MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: BABY, THE RAIN MUST FALL (1965)

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Tuesday, May 13, 2008

BABY, THE RAIN MUST FALL (1965)

Three years after TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Alan Pakula, Robert Mulligan, Horton Foote & Elmer Bernstein (producer, helmer, writer & composer, respectively) regrouped for this modest rural piece. It's about a parolee (Steve McQueen in Paul Newman mode) whose dreams of rockabilly respectability hit a wall when his wife & kid come to town just as his vindictive mom puts the hex on him as she lays dying. It’s Foote at his most Faulkneresque & they almost get away with it. The pic earns black marks for McQueen’s rotten dubbing, for an ineptly staged fight sequence & for that annoying Gothic harpsichord motif, but Lee Remick & Don Murray are pitch-perfect in hand-me-down roles. These two deserved far better offers than they got after this one.

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A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola

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Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

BABY, THE RAIN MUST FALL (1965)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE