Cannes
Film Festival 1967
Continental
Film Review magazine July 1967
Κινηματογραφικά
CANNES 1967 will be remembered essentially for the
fine weather and the five films shown under the flag of Great (and certainly
permissive) Britain. They at once provided the scandal, the serious engagement
and artistic talent required at a festival and if two were directed by
Americans, one by an Italian and one was an adaptation of an American play and
made with American money at least (with the Common Market headlines that
interrupted the festival) they laid low the myth of Britain’s insularity.
Time was. at
Cannes, when ‘lesexy’ emanated from starlette exposure on the plages at the
urging of frenetic photographers. Now the plage strip appears modest indeed
compared with the several aspects of amour to be seen inside the Palais des
Festivals.
This year, in
fact, may be established as an erotic vintage with such items as the lifting of
a pullover over a girl’s head with a wonderful economy of movement (Mon Amour,
Mon Amour) and the development of a botanical ramble into a Priapic scramble
(Three Days and a Child).
One can, of
course, have too much of a good thing and one was not surprised to find critics
deprecating the promptness with which pretty Anna Katarina Larsson popped into
bed for Jean Louis Trintignant — particularly when later she mentioned she had
a job connected with the press. “Ca explique tout”, came from a jaded audience.
[ Elio Petri, “A Ciascuno IL Suo” ]
Early on Elio
Petri’s “A
Ciascuno II Suo” (To each his Own) proved to be a polished piece of
film-making of political and amorous skullduggery in Cefalu and Palermo (the
landscape was beatuifully presented). With quick, certain strokes the
corruption and political engagement that too often disastrously overspills into
private lives were sketched in.
A young
teacher, dissatisfied with the arrests made in connection with a double murder
proceeds to investigate on his own — as much, he comes to realise, for the
contact it brings with the widow, Luisa (Irene Papas) as for his love of justice.
His
investigation brings about his own murder (Chicago style) and the two real
culprits, Luisa and her cousin and childhood lover the barrister Rosello (Gabriele
Ferzetti) go smoothly and confidently to the altar together.
Said Petri: “Like
intellectuals everywhere my hero knows
about the past and understands the possibilities of the future but does not
know the reality that surrounds him in the present. Everyone else knows the
situation — but not he”.
Irene Papas in ““A
Ciascuno II Suo” (To each his Own)
[ Antonin Masa, “Hotel for Foreigners”]
Disappointing
was "Hotel for Foreigners” Antonin Masa’s first independent feature film.
A kind of cross between “Marienbad” and “The Trial”, a hotel staffed by the
weirdest characters, is seen as an allegory of the real world. A poet arrives,
takes a room and awaits for the girl he loves but his idyllic vision is soon
disenchanted and finally destroyed.
There are
some truly wonderfully inventive surrealistic scenes but the banal allegorical
premise leaves no room for imaginative subtlety as in “Marienbad” or “The
Trial” and one eventually tires of a group of characters who retain no mystery.
But there is no question of the talent of this new, young (32) director who,
incidentally wrote the script of "Everyday Courage".
[Volker Schloendorff, “Mord und Totschlag” ( A degree
of Murder) ]
It seems
very likely that Volker Schloendorff, one of Germany’s best young directors, is
going to achieve a considerable oeuvre, at once personal and homogeneous. His “Mord und
Totschlag” (now given the English title of “A
Degree of Murder”) is a first-rate evocation of the drifting
teenager of today, intuitive, ingenuously emotional, free of any burden of
guilt.
As Marie, the
young waitress who, more by accident, shoots the boy who has been living with
her. Anita
Pallenberg (herself a real, cosmopolitan drifting daughter of the
sixties) gives a vital authentic performance.
Anita Pallenberg in "A Degree of Murder"
The Young
German cinema is no longer a ponderable possibility — it has arrived.
Schloendorff's brilliant film, “The Young Toerless” has, incidentally, been
acquired for distribution here by Amanda Films.
