The Wrong Box (Bryan Forbes, 1966)

John Mills and Michael Caine in The Wrong Box

Masterman Finsbury: John Mills
Joseph Finsbury: Ralph Richardson
Michael Finsbury: Michael Caine
Morris Finsbury: Peter Cook
John Finsbury: Dudley Moore
Julia Finsbury: Nanette Newman
Peacock: Wilfrid Lawson
Dr. Pratt: Peter Sellers
Detective: Tony Hancock
Lawyer Patience: Thorley Walters
Major Martha: Cicely Courtneidge

Director: Bryan Forbes
Screenplay: Larry Gelbart, Burt Shevelove
Based on a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
Cinematography: Gerry Turpin
Set design: Ray Simm
Costume design: Julie Harris
Film editing: Alan Osbiston
Music: John Barry

The Wrong Box could have used a director like Richard Lester or Blake Edwards, one with a defter comic touch than Bryan Forbes, whose direction is a bit stodgy: The opening sequence that sets up the tontine goes on too long, and the montage of the deaths of the subscribers to the scheme is stolen from the similar sequence in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), which Robert Hamer handled with a lighter, wittier staging. There's an ill-advised slow-motion scene in which Michael Caine and Nanette Newman pirouette through the house as they discover they're in love; it's meant to be a parody of slo-mo love scenes, but it falls flat. And the climactic hearse-chase is something of a muddle whose opportunity for gags is mostly wasted. But none of this matters when you have a cast like this one, capable of reducing you to helpless laughter, as those masters of comic timing Peter Cook and Dudley Moore do to me in the scene in which they resort to using the word "thing" as an all-purpose euphemism. Or when John Mills tries and repeatedly fails to kill Ralph Richardson. Or when Richardson reduces all and sundry to bored stupefaction with his fact-filled monologues. Even the prudish Victorian lovers played by Caine and Newman have wonderful moments, such as Julia's hushed admission that she finds eggs ... obscene, and Michael's eager-to-please acknowledgement that she has opened his eyes to that fact. It goes without saying that Peter Sellers's cameo as the zoned-out Dr. Pratt is one of his many classic moments, but the film is loaded with British comic actors doing their thing, among them Wilfrid Lawson's aged, desiccated butler, Tony Hancock's irascible detective, and Cicely Courtneidge's imperious Salvation Army major. The Wrong Box is a case where directorial auteurship goes out of the window in favor of skilled performers and a screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove that helps them do what they do best.

Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)

Girl: Jenny Agutter
White Boy: Luc Roeg
Black Boy: David Gulpilil
Father: John Mellon

Director: Nicolas Roeg
Screenplay: Edward Bond
Based on a novel by James Vance Marshall
Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg
Production design: Brian Eatwell
Film editing: Antony Gibbs, Alan Pattillo
Music: John Barry

Walkabout is both provocative and provoking. It stimulates thoughts about humankind's relationship to nature, about the fragility and even perniciousness of civilization, and about what happens to everyone as they grow up and learn to "fit in" to societal expectations. It's a film in which brutality jostles beauty. But it's as provoking, as annoying in its way, as a 3-year-old's constantly questioning "Why?" You start out trying to answer, but eventually realize that there's no end to the game. Nicolas Roeg has so loaded the familiar tale of the clash of civilization and the primitive with images and narrative incidentals that defy explanation. We begin with trying to understand the film's initial shock, in which the Father drives his children into the desert for a picnic and then tries to kill them before setting fire to the auto and turning the gun on himself. We want to know what brought him to such a terrible moment, but Roeg has no interest in giving us an answer. We want to know why the Girl so stoically accepts this horror, in the face of which most children would break down. Later in the film, we want to explain interpolated scenes like the one of the scientific crew in the outback -- what are they doing, and why is the one female in the crew so provocatively sexy? And the ending, in which we see the now-grown and -married Girl preparing dinner for her husband, who is crowing about his job advancement, juxtaposed with a scene of the three children playing naked in a pond, has a heavy-handed voiceover quoting A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
 I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

It feels oddly false and sentimental, an evocation of something untrue to the events shown in the film.  Does Roeg intend this ironic jolt, this disjunction of reality and sentiment? If so, he does little to prepare us for it. It's a fascinating film, but it feels incoherent.

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange

Alex: Malcolm McDowell
Dim: Warren Clarke
Georgie: James Marcus
Pete: Michael Tarn
Mr. Alexander: Patrick Magee
Mrs. Alexander: Adrienne Corri
Deltoid: Aubrey Morris
Catlady: Miriam Karlin
Minister: Anthony Sharp

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick
Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess
Cinematography: John Alcott
Production design: John Barry
Costume design: Milena Canonero
Film editing: Bill Butler

Any movie that was panned by Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert can't be all bad, can it? A Clockwork Orange remains one of Stanley Kubrick's most popular films, with an 8.4 rating on IMDb and a 90% fresh rating (93% audience score) on Rotten Tomatoes.  I think it's a tribute to Kubrick that the movie can elicit such widely divergent responses. I can see what Kael, Sarris, and Ebert are complaining about while at the same time admitting that the film is undeniably entertaining in a "horrorshow" way: that being both novelist Anthony Burgess's Nadsat coinage from the Russian word "khorosho," meaning "good," and the English literal sense. For it is a kind of horror movie, with Alex as the monster spawned by modern society -- implacable, controlled only by the most drastic and abhorrent means, in this case a kind of behavioral conditioning. Watching it this time I was struck by how much the aversion therapy to which Alex is subjected reminds me of the attempts to convert gay people to heterosexuality. Which is not to say that Kubrick's film isn't exploitative in the extreme, relying on images of violence and sexuality that almost justify Kael's suggestion that Kubrick is a kind of failed pornographer. It is not the kind of movie that should go without what today are called "trigger warnings." What's good about A Clockwork Orange is certainly Malcolm McDowell's performance as Alex, one of the few really complex human beings in Kubrick's caricature-infested films. Some of his most memorable scenes in the movie were partly improvised, as when he sings "Singin' in the Rain" during his attack on the Alexanders, and when he opens his mouth like a bird when the minister of the interior is feeding him. Kubrick received three Oscar nominations, as producer, director, and screenwriter, and film editor Bill Butler was also nominated, but the movie won none, losing in all four categories to The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971). It deserved nominations not only for McDowell, but also for John Alcott's cinematography and John Barry's production design.