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It's a matter of tenor, this Nouvelle Vague gig: "You ever hear Jelly Roll sung like an opera?" The fringes of the fringes, the John Cassavetes turf, an impressionistic whirl worth a thousand fumbled words. An artist's dilemma, naturally, the lounge baritone (Hugh Hurd) whose song is unceremoniously cut short to make way for a row of seedy chorines. His brother (Ben Carruthers) is a trumpeter with shades perpetually pinned to his clenched visage, his sister (Lelia Goldoni) is an aspiring novelist eager to venture into the teeming city. (Her night stroll through Times Square is a rough marvel, a Bardot cutout is spotted amid a galaxy of neon while a pushy wolf is warded off by a familiar hepcat.) "What the hell is a literary party?" Sartre's existentialism is brought up along with a stripper's art in a Minnellian little interlude, where the heroine ditches her manager for a suitor (Anthony Ray). Their love scene is filmed under the aegis of Renoir's A Day in the Country, the freshly deflowered girl sits up against a dusky background and laments the shortage of magic: "Instead, we're just two strangers." A highly variegated snapshot of diner booths, sidewalks, terminals and studios, a sustained rediscovery of the face in close-up, volatile and vulnerable. The tragedy and comedy of "a problem with the races, that's all," the hippest spot in town is not immune to a prejudice that can terminate a romance with a glance. "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow..." The jaunt through the museum garden affords a joking study of a bulbous Lachaise nude, the cranky cabbie warbling "I Love You Truly" points up the debt to Capra. The end is a characteristic Cassavetes gesture, get into a fight and take your lumps and forge ahead. With Dennis Sallas, Tom Reese, and Rupert Crosse. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |