The ripples of the events of 1968 were still in evidence at the Cannes Film Festival of 1973, a decade in which heated political discussions would become (and remain) central to the reactions to films at the festival and the awards that they would win. In the past, countries were invited to submit their selections for the competition at their own discretion, but as of 1972, festival delegate Maurice Bessy implemented the idea of the festival director choosing the films for competition and encouraging a celebration of auteurs, a tradition that continues today. In the slate for 1973, two films overshadowed the eventual winners of the top prize thanks to jury president Ingrid Bergman finding them incredibly unappealing. Beyond the festival, 1973 was a firestorm of notable events before and after May, with the recent signing of the Treaty of Paris in the rearview mirror, followed by Pinochet taking power in Chile that September, and the Yom Kippur war a month later.
Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe was the most talked about sensation at Cannes that year: a provocative (for its time) tale of four friends who hide away in a mansion with the plan to eat themselves to death while enjoying the company of sex workers. At the film’s press conference, Ferreri responded explosively to journalists’ questions, making a situation more entertaining than the film itself. Meanwhile, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore also managed to ruffle feathers, although critical reaction was more favourable and the film was admired as much as it was remarked upon for its shocking, frank treatment of sex and relationships. Bergman, despite having come up against the hypocrisy of American sexual morality when her own affair with Roberto Rossellini saw her exiled from the United States, found both films sordid and said so in no uncertain terms.
By the time the awards were handed out, Eustache took second place, but Ferreri was left to settle for a measly prize from the international critics panel (which he shared with Eustache). The top prize, which from 1964 to 1973 was no longer the Palme d’Or but the Grand Prix, went to two films that have been virtually ignored (unjustly) in the years since: The Hireling by Alan Bridges, a fine British adaptation of an L.P. Hartley story (who also wrote The Go-Between, the Palme d’Or winner of 1971), and Scarecrow by Jerry Schatzberg, a touching American road movie that isn’t one of the better known works of either of its stars, Gene Hackman and Al Pacino.
This month, my co-host Gregory Rosebrugh and I go through the selections of the 1973 Cannes Film Festival on our podcast, Riviera Rats. Below are summaries of the films in the Official Competition of that year. Riviera Rats is available on Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts.
MUST-SEE
The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (Paul Newman)
Newman stepped behind the camera a handful of times during his formidable acting career and, for the most part, made a series of low-key dramas starring his remarkably talented wife Joanne Woodward, who earned Best Actress at the festival for the European premiere of their 1972 film. She plays an eccentric widow who rages through the rooms of her run-down house and exerts an intense influence over her two daughters, one a teenager (Roberta Wallach, daughter of Eli) burgeoning into full rebellion but set back by health troubles and some intense sleepwalking. The other daughter is a budding science genius (Nell Potts, Paul and Joanne’s daughter) who is working on a project involving the titular blooms. The script is adapted from Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play and turns the focus from Potts’ character to Woodward’s for obvious reasons, and thanks to Newman’s invisible direction, it feels like something much more than just an excuse to let a powerhouse actress give a bravura performance. The suggestion of mental illness and traumas of the past are that much more powerful for how little they are explained, and the overstated theme (radiation causes mutation, hurt causes hurt) feels poignant rather than didactic. The prize could easily have been given to the whole female ensemble (which includes Judith Lowry, best known as Mother Dexter on Phyllis, as a wordless boarder in the household) and not just its lead, but either way, this is a moving and enjoyable drama rightly highlighted by a prize win.
