The Great Silence
The Great Silence
The Great Silence (1968) opens on a blinding white snowfield broken only by the advance of a tiny horseman. They call him Silence (Jean-Luis Trintignant) and riffing on Clint Eastwood, he says nothing as he kills. But he’s the good guy in this visually poetic spaghetti western by director Serio Corbucci. The bad guy, Loco (Klaus Kinski), is a bounty hunter who’d rather bring ’em back dead than alive. Ennio Morricone provides the eerie score.
A Bucket of Blood
In Roger Corman’s 1959 spoof of the Beat Generation, Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) is a none-too-bright busboy at a coffeehouse where second-string Ginsbergs hold forth and murder ballads are sung. Every jive-talker in the joint wants to be “creative.” Walter, the failed sculptor, gains recognition after dipping the things he kills in clay. “It expresses modern man in all his self-pity” gushes a fan. The black-and-white cinematography is cool and the acting is spot on.
The Woman in the Window
Edward G. Robinson maintains a Sphinx-like expression as bad goes to worse in this 1944 film noir by Fritz Lang. He encounters an enchantress (Joan Bennett) who turns out to have an angry sugar daddy. Robinson kills him in self-defense, clumsily disposes of the body and waits as the evidence of his guilt accumulates. And then the blackmailer appears. The Woman in the Window’s final twist is disappointing but it’s suspenseful and surprising as anxiety builds.
Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris
The extras on the Blu-ray release explain the ambitious concept underlying this 1975 production of the cabaret show Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. It was part of the American Film Theatre subscription series, a kind of analogue Amazon Prime with purpose-made films shown in movie theaters across the country. All were based on stage plays. The budgets were modest but AFT had no trouble recruiting top-flight actors and crew.