[
Bo Widerberg, “Elvira Madigan”]
"Elvira Madigan",
a beautiful lyrical period love story, seemed a remarkable contrast to Bo
Widerberg’s previous contemporary, socially tempered films. Shot in a golden colour
that seems to illume not only the landscape but the very love the young
deserter from the Swedish army, Lieutenant Count Sixten Sparre, bears for the
tight-rope walker, Elvira, Widerberg manages to sustain the lyrical key right
to the tragic end when, reduced to eating berries to sustain themselves, the
two realise that only death will save their love from disenchantment.
Apparently it
is a true story still remembered in ballad and it is beautifully played here by
Thommy Berggren as the count who leaves army, wife and children and Pia
Degermark as the girl who leaves her parents' circus. Director of photography
is Jorgen Persson.
APART FROM being represented at Cannes by Bo
Widerberg’s "Elvira Madigan” the Swedish film industry, as last year, put
on a whole series or showings of new films which included ''Stimulantia”
(Stimulation)
[film in 8 episodes], Arne Mattsson’s “Women of Darkness", Jonas Cornell’s
"Hugs
and Kisses’ and Jorn Donner's latest, “Tvarbalk’’ (Rooftree).
[ Jorn Donner, “Tvarbalk’’ (Rooftree) ]
Jorn Donner’s
piece, with photography by Rune Ericson, is a rather tedious sexual rondo
between an artist, the young Jewish girt he has met who carries still the memoire
of the concentration camps, Leo a publisher friend, and Leo’s wife. The four
interchange their sex partners with little appreciable increase of happiness
and the film has an enclosed feel about it. Donner said about the film “there
are no dead spots. Things happen in this picture. They do, of course, but one
doesn’t seem to care much whether they do.
[Jonas Cornell, "Hugs and Kisses" ]
"Hugs and Kisses" is a livelier little
rondo with a bohemian author moving in on a young married couple whom he barely
knows — the understanding is that he will act as their domestic servant. It is
a brisk comedy in which young people are shown to have some conventional
emotions as well as a new morality.
[ nine directors, “Stimulantia” (in eight episodes) – σπονδυλωτή ταινία ]
“Stimulantia”
was a disappointment — the eight short episodes varied very much in quality.
Hans Abramson's
was a look at Chaplin’s birthplace in London.
Jorn Donner’s
a skittish duologue about a girl who took too long in preparing for love-making.
Ingmar Bergman
showed us photographs of his son, Daniel.
Arne Arnbom
gave us Birgit Nilsson rehearsing and singing Wagner.
Gustaf Molander directed a Maupassant story
with Ingrid Bergman and Gunnar Bjornstrand both in good form.
Vilgot Sjoman
gave us a fantasy of a husband who finds an attractive Negress in his bedroom
cupboard.
Tage Danielsson
and Hans Alfredson combined to write and direct the Balzac tale of the laundry
girl who was robbed of her virtue. All in all very light weight and some
sketches only thinly clinging to the main theme.
[ Nadine Trintignant, “Mon Amour, Mon Amour” ]
Nadine
Trintignant achieves in her first film, “Mon Amour, Mon Amour” the supreme joy of
uninhibited love, which begins (with distinct overtones of "Un Homme et
une Femme”), with a young woman, Agathe (Valerie Lagrange) about to join her
lover at Nice (where he is concerned with the construction of a block of flats
and irresolute about telling him that she is carrying his child.
The first
half of the film with its girl to girl confidences (Agathe and her friend
Jeanne — played by Annie Fargue) and the splendidly free love-making between
Vincent (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Agathe is good enough to overcome the obvious
comparison with Lelouch's film, but from the moment the wife-child Marilou
(Anna Katarina Larsson) smiles her way into Vincent’s bed, the film loses its
easy sense of reality and natural tension. A pity, for the players are
personable in the extreme. The often beautiful pastel photography was directed
by Willy Kurant.