Award: Best Actress (Joanne Woodward)
Newman in Competition: Best Actor (The Long, Hot Summer, 1958); The Glass Menagerie (1987)
The Hireling (Alan Bridges)
Class stratification goes hand in hand with emotional repression in this expertly directly, scintillating drama, co-winner of the top prize. Sarah Miles is superb as Lady Franklin, a gentry woman from Bath who is released from psychiatric care after having suffered a nervous breakdown in the aftermath of her husband’s death. Fearful of rejoining the outside world, she finds a friendly kindness in the driver, Ledbetter (Robert Shaw), who is hired to take her from the institution to her mother’s home, where she resides until ready to once again take up her country seat at her husband’s estate. Lady Franklin immediately begins hiring Ledbetter to drive her places on a regular basis. Their conversation bolster her back to good spirits, inspiring her to take her responsibility in the community seriously when he suggests she donate a prize cup to the boxing club that he mentors in his spare time. The friendship that develops between these two does a great deal for Ledbetter as well, a World War I veteran who has gone into business for himself and is beginning to feel the pangs of hope that a post-war, allegedly now classless Britain is promising him. Affection for the lady in question develops but, unable to express it properly, his attempts at intimacy come out as fabrications about his personal life, which are expressed with such subtle unease by Shaw that one does not need to see the later proof of his fictions to know he’s being untruthful. Lady Franklin, however, begins a much more appropriate romance with another war veteran who is seeking political office, Captain Cantrip (Peter Egan), and it creates a great deal of conflict in the heart of a man whose chance at upwardly mobile success depends on his suppressing his human feelings. While undeniably destroying any claims of Britain’s having rearranged its class system as utter nonsense, Wolf Mankowitz’s very crisp screenplay (which does a particularly good job of opening up L.P. Hartley’s more constrained novel) allows character and drama to take precedence over political screed and, as a result, the message is that much better absorbed. A host of devastating supporting performances, including a terrific Elizabeth Sellars as our heroine’s concerned but just-ghoulish-enough mother, round out a world that is intoxicating, elegant but airless, as if to take your place in it would be to join a beautiful tableau that then devours you whole. Author Hartley’s The Go-Between was another winner at Cannes, taking the big prize two years earlier, also a narrative that sought to find the transgressive blood flowing beneath the icy blue veins of prestige English period pieces.
Awards: Grand Prize (tied with Scarecrow); Special Award (Sarah Miles)
Bridges in Competition: The Return of The Soldier 1982)
Love and Anarchy (Lina Wertmüller)
Wertmüller had a magnificent run of films in the mid-seventies, beginning with The Seduction of Mimi and culminating with her internationally acclaimed Seven Beauties, for which she became the first and, until 1994, only woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. (The first American wasn’t until 2004.) In the middle of this run is, for some, her masterpiece, in which Giancarlo Giannini deservedly earned the Best Actor prize at Cannes for playing a buffoon from the sticks who is sent to the big city by a group of political anarchists to assassinate Mussolini during a political rally. His friend was killed by fascists and he wants revenge, so he is stationed with a politically sympathetic sex worker (Mariangela Melato, who is also marvellous) in her labyrinthine brothel until he can carry out the deed, but while there, he falls in love with his contact’s colleague and she insists he not get himself killed carrying out his mission. Despite her own personal devotion to her politics, Wertmüller often saw the devotion to ideology as being fundamentally naive (or in the case of her Haves-And-Have-Nots allegory Swept Away, impractical), and here the foolishness of Italy’s falling under the sway of a rhetorically empty dictator is measured against the vulnerabilities of personal risk and the temptations of ritzy living to which our hero is subjected. Displayed in the baroque fashion of cinematography and editing that the director indulged in with such intelligence and style, it’s a terrific place for those curious about her oeuvre to start.
Awards: Best Actor (Giancarlo Giannini)
Wertmuller in Competition: The Seduction of Mimi (1972)
The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache)
Three and a half hours of three people having a conversation may not sound like a scintillating experience, but this masterpiece is one hell of a ride, and while it’s impossible to imagine it based on this description, it is probably among the least pretentious films ever made. Jury president Ingrid Bergman called this film and La Grande Bouffe “the most sordid films” she’d ever seen. The latter likely stoked her ire because of its raw imagery, and this one, it could be presumed, because of its dialogue: liberal uses of the word “baiser” (to mean “fuck” and not kiss), talk of abortions as a normal function of life, and a moment involving an inconvenient tampon were not custom viewing material for a star of Hollywood’s golden age, even one who had herself been mistreated by the American public because of societal sexual hypocrisy. This many years later, Eustache’s masterpiece is no longer provocative in theme or for its frank conversations, but the delicate intimacy that it has with its characters, who hold you spellbound in their daily lives for the film in its entirety. Its surprisingly easy running time still feel like a revolution. At the centre of the plot is the adorably rakish Jean-Pierre Léaud, caught between his bossy, caring girlfriend and a sexually adventurous nurse whom he picks up at a cafe, the film’s title ironically giving us his view of women who, it is revealed, are actually so much more than what the male gaze reduces them to. Unlike Godard’s political posturing in a similar vein, the lengthy monologues are never empty theorizing but see characters tapping deeply into their emotional concerns. A film that out-vagues all the French New Wave classics that came before it with daring and panache, it’s the best known work of the short career (and life) of the late Eustache. It’s the best known title from a filmography that has recently been resurfacing in restored prints after having been unavailable for decades. For years, this film was hard to find except for a long out of print VHS copy and the occasional arthouse repertory screening, one of which I had the great luck to attend a long time ago, but it has now been restored in 4K and released by the Criterion Collection.
