tolerate Bob’s bed-hopping because they’re fragile people who consider themselves undeserving of love. Alexandra’s psychological burdens include self-esteem problems inflicted by strict parents, as well as lingering trauma from growing up during the horrors of World War II. Concurrently, Daniel wrestles with the interrelated issues of Jewish guilt and self-denial because he refuses to tell his family that he’s gay.

          Gilliatt, Schlesinger, and the actors go deep into characterization, so it’s not hard to understand why partisans of Sunday Bloody Sunday regard the film so highly. Among other things, Schlesinger strives for a delicate synthesis of naturalism and stylization—he probes scenes with his camera to find oblique angles, and yet he coaches his actors to deliver lines loosely and to occupy spaces comfortably. Speaking of the actors, the performances in Sunday Bloody Sunday occur on vastly different levels, probably by design. Finch is closed and tight, forcing viewers to peer through his façade for glimmers of truth. Head is a cipher, putting across the idea that his character is a handsome canvas onto which others project their desires. And Jackson is an open wound, crying and laughing and snapping as her already taut emotions are strained past their limits. In many ways, she steals the show, even though Finch took a considerable risk by playing a gay character at a time when onscreen homosexuality was treated with kid gloves.

          Nonetheless, it seems that every admirable element in Sunday Bloody Sunday is matched by a questionable flourish. The camerawork is intrusive, the dialogue is cryptic, the editing is distractingly arty, and the tone is so restrained as to create occasional pockets of tedium. Furthermore, the way that flashbacks and supporting characters are integrated into the story strikes me as contrived and mechanical. Even more egregiously, the picture ends with a direct address to camera that comes out of nowhere, stylistically speaking. I wish I could see the transcendent character study that others perceive when they watch Sunday Bloody Sunday, but perhaps my eyesight isn’t good enough.

Sunday Bloody Sunday: FUNKY

The Day of the Locust (1975)

          In terms of artistic ambition and physical scale, The Day of the Locust is easily one of the most impressive studio movies of the ’70s. Working with first-class collaborators including cinematographer Conrad Hall, director John Schlesinger did a remarkable job of re-imagining ’30s Hollywood as a dark phantasmagoria comprising endless variations of debauchery, desire, despair, disappointment, and, finally, death. As a collection of subtexts and surfaces, The Day of the Locust is beyond reproach.

          Alas, something bigger and deeper must be present in order to hold disparate elements together, and even though Schlesinger’s film was adapted from a book many regard as one of the great literary achievements of the 20th century, The Day of the Locust lacks a unifying force. Schlesinger and his team strive so desperately to make a Big Statement that the movie sinks into pretentious grandiosity, and Schlesinger’s choice to present every character as a grotesque makes The Day of the Locust little more than an exquisitely rendered freak show.

          Novelist Nathanael West based his 1939 book The Day of the Locust on his own experiences as a writer in ’30s Hollywood, capturing the has-beens, never-weres, and wanna-bes living on the fringes of the film industry. West’s book is deeply metaphorical, with much of its power woven into the fabric of wordplay. So, while screenwriter Waldo Salt’s adaptation of The Day of the Locust is admirable for striving to capture subtle components of West’s book, the effort was doomed from the start—some of the images West conjures are so arch that when presented literally onscreen, they seem overwrought. Plus, the basic story suffers from unrelenting gloominess.

          While employed at a movie studio and hoping to rise through the art-direction ranks, Tod Hackett (William Atherton) moves into an apartment complex and becomes fascinated with his sexy neighbor, actress Faye Greener (Karen Black). Loud, opportunistic, and teasing, Faye accepts Tod’s affections while denying his love, even though Tod befriends Faye’s drunken father, a clown-turned-traveling salesman named Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith). Meanwhile, Faye meets and seduces painfully shy accountant Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland), who foolishly believes he can domesticate Faye. The storyline also involves a hard-partying dwarf, a borderline-sociopathic child actor, a lecherous studio executive, and loathsome movie extras who stage illegal cockfights.

          The narrative pushes these characters together and pulls them apart in wavelike rhythms that work on the page but not on the screen. And in the end, ironic circumstances cause Hollywood to erupt in a hellish riot.

          Considering that Schlesinger’s film career up to this point mostly comprised such tiny character studies as Darling (1965) and Midnight Cowboy (1969), it’s peculiar that he felt compelled to mount a production of such gigantic scale, and it’s a shame that his excellent work in constructing individual moments gets overwhelmed by the movie’s bloated weirdness. In fact, nearly every scene has flashes of brilliance, but The Day of the Locust wobbles awkwardly between moments that don’t completely work because they’re too blunt and ones that don’t completely work because they’re too subtle. Predictably, actors feel the brunt of this uneven storytelling. Atherton gets the worst of it, simply because he lacks a leading man’s charisma, and Black’s characterization is so extreme she’s unpleasant to watch. Meredith’s heart-rending vulnerability gets obscured behind the silly overacting that Schlesinger clearly encourages, and Sutherland’s performance is so deliberately bizarre that it borders on camp, even though he displays fierce emotional commitment.

