Burl reviews Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment! (1966)

Hello friends and sweet draculas, it’s Burl, here to review a picture from the Great Swingin’ 60s in Old London Town! Ha ha, I took a course once in postwar British film, and we saw some Ealing works and pictures like The Fallen Idol, but then we moved into the Dishpan Hands Era, which is to say Britain’s own New Wave, and were treated to gritty slices of life like Room at the Top, Billy Liar, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and so forth! But we never got to this movie, Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment, which was made by Karel Reisz, the same director who brought us Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and, later, the oddball Everybody Wins!

Morgan is the tale of Morgan, a painter who hasn’t painted anything in a long time, and has instead been going crazy! David Warner from Nightwing, The Island, The Man With Two Brains, and many others, plays the part, and does it with at least some of the sensitivity a movie about mental illness would seem to demand; but remember, ha ha, this is 1966, so at some moments Morgan’s crazy behavior is simply there for us to laugh at! His frequent daydreams of stock animal images sit somewhere in between!

This was Warner’s big break, and he delivers a roller-coaster performance that renders Morgan a fully dimensional human while still extremely annoying! Vanessa Redgrave from Mission: Impossible, The Devils, and Blow-Up, plays his exasperated ex-wife Leonie, who at times displays what I can only describe as a superhuman tolerance for Morgan’s antics! Robert Stephens from The Asphyx and The Shout plays Leonie’s new boyfriend, Charles Napier, who was also Morgan’s gallerist and friend, once upon a time! But now Morgan is always busting into his office and threatening to kill him, or simply scrawling “Charles Napier Go Home” on the back of a painting!

Ha ha, that delighted me when I saw it, because I at first assumed he was referring to Charles Napier the actor, who hadn’t even entered the Russ Meyer stage of his career at the time of this movie, and was still a long way off from Jonathan Demme and Rambo! Irene Handl from Two-Way Stretch and The Wrong Box plays Morgan’s ardently Marxist mother - ha ha, a character type I frankly adore! You’ll no doubt recall the similar Aunt Sonya character in The Big Fix! She has Morgan take her to Marx’s grave on his birthday, and despairs of his union with Leonie and her very bourgeois family! Morgan, too, is a Communist, and really, that‘s one of his most admirable traits! He’s got emotional problems and is frequently in distress, but he’s also extremely selfish!

The film follows Morgan’s efforts to win his ex back, and though he comes close to it at least once, Leoni ultimately marries Charles Napier (ha ha!) instead, and this is what puts Morgan farther ‘round the bend than he’s ever been before and lands him, in fact, in the bughouse! But you still come away convinced that you’ve seen a happy ending!

Ha ha, it’s a pretty enjoyable picture, with nice black and white imagery, jumpy New Wave-y editing, solid performances, and some laffs! Morgan himself never became an appealing presence, but I could hardly doubt the sincerity of his pain! That he kept it together long enough to get married is astonishing, and the gorilla suit finale feels inevitable! Ha ha, I give Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment three big knit jumpers!

Burl reviews The Firemen's Ball! (1967)

In the light of the dancing flame, it’s Burl, here to review a fine example of Czech cinema for you! Yes, I’m talking about Milos Forman’s exquisite amusement The Firemen’s Ball, which he made after rusticating in a small town and attending, yes, their fireman’s ball! He and his co-writers were inspired to put what they saw first on paper and then on film, and, ha ha, I for one am glad they did!

The picture opens with a little pre-ball vignette that displays, in microcosm, the disasters that are shortly to come! The rest of the story takes place at the ball itself (ha ha, the picture is aptly titled!) and displays the many blockheaded misadventures of the fire brigade, which is made up of variously dim, stubborn, misguided or foolish men! And what a gallery of eastern European faces is on display here! Ha ha!

The purpose of the ball is to honour an ancient and retiring member of the volunteer brigade, and to present him with a token, an ornamental axe! There’s a raffle, but the prizes, exotic foodstuffs heaped on the table at the beginning of the evening, begin to disappear - ha ha, no surprise in the environment of privation that is 1960s Czechoslovakia! Everyone in the cast - all of them non-actors - is a suspect, and in fact all of them might be guilty, but nobody would blame anybody for the pilfering either!

The film’s centerpiece is a beauty contest, or at least an attempted one; and a true catalogue of bumbling, mismanagement and dirty-old-man ogling it is! The young ladies shanghaied into participating in the goofstravaganza are a truly fascinating lot: some are pretty, some not, but all of them are compelling in their own way! And they’re a lot smarter than the old boys of the fire brigade!

By the end of the picture there’s a fire, and it turns out, to no one's surprise, these fellows are no better at dousing conflagrations than they are at holding balls! The very end of the picture I won’t detail for you, but it hits the precise note of humour, melancholy and cutting satire that it needs to! It’s one of those movies that seems to ramble while it’s on, and then in the very last shot everything is tied together tightly and beautifully! Ha ha, I love those kind of movies!

The tone of the picture is that of a more allegorical, more politicized Bill Forsyth film! As it turns out, that’s a pretty good combination! And it’s all still relevant today, ha ha! As a chronicle of the incompetence, ignorance and venality of authority that ends in shameless pilfering and avoidable tragedy, it all seems very applicable to the current goings-on down in Yankee Doodle land! Ha ha, but the movie is at the same time very funny, and I recommend it with a hearty ha ha! I give The Firemen’s Ball three and a half head cheeses!