Awards: Grand Prize of the Jury; FIPRESCI Prize (tied with La Grande Bouffe)
Scarecrow (Jerry Schatzberg)
The USA won its most Palmes (or their equivalent) in the seventies, and it feels like none of them defines that era’s burst of independent spirit better than Schatzberg’s co-winner of the 1973 top prize. Something of a heartland Midnight Cowboy, it’s also one of the most delicate and unassuming films to win at Cannes. It’s a story about the impossibility of beauty surviving a cruel world that features magnificent, widescreen cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, who creates poetry out of images of hardship. Two men making their way from California towards the east (the opposite direction that most road movies travelled in this era, it should be noted) meet while hitchhiking the same road in the film’s opening scene. Max (Gene Hackman) has just been released from San Quentin and is planning to go to Pittsburgh to open up a car wash business. Francis (Al Pacino), whom Max prefers to call by his middle name, Lionel (which then becomes Lion), has just returned from years in the Navy and is on his way to reunite with the wife he abandoned when she was pregnant with the child he’s never met. They become travel companions and develop a dynamic akin to the main characters of La Strada. Max is tightly wound and always half a reason away from starting a fight, while Lion is an endearing, sweet clown for whom everything has the potential for adventure. A detour on the road sees them get in trouble with the law, however, and the experience does irreparable damage to one man’s spirit and reminds the other that his bullying personality is just a false front for someone who is as co-dependent as all the people he looks down on. Set in dive bars, messy living rooms and dusty streets, it’s as beautiful as any ugly film could possibly be and one with a great deal of heart, following Schatzberg’s previous award winner, Panic in Needle Park (also starring Pacino) in which soft people survive hard worlds. The film is also a reminder of something we rarely got from Pacino for the rest of his career: the vulnerable charmer he seems to be on screen would soon be dominated by roles that demanded great speeches and gasket-blowing tempers (which, to be fair, he has always done exceptionally well). Hackman, playing a darker version of his tough-guy self, also excels in a role that requires him to be constantly reacting to everything around him while remaining in complete denial about his true feelings. The supporting cast is a bevy of gem-like turns by actors playing the women in their lives, the best of them acting teacher and frequent Pacino colleague Penelope Allen as his ex, and Ann Wedgeworth as, yet again, a breathy-voiced, sexually charged southern belle.
Awards: Grand Prize (tied with The Hireling); OCIC Award
Schatzberg in Competition: The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Sweet Revenge (1976), Reunion (1989)
WORTHY
La Grande Bouffe (Marco Ferreri)
Ferreri won the festival, even if he didn’t get a prize from the jury, for what turned out to be the most discussed film in competition, settling for half a FIPRESCI prize and a whole lot of notoriety. Jury president Ingrid Bergman announced she had to keep herself from vomiting throughout the screening, Jean Cau of Paris Match called it “garbage” and Ferreri himself can be seen in file footage getting into screaming matches with persnickety journalists at the film’s press conference (while star Andréa Ferréol beams, calmly, next to him). Fifty-two years later, is the fuss justified? In some ways, yes, as this very dark comedy still has the power to provoke reactions even if some of the things that would have seemed beyond the pale to mainstream audiences in 1973 (like the sex and nudity) feel quite tame now. It’s the attitude to excess that still catches your notice. Ferreri anticipates the Porno Chic era of the early seventies (this film premiered at Cannes not long before Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat would turn American moviegoing on its ear) by asking his audience if they were ready for a no-holds-barred exploration of indulgence. Marcello Mastroianni, Michel Piccoli, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi play four middle-aged friends who hole up in Noiret’s crumbling family mansion with a very ugly plan: they have fortified themselves with enough food to feed an army and plan to eat themselves to death. Upon arrival, Mastroianni decides he needs to get laid before his final hurrah, ushering in the companionship of three sex workers as well as the presence of a good-natured, kindly schoolteacher (Ferréol, who gained fifty pounds for the role of a voluptuary) who turns out to be far more accommodating than her professional counterparts. The establishing scenario and a few kinky scenes to follow are where the excitement ends, unfortunately, as Ferreri is great at setting up a situation and creating unforgettable images, but rarely follows through on story development. As it turns out, these characters don’t really experience much despite all the activity (and there’s a lot of it, including enough eating to make you sick) and none of the characters ever become multi-dimensional. It’s a film that is fascinating for being both shocking and boring at the same time, though, for all the ink spilled over its content, it should be seen by every serious film fan at least once.
