I watched 7 movies last week:
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- Contemporary reviews talk a lot about how Save the Tiger wouldn’t work without the Jack Lemmon performance. Which is a little weird considering that it has the Jack Lemmon performance. I agree you probably couldn’t drop just any actor into this material, but that isn’t a fault of the material, or just because Lemmon is genuinely so good. His performance is finely calibrated to this material, a character study set against the regret and malaise of 1970s America. It’s not necessarily a fun movie, and it is easy how it could be bad without an actor so good, but I think it does work.
- The Anderson Tapes is interesting, not least for its eclectic cast, though it’s mostly a testament to Sidney Lumet’s skill as a director that the movie is as engaging as it is.
Cold Turkey is never exactly funny, but its characters, while largely unlikable, are well observed.
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- To the Devil a Daughter is shockingly bad, and if wasn’t Hammer Films very last movie before going under at the end of the 1970s, oh boy, was it a huge nail in that coffin. The movie approaches hauntingly atmospheric now and then—it’s definitely trying to do something, and it has a much better cast than it deserves—but it’s so very tedious and over-complicated. And then when I learned that Nastassja Kinski, who briefly (and needlessly) appears fully nude, was only fourteen at the time, I really hated this film.
- Z.P.G. is a 1970s sci-fi movie you’ve probably never heard of. I’d recommend keeping it that way. Everybody involved, from the actors to the audience, walks through it half-comatose.
- Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the laziest, muddled, and unfunniest chores of a comedy I’ve ever sat through.
- 1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, on the other hand, is a delight. It’s arguably more Hammer Horror than Sherlock Holmes, but with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee on hand, the movie is a whole lot of fun.
I also rewatched A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I think I’d forgotten just how silly and Richard Lesteresque the movie is, but it’s good goofy fun.