World Cinema-HD: Get Out Your Handkerchiefs ***+ (1978, Comedy)
Aspect ratio 1.66 : 1
Summary: Thoroughly safe and mild compared to Going Places--the anarchic, something-to-offend-everyone earlier collaboration of Gérard Depardieu, Patrick Dewaere, and French director Bertrand Blier--the 1977 Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is an outwardly civilized satire with a heart so dark it's a wonder you can see the film's images. Depardieu plays the bellicose but well-meaning husband of a beautiful and depressed woman (Carole Laure) who wants to be pregnant but isn't. Hubby's solution to her woes is to talk another man (Dewaere), a complete stranger, into becoming her lover. When that fails to lift her spirits and fill her womb, the two men--both of them now slavishly devoted to the cult of her misery--bring in a boy (Riton) with whom Laure's character seems to be in perfect emotional synch. As with many of Blier's films, Handkerchiefs is an intellectually brutal but slaphappy variation on traditional comedies of manners. What makes this film a bit different was its obvious jibe at frothier French sex farces of the day (Yves Robert's Pardon Mon Affaire, for example, was released the same year) as well as then-contemporary adult comedy-dramas from the U.S. about the vicissitudes of relationships (Blume in Love, Kramer vs. Kramer). Seen in that context, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs looks like a wolf in sheep's clothing, though it isn't necessary to bring any context to Blier's acid wit. --Tom Keogh
Epics-HD: Barry Lyndon ***+ (1975, Drama)
Aspect ratio
1.37 : 1 (negative ratio)
1.66 : 1 (intended ratio)
Summary: In 1975 the world was at Stanley Kubrick's feet. His films Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, released in the previous dozen years, had provoked rapture and consternation--not merely in the film community, but in the culture at large. On the basis of that smashing hat trick, Kubrick was almost certainly the most famous film director of his generation, and absolutely the one most likely to rewire the collective mind of the movie audience. And what did this radical, at-least-20-years-ahead-of-his-time filmmaker give the world in 1975? A stately, three-hour costume drama based on an obscure Thackeray novel from 1844. A picaresque story about an Irish lad (Ryan O'Neal, then a major star) who climbs his way into high society, Barry Lyndon bewildered some critics (Pauline Kael called it "an ice-pack of a movie") and did only middling business with patient audiences. The film was clearly a technical advance, with its unique camerawork (incorporating the use of prototype Zeiss lenses capable of filming by actual candlelight) and sumptuous production design. But its hero is a distinctly underwhelming, even unsympathetic fellow, and Kubrick does not try to engage the audience's emotions in anything like the usual way.
Why, then, is Barry Lyndon a masterpiece? Because it uncannily captures the shape and rhythm of a human life in a way few other films have; because Kubrick's command of design and landscape is never decorative but always apiece with his hero's journey; and because every last detail counts. Even the film's chilly style is thawed by the warm narration of the great English actor Michael Hordern and the Irish songs of the Chieftains. Poor Barry's life doesn't matter much in the end, yet the care Kubrick brings to the telling of it is perhaps the director's most compassionate gesture toward that most peculiar species of animal called man. And the final, wry title card provides the perfect Kubrickian sendoff--a sentiment that is even more poignant since Kubrick's premature death. --Robert Horton
Divine-HD: Where the Boys Are **+ (1960, Comedy)
Aspect ratio 2.35 : 1
Summary: The movie that put the Break into Spring, Where the Boys Are inspired thousands of college kids to seek sun, surf, and even s-e-x on the beaches of Florida. A bevy of co-eds (including foxy Yvette Mimieux and delightful Paula Prentiss, in her film debut) make for Fort Lauderdale, finding fun but also quite a bit of heavy-breathing drama. It's a little like a dressier, glossed-up version of the Problems with Today's Youth movies that were filling up the drive-ins of the era. The movie's actually pretty frank for 1960, although these days the lightweight stuff with Prentiss and Jim Hutton holds up best. There's also Connie Francis, who plays one of the college girls and croons the great title tune (which belongs on anybody's mix tape of classic teen-beach music). The film was remade, with vague Orwellian overtones, as Where the Boys Are 84, a truly dismal effort. --Robert Horton