Awards: FIPRESCI Prize (Tie with The Mother and the Whore)
Ferreri in Competition: L’Ape Regina (1963), The Ape Woman (1964), Dillinger Is Dead (1969), Ciao Maschio (1978), The Story of Piera (1983), I Love You (1986), The Flesh (1991)
The Invitation (Claude Goretta)
The seventies is replete with charming European films about groups of friends revealing the cracks beneath their civilized facades through a series of charming, beautifully lit interactions. This film is among the least flashy of them, playing as a sort of unfettered Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, or Rohmer without all the sexy stuff. An employee in the office of an unspecified bean-counting financial business takes a leave of absence after he is devastated by the news of his mother’s death. Some months later, he invites his former colleagues to a garden party at his new home, having used his inheritance to sell his suburban bungalow and move to a gorgeous villa in the countryside where he can attend to his personal, horticultural passions. The variety of characters, single, dating, and married, arrive and, as the mysteriously accommodating butler serves one overly sweet cocktail after another, start loosening up their tongues and their ties. It’s possible that Goretta is creating a microcosm of human interaction, as we see everyone is getting along until a few characters get out of hand and the rest argue over how to deal with them, but an allegorical lecture does not feel like it’s the main purpose here. Whatever its aims, it’s a film that, while not groundbreaking or unforgettable, is incredibly impressive for how simultaneously light and sharp it is, almost like a dagger you don’t know has punctured you until after you find the wound. Shot in a gorgeous locale, Goretta’s superb, brightly lit cinematography emphasizes large swathes of solid colours, whether the bright yellow of Rosine Rochette’s dress, the burning orange of the bathroom tiles or the lush depths of the greenery surrounding the property. Goretta had what was probably his biggest success of the decade, a film that went on to represent Switzerland as a Best Foreign Language Film nominee at the following year’s Academy Awards (losing to Truffaut’s Day For Night). Today, he’s better known for his film The Lacemaker, which came to Cannes in 1977 and featured the breakthrough lead performance of a young woman named Isabelle Huppert.
Awards: Jury Prize (tied with The Hourglass Sanatorium); International Prize-Dramatic
Goretta in Competition: The Lacemaker (1977), The Death of Mario Ricci (1983)
FOR THE CURIOUS
Ana and the Wolves (Carlos Saura)
Kinky drama masquerading as political allegory is a Cannes favourite and, it should be pointed out, Saura was to be admired for making many of his while his country’s dictator was still, although no longer at the peak of his repressive powers, still alive. Saura’s then-partner Geraldine Chaplin plays a governess who comes to work for an aristocratic and, what else, corrupt family in Castile, where she takes charge of three little girls but spends most of her time being spoken to, attacked and manipulated by the adults in the house. The children’s mother Luchy is miserably married to womanizing philanderer Juan, his elder brother Jose is obsessed with military history and shows Chaplin his collection of perfectly preserved uniforms, and his younger brother Fernando is a holy fool who is turning a cave near their property into his isolated domain for fasting and praying. Chaplin has a winsome, good-natured reaction to all these oddballs, which also include the senile grandmother constantly accusing the servants of stealing, but the family soon decide that her being so accommodating is actually sowing discord and take decisive action against her presence. The brutality of Franco’s Spain is not a subtle target for this insouciant satire, but its directness would be much more entertaining if the characters didn’t feel so much like symbols (the brothers are Sex, Politics and Religion writ large) and if the director had a clearer understanding of his leading lady’s persona. Talented and striking, Chaplin was also rarely someone who let us in, and her attempt to put together a series of quirks and cliches into a fully formed human being doesn’t result in anything particularly memorable or compelling.
