Honored Portugese master Manoel de Oliveira, who lived to be 106 and never stopped turning out films (take that Clint Eastwood), a critical darling, especially at film fests toward the end of his long career, never broke thru Stateside, even in an auteurist manner. And, to go by his late work, easy to see why. Overloaded with grand themes: obvious, weighty, pretentious, in spite of some tantalizing international casts eager to have worked with the old man. Could a better encounter be had by going to his beginnings rather than his end? Say, this very first feature from 1942? Nope. It’s no more satisfying then the late works, and a bit rough technically. Editing particularly bumpy. Meant as a modest charmer about the games kids play on the streets of Porto, this episodic film best for its location work on the narrow alleys, stairways, roofs and tenement apartment buildings of this seaside city. If only the kids weren’t a mass of worn clichés and schoolyard casting calls that didn’t pay off. The storyline, beside all the roughhousing and urban games, follows a couple of rivals for a little girl's favor, a doll stolen from a store display window, and the store owner developing an interest in the kids. (He proves something of a behind-the-counter child psychologist/philosopher.) The main action, which opens the film before we flash back, showing a dangerous fall by one of those rivals down a slope toward an onrushing rain. Will the boy be crushed? Was he pushed? And while you won’t be chewing your nails for the next 80 minutes, the film’s pleasant enough and there’s a nice set piece set on dangerously unstable ceramic rooftop tiles. Next time, maybe something from de Oliveira’s middle period.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: François Truffaut’s SMALL CHANGE/’76 is the go-to pic for this sort of thing. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/small-change-1976.html
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