Jean Louis Trintignant and Anna
Katarina Larsson in “Mon Amour, Mon Amour”.
[ Uri Zohar, “Three Days and a Child”]
For a moment
the Israeli director, Uri Zohar, had us believing that his film, “Three Days and a
Child’’was going to be something of a revelation. The easy
companionship between the three main characters was so swiftly and beautifully
established through the credits that we were impatient to learn more about
them. Unfortunately, in a series of flashbacks, we learn of the hero's first
love whose child he is now being asked to mind for three days while the parents
sit for a university entrance exam.
But if
nothing else the film reveals the potential of Israeli production with such
attractive players as Germaine Unikovski, Judith Soleh and the handsome Odded
Kotler.
[ Antonio Eceiza, “Ultimo Encuentro” ]
One or two
Spanish directors have now achieved a kind of popular realism which is both
satisfying to audiences and the directors themselves who are concerned not
merely with an escapist cinema but with some reflection and criticism of
contemporary Spain.
Aranda,
Eceiza and Mario Camus are good examples of directors working in this genre of
popular realism, and Antonio Eceiza’s new film, “Ultimo Encuentro’’ was seen at
the festival.
Starting off
in a TV studio where a popular flamenco dancer, Antonio Esteve, is being
submitted to a “This is your Life" programme — the film cleverly plays between
past and present. A tragic past is symbolized by the presence of the dancer’s
former guitarist whose wife was at that time both Antonio’s dancing partner and
mistress.
The dancer is
obsessed with guilt and while he tries, violently, to regain his peace of mind
we slowly learn of the earlier tragedy.
In the main
role is the dancer Antonio Gades who is as an emotional an actor as he is
dancer. Essentially Spanish, Eceiza’s film combines authenticity with a popular
melodramatic theme.
Antonio Gades and La Polacca as the
flamenco dancers In “El Ultimo Encuentro”.
[ Leopoldo Torry Nilsson, “Monday’s Child” ]
Leopoldo
Torre Nilsson is one of the major directors of Latin America. With his writer
wife, Beatriz Guido, he has produced a body of work which is highly personal,
hermetic almost, with its heavy, introvert atmosphere of a decadent society
crumbling before the demands of social change.
With “Monday's Child”,
the director has stripped his image of all the cluttering, atmospheric decor of
previous films, and tells a straightforward story of a neurotic child who, when
a favourite doll is irritably given away to the children of Puerto Rico
families made destitute by a hurricane, throws a tantram pretending blindness
and numbness. Desperate, her father goes in search of the doll at El Palomar.
Finally the
doll is reclaimed and Alice is miraculously ‘cured’ but when the family is
driving back on the San Juan road the child cruelly Iets the doll dangle from
the car in the dust of the road and then contemptuously drops it.
The film is a
hard look at the perversities of love.
[ Luigi Comencini, “L’Incompresso” ]
The first
half of Luigi Comencini’s “L’lncompreso” (Misunderstood)
is a brilliantly observed and sympathetic study of two brothers: Milo, four
(Simone Giannozzi) and Andrea, seven (Stefano Colagrande) who, bereft of their
mother have to adjust to a governess brought in by their father, sir George
Duncombe, who is the British consul at Florence.
Sir George
feels that Milo has to be shielded from the truth at all costs and Andrea,
desperately in need of comfort himself, finds he has to be the smaller boy’s
protector while receiving no real moral support or understanding from his
father.
It is only
when, through an accident caused by Milo’s thoughtless selfishness, that Andrea
has a fatal accident that the father realises that it was the elder boy, who
really understood the implications of his mother’s death and thus needed his
love and support.
The playing
of the two boys and Anthony Quayle as the father is so right that one can
almost forgive the melodramatic scene at the end in which the father discovers
too late, that his boy had fundamentally the character and good sense he had
previously not seen in him.
The lovely
colour photography of Florence and Fiesole is the work of Armando Nannuzzi.
Based on Florence Montgomery’s novel, the film would do well, 1 think, with
British audiences.
