
In Fabric
Strickland frequently tests viewers’ patience, but his off-putting sensibility is powerful enough to make In Fabric as mesmerizing as its subject: salesmanship as a sinister,…
Strickland frequently tests viewers’ patience, but his off-putting sensibility is powerful enough to make In Fabric as mesmerizing as its subject: salesmanship as a sinister,…
Portrait of a Lady on Fire is its own, wondrous, magnificent thing.
Roger Ebert on James Ivory's "Howards End".
"The Ballad of Narayama" is a Japanese film of great beauty and elegant artifice, telling a story of startling cruelty. What a space it opens…
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An article about the screening of Horace Jenkins' "Cane River" on Friday, November 1st, at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles.
Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterpieces celebrates Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.
An article about today's noon premiere of a new movie about architect Benjamin Marshall at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
An FFC on Gavin Hood's Official Secrets.
A celebration of Yasujiro Ozu, as written by a Far Flung Correspondent from Egypt.
A piece on Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Joe Pesci, and what they've meant to the career of Martin Scorsese.
A review of Apple TV's Truth Be Told with Octavia Spencer and Aaron Paul.
"Going Home" is a fairly awful melodrama that's worth seeing primarily for the presence of Robert Mitchum. Not that he's especially good. Mitchum can't be described as good or bad in most of his performances. It's just that he's there, the kind of screen presence that draws your attention.
Someone was remarking the other day that Mitchum had never been in a really great film. That's just about true. He's been in some good films (and "Thunder Road" is still able to fill any drive-in in the South for two weeks) but nothing really great. Yet he remains the favorite movie star of a lot of people (myself probably included) and he is able to make a bad movie interesting.
Advertisement
[NOTE: Ebert later added "The Night of the Hunter" (1955), featuring Mitchum's most famous and outrageous performance, to his list of Great Movies. "The Night of the Hunter" was very difficult to see in the 1960s and 1970s.]
And no mistake about it, "Going Home" is bad. It is also Meaningful in a cynical, isn't-life-hell kind of way. Mitchum plays a guy who got drunk 14 years ago and murdered his wife. When he gets parole, he moves into a trailer camp, falls in love (with Brenda Vaccaro) and then is confronted by his son (Jan-Michael Vincent). The son is one of those huge physical presences who is supposed to say nothing but project a lot of smoldering anger. This gets heavy after about one scene. A lot of things in the movie get heavy, for that matter, including a clumsily-handled suggestion that the boy is impotent, some Grand Guignol flashbacks and a rape in a loft filled with fighting, uh, roosters.
"Going Home" must have rushed through post-production. It was still filming on location in August, and now here it is. Some of the haste shows as when the son turns up and says "Hi, dad" and Mitchum goes into his trailer without a word. Then Brenda Vaccaro turns up, and in the next scene all three of them are outside the trailer. There must have been a moment there somewhere when she persuaded him to go back outside, but it's not in the movie. This kind of sloppiness makes it hard for us to figure out the characters, if we cared to.
An early review of Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell out of AFI Fest.
A Far Flung Correspondent weighs in on the MCU controversy.
Scout Tafoya's video essay series about maligned masterpieces celebrates Steven Soderbergh's Solaris.
This message came to me from a reader named Peter Svensland. He and a fr...