For the remainder of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, we’ll be highlighting a selection from Roger’s Cannes coverage each day, providing you with luminous snapshots of the critic’s many invaluable weeks spent in the midday sun.
Flashback #1: A Study in the Art of Being Rude
Language barriers, cinematic delirium and general cluelessness are merely a few of the factors that can cause a Cannes press conference to steadily devolve into a free-for-all. This first selection from the 1981 festival hilariously details the outrageous disorder that engulfs a conference for Bob Rafelson’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange. Roger is clearly appalled by the chaos and has a blast reporting on it. When long-suffering moderator Richard Roud exclaims, “Ladies and gentlemen, please!” as the paparazzi raids the starry panel, Roger half-quips, “He has been the festival translator for years and must know that none of the paprazzi fall into those two categories.”