The Day of the Locust: FREAKY

Marathon Man (1976)

          A year after Jaws gave a generation of moviegoers nightmares about great white sharks, the brilliant thriller Marathon Man made dentistry seem like the most terrifying thing in the world. Playing a Nazi war criminal obsessed with finding a cache of stolen diamonds, the venerable Sir Laurence Olivier scared the crap out of audiences by performing oral surgery without anesthetic on the movie’s hero (Dustin Hoffman), all the while muttering the unanswerable lunatic query, “Is it safe?”
          Hoffman plays Babe, a New York City graduate student and marathon runner unwittingly drawn into a race between the Nazi and U.S. government agents. In a deft touch, the movie’s narrative is intentionally convoluted—although screenwriter William Goldman, who adapted the story from his own novel, makes the basics of the story clear enough for viewers to follow along, he ensures that moviegoers as perplexed as Babe, which adds to the tension of watching the film. By showing people getting killed left and right, and by demonstrating that everyone in the movie is chasing everyone else, Goldman creates a dizzying vibe in which it’s impossible to tell who can be trusted. Yet Goldman also keeps viewers squarely in Babe’s camp, since he’s the one true innocent in the story.

          Director John Schlesinger, whose previous collaboration with Hoffman was the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy (1969), gracefully balances pulpy material with sophisticated execution, so even though Marathon Man is primarily a very effective thrill machine, it’s also a credible dramatic film with subtle textures like the layered relationship between Babe and his secret-agent older brother, Doc (Roy Scheider). There’s even an edgy love story between Babe and Elsa (Marthe Keller), plus a complex dynamic between Babe and Doc’s fellow spy, Janeway (William Devane). However, what makes the biggest impact is Szell (Olivier), the unhinged German with a nasty habit of jabbing drills and needles into healthy teeth, causing victims unbearable pain. Olivier’s performance, which earned an Oscar nomination, sits on the border between genius and camp, but his choices were validated by how deeply he unsettled audiences; Szell is inarguably one of the creepiest screen villains of the ’70s.

          Hoffman’s great acting in the picture is sometimes overshadowed by Olivier’s star turn and also by oft-repeated lore about Hoffman’s overzealous work ethic. In the most notorious incident, Hoffman stayed up all night as preparation for a scene in which his character is exhausted, only to have Olivier ask, “Why don’t you just try acting, dear boy?” Yet while the thespians used different methods, both delivered peerless results that, when combined with Goldman’s rip-roaring narrative and Schlesinger’s masterful direction, created 129 minutes of vivid escapist entertainment.

Marathon Man: RIGHT ON

Yanks (1979)

Although it boasts crisp performances, interesting subject matter, lavish production values, and sensitive direction by John Schlesinger, the World War II ensemble romance Yanks is a chore to watch, because the characterizations and storyline aren’t compelling enough to sustain the movie’s bloated running time—two hours and 18 minutes is a bit windy for a piffle, no matter how handsomely made. Exploring relationships between American soldiers and the residents of the ravaged England the GIs occupied during the early 1940s, the picture focuses on Matt (Richard Gere), an enlisted man who falls in love with a British store clerk (Lisa Eichhorn), and John (William Devane), an officer who carries on an extramarital affair with an aristocratic volunteer nurse (Vanessa Redgrave). If you think that sounds like the set-up for a maudlin soap opera, then you’ve lit upon the problem: With its anguished goodbye scenes, tender romantic encounters, and violin-drenched soundtrack, Yanks is an intelligent but syrupy melodrama. There’s not a whit of battlefield action in the movie, so it’s all about the unexpected unions lovers form during wartime. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with a WWII chick flick, shouldn’t this sort of thing evoke some sort of emotional reaction, instead of just unspooling in glossy monotony? Everything in the movie looks great, from the meticulous period details to the shining faces of young beauties (male and female alike), but it’s all so trite. As for the actors, Devane and Redgrave perform with chilly professionalism, while Gere and Eichhorn generate a bit more heat. Gere tries too hard, however, forcing intensity when it doesn’t come naturally, so he’s somewhat awkward, and although Eichhorn is at the height of her youthful beauty, she simply doesn’t have the magnetism required for a movie of this scale. Yanks means well enough, and it’s quite watchable on a scene-by-scene basis, but the gulf between its slight narrative and its epic production values results in a lot of fuss over nothing.

Yanks: FUNKY