Take One (Nov-Dec 1972)

completely well-knit in the certainty of her desires. There is no sense of why she would want Alexandre, pursue him, humiliating herself in the process, but she is relentless in insinuating herself in his and Marie’s life. He, in turn, with the certainty of his power over Marie, of her dependence on him, allows himself to be pursued, introduces the younger girl to the older woman, does everything to create emotional and domestic chaos. Comical in a way, because none of the three seems to enjoy the relationship. Yet there is a kind of brute compulsion to continue it, a kind of psychic destiny to be fulfilled. And indeed, by the film’s end, you realize this is so: the conclusion is both unexpected and, according to the emotional logic of the characters, inevitable. That we are alone. That we are dream ing and making love and wasting our lives and that at the core of it, divested of all camouflage of the rites and décor of love — the economic and institutional ties that tend to bind men and women together beyond the call of their true feelings — we know little about ourselves and less about others. That there is no such thing as a mature relationship or an enlightened one, except when you are not in love, and that love kills as surely as it nourishes; that for all our education and sophistication, we live by instinct. This, in part, is what Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore painfully reminds us. | don’t think many will like this film: there are not enough lies in it, not enough glamorous equivocations to make its truth swallowable. Frederic Tuten Incredible Value! ONLY $20! DON'T MAKE A MOVIE without THIS GREAT SHOOTING KIT! By the Author of THE FIVE C’s OF CINEMATOGRAPHY TEXT @ TOOLS e CINE ACCESSORIES All Technical Data in Feet and Metric Everything you need to shoot perfect color motion pictures. WRITE FOR DESCRIPTIVE BROCHURE Californians add 6% Sales Tax. Foreign Orders add $1 per book for postage, handling. NO C.0.D.’s! NO BILLING! THIEVES LIKE US A United Artists release of a Jerry Bick production. Director: Robert Altman. Screenplay: Calder Willingham, Joan Tewkesbury and Altman, based on the novel by Edward Anderson. Photography: Jean Boffety. Cast: John Schuck, Bert Remsen, Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, Louise Fletcher. 121 mins. Damn good inevitability — finally a movie about Coke (company insists you capitalize it so as not to confuse it with the pharmaceutical of the same name) that ain't even a documentary! Favorite beverage of the great Paul Nelson of Mercury Records (walks into La Strada on 46th Street in NYC every day for lunch and Peppy the waiter immediately hands him his starter of two Cokes) who for the record is also the man who taught Rolling Stone film moron Jon Landau (who considered Class of ’44 quite a delite!) how to tie his filmcrit shoes and rip off that other a-hole Andrew Sarris. For whatever it's worth Paul’s already seen this one twice (likes it). Well anyway drinks had already played a more than marginal role in at least a couple other Robert Altman pitchers before it. Warren Beatty had plenty of whiskeys with an egg in it in McCabe & Mrs. Miller. And then there was Sterling Hayden with his fifth of akvavit frozen in a long cube of ice in The Long Goodbye. Both items slightly off the wall far as popular consumption in the USA is concerned, thus setting the’ men with the glasses off into the realm of slight eccentricity for at least the duration of a drink. Partially because no one else was drinking the stuff with them (Hayden even CINE/GRAFIC PUBLICATIONS © BOX 430 © HOLLYWOOD, CA 90028 SHOOTING GRATTAN PRODUCTIONS 38 Contact Jim Grattan for top equipped crews. Single and double system. CANADA? 1440 St. Catherine Street, West Suite 507, Montreal 107, P.O. Canada (514) 878-9638 offered some to Elliott Gould and the latter's sole response besides wincing was “Caraway seeds?”). Well so anyway now here Altman goes introducing a potable that’s as far on the other side of the fence as you’re gonna get, something downright common. Cause he really must fuckin want that common touch or something. Rest of those cultural curiosities in the film just don’t go that far. Course everybody was supposed to have listened to all that crap on the radio in those days (just ask mom & dad!) but that’s just for de rigueur period flavor, doesn’t cut through enough-populist mustard by itself. Just the radio shit and it’s no more than Paper Moon or Dillinger — it’s the Coke that really generates the angle Altman’s after. So you get gratuitous Coke (cause Coke is gratuitous!) from beginning to end, Coke out of the thing in the garage, Coke shared by young lovers on the veranda, Coke in the street from the Coke Lady. Enough Coke to really make you sick. Speaking of which there’s even that decent irony towards the end where Shelley Duvall’s puking pregnancy requires the goddam sticky brown liquid so she goes out for it and thus avoids getting shot to shit by the cops. But the cultural specifics in Thieves are damn good anyway. Far as props and all that go it’s got Paper Moon (which Bogdanovich would have you think was meticulously pieced together in the archaeology department) beat by a mile, those detective mags in it really looked yellowed even in black and white. Dillinger had too much big-screen newspaper hokum a la Lady Sings the Blues. Both of em had radio matter so officially knowable and venerable (FDR in the former for inst) as to be just plain unavoidably corny in that regard, as corny as Corman’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre or The Way We Were. Whereas Altman really fished for some decent nonsense like that show about the International Crime Police and even Shakespeare for the masses. Much less topicality and poignancy (poignancy equals death — a film maxim that really oughta see the light of day in general practice), hence much more palatable in context. And the palatability adds up real good. How about that tap dance scene! So in terms of just that sort of stuff alone it’s at least a 3/5-decent filmic whatsit (a film ain't been made yet that’s gone much beyond 3/4). But then again you can also view the whole thing as Altman really mining for * some previously undisclosed kulture to have some laffs over now that The Graduate and all that it and its ilk have wrought (e.g. Taking Off, Lovers and Other Strangers, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, etc., etc., etc.) have destroyed the possibility of getting anywhere anymore with that sort of orientation re the present. Woody Allen even took it into the fuckin future just to deal with exactly the same gimcracks one more time. So