PLOT
Three days in the life of Hiram Jaffe [Elliot Good], a would-be playwright who supplements his living as a porn writer and by walking dogs. He and his wife, Dolly [Paula Prentiss], are moving to a new apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. Jaffe is beset by problems, including his inability to persuade the moving man to move the couple’s furniture, and retreats into fantasy.Read More »
Private investigator Philip Marlowe helps a friend out of a jam, but in doing so gets implicated in his wife’s murder.Read More »
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Bergman’s little-seen English-language film starring Elliott Gould and Bibi Andersson, which charts the course of a doomed affair, earned mixed reviews on release in 1971 and was quickly overshadowed by his subsequent works – but it’s time to recognise it as a major entry in the director’s canon.
It’s unsurprising that many myths and misconceptions have arisen surrounding Ingmar Bergman, that of the terminally gloomy Swede being merely the most prevalent. Here, after all, is someone acknowledged as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time yet viewed by those none too familiar with his body of work as a whole as a forbiddingly lofty, aloof philosopher rather than an artist or entertainer. (Even a feature in last month’s Sight & Sound claimed that some of Bergman’s films might today “be considered so wilfully opaque and mired in symbolism as to be past the point of parody”.)Read More »
Despite the title the film has nothing to do with conspiracy stuff but refers to the “Chicago Eight” who were eight protestors and were charged with conspiracy, inciting to riot, and other charges related to violent protests that took place in Chicago, IL, at the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.Read More »
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Pitch black comedy about a young nihilistic New Yorker coping with pervasive urban violence, obscene phone calls, rusty water pipes, electrical blackouts, paranoia and ethnic-racial conflict during a typical summer of the 1970s.Read More »
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Director Robert Altman, famous for his ability to turn any genre inside out, takes aim at film noir with this evocative adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel. Altman’s Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is a relatively unsuccessful private eye living and working in 1970s Los Angeles. Stepping into the shoes of the notorious detective, Gould delivers a captivating performance that is the definition of ’70s hip: he spends the entire film mumbling to himself, smoking cigarettes, and making wisecracks to everyone he encounters. This time around, Marlowe decides to investigate the supposed suicide of his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton). Read More »
California Split
By Roger Ebert / January 1, 1974
They meet in a California poker parlor. One wins, despite a heated discussion with a loser over whether or not a dealt card hit the floor. They drink. They become friends after they are jointly mugged in the parking lot by the sore loser.
They did not know each other before, and they don’t know much about each other now, but they know all they need to know: They’re both compulsive gamblers, and the dimensions of the world of gambling equal the dimensions of the world they care anything about. It is a small world and a flat one, like one of those maps of the world before Columbus, and they are constantly threatened with falling over the edge.Read More »
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Documentary film-maker Bob Saunders and his wife Carol attend a group therapy session that serves as the backdrop for the opening scenes of the film. Returning to their Los Angeles home, the newly “enlightened” couple chastise their closest friends, Ted and Alice, for not coming to grips with their true feelings. Bob insists that everyone “feel” rather than intellectualize their emotions, and Carol pronounces “that’s beautiful” after anyone says anything even remotely personal. Ted and Alice humor their friends, but it is obvious that there is a good-natured sexual tension at work within the foursome.Read More »