The 1967 Mini-List

[therewillbeblus]

I wanted a chance to revisit Torture Garden but didn't get around to it with my Indicator order still unshipped. Other tough cuts: This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse, Accident, and Wait Until Dark. I'd probably tap-in the latter if I submitted today, though I totally forgot about Hombre too, so no idea what I'd've cut

The real win is six votes for La cotta and a pretty substantial placement on the final tally- above quite a few high profile titles. Bravo, forum!

[alacal2]

I watched Hombre and was pretty underwhelmed by Newman's underwhelming performance. Probably influenced by having been totally bowled over by The English, Hugo Blick's brilliant 'revisionist western' new drama series on BBC2.

[domino harvey]

Hombre belongs to Richard Boone, not Newman. The intimidation scene at the station is a masterpiece

[therewillbeblus]

I watched Hombre and was pretty underwhelmed by Newman's underwhelming performance

I believe I argued Newman's character is underwhelming by design, or at least that his insipidity can help lend interesting context to what the film is about

Hombre (or “Man” as my library calls it, misjudging the American western as a foreign film in need of translation): Revisiting this film a few times in adulthood fleshed out its strengths in supporting players, notably Diane Cilento as a multidimensional self-actualized version of the oppressed sex, who in an early scene fearlessly faces a series of rejections and stays present to bleed the stone dry of any opportunities left, instead of saving face as a shamed lady or male cowboy would against their own tangible interests. Boone’s villain is electric, though even the bit players like the kid and his new bride are given breathing room to become interesting characters with many shades acknowledged behind the tip of the iceberg we get to see.

Newman’s enigma is the least interesting element of the film, but his foreign behavior is reflected off the ‘normal’ characters, which is enough of an informative contrast to make the dynamics work in a looped transaction of entertainment between Newman, his allies who are confounded by his mannerisms, and their mutual enemies who are a bit too cocky in believing morals to be binary. The film establishes a strong hint early on that social context informs morality via Newman’s flatly-delivered rationales inherited through 'alternate'-institutional teachings, but the narrative eventually arrives at a far more unsettling and unexpected lesson: that moral value cannot be transferred between social groups in any meaningful way to that individual.

SpoilerShow

Newman may act heroically in the end, subscribing to our (presiding, non-'savage') ethical principles, but he still lacks the emotion that drives these behaviors, and so he cannot reap the philosophical rewards of a personality transformation that merits cathartic sensitivity. It’s pretty tragic to assimilate and remain divorced from the psychological payoff, and so a utilitarian or humanist rationale shift feels meaningless without any knowledge of the heart beneath the clothes that took a stand with strangers. Was empathy or moral philosophy behind the reasons to suicidally face-off, and, even if so, was this reasonable according to Newman’s own worldview?

I’m not so sure, and if he forced it without a real reason, what does that say about the strength of his own identity? Perhaps the film isn’t saying that morality is fluid, or even cynically providing a subliminal message that it isn’t fluid, but rather that a strong exterior doesn’t indicate a strong interior, and Ritt may be positing for us: which is the more valuable asset? In westerns, superficial behaviors and skills hold more weight than the internal emotional ones: Newman can be cold and ruthless with practical choices (my dad’s favorite movie moment, that he still mentions constantly to this day, is “Hey I got a question for you. How are you gonna get down that hill?”) and the villains carry similar traits, while the helpless citizens are caught in the middle, mostly impotent.

Yet in the end it all amounts to what? Quick death without pragmatic gains. One of the killers asks with a dying breath what Newman’s name is, a trivial and stupid last request, to obtain non-knowledge according to some skill-respect principle. It’s people like the boy or Cilento whose principles will grant them meaning and prosperity. They might need folks like Newman for protection in such a brutal Hobbesian world, but that doesn’t mean that characters like Newman's have intrinsic value, and Ritt seems to suggest that he may be the most pitiable character of all without even knowing it; one who has no secure individuality outside of his surface function. That, or his identity is rooted in an alien culture and he’s been so easily swayed away from familiar ideology, that said fundamental virtues are rudderless in their replicability. Either way, he’s a man without a home, and not a self-actualized one, at least not as securely as Newman’s exterior appears to be.

I choose to believe that rather than deliver a subliminal commentary on the fatalism of foreign ideology’s dry-well sustenance, Ritt is forcing a revelation that Newman’s representation of foreign ideologies shows an emptiness- not because the dominant ideology has inherent worth, but because morals are relative and constitutionally meaningless in objective terms. The rest of the civilians will go on to prosper, maybe, but because of luck. Going by that logic, is Newman a fool, or is he just meeting the world where it's at by creating his own meaning, serving as another brick in the wall to let these folks take a few more breaths.. because he has no reason to stay alive to supersede that cause?

