A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Monday, May 18, 2026

Mr. Freedom (William Klein, 1969)

John Abbey in Mr. Freedom

Cast: John Abbey, Delphine Seyrig, Donald Pleasence, Jean-Claude Drouot, Serge Gainsbourg, Yves Lefebvre, Sabine Sun, Rita Maiden, Colin Drake, Pierre Baillot, Raoul Billerey, Philippe Noiret, Sami Frey, Catherine Rouvel, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret. Screenplay: William Klein. Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme. Production design: William Klein. Film editing: Anne-Marie Cotret, Valérie Mayoux, Monique Teisseire. Music: Serge Gainsbourg. 

William Klein's sledgehammer satire Mr. Freedom was made at a time when revolutionary posturing was all the rage in France and things seemed to be coming apart in the United States. It stars John Abbey, an expatriate in France like his director, as a cop turned superpatriotic superhero. Donning the guise of Mr. Freedom, which involves a lot of padded musculature and a costume made out of sports gear, he descends on France to save it from the commies and ends up nuking much of it. For a contemporary equivalent to the character, think of Homelander from The Boys. The movie is a gleefully unsubtle mess, filled with cameos by French actors and a larger role by Delphine Seyrig as Marie-Madeleine, a French collaborator with Mr. Freedom. (Or is she?) The movie's lampoon of American political and cultural imperialism (the American embassy is a shopping mall) is almost too broad to cause offense. It's about half an hour too long, like an SNL skit run amok, but there are laughs to be had.   

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