Ten-Best

Ten-Best

FILM

Why do a ten-best list? Well, they turn out to be habit-forming, as it happens. I did one last year, and it proved to be fun. So this year I did another one, and it was fun too. This is it. (Trumpet flourishes, alarms and ex, cursions)

Oh yes, before we begin I should mention that the list is not restricted to films released this year — just to the films I’ve seen this year for the first time. Living Dead, for instance, was released a couple of years ago, while WR is still unreleased. (More trumpets)

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (directed by Stanley Kubrick)

EVEL KNEIVEL (directed by Marvin Chomsky)

GAS-S-S-S (directed by Roger Corman)

HOUR OF THE FURNACES (directed by Fernando Solanas)

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (directed by Peter Bogdanovich)

McCABE 'AND MRS. MILLER (directed by Robert Altman)

MILLHOUSE (directed by Emile de Antonio)

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (directed by George Romero)

THE RISE TO POWER OF LOUIS XIV (directed by Roberto Rossellini) WR: MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM (directed by Dusan Makavejev)

Verbal Slapstick

In addition, there are the following Black Shadow Awards for Excellence in Moving Pictures:

THE CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR AWARD goes to three films this year: Klute (dir. Alan Pakula), This Man Must Die (dir. Claude Chabrol) and Vladimir and Rosa (dir. Jean-Luc Godard & the Dziga Vertov Film Group).

THE “TORN CURTAIN” AWARD FOR WORST FILM OF THE YEAR BY A GOOD DIRECTOR: The Grissom Gang (dir. Robert Aldrich)

THE MAX SCHREK AWARD FOR THE BEST HORROR FILM: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (dir. Robert Fuest)

THE HOWARD HAWKS AWARD FOR THE BEST OLD FILM SEEN THIS YEAR: The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947, dir. Preston Sturges)

THE HENRI LANGLOIS AWARD FOR SERVICE TO STUDENTS OF FILM HISTORY: Peter Bogdanovich, for Directed By John Ford

THE SPECIAL SUZUKI MEMORIAL AWARD: Hiroshi Inagaki for the “Samurai Trilogy”: Legend of Musashi, Duel at Ichijoji Temple, and Duel on Ganryu Island

THE CINEMATHEQUE FRANCAISE AWARD FOR OVER-ALL CREATIVITY IN THEATER PROGRAMMING: Tom Luddy, Peter Buchannon, and the Interplayers Theater (S.F.)

THE FALSE START AWARD FOR EXCELLENT, UNRELEASED PICTURE OF THE YEAR: Le Boucher (dir. Claude Chabrol)

THE BERNARD HERMANN AWARD FOR BEST MUSIC: John Hammond Jr., for Little Big Man

THE BILLY BITZER AWARD FOR CREATIVE CINEMATOGRAPHY: Vilmos Szigmond, for McCabe and Mrs. Miller

BEST ACTRESS: Jane Fonda, for Klute

BEST ACTOR: Ben Johnson, for The Last Picture Show

BEST DIRECTOR: Peter Bogdanovich, for The Last Picture Show

BEST FILM: The Last Picture Show

We missed Claire's Knee, Confession, Straw Dogs, Wanda, and Walkabout. We’ll get around to them next year.

Oh, yeah, I nearly forgot. THE TURKEY OF THE YEAR AWARD: El Topo, and I don’t even want to talk about it.

Michael Goodwin

DEALING

OR: THE BERKELEY TO BOSTON

LOST BAG BLUES

Directed by Paul Williams

Starring Barbara Hershey

and Robert F. Lyons

This is not the Paul Williams who wrote cute top forty hits last year, nor. is it the Paul Williams who used to publish Craw daddy and received recent publicity for his involvement with the Lyman family. This is the Paul Williams who made The Revolutionary with Jon Voight. And this is that Paul Williams’ newest movie, a dope, sex and violence kollege kids adventure movie called Dealing.

The ideas in Dealing are pretty accessible. They involve running down a few numbers on the various kinds of Dealing, as was done with performing in Performance, though hardly on that level. The virtues are also easily stated. The funny parts are all funny — that’s its strongest point. The humor comes in turns of subtle wit, precise rendering of strung out speech effects, and welltimed familiar kinds of verbal, slapstick. The exciting parts may or may not be exciting, depending on your mood, and whether you’ve seen McCabe and Mrs. Miller or even heard about The French Connection. The development of the story is definitely weaker than the novel it comes from, written by the Crichton brothers under their first names, Michael Douglas.

Robert F. Lyons plays an alienated Harvard -student midway between Dustin Hoffman and Mark Whatshisname of Zabriskie Point. His performance is as boring as the character he plays is supposed to be bored. Barbara Hershey is good, but she isn’t given much to work with or really very much to do as the dope-moll with the instant heart of gold. Lyons and Hershey can be affecting when the moment is right, but there are several important moments that ride on Lyons’ acting and they just die. Despite all this, Williams’ directing is somehow vital and energetic.

