Eight More from Crowther

 

Yojimbo

• Seen here was an expanded upon taste for Westerns' clichés.
• No deep drama was in the hard to follow plot complications.

 

The Wild One

• A part of the then contemporary American life was an ugly and debased menace. Those making up the menace, like a wolf pack, were seen from a frightening viewpoint.
• What with their aggressive contempt for police and common decency, the members of the pack enjoyed an advantage against those in a fair society that were not members of the pack.

 

Blackboard Jungle

• This was a tale of vicious and terrible hoods as animal-like juvenile delinquents. Could such horrors be real? The movie depicted terrorism by urban youth.
• The movie was social dynamite. It went beyond entertainment and perhaps stimulated youth.
• As an ineffective counterbalance, there was shown, briefly, an incredibly different school complete with palm trees.

 

Hud

• Ours was a culture, asserted Crowther, that nurtured indulgence and greed. We were foully diseased moderns.
• Some critics disapproved of the film's conventional morality. Hud was said to be no worse than all the rest of them.
• Moral scruples including respect for the law were addressed by the film. Such a subject could very well be more important than petroleum or the nuclear bomb.

 

Blowup

• Within the long wandering about into redundancy, there was good, solid substance in the film. It was a fascinating film having something to say about personal involvement and emotional commitment.
• The too candid dehumanizing potential of photography may have explained the film's blackballed status.

 

The Godfather

• Crowther found immense and astonishing scope in this film. As a moral society we were shown to be phoney.
• The ethics within the mob were put to us as supporting love, loyalty, and sentiment as opposed to the mores of the conventional capitalist economy. The mob's ethics were grounded in expediency and the audience went along with it.
• The film achieved the ultimate in fantasizing and romanticizing the genres of gangster and crime movies.

 

Nashville

• A great swath of the American scene was accurately developed in this film. The theme was that politics was everywhere in American life.
• The ubiquitous political cast to our lives was a grim and sinister take on the cheap and vicious Big Con of having the concept of values supported but specific values becoming vulgar.

 

Last Tango in Paris

• Because Brando was in this film; it got a lot of attention.
• Sheer lust was denigrated. A cruel sadistic way to loss of confidence and competence brought out brutality to a woman as part of a self-destructive urge.
• As a preventive for love, the male character became a sodomist. He was a strong symbol of evil, actually, there was nothing stronger.
• In sum it was the flame-out of the Heroic Age of movie entertainment. Perhaps it represented the American rape of the postwar world.