- The great difficulty in talking about cinema style is that the cinema is a pot-pourri of art forms, sharing elements in common with each, but weaving them into a pattern of its own.
- [reviewing "Maniac" (1963), a Hammer horror film]: This is from a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, which means, in effect, that a handful of effectively macabre ideas are worked out in a style as creative as the operation of a meat grinder.
- [on Cecil B. DeMille]: If DeMille had had a coat of arms, a cross and a bathtub would have been equally prominent thereon, and this moral dichotomy is characteristically Victorian.
- [on Ingmar Bergman]: Occasionally, one is tempted to divide Bergman's work into 'first-rate' and 'second-rate'. But wiser counsel prevails - each Bergman film explores and lyricizes experiences lying latent in the others, and Bergman's 'second-rate' usually results in a challenge more powerful, more intimate, more truly humane than almost everyone else's 'first-rate'.
- [on Jean Cocteau]: Cocteau's artistic personality is a complex blend of fin-de-siecle dandyism, a classical discipline of form, a disillusioned narcissism and a romantic preoccupation with the spiritual worlds on the borders of the 'real' one. One might speak of self-centredness in depth; he reworks a repertoire of obsessive themes into a dazzling variety of forms, so as to bring out the emotional ambivalence which inspires it.
- [reviewing Jerry Lewis's "The Nutty Professor", 1963]: There's no doubt, it may not be a film at all, but, what's more, it's a Jerry Lewis film, if anything.
- [on "The List Of Adrian Messenger", 1963]: There is a nicely macabre scene where the murderer's removal of his make-up from his face resembles a slow, grueling self-dismemberment. In fact, the best tribute one can pay make-up man Bud Westmore is to admit that, after the film's coda, one felt like inspecting all one's friends' faces and saying, "Wonderful, very convincing... but who are you really?".
- [on the 1956 documentary film, "Momma Don't Allow", directed by Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz]: "Momma Don't Allow" is badly cut and badly shot, with no feeling for jazz, for dancing, for bodies, for clothes or for place. Indeed, the directors seem to have less feeling for jazz rhythms than the slumming "hoorays" (rich young things) at whom they laugh so heartily - for, at one point, all the couples seem to be dancing a slow blues to an up-tempo jazz number. You wouldn't guess from this film that the actual jazz club had a red lamp placed strategically low so that the thighs of of unwary girls would be very prettily silhouetted through their dresses. Momma don't allow that, and Momma's name is - Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson.
- [reviewing "The Damned", directed by Joseph Losey (1963)]: For all its faults, Losey's film is in the highest class. Its social criticism cuts like a whip and yet is full of haunting poetic images. Its science-fiction universe, with its helicopters and rubber suits, recalls the eerie coldness of Antonioni.
- [on Jean-Luc Godard]: A Swiss Calvinist who wears dark glasses to hide the fact that he's in a permanent state of ocular masturbation.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content