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It’s ironic that the image of Jack Nicholson’s character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — R.P. ‘Mac’ McMurphy, in that black watch cap and grinning his devilish grin — has become a kind of visual shorthand for insanity. McMurphy isn’t insane. I’m not sure if very many of the characters surrounding him in this quietly shocking movie are, either.
Part II continues the sweeping family epic that ironically juxtaposes quintessential American values with the extremely realistic violence and criminal mentality of mobsters. The Godfather Part II, even more so than its predecessor, tells a story of immigrants in America that — minus the felonies and murders — many of us might recognize as tales our grandparents told.
What would the AFA have to say about The Godfather? Francis Ford Coppola’s riveting generational saga of Sicilian mob families in New York City is steeped in themes like loyalty to family and the importance of religion, and at the same time demonstrates how dangerous too-close family ties can be.
The French Connection is Patient Zero in Hollywood’s epidemic of blood, guts, and mayhem, the Typhoid Mary that spread gunplay, car chases, and psychotic cops throughout filmdom. Like Typhoid Mary, though, The French Connection has only a mild, nonfatal case of the sickness that continues to rage through movies. This film demonstrates how smart action movies can be, and points out how dumbed down most of them have gotten.
From my perspective thirty years on, I can only guess that it was Midnight Cowboy’s shock value at the time of its original release that created its reputation as a ‘great film.’
Charles Dickens’s mostly gloomy Oliver Twist set to music is no sillier than the French tragedy Les Miserables recast as an English-language opera, and it works just as well — that is to say, very well indeed.
Maybe it’s an indication of some slight social progress, or just a marker of how fine a film this is, that In the Heat of the Night also works as a crime-fighting story in a tradition as old as the Sherlock Holmes tales and as new as The X-Files.
How can you tell The Sound of Music is a fantasy? Forget that it’s based on a true story. The fantasy tip-off is this: Julie Andrews plays a nun. The radiant and sweetly sexy Andrews, not that she isn’t delightful in the role, is about as believable as a nun as, say, Mel Gibson would be as the Pope.
Tom Jones is one of those movies I appreciate more than I enjoy. Though based on Henry Fielding’s classic 18th-century novel, it seems at times little more than an excuse to revel in the licentiousness of the burgeoning free-love atmosphere of the 1960s.
Make no mistake — Ben-Hur is not great art. But it is great fun. Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston), a contemporary of Jesus, is a Jewish prince in Roman-ruled Judea newly reunited with his boyhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd). Messala, a Roman, has just returned from the empire’s capital to reign as tribune, a sort of lieutenant governor, of Judea. These old pals now find themselves separated by politics — one is the ruler, the other the ruled.
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