[ Gabriel Axel, “The Red Mantle” ]
Denmark's
entry, “The Red
Mantle", directed by Gabriel Axel, is a saga first written down
by Saxo Grammaticus in the 13th century concerning three sons who seek
vengeance for the death of their father and do combat with the three sons of
King Sigvor (Gunnar Bjornstrand). After an all day combat the king prevails
upon the six to sink their differences once and for all.
They return
to the king’s camp where Hagbard falls in love with the king’s daughter Signe
but there are those who wish the strife between the families to continue and
finally all six young men and Signe are either butchered, hung or burned to
death.
The interest
lies mainly in the bare, natural locations cf northern Scandinavian, and the
handsome young players of whom the young Soviet actor Oleg Vidowy (Hagbard) is
outstanding. The very frank love scene at the close is beautifully handled but
the film, generally, lacks tension.
[ Glauber Rocha, “Terra em Transe” ]
As always,
the films from Brazil are either ethnologically or politically national.
Twenty-eight year old Glauber Rocha’s third film. "Terra em Transe” (A Useless Revolt) [Entranced Earth] is a
political drama in which a journalist-poet finds himself (through his love for
a woman) aiding a politician who, achieving power, forgets his promises because
he is in the hands of the big landowners.
Disgusted,
the writer returns to his former newspaper owning boss only to find that he is
intent on destroying another politician, once the writer’s leader and friend.
Rocha is so
intent on the political in-play that he forgets to make us interested in the
characters as people — they are, in fact, merely political puppets.
[Francis Ford Coppola, “You’re a big boy Now” ]
The best
laugh at the festival undoubtedly came from twenty-seven year old Francis Ford
Coppola’s crazy comedy ‘‘You’re a big boy Now" which has a Jerry
Lewis cum young Mickey Rooney character, Bernard Chanticlear – an innocent in
New York – who gets himself involved with a neurotic child-woman off-Broadway
actress, a pretty librarian, not to mention a spinster landlady (who finds
herself locked in the pornographic section of a New York library with the head
librarian) and a rooster with an allergy for pretty girls.
The pace
never lets up and the invention rarely, and often, in the slapstick, there are
some shrewd cuts at the American male and his sex fantasies. We liked the bit
where the actress (as a pretty but precocious child) steals the amorous
psychiatrist’s wooden leg and keeps it above her bed from then on as a
triumphal trophy in the battle of the sexes.
[ Alain Jessua, “Jeu de Massacre” ]
Alain Jessua
proved his originality with his first film, "Life Upside Down" and
with his second "Jeu de Massacre", a much more costly
production in colour, he gives the eternal triangle a new twist and effectively
introduces the strip cartoon into the fictional cinema. Incidentally the
strip-cartoon exhibition currently held at the Paris Decorative Arts Museum is
worth a visit.
The French
take this new narrative medium seriously (they have two magazines devoted to
its technique) and indeed when one sees the effective work of Burne Hogarth and
Chester Gould among others, one recognises the dramatic common factor of
cartoon and film image.
In the Alain
Jessua film “Jeu
de Massacre” [(The Killing Game)], Jean-Pierre Cassel and the
ravishing Claudine Auger are a man and wife strip-cartoon team, he doing the
story line she the drawings. One day a Swiss admirer, Michel, bursts into their
office and invites them to stay at his villa at Neuchatel on lake Lausanne.
Once there the two get to work on a new strip-cartoon hero and his adventures
and the admiring Michel, who begins to identify himself with the new hero, also
begins to act out the adventures as soon as they are invented.
As the
heroine of the cartoon adventures is drawn (figuratively speaking and quel
figure) from the artist wife naturally Michel begins to fall in love with her
and involve her in the adventures.
It is all
neatly tied in although the mood unhappily changes towards the end from nicely
judged comedy to farce.
Claudine Auger
made a sensational appearance at the evening gala performance in a white
organdy Cardin dress embroidered with jewels and saphires which seemed, as one
French critic lyricised, “to have been created in the mists of a summer morn.”