Saura in Competition: Los Golfos (1960), La Prima Angelica (1974), Cria Cuervos (1976), Elisa My Life (1977), Blindfolded Eyes (1978), Carmen (1983), El Dorado (1988)
Belle (Andre Delvaux)
An academic living a comfortable middle-class life in the country has his cushy life of lectures and his wife’s classy dinner parties interrupted when he accidentally hits a dog on a late night drive home. Obsessed with the matter, the next day he goes in search of the animal’s owner and finds a lone, beautiful woman who doesn’t speak French living in a run-down shack. She’s not well and he helps her out with some medicine and groceries, but soon gives into his urges and she welcomes a love affair despite the fact that they cannot communicate verbally. His obsession with this woman, whom he calls “Belle”, soon begins to reveal the cracks in the rest of his life, which comes to a climax when we learn the real reason that the woman is there. Delvaux’s first film of three to appear in competition at Cannes passes the time and is well acted and photographed. However, among the mildly amusing dramas included in this year’s festival, this one feels the most like the sort of thing I used to find playing on late-night television when I was a teenager dealing with jet lag on my summers in Greece.
Delvaux in Competition: Woman Between Wolf and Dog (1979); L’Oeuvre au Noir (1988)
The Death of a Lumberjack (Gilles Carle)
While it went home empty-handed from the Cannes competition, Carle’s provocative and very popular oddity established the career of a young and beautiful Carole Laure, leading to her even more sensationally received performance in Makavejev’s Sweet Movie a year later and her appearance in the Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs in 1978. (Not to mention a successful recording career and, eventually, the Order of Canada.) She plays a young woman, insouciantly named Marie Chapdelaine, who leaves her home in the sticks to come to Montreal and find out the eventual fate of her father who left her and her mother without a word ten years earlier. Marie first falls into the hands of an exploitative bar owner who gets her to sing and strip at his club, then falls into a deep relationship with an ambitious journalist who, in fostering her modelling career, turns out to be no less exploitative. The open reference to Louis Hémon’s novel Maria Chapdelaine, the Gone with the Wind of Quebec literature, a story about a woman who feels forced to choose between suitors, is where this story begins before it spins out into a strange, cultish murder mystery in the second half, when Marie, her father’s mistress, her neighbour, and her boss take a drive to a remote lumber camp where she learns of her father’s eventual fate. It’s an interesting premise, it has a sexy and talented lead who is supported by a superb cast, and it’s photographed beautifully, but it doesn’t always maintain its energy. A scene where Laure poses with frozen pig carcass in a meat locker is followed by an examination of labour exploitation. That makes us wonder if we need 115 minutes to tell a story that features so little subtlety. Carle would, ironically enough, direct an actual adaptation of Hémon’s novel eleven years later, with Laure in the lead role.
Carle in Competition: La Vraie Nature de Bernadette (1972); Fantastica (1980)
Electra Glide in Blue (James William Guercio)
Guercio directed his only feature film within a very successful career as a music producer and manager for the band Chicago (many of whose members appear in small roles here, including Peter Cetera). When the film screened at Cannes, it was derided by critics as being pro-fascist, which is interesting given that it reads, at least today, as very heavy ACAB propaganda despite the tragic twist in its conclusion. Robert Blake plays an Arizona highway patrolman who dreams of becoming a suit-wearing detective and gets his chance when he and his outrageously impulsive partner (Billy Green Bush) find a local hermit dead of what at first appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Blake is sure that it’s not a suicide and his theory is supported when a detective (Mitchell Ryan) arrives on the scene and confirms that it was a different bullet that killed the man. Ryan makes Blake his “partner” (actually his driver) but their investigation of clues and suspects involves more of the same harassment of hippies that Blake has been witnessing by his partner than any kind of high-level detective work, and his illusions about making the world a better place soon degrade to dust. Frequently referred to as an offshoot of Easy Rider, this bit of counterculture’s attitude towards law enforcement would play well to liberal Defund the Police mindsets today, the good cops are stupid and the bad ones are violent maniacs, but its conclusion softens the blow enough to make it easy to see Blue Lives Matter viewers admiring it as well. What is more significant, though, is that while it has a few cool sequences (and its final shot is probably the best of this entire selection of films in competition), it does meander a lot, and a good deal of it feels like filler.
