JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 50 из 359To this American movies have added a fierce sense of image, and the two together create a dazzling show. Take Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, for instance. In terms of ideas, the film is an idiotic mishmash. In terms of image and emotion-the young kidnap victim being pulled from the cistern at dawn, the bad guy terrorizing the busload of children, the granite face of Dirty Harry Callahan himself-the film is brilliant. Even the best of liberals walk out of a film like Dirty Harry or Peckinpah's Straw Dogs looking as if they have been clopped over the head . . . or run over by a train.
There are films of ideas, of course, ranging all the way from Birth of a Nation to Annie Hall.
But until a few years ago these were largely the province of foreign filmmakers (the cinema "new wave" that broke in Europe from 1946 until about 1965 ), and these movies have always been chancy in America, playing at your neighborhood "art house" with subtitles, if they play at all. I think it's easy to misread the success of Woody Allen's later films in this regard. In America's urban areas, his films-and films such as Cousin, Cousine-generate long lines at the box office, and they certainly get what George ( Night of the Lining Dead, Dawn of the Dead) Romero calls "good ink," but in the sticks-the quad cinema in Davenport, Iowa, or the twin in Portsmouth, New Hampshire-these pictures play a fast week or two and then disappear. It is Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit that Americans really seem to take to; when Americans go to the films, they seem to want billboards rather than ideas; they want to check their brains at the box office and watch car crashes, custard pies, and monsters on the prowl.
Ironically, it took a foreign director, the Italian Sergio Leone, to somehow frame the archetypal American movie; to define and typify what most American filmgoers seem to want.
What Leone did in A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and most grandiosely in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly cannot even properly be called satire. T.G.T.B.A.T.U. in particular is a huge and wonderfully vulgar overstatement of the already overstated archetypes of American film westerns. In this movie gunshots seem as loud as atomic blasts; close-ups seem to go on for minutes at a stretch, gunfights for hours; and the streets of Leone's peculiar little Western towns all seem as wide as freeways.
So when one asks who or what turned Mary Shelley's well-spoken monster with his education from The Sorrows of Young Werther and Paradise Lost into a pop archetype, the movies are a perfectly good answer.
There are films of ideas, of course, ranging all the way from Birth of a Nation to Annie Hall.
But until a few years ago these were largely the province of foreign filmmakers (the cinema "new wave" that broke in Europe from 1946 until about 1965 ), and these movies have always been chancy in America, playing at your neighborhood "art house" with subtitles, if they play at all. I think it's easy to misread the success of Woody Allen's later films in this regard. In America's urban areas, his films-and films such as Cousin, Cousine-generate long lines at the box office, and they certainly get what George ( Night of the Lining Dead, Dawn of the Dead) Romero calls "good ink," but in the sticks-the quad cinema in Davenport, Iowa, or the twin in Portsmouth, New Hampshire-these pictures play a fast week or two and then disappear. It is Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit that Americans really seem to take to; when Americans go to the films, they seem to want billboards rather than ideas; they want to check their brains at the box office and watch car crashes, custard pies, and monsters on the prowl.
Ironically, it took a foreign director, the Italian Sergio Leone, to somehow frame the archetypal American movie; to define and typify what most American filmgoers seem to want.
What Leone did in A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and most grandiosely in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly cannot even properly be called satire. T.G.T.B.A.T.U. in particular is a huge and wonderfully vulgar overstatement of the already overstated archetypes of American film westerns. In this movie gunshots seem as loud as atomic blasts; close-ups seem to go on for minutes at a stretch, gunfights for hours; and the streets of Leone's peculiar little Western towns all seem as wide as freeways.
So when one asks who or what turned Mary Shelley's well-spoken monster with his education from The Sorrows of Young Werther and Paradise Lost into a pop archetype, the movies are a perfectly good answer.