We liked the way she often was in the film, deshabille.
Jean-Pierre Cassel and Claudine
Auger in a scene from Jessua’s “Jeu de Massacre”.
[ Carlos Velo, “Pedro Paramo” ]
The Mexican
film, “Pedro
Paramo” had everything to recommend it: director — Carlos (Raices)
Velo; writer — Carlos Fuentes and photographer — Gabriel Figueros, but this
story of a young man searching across the arid plains of the Jalisco highlands
for a deserted village where his father still lives is heavy with a
supernatural melodrama now some thirty years out of date.
[ Aleksandar Petrovic, “I met the happy Gipsies” ]
The Yugoslav
film, “I met
the Happy Gipsies" directed by Aleksandar Petrovic was an
authentic picture of the crude, violent way of life of the gipsies, their
appalling conditions, their snatched moments of wild release. Tomislav Pinter's
photography was particularly outstanding in quality and adaptability.
[ Zvonimir Berkovic, “Rondo” ]
The
first film was Zvonimir Berkovic's ‘‘Rondo’’. It was a beautifully observed trio of
a young couple who, to avoid the tedium of Sundays, invite a magistrate to come
regularly and play chess with them. There springs up between the wife and
visitor a genuine affection and love which ultimately has its expression and
then, with the mood slightly changed, the three begin again their Sunday chess.
[ Dusan
Makavejev, “The Love Dossier” ]
The second
film, Dusan Makavejev’s second feature, "The Love Dossier" robustly
defies any kind of classification. It begins with the distinguished but amiable
Dr. Aleksandar Kostic discussing the history of sex in life and art and then
switches to a couple of exchange telephonists, one of whom. Isabella, meets an
official rat catcher, Ahmed. He goes to her apartment and, the bed being
conveniently placed for watching the television, one thing leads to
an-amorous-other. They marry and are splendidly happy (particularly in bed)
until a worker at the telephone exchange seduces Isabella and she becomes
pregnant. Ahmed rejects her and one day, in a drunken fit, pushes her down a
Roman well where her body is discovered by the police.
This tale,
very well played by the protagonists, has a number of interjections such as a
criminologist’s discussion of crime (in connection with the discovery of the
girl’s body), more of Dr. Kostic and there are some lovely comments on the
Party and day to day living.
BRITISH BRILLIANCE
We come now
to the piece de resistance of Cannes, the British participation.
[ Joseph Strick, “Ulysses”]
First, the “Ulysses” affair which began with the
Saturday afternoon performance (mainly for the press) during which a few
critics vocally expressed their offended views and left the cinema.
There followed
immediately after this showing a press conference at which the director, Joseph
Strick, the producer Walter Reade and the writer, Fred Haines answered
questions. It was all very controlled even if Mr. Strick did suggest a woman
critic leave the theatre and break a leg on the way out. One or two points
raised seem relevant to the subsequent affair. First, the subtitles very often
did not get across the real feel of the English dialogue. Second the fact that
when the subtitles were in focus the image was not and vice versa. Third, why
had the director not taken into account the standard French translation of
Joyce's book?
To these
questions Mr. Strick replied that, in fact, the subtitles had been a rush job —
just about a week in fact. It was true about the focusing bit and so they had
to show the film slightly out of focus to get the subtitles across. They had
bought the rights of the mentioned translation but had found the sections
required too lengthy for subtitling purposes. Mr. Strick also went on to say
that the film had been shown for three days in America at 5 1/2
dollars a seat with publicity that had suggested that audiences should first
acquaint themselves with the book in order to know of its kind of content.
It all ended
quite gentlemanly. Then came the evening gala performance. By this time certain
words used in the French subtitles had reached the knowledge of the Festival
officials. It was decided to have them blotted out on the copy. As there was
only roughly two hours between the afternoon performance and the evening
performance general consultation was impossible.
