Word: directors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Alone. This extraordinary historical footnote has been refined and condensed into a hard, gritty new movie called Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here. Writer-Director Abraham Polonsky makes good use of all the obvious contemporary parallels but deliberately holds them in check. The result is a subtle, intense document of racial persecution that stands as one of the finest films of the year...
Dead Anyway. The movie is well served by the shimmering, bleached-out color photography of Conrad Hall. It Is obvious from the opening scenes, however, that this is most deeply Director Polonsky's picture. Author of the remarkable script for Body and Soul ("Everybody dies!"), Polonsky made his directorial debut with another John Garfield movie, Force of Evil, in 1948. An ode to gangsterism and individual morality, it passed almost unnoticed on initial release. As a lifelong proponent of the sort of radical politics frowned upon during the witch hunts of the 1940s, Polonsky did not long escape...
Professional virginity has had its Day; in cinema, the current trend is toward making it. This year's version of Pillow Talk is John and Mary, a Now movie that dares to open with its leading players (Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow) together in bed. Director Peter Yates (Bullitt) riffles through flash cards of identity, exhibiting the fun couple nude and clothed, before, after and during the New York-based affair. Mary, it turns out, has been grooving with a married politician. John seems the sort of clumping, turtle-nosed customer who could not seduce a girl...
...Director Yates knows how to shape even the sketchiest scenario, and if John and Mary is no deeper than an eggshell, it is every bit as functionally designed. Mia Farrow adds an otherworldliness to her character by reciting her lines as if they were cabala. Hoffman, one of the shrewdest young actors in the business, manages to be at once predator and victim. But when the film tries to make the audience care for the characters, it proves bankrupt. For beneath the Manhattan chatter and the glossy confrontations, John and Mary is as empty as a singles bar on Monday...
...more engaging questions facing America today: Can Laugh-In's Goldie Hawn really act? Yes, she can, and so can Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman. With that kind of cast, a Sears, Roebuck catalogue could serve as a script, and Cactus Flower is far more than that. Director Gene Saks is no Billy Wilder, but Wilder's collaborator I.A.L. Diamond (Some Like It Hot, The Apartment) is still I.A.L. Diamond, and he knows funny lines when he writes them. Ornamenting Abe Burrows' stage hit (itself an adaptation of a French farce), Diamond outfits his confident cast with...