[therewillbeblus]

Caught up with Don't Make Waves, and found it delightful. It's such a weird sex comedy, with seemingly no internal logic to its progression and tone. Most of the picture is propelled by a taxing accumulation of genre-typical feral mania, exhibited by a bunch of characters tangled in multiple love triangles. Their dynamics are even more eccentric than (though not necessarily as interesting as) your standard sex comedy troupe, bred by flighty but compulsive attractions that become so confounding that the film needs to force an earthquake to externalize their insanity and coerce some kind of silly resolution- one that the picture and characters and audience collectively shrug at and nod to, because we all know it's exhausted itself on every level. I love it. But within the zany antics, there are also random inclusions of dry humor. My favorite is the WTF moment of Sharon Tate watching mindless TV with a flat affect as Tony Curtis lays in bed post-coitus. Alexander Mackendrick decides it's a good time to explore various experimental angles to voyeuristically capture her beauty as she's catatonically glued to the television. These shots are held for way too long, for seemingly no reason, but I thought it was a hysterical offbeat artistic choice to derail the momentum by glaring at an underwritten character engaging in a banal activity of non-action. It kinda works if you see Mackendrick's manipulation of the camera functioning as not part of Curtis' obsessive protagonist, but a separate likeminded competitor for his conquests (hence how the film constantly throws him into destabilizing conflict). Tate's introduction is similarly overwhelming with sensuality, and then Mackendrick halts the narrative for about three whole minutes as Curtis and he watch Tate as an object bouncing on a trampoline half-naked. He even freeze-frames a couple of shots. So I suppose it's within some internal logic of the film that Mackendrick pauses and stalks Tate as she's seemingly alone watching TV, himself getting roped into the action and creating an invisible third(?) love triangle, but keeping those cards close to the chest behind the scenes..

[ryannichols7]

Playtime was my #1 and is one of my top 10 films ever, but I believe my #2 Marketa is probably our only chance to see a Czechoslovak film take the #1 spot, so I'm absolutely pleased with the results. a shame I found this year to be very weak overall in all my watches, but nonetheless thank you swo for compling and everyone else for voting and discussing!

[therewillbeblus]

Yes, thank you swo! I'll post my list in the hopes that it prompts somebody sometime to check out Warrendale or the other orphans

1. The Young Girls of Rochefort
2. La cotta
3. Marketa Lazarova
4. Week End
5. La Collectionneuse
6. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her
7. La chinoise
8. Warrendale
9. Dragon Inn
10. Frankenstein Created Woman
11. Elvira Madigan
12. Playtime
13. Two for the Road
14. Le Samourai
15. You Only Live Twice
16. A Pact with the Devil
17. Branded to Kill
18. Les Contrebandières
19. Mouchette
20. The Graduate
21. Cool Hand Luke
22. El Dorado
23. Up the Down Staircase
24. A Colt Is My Passport
25. Playing Soldiers

[DarkImbecile]

Torture Garden (Freddie Francis 1967) Any anthology where the segment about an evil, telepathic, decapitation-capable cat is the weakest link is doing something right. Burgess Meredith's carny hack shows a quartet of spectators possible fates borne from personal selfishness, all of which are wonderfully outlandish. It's hard to pick a favorite, but the one where Beverly Adams learns the secret of how Hollywood stars stay looking eternally youthful is particularly clever.

I don't think I enjoyed this as much as domino (or as much as I did Bava’s Black Sabbath, my reigning favorite of this sub-genre) but it was fun enough that I’m considering working through all of the Amicus portmanteaus. Oddly, I think the eerie gothic tone of the killer cat segment might have been the most effective for me, though the similarly weird concluding vignette about fanatical Poe collectors was also engaging for Jack Palance’s wide-eyed fervor. The use of Clytie Jessop’s blank Atropos in Burgess Meredith’s framing narrative (and a little cameo in each story) was pretty effective, though it started to feel a little ridiculous the third time or so Meredith’s carnival barker repeatedly orders someone to gaze into the shears of fate. I didn't find as much to enjoy in the more Twilight Zone-ish story about Hollywood's secrets to eternal youth or the shorter haunted piano segment — but on the other hand neither were actively bad, which makes for a successful horror anthology in my book.

[domino harvey]

I didn't get a chance to watch Costa-Gavras' Un homme de trop in time to vote for it, but I thought it was another star studded genre film from CG, this time a Resistance-focused war movie with lots of incredible low lighting shots and chaotic forward momentum. Some interesting casting decisions too, like Jean-Claude Brialy as the hard nosed second in command. The film is a well-made variation of the kind of thing Hollywood was making and would go on to make for years to come, but it's extremely well-done. But the best part of the film is its insane final shot, which the film wisely chooses to end on even though the narrative isn't quite finished because there's nowhere to go from there. Would love to have been present the day the filmmakers managed to convince the producers to endanger the life of one of the biggest stars in French cinema just for a wild ending image

[domino harvey]

I know nothing about Yugoslavian cinema and I have no idea how this got on my radar (and there are fewer than fifty logged viewers of it on Letterboxd), but I can give a hearty recommendation to Fadil Hadzic's Protest. The film opens with the suicide of the machinist protagonist and the rest of the film is fragments of his life interspersed with the reactions of those he knew to his passing. Sounds rote enough, but the film is deeply cynical and presents a character who you'd expect to be as uncomplicated as possible as nevertheless being impossible to understand in any meaningful way by any second party. We see him act proud, slovenly, angrily, self-righteously, meekly, idealistically, and so on, but it all only adds up to a question mark followed by the exclamation point of his freefall from a tall building-- if possible, we know less about him by the time the film is over. Additionally the film gives us multiple scenes of colorful characters (my favorite being the ex con who turns to taxidermy after being released, who offers the dead man's co-worker a stuffed bird in lieu of money he owed the departed) from his life acting with various stages of obligation but not much affection for the departed, their lives filled with a similar self-driven meaning that may also be equally mysterious were they to pass.

I'm intrigued to dive into more films by Fadil Hadzic, as unexpectedly almost all of his work has fansubs up on back channels-- I didn't see anyone mention him via a board search, anyone familiar with him?

[TMDaines]

Yugoslav is a bit blind spot for me, so thanks for the recommendation.