The Montreal Star from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 70

ifLja ti: jut jr 7 Faflm 'MM lor ACADEMY AWARDS Martin Molina BEST PICTURE Bound for Glory BEST ACTOR: ROBERT DE NIRO i If I IttsSsrll BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: JODIE FOSTER cl David Carradine in Bound For Glory DAILY AT: 100-500 ROBERT DE NIRO '9 TAXI DRIVER A BILL PHILLIPS Production of a MARTIN SCORSESE Film 111 STKimUl W-UW1Y 866-8057 playing of its principal character and Miss Foster disappoint Thirteen-year-old Rynn Jacobs is meant to be self-sufficient her late father groomed her accordingly but the fierce show of independence that Foster brings to the part probably surpasses the Intentions of director Nicolas Gessner and scenarist Laird Koenig Rynn is so self-contained and sure of herself it is positively eerie When the landlady's (Alexis Smith) shrill nosiness threatens secret (that her father is not locked in his study writing poetry whenever someone visits or consulting his publisher in New York but is in fact dead) Rynn coolly rids herself of the woman by poisoning her tea A similar fate befalls another pest a nasty child seducer named Frank Hallet (Martin Sheen) who would like to add Rynn to his list of conquests I want to give away too much of the plot particularly what happens between Rynn and a cheerful young neighbor (Scott Jacoby) who rides on a bicycle dressed in magician's costume even if the plot is the picture's weak point The fun in Little Girl is not so much in what happens (you'll probably see through it early on) but how it happens And Jodie Foster herself is a winder to behold I FIND IT FASCINATING A REVEL OF A MOVIE!" CANBY NY TIMES servers as something novel as an original slant at once comic and compassionate on the familiar working-class world of east end chaude looks artificial a contrived and largely unsuccessful attempt at black humor a sort of primitive Grand Hotel set in a tawdry rooming house on St Denis Former's images are still shock-provoking a pubescent girl boosts the ignition of a friend's motorcycle with the battery of her pacemaker a shooting gallery with live rats a farcical birthday party thrown for the local loan shark by his clients but they float weight-lesaly through a banal and Indulgent soap opera The critical raves for Bar Salon seem to have gone to Forder's head that's what you like" he appears to have reasoned "Well here's even What's wrong with L'eau chaude Is what's wrong with so many Quebec films a lack of control Not restraint chaude is not meant to be a social document or a realistic sllce-of-life domestic melodrama energy is essentially anarchistic (his acknowledged model is Vigo) But where Vigo's films (and Bar Salon) were ultimately upbeat L'eau chaude is ridden with easy cynicism and despair Bar Salon was most eloquent during its silences In chaude the din is deafening We can't hear the dialogue lor the loud and often four-lettered words The actors Jean Lapointe as Polo the loan shark Guy L'Ecuyer as Panama the homosexual baker Jean-Pier re Bergeron as the frustrated delivery boy Louise Gagnon as the most mischievous screen heroine since Zazie in the Metro Sophie Clement as her promiscuous mother etc and Forcier himself seem to have had a ball making this move It's a pity we can't have as much fun watching it MIND-BOGGLING MADLY EXTRAVAGANT SPECTACLEI 14 A BOLD JOURNEY INTO THE WILDEST REACHES OF YENS THE IMAGINATION OF A GENIUS FILMMAKER EYE-DAZZLING ROBUSTLY AMUSING KATHLEEN CARROLL HY HEWS "FABULOUS FILMMAKING THAT TAKES ITS PLACE AMONG WILLIAM WOLE CUE MAGAZINE gr Fellini's vLasaiiiMjvai The Edge mis riRsr cnc'iLism lanojage film Hiatedlof 2 III 1 -v i FOR ALL the sailing ships and speeches and re-enacted battles in period cos tume last year's American bicentenary was a curiously unmarked affair The United States have a poet laureate and Robert Frost who was its closest American equivalent is dead Top American painters and sculptors either ignored or satirized the event and the only writers whom it seemed to were newspaper editorialists The cinema was in a particularly un-American mood in 1978 what with Buffalo Bill and the Indians All the President's Men Network Taxi Driver and a host of similarly pessimlsticparanoiac works (And if you think 1977 is any improvement see Twilight's Last Gleaming or The Cassandra Crossing) The only celebratory picture of any consequence that Hollywood made in 1978 (actually in 1975 for release late last year) is Bound for Glory (now at the Avenue) and the man it celebrates was (and still is) sometimes regarded as an unpatriotic Red These charges are ridiculous Woody Guthrie the subject of Bound for Glory was as American as Walt Whitman and cherry pie and it Is appropriate though a little Ironic that one of his most famous songs This Land is Your Land which started out as a battle hymn for left-wing activists should have ended up as an anthem for professional patriots 1 And despite the left-wing legend there was always something boosterish about Guthrie's view of America not to mention a certain self-righteousness in the way he expressed it But warts and all Woody Guthrie is as genuine an American hero as Hollywood ever invented and the movie that Hall Ashby has made of a short but seminal period in Guthrie's life is itself a triumph of Americana Bound for Glory takes place toward the end of the Depression Guthrie wrote his memoir in 1943 when he was 32 (he died in 1967 after suffering 13 years of a slow torture known as Huntingdon's chorea) and not yet halfway through the rambling career that would eventually produce