I saw this film at its Boston World Premiere, with the Harvard crowd that more or less plays itself in the picture. (The producer, director, writer and most of the actors are Harvard alums. The singer, Buzzy Linhart, who does a nice but pointless song in the film, is also from Cambridge.) I mention this because I may be prejudiced against Harvard shits and unsympathetic to their peculiar problems, also, since it was the premiere, the version you see may be a bit different. At least I hope the color and sound are better and some of the awkward moments are shortened. And I know you won’t have to put up with Boston cops roaming the aisles and blocking the screen. They were a little uptight since the department, and one member of the narcotics squad who is based (at least in the book) on real life, are not portrayed in the best light. For my tastes, Williams copped out (so to speak) on the issue of police involvement in narcotics by making the final scene so otherworldly in its suspensefilled showdown violence.

It’s a flick worth seeing, but there’s no rush.

WR - MYSTERIES OF THE ORGANISM Produced, directed and written by Dusan Makavejev

The unity of this non-linearly constructed film is in the major aspects of Wilhelm Reich’s biography; the important stages and junctures of his life provide the themes, and extrapolations on his theories within examinations of what’s been happening in relevant areas since his death are the artfully extended variations.

Reich was a post-Freudian theorist and committed Communist in Germany in the twenties when he first applied Freud’s theory of individual neurosis to societies. The basic theory is pretty familiar these days — Frank Zappa bases his ideas of fifties rock ‘n’ roll on its main thrust — which is simply that sexual frustrations block, energy and channels it in destructive ^directions for whole societies as well as sick individuals. Reich’s statement that sexual repression leads to fascism eventually got him drummed out of the Communist party, which adhered to the doctrine that only economic conditions had such political consequences.

In the late thirites, Reich’s studies took him into experimental work to find a basis of biological energy as fundamental as the atom in physics. After his move to America in the forties, he announced that he had found this unit of errergy, called the orgone, which was carried by cosmic rays, intangible as light but substantive enough to be trapped like heat. For the purpose of saturating bodies with this energy he invented the orgone box, a sort of sauna of cosmic energy, made of wood and organic material on the outside of a structure the size of a telephone booth, and lined with metal on the inside. Although Reigh had repudiated Communism after the assassination of Trotsky, and had, in fact, supported Eisenhower for president, he was jailed by the government for selling orgone boxes.

Reich, who took the chance of being the Einstein of biology or a grand shmuck, died in a federal prison in the decade that was the living epitorqe of his theory of societal neurosis — the fifties. His sexual theories are the basis of much of our current encounter, scream, etc. therapies.

Makavejev runs through this biography once quickly, goes back and amplifies, then puts the pieces together in various illuminating ways, and finally the film settles on the scenario that has been running through it — a Godardian drama involving some young Czechs. The American sections illustrate biographical information, following up with his small town neighbors’ memories of him, the bitterness of his wife and devotion of his friends. PostReichian therapy is shown, along with some bizarre evidence of American revolt-against sexual repression, like the plaster casters.

Reich broke with Freud on the issue of the utility of ' sexual expression. Freud felt that some sublimation was necessary for other things to get done, but Reich believed that sexual impulses should be totally liberated, that it was necessary for individual and social health. Without denying Reich in principle or quite agreeing with Freud, Makavejev seems to be saying that while frustration has led to demonstrable evil and hypocrisy, that same frustration may cause the sudden release of sexual energy to be just as destructive. This is most clear in his perceptive and humorous handling of the Czech heroine Milena (millenium?) who preaches sexual liberation on political grounds but who nevertheless refuses the propositions of an eager worker and instead seduces the repressed elitist Russian champion skater. When the Russian eventually relents, his passion is, such that he ejaculates five times the normal amount of semen into her and, as an extension of his colossal orgasm he also decapitates her with his ice skate. The relationship of sex, repression and violence is more complicated than any doctrine.

The work of the Reichian therapists also has its irony as Makavejev sees it. One therapist in the film reflects, “If we really succeeded in creating a perfect individual (through Reichian therapy) and sent him back on the street, he would probably commit suicide immediately.”

Makavejev’s portrait of America in ,general is less developed than that of the Czechs. He gives the perhaps accurate impression that weird quirks of liberation are part of a protean political situation, presently about as subtle as Tuli Kupferberg, who, appears prowling through city streets with a toy machinegun, to the amusement of definitely unfreaked-out citizens.

Makavejev is more ambiguous than ambivalent, though he is both. He seems to believe that contradictions coexist, at least for the moment, and are perhaps inherent for any future. This film is less a statement than an exploration. After all, it is called Mysteries of the Organism, even though Reich’s theories and life shed light on some of them.

Bill Kowinski