Fantastic Planet (Rene Laloux)
In a collection of films whose themes and styles scream “That’s So Seventies,” it really doesn’t get more dated than this French-Czech co-production whose animation style, somewhere between Monty Python and the 1-2-3-4-5 skit on Sesame Street, actually contributes to its sense of otherworldliness. The allegory of its plot is (I hope) intentionally obvious: a pro-peace, anti-colonial, pro-vegetarian propaganda narrative in which humans (“Oms”, get it?) live on a planet populated by giant blue humanoid creatures called “Draags.” Oms are vulnerable and tiny in this place and live as an oppressed minority, barely surviving in hiding while the Draags keep them as pets or make efforts to exterminate them when the mood hits, the rest of their time spent in funky meditations or learning universal knowledge from their A.I. machines. One young Om is orphaned as a baby and given as a gift to a Draag and, growing up in her house, learns the ways of his overseers before leading a rebellion that will change relations between the two species forever. It’s a very popular cult film and rightly so, it has a distinct flavour to it that would make it great viewing at a late-night screening with a few hallucinogens for added piquancy, but in its desire to lay plain its call for co-operation on our planet by making its story so incredibly easy to interpret, it’s also a draag to sit through. It gets few points for originality as a concept, but you won’t easily shake off the haunting score or images.
Awards: Special Award
Godspell (David Greene)
Wicked composer Steven Schwartz established his career with this popular off-Broadway musical, which premiered the same year that Jesus Christ Superstar played on the Great White Way, with both film adaptations also released the same year. (Although Godspell wouldn’t go to Broadway until 1976.) It’s a gentle time capsule of hippie optimism, in which Jesus is a clown-shoe wearing flower child (played by a young, physically awkward Victor Garber) who speaks to the disciples gathered from various parts of Manhattan by John the Baptist (David Haskell) and sings them pop songs inspired by the parables of the gospel of Matthew. The score is more or less intact from the show (one song cut, a new one written) and Greene impressively manages to make the small cast seem like the only people left in the city, shooting the cast in an abandoned Manhattan and using some impressive helicopter shots that appear to plummet off tall buildings (including the now poignant image of the Twin Towers). The twee optimism of “Love, Joy and Peace,” as performed by grown-ups who really should know better, hasn’t aged well. Unless you’re a fan of the songs and this show, this one is an endless, annoying indulgence in empty nostalgia.
Hospitals: The White Mafia (aka Scalpel) (Luigi Zampa)
The social upheavals of Italy’s “Anni di piombo” were reflected in a number of films that provided excoriating commentary on the country’s various social systems, this one focusing on the crumbling state of health care. Gabriele Ferzetti (best known for L’Avventura, or the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) plays a renowned surgeon with a mile-long waiting list of patients hoping to have him perform their life-saving operations, who runs a classy private clinic while administering charitable help at other hospitals as well. Enrico Maria Salerno plays the distraught fellow surgeon who comes to understand that Ferzetti is actually passing off most of his cases onto underlings that he bullies into doing what he wants, with scores of unsuspecting patients dying during surgery because of administrative nonsense or personal complications. Pay-offs and cover-ups abound until the climactic moment when the man who thinks himself untouchable finds that he himself is also human and cannot escape his own mortal vulnerability. The acting is dedicated and the milieu is convincing, but while director Zampa has a very direct attitude about his criticism of a societal failing, he doesn’t have much else: the film lacks good drama and the characters are little more than symbols, which results in its feeling like a lecture, although thankfully a diverting and not overlong one.