over 1000 of the best-known American folk songs The movie begins its story in 1936 when Guthrie fled his wife and kids in the dusty panhandle of Texas (Pampa to be precise) and it follows the young guitar-strumming vagabond across hard-times America to Los Angeles and a promising musical career in the early The film takes well over two hours to tell the story of these few years and although it is a picture in all senses of the word the form it takes is more picaresque than epic more akin to a ballad than a socio-historical saga Bound for Glory is Woody's story In the book he had tried to explain how (to borrow a current expression) his consciousness was raised bv encounters with the Grapes-of-Wrath world of migrant farmworkers and it is full of personal anecdotes Ashby and scenarist Robert Gretchell (who wrote Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore) gambled that they could reproduce this sprawling story on the screen and it is a bet that has paid off handsomely Bound for Glory is long it is repetitious one could trim 20 minutes without affecting the film's plot or any important dramatic incident But while the content might not change the film's form surely would 1 And that form sketchy anecdotal rambling in short a sort of cinematic ballad is one of the great strengths of Bound for Glory The others are chiefly Haskell Wexler's stunningly atmospheric color cinematography he has managed to reproduce the same texture of Depression America that we have come to know from Steinbeck and the great still photograhers of the '30s Walker Evans Dorothea Lange and Margarate Bourke-White and a castful of excellent acting led by David Carradine's performance as Woody Carradine does not bear too much physical resemblance to Guthrie and his singing voice is a lot deeper and less raspy than Woody's But without imitating Woody's mannerisms Carradine seems to have caught his essence the restless energy the gritty implacable conviction that things ought to and would be changed and he has done this with minimum of thespian technique It is such a winning performance that we are inclined to overlook the occasional false notes and even the romanticizing of Woody Guthrie (whose feelings for "people" never seemed to include his wife and kldf) We are carried along by Carradine and by this picture in much the same way that we sing along so happily with own songs Bound for Glory is an amazingly Infectious film SYLVIA KR1STEL is no slough either as fans of Emmanuelle will already know The Dutch-bom queen of soft-core pom plays a (thoroughly unlikely but who cares?) pavement-pounding French prostitute in The Edge (at Loews) a hooker with a heart of malleable base metal who learns to enjoy the amorous and monetary attentions particularly the latter) lavished upon her by a rich provincial (Joe Dallesandro also rather unlikely in the role) suffering from what the French call le demon de midi The Edge was written (from a novel by Andrd Pieyre de Maniargues) and directed by Walerian Borowczyk the expatriate Pole who (in Blanche Immoral Tales The Beast and The Story of Sin) has developed into one of the few true artists of erotic cinema The Edge is not quite up to the imaginative standard of Immoral Talcs but Borowczyk has managed to transform what might just have been a ludicrous melodrama into an exquisitely stylized study of sexual obsessions The film's psychology may be shallow and its visual beauty only skin deep but what skin! BEST SCREENPLAY (BASED ON MATERIAL FROM ANOTHER MEDIUM) BEST COSTUME DESIGN The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane A Film by FEDERICO FELLINI wm DONALD SUTHERLAND by ALBLRTO GRIMALDI 4 THE PRECOCIOUS talents of Jodie Foster who is up for an Oscar at the end of this month for her brilliant performance in Taxi Driver are on display once again in a Canadiajwnade film entitled The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Loews) This odd little adolescent love story-cum-murder mystery depends very heavily for Ha effectiveness mi the PLACE DU CARADfll NnUtyt: US Sltwlij--1JS-40l-7il ISS Snfij: 2JI S1S I1S VIA CHATEAU CHAMPLAIN 861-4595 IN CONCERT AND BEYOND I FOR ALL BONUUTED FOI 3 MISERY MUDS including BEST ACTRESS MAUE-CMSTIME BAIUUAT BEST FOUND FILM 1 tl tet mnM 111 The funniest film of 1905 Enfhali SuMiUm A FILM BV JUN CHARLES TACCHELLA STARRING MARIE CHRISTINE BARRAULT VICTOR LANOUX MARIE FRANCE FI5IER MIMA FILMS Wookdayt: 716-91S Sot-Sun: 1 40-3 40-B 30-725-9 IB 7TT7 18VBARS Adukt (Lacggln) FASHION FLOOR 31-1311 1 "I BONE-CHUM NEMHUYIM IRC WU KKMN tCUJUNM FM HEED HY DAILY HEWS COLUMNIST "WOBBI BUM III BUM UTBMSTf TO STUB IT WIT I FEW BUS HI" WOLF CUE MAGAZINE THEM MUST FOREVER DC A GUARDIAN AT THE GATE FROM HELL 's-sS'" YEARS From the Frightening Dest-Seller thtwjw senni L'eau chaude frette Prawn A DaM Mm ll AMICHMIMNNEAF1M IHESENTiNEC CHRIS SARANDON -CRISTINA RAINES MARTIN DAUAM JOHN CARRADINE -JOSE FERRER AVA GARDNER ARTHUR KENNEDY-DURGESS MEREDITH SYLVIAMIIES DEBORAH RAFFIN-EUWALLACH 7 ATWATER 1 ALEXIS MHOIMWA ANDRE FORCIER didn't so much burst onto the Quebec movie scene in 1975 as sneak up on it Bar Salon Forder's second and best film had to make the rounds of local and international festivals before earning commercial release and critical notice and Forder's latest film L'eau chaude l'eau frette (in French at the Parislcn) has takdn a similar route Bpt where Har Salon struck ob- 100-325-525 725-925 With CHEVY CHASE liar of "Saturday Night Llvo" AJM Sun CHEECH CHONG "Basketball Jones" METRO LEVEL 935-4246 METRO LfVH UB4MI E14 THK MONTH IE AL STAS EVTKRVAINMtim 1ATHRIMV MARCH IH?.