When, at the
evening performance, Mr. Strick saw these blottings out he objected and went to
the projection room to have the film stopped.
On not being
admitted he returned to cinema to protest aloud that the film should not be
shown in this manner. The following morning he wrote an open letter to M. Favre
le Brett demanding a public reshowing of the original copy and a public
apology. The reply came that the Festival authorities had acted within their
rights but that they were prepared for the jury to see the film again in its
original form. Mr. Strick published in the Festival bulletin a page notice to
the effect that he had withdrawn the film from the festival.
In fact all
the fuss was not really about the British version of the film at all but simply
about some words that had been used in a hurried French translation of the
dialogue.
As for the
film itself it is an honest reflection of Joyce’s book which, I would have
thought, was not the best of film material as such. Nevertheless in making the
film Joseph Strick had every right to make it as he has done and, as apparently
the film is to be shown at Academy One, with all bookable seats and raised
prices to continue the Ulysses affair in terms of censorship seems to me simply
prudish.
[ Peter Watkin, “Privilege” ]
The next
British film to be shown (this time hors competition) was Peter Watkins' "Privilege”
a powerful warning of how a pop singing idol may be used for political
religious or commercial purposes by 1970. His slow revulsion to his own loss of
personality and the public death he immediately suffers when he rejects both
his promoters and his public is told with considerable power.
The singer
Steve Shorter's reputation has been built up on a violent image which his
promoters now wish to change to one of conforming. To do this they harness the
United Churches of England to their star and launch Christian Crusade Week. It
is a fantastic success but Steve cannot take it.
Realising
perhaps that his two stars Paul Jones and Jean Shrimpton are not actors, Peter
Watkins has very skilfully used a documentary (TV) technique with them in which
they often react as though being interviewed rather than playing an independent
fictional role.
The big
scenes are handled in a masterly fashion and several small part players give
impressive cameo performances while Mark London as Alvin Kirsch, the publicity
agent, is brilliant — his handling of the high ranking clerics at the cocktail
preview is a gem. Paul Jones and Jean Shrimpton are adequate but it is not
their film.
Joseph
Losey's "Accident”
and Antonioni's "Blow Up” we have previously reviewed and
illustrated in CFR. Both were well received and "Blow Up” was immediately
thought the main aspirant for the Palme d'Or.
Finally, in
the Critics’ Week, was Anthony Harvey's "Dutchman”, the film version of
the American Negro writer. Leroi Jones’ play of the same name. Tremendously
powerful, in new-style terms, this is a Negro's revolt against white
manipulation — the day of the future if the whites don’t watch out. The images
show a white girl alternately tempting and rejecting an outwardly good-natured
Negro in a tube train bound for anywhere. Suddenly the negro can take it no
more and there is suddenly unleashed all the terrible force of his pent-up hate
and rage. Tremendous performances from Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr.
Cannes Awards:
Grand Prix — Antonioni’s “Blow Up”.
Special Jury Award — to Joseph Losey's "Accident”,
and to Aleksandar Petrovic’s ”I Also Met Some Happy Gipsies” (Yugoslavia).
Actress award — Pia Degermark in “Elvira Madigan” (Sweden).
Actor award — Odded Kotler in "Three Days and a
Child” (Israel).
Scenario award — Alain Jesua "Jeu de Massacre” and Elio Petri "A Ciascuno II Suo”.
Director award — Ferenc Kosa for “Ten Thousand
Suns” (Hungary).
First Film Award — Mohammed Lakdar Hamina for "Le
Vent des Aures” (Algeria).
Short Film Grand Prix — "Skies of Holland”
directed by John F. Fernhout.
Film Critics’ Award — "Accident”
and "I Also Met Some Happy Gipsies”.
Gordon Reid, “Cannes 1967”
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ
[ ανάρτηση 24 Φεβρουαρίου 2024 :
Cannes Film Festival 1967
Continental Film Review
magazine July 1967
Gordon Reid
Κινηματογραφικά ]
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