The Hourglass Sanatorium (Wojciech Has)
Juries are sometimes more impressed by the fate of a film than its contents, and it’s possible that the troubled road that this film traversed to get to the festival had a great deal to do with its sharing the Jury Prize with Goretta’s celebrated The Invitation. Has adapts stories by Bruno Schulz, a Jewish Galician writer who was murdered by the Gestapo for stepping outside his Drohobycz ghetto in 1942 (to get a loaf of bread), and combines them into one experience that is exceptionally photographed, superbly directed and, because it’s basically one allegorical idea spread out over two hours, something of a chore to sit through. A man arrives at a countryside institution to visit his dying father and is told that his father is, for all intents and purposes, dead. The doctor presiding over the hospital keeps his patients suspended in a comatose state that takes away all boundaries of time and space, which our protagonist experiences (or possibly dreams) when he lays down in his father’s room and finds himself travelling backwards through time, experiencing the Holocaust, visiting Hasidic shtetls and dealing with all manner of symbolic characters who represent the destruction of Jewish life in twentieth century Europe (and specifically Poland). The film was released not long after a 1968 anti-Semitic campaign to rid the country of its Jewish population, including a great deal of firing people for “Zionist” views which resulted in an exodus of thirty thousand citizens, and this, compounded with the country’s repressed feelings over the war years, inspired the government to prevent Has from bringing the film to Cannes. A print was smuggled in anyway, and it’s likely that this triumph over adversity made spectators, who were already struggling with how to feel about Ferreri’s controversial indulgence, see more value in a film whose moral value wasn’t as hard to pin down as its proceedings were to sit through.
Awards: Jury Prize (tie with L’Invitation)
Has in Competition: How to Be Loved (1963)
Jeremy (Arthur Barron)
AKA Susan and Jeremy. The controversy of authorship had barely begun by the time this film won the award for Best First Work (now the Camera d’Or) and the darker behind-the-scenes information about filming a sex scene with minors (and original director Joseph Brooks’ further criminal activities) were barely on the radar when this sweet and unassuming little romance graced the screens of the festival. It stars a very young Robby Benson (later to be best known as the voice of the Beast in the 1991 Disney hit) as a lonely teenager who excels in his extra-curricular musical studies and has a good time hanging out with his best friend, but who longs to make a deeper connection with someone. The opportunity comes his way when he falls in puppy love with a junior named Susan (Glynnis O’Connor) who is just as delighted by him. They begin a whirlwind romance that sees them covering Manhattan on long walks, dates to the movies, board games at home and, eventually, initiating each other into physical love. Barron took over production after producer Elliott Kastner was alarmed at Brooks’ directing teenagers having sex, which resulted in the most contentious scene of the film being edited down to something as tasteful as possible (at least for the seventies), but what really stands out in this minor charmer is how free it is of obvious manipulation. The plot takes a ridiculous turn towards tragedy in the end (you’re moving out of the city in TWO days?) but the honesty with which the young kids perform their connection to each other does make one reminisce of being that young. Lovely images of an early seventies’ Manhattan also make an impression, its most charming elements easily overriding the fact that, overall, it’s not a particularly interesting or groundbreaking film.
Awards: Best First Work
O Lucky Man (Lindsay Anderson)
Anderson called The Hireling “sentimental muck” after his own follow-up to his 1969 Palme d’Or winner If…. failed to net him a second prize (which he openly announced he expected to receive). The second in what would turn out to be the “Mick Travis” trilogy (the third, Britannia Hospital, would play in competition in 1982), it features the irascible Malcolm McDowell once again in the lead role, in a plot that he outlined and gave to David Sherwin to fill out. The lengthy (three hours) epic musical begins with Mick, now graduated from school, as a sales representative for a coffee company, travelling the country building up business relationships with various clients and meeting some interesting characters along the way. After an affair with a hotel landlady and a trip to a backroom orgy at a fancy pub, Mick goes for a meeting in Scotland and ends up at a secret government compound where he is arrested as a spy, then sent back to London with a group of musicians (played by Alan Price and his band, who provide the film’s songs). There, he ends up the assistant to a wealthy industrialist and falls in love with his beautiful daughter (Helen Mirren) before being used as a fall guy for the company’s white-collar crimes and sent to prison, where he learns to embrace humanism. Meant to cover all the ins and outs of British Society Today, dealing with economics, class and cultural revolution, the film is far too well directed and performed to feel like a mess, but it also promises a glee-filled tumble down a rabbit hole that it never actually provides. Many of the cast members repeat roles throughout, and the best of them is Ralph Richardson as both Mick’s neighbour at his first hotel and later as Mirren’s father, but it’s McDowell’s show all the way. Whether or not you can stand the strangeness of this movie, particularly how little it apologizes for its bizarre twists and very calm pacing, there’s no denying that the actor’s charisma and unpredictability keep it from being boring even when it gets a bit too socially philosophical (and therefore dated) for its own good. It helps that the musical aspect of it works well, as Price’s songs are all wonderful.
