mlzafron Reviews

Suspiria (1977)

Flawed but worth seeing

[6 April 2002]

Having heard such mixed things about "Suspiria," I was actually somewhat pleasantly surprised. My main interest in seeing the movie was because of Joan Bennett and Alida Valli.

The sets are quite marvelous and the opening sequence appropriately gripping. I can't say that I was scared by the film. The maggot sequence was actually pretty funny. One minute they're dropping all over the place and the next there's poor Joan Bennett (I read somewhere that she did the film so she could go abroad) in her best finishing school posture and accent explaining away the problem. Don't get me wrong, but there are some genuinely creepy bits. The scene with Jessica Harper walking down the hall and seeing the old woman and the little boy and then her dance class with the sadistic Alida Valli character was unnerving.

The script needed some work. It is, as others have said, a very dreamlike/nightmarish film, but I need some sort of narrative cohesion in my movies. I also have to agree with the reviewer here who questioned the whole sleep apnea thing.

The acting is . . . uneven. Jessica Harper does fairly well as the young woman who's come to the dancing school and discovers there's much more going on. I'm not sure what to say about Bennett and Valli. I've seen it suggested that their performances were supposed to be like that--why, I don't know--but it would be to their credit if that were the case, because both of them gave much better performances in their careers. Still, glad I saw it and I will probably watch it again.

The Woman on the Beach (1947)

Flawed but worth seeing

[6/10 · 17 February 2001]

`Woman on the Beach' could have been a much better film; that's the tragedy of it. There's meat in this soup of a movie-mainly because of the performances of Charles Bickford and Joan Bennett. But the rest of it is awfully weak, including, somewhat surprisingly, Robert Ryan. The main failures are the screenplay and the score. The latter can be forgiven, although it's so heavy as to be intrusive, but the former is full of holes that leave the viewer baffled.

I've seen the film three times now and I'm still trying to figure out what exactly happened to Ryan in his career during the war (Navy? Coast Guard? As a previous reviewer here suggested, it's weirdly unclear what Ryan's duties were before and after the war) and what is supposed to be wrong with him.

The secondary characters seem to have wandered into the noirish landscape from a Ma and Pa Kettle film and frankly I'm not all that surprised that Ryan seems ambivalent about marrying good girl, Nan Leslie. Renoir doesn't seem to have known just what genre of a film he was making. We go from the woman's film to film noir to hokey comedy and back again. Irene Ryan is wildly out of place and her performance is over the top in the worst kind of way.

But the gems in this film are Bennett and Bickford. Their characters' seamy, violent, sado-masochistic relationship is riveting and you can't help but wish that Renoir had spent more time focusing on it and less on the antics of the Wernecke brood. Joan Bennett usually needed good material (`Scarlet Street', `The Reckless Moment', `The Woman in the Window') to shine, but she does quite well here, particularly in her scenes with Bickford. There's also a wonderful moment where Ryan is beginning to realize that she isn't quite the put-upon little woman he thought she was. Her reaction is worth suffering through scenes about chocolate cake and the decorations at the coast guard station.

Charles Bickford is fabulous as the blinded, bitter and jealous artist, easily outshining the usually excellent Robert Ryan, who appears merely dazed and confused. This was the film that got me interested in Bickford's career. I've yet to find the movie where he isn't excellent.

Mansfield Park (1999)

A Waste

[1/10 · 24 November 2000]

Although, I had read disastrous reviews of this movie, I wanted to watch Patricia Rozema's "Mansfield Park" with an open mind and to see for myself. Now I wish I'd listened to the bad press.

This is not a good film by any means. It bears no resemblance to the work upon which it is based--but even someone trying to view it as something separate and distinct from Austen is going to be disappointed.

The script is uneven, unbalanced and gives none of the talented performers a chance to shine. Historically inaccurate, the costumes and the sets are a joke. If someone could tell me why Mansfield Park looked like the aftermath of a bankruptcy sale, I'd be grateful.

Rozema reportedly disliked Austen, the novel and the character of Fanny Price as she was written. Given the way she went about showing her dislike, she must have had some say what projects she worked on. I wish she had made an entirely original movie instead of destroying what could have been a really enjoyable film.

It does boast a good score.