Burl reviews Band of Outsiders! (1964)

Et tu, c’est Burl! Hé hé! Yes, I have a French picture for you today: a small delight from Jean-Luc Godard entitled Bande à part, or, for the Englishers, Band of Outsiders! Of course we know Godard from his first picture Breathless and the many other great films that came after, and the confounding ones too, ha ha! I’ve never met the man myself, but I did sit directly behind him once at a cinema as the movie played, and I count that an appropriate encounter!

I suppose Quentin Tarantino must have taken his company name from this picture, and that computes because it’s a crime drama more or less, like the marvelous Breathless was, but even more Godarded up, and with characters who love gangster movies, and plenty of discursive scenes! Here we have two buddies, Franz and Arthur, adrift and disreputable, who meet the winsome Odile in an English language course, and, while both angling for her favours, try to convince her to help them pull a robbery on the rich old man who boards in her aunt’s house, where Odile also lives!

Odile is played by Anna Karina from Justine; Sami Frey from Sweet Movie and Black Widow is Franz; and playing Arthur with an ever-increasing sense of potential violence is Claude Brasseur from Eyes Without a Face! This trio crack against one another like multiballs, with the two fellows putting increasing pressure on Odile to help facilitate the robbery, and the fellows getting increasingly fractious with each other over Odile! For some reason Odile falls for Arthur, who, ha ha, is a real jerk, and one is afeared of another ending like that in L’Avventura! (I’d seen this movie before my recent viewing, but not for years, so I couldn’t remember how it resolved!)

Narration from Godard himself occasionally gives us insight into the characters’ thoughts and feelings, and this is an ingratiating feature indeed! On the debit side is how they treat their nifty little car, ha ha! Of course the centerpiece of the picture, the scene everybody remembers, which, notably, has nothing to do with either the romantic conflict nor the supposed heist plot, is the spontaneous dance scene in the café! Ha ha, they must have practiced that one a couple of times, and that’s the great charm of the scene! Somehow, having nothing to do with anything, it increases the emotional stakes and sets our characters on their way into the second half of the movie!

Well, it’s all very Godardian and beautifully styled, even if it takes place in a rather bleak Parisian winterscape! Ha ha, it’s still Paris after all! It’s got more thrills in it than I remembered - in my memory it was a movie about people who wanted to do a crime, but were simply too lazy to go about it! But no! The heist happens, but of course it doesn’t go exactly as planned! And that’s to be expected with Godard, ha ha! I suppose this is one of his minor works, but it’s a solid little piece of New Wavery, and the cast is terrific, particularly the lovely Karina! I’m extremely fond of Band of Outsiders, and I give it three and a half high speed runs through the Louvre!

Burl reviews Breathless! (1960)

Bonjour, c’est Burl ici! Ha ha, aujourd’hui je vais revué le film À bout de souffle, par le grand réalisateur Suisse-Français, Jean-Luc Godard! But no, this whole review won’t be in French! I would make too many mistakes in my grammar, I think, and would thereby annoy my French readership, if I even have a French readership!

À bout de souffle is of course known as Breathless in English, and was Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature! I’ve been a big Godard fan for a long time, and until I watched this picture again the other night, I hadn’t seen it in years! Ha ha, it’s a great picture! I knew that of course, but I had a fine time reacquainting myself with this Gallic classic and realizing just how much it managed to change the motion picture arts as we know them!

Of course this wasn’t the very first movie to take the camera off the tripod and ignore the established rules of editing and mise en scéne, but it was among the first, and certainly was among the most popular! On top of that it’s a lustily entertaining picture, a movie about movies that’s a more effective tribute to the medium than a thousand of those stultifying “Aren’t Movies Great” Oscar night montages could ever hope to be!

Maybe you’ve heard of the movie but haven’t seen it, thinking to yourself “Ha ha, it’s just another boring, impenetrable avant-garde art picture!” No way! It’s a racy and thrilling crime romance that’s of much more than historical interest to anyone who appreciates a good genre exercise! The hero, Michel Poiccard, is played by the incomparable Belmondo, and is a Bogart-worshiping small-time Parisian crook who steals a car and then, cornered, commits a casual copicide! All the flics of France are after him then, but before he can flee the country, Michel needs to do two important things: get his hands on the money that’s owed him for past thieveries, and woo his tentative, impossibly cute American girlfriend Patricia into a dedicated, Bonnie-and-Clyde state of love! Then the two of them can run to Italy, and to freedom!

I won’t repeat the encomiums so many others have lavished on this picture! Ha ha, you’ll just have to see it for yourself and invent some of your own! You’ll be captivated by Belmondo and his habit of running his thumb over his upper lip in imitation of Bogie; with Jean Seberg and her fantastic pixie cut and New York Herald-Tribune t-shirt; and with Paris itself, just for being Paris!

One last note: I’ve often wondered if there was any connection between the character Laszlo Kovacs who is so often mentioned in the film, and the real-life Hungarian cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, who shot Easy Rider, Ghostbusters and of course Butch and Sundance: The Early Days! Ha ha!

I give Breathless four enthusiastic Gauloises, and encourage you to check it out with all haste!