Anderson in Competition: This Sporting Life (1963), If…. (1969, Palme d’Or), Britannia Hospital (1982)
SKIP IT
Le Far West (Jacques Brel)
My co-host on the Riviera Rats podcast, Gregory Rosebrugh, and I give out the “Dinde d’Or” every episode to the film we feel deserves the Golden Turkey for being the worst selection in the Official Competition. Despite the fact that we were not able to watch two of the films in this list, my choice is definitely, without any hesitation, Brel’s second and final directorial effort made only a few years before his death from lung cancer at the age of 49. One of the most famous singers to ever come out of Europe, whose work inspired a pastiche stage musical and has been used on film soundtracks endlessly since, Brel also made a handful of appearances in films and directed two features, this being his second. Whatever he was going for with this project never gels into a workable experience, a random collection of ideas mainly to do with his own passion for American westerns. He plays a man donning cowboy gear who has gone in search of the mythical setting of the title and, as he travels, gathers a group of fellow misfits also outfitted in costumes familiar to the genre. (There are a lot of Indigenous headdresses, and not a single indigenous person to be found on screen.) He is also, illogically, gifted with a magical trick of making buildings crumble whenever he leans on a wall. In the end, however, it appears that the places we dream of are only in our dreams, and that getting to the essence of our own sense of joy is what matters more than actually living in the places we think will solve all our problems. I guess? Anyone watching this will struggle to have a reason to finish it, let alone make heads or tails of what it is going for, and even taking into account the spirit of experimental hippiedom that found itself at play in avant-garde cinema of the era (which Godspell touches on as well) doesn’t help one figure out a reason for this film to exist.
One Hamlet Less (Carmelo Bene)
An artist of Italy’s avant-garde who was a poet, actor and filmmaker, Bene scored big with his performance in Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex and a Jury Prize at Venice for Our Lady of the Turks before bringing this confusing experience to the Cannes competition. In description, it’s a free interpretation of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, in which elements of Hamlet weave among ruminations both on Freud and on Sophocles’ masterpiece as well, although to watch it is to find nothing near the plot that is described when you read up on it after watching it. Shot on gorgeous, empty Cinecittà soundstages, it is at least valuable as a feast for the eyes, replete with gorgeous costumes and some strong performances, but even at the respectably brief running time of seventy minutes, it is an undeniable bore. The excuses for nudity, mainly of women wearing monastic wimples above while exposing breasts and bottoms below, might be making claims to some sort of provocative religious irony and, at the time, may have gotten somewhere with that explanation. But today, it just reads as the kind of Eurotrash exploitation we’re used to from films of the era.
The Vows (Antonio de Macedo)
In a small Portuguese fishing village, poverty and religious fanaticism make the private lives of its citizens nearly impossible to live. One couple sleep side by side chastely thanks to a promise made when the husband became the sacristan at his church, which he did to bring in the money that his work as a fisherman could not. In order to facilitate the miracle of his family’s survival, he also made a promise to never consummate his marriage with his beautiful wife. She takes her frustration out on the care of a wounded Romani stranger (referred to, as is unsurprising in the time and place, as a gypsy) who has escaped his brothers. Their visitor crowds a small hut already teeming with family members (the husband’s ailing father and blind brother are also in residence), then decides to go hide in an old mill and wait for the return of his brothers, who have kidnapped a girl from the village and come back for her when she escapes with their money. The melodrama is set against the beauty of a vast, empty, beautiful but impoverished landscape and the performances are committed, but it’s a grungy, unimportant little movie that is easy enough to abide when it’s on and feels silly and trite by the time it’s over.
ALSO IN COMPETITION
The following films competed for the Palme d’Or but were not available to be reviewed for this article:
Monologue (Ilya Averbakh)
La otra imagen (Antoni Ribas)
Petőfi ’73 (Ferenc Kardos)
We Want the Colonels (Mario Monicelli)
Monicelli at Cannes: Guardie e Ladri (1952), L’Armata Brancaleone 966), Un Borghese Piccolo Piccolo (1977), Le Due Vite di Mattia Pascal (1985)
