Ken Russell is ringmaster to a head-spinning series of gaudy tableaux: London in flames after a Luftwaffe raid, a pagan religious service paying frenzied tribute to plaster icons of Marilyn Monroe, a smashed TV screen spewing a mixture of baked beans and laundry suds into an ivory-white bedroom. All the …
Roy Boulting, writer-director, brings some sniggering double-entendres and a general ooh-la-la outlook to this WWII farce located in an internationally renowned Paris brothel. But he shuffles the brunt of the responsibility onto Peter Sellers, who comes up with some amusing vocal inflections and behavioral tics, but who hardly gives any …
A revival, sort of, of Warner Brothers' working-man melodramas of the 1930s, by Jonathan Kaplan, a reigning whiz-kid in the action-exploitation genre. He, helped by Fred Koenekamp's exalting camerawork, gets some handsome views of the monster trucks and the Southwest highways. Jan-Michael Vincent, quite good at inspiring shaky confidence, is …
Raisuli, the Berber chieftan, kidnaps an American widow and her two children in far-off Tangiers; and Roosevelt, the cowboy President, sends the U.S. Marines to the rescue, double-time. The vision of history is something a fanciful adolescent might have concocted, eyes closed, dozing over his schoolbooks. What dances into view …
Based on the Wilhelm Meister novels of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, updated and adapted to the screen by Peter Handke, and directed by Wim Wenders. Just sorting out whose input is whose, among these three towering artists, would be a term-paper-sized project. Curiously, the chemistry of this threesome seems to …
A smiling holdup man, acting out of general generosity and specific lust, promotes a one-woman, four-man country-western band to a debut at the Grand Ole Opry. The Nashville milieu and the self-glamorizing Robin Hood hero, who idolizes Errol Flynn, yield some fairly funny mimicry -- of 1950s pop music, of …