Marianne Faithfull, Made in U.S.A., Jean-Luc Godard, 1966
Marianne Faithfull, Irina Palm, Sam Garbaski, 2007
Still stunning, and still the undisputed Queen Of Cool, British division.
Hat tip to the ever great If Charlie Parker Was A Gunslinger… for inspiration…
I sit and watch…
…As Tears Go By
In his autobiography, Captain Beefheart’s guitar player Zoot Horn Rollo reminisces about meeting Marianne Faithfull at a party back in the day. He says something like “I saw Marianne Faithfull there and she was gorgeous. She had a long thread of drool coming out one side of her mouth, but she was gorgeous.”
I’ve seen some video of Marianne’s recent live performances and she’s at the top of her game as a performing artist. I think her album BEFORE THE POISON, with songs she co-wrote with Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, leaves BROKEN ENGLISH in the dust.
Completely unrelated to this, who says Première doesn’t still offer insightful critique?
http://www.première.com/Review/Movies/Transformers-Revenge-of-the-Fallen
$60 million opening day…
*sigh*.
Anyways, more on topic, I wonder why Criterion isn’t giving the new Godard releases (Made In USA and Two Or Three Things…) the Blu-ray treatment. How do they decide what qualifies? Does a film have to be singled out for its visual greatness?
God, I loved that movie when I saw the re-release a few months ago. What was Donald Westlake’s problem? Surely this adaptation, however loose (and I assume it was so loose as to have no real connection to the source material) couldn’t have been more offensive than every other Westlake adaptation, Point Blank excepted. Anyway, it was a real treat to see it in the theater here in LA.
@JC: I sure wish that Criterion would put EVERYTHING they’ve got on Blu-ray, but there are myriad economic, not to mention licensing, concerns that necessarily inform all their decisions in that realm. Both films look absolutely killer in their SD editions, particularly if played on an upconverting player.
@Joel: I don’t know that Westlake had a problem with the film per se so much as he had a problem with getting, as he and his attorneys saw it, ripped off. Godard’s film is, after all, a very cursory adaptation of “The Jugger.” As it happens, Westlake was making himself available for interviews on the film just prior to its Film Forum revival, and I was going to schedule one, but the man died before he spoke to any press about the picture,
As a future lawyer, I understand why he objected to Made in USA. Too bad you couldn’t interview him. He’s one of my favorite comic novelists, and I’ve always thought that there’s a great trove of un-filmed Westlake on the bookstore shelves, starting with God Save the Mark.
She is gorgeous, but IRINA PALM is one of the worst European movies released in the last ten years. And that’s saying something.
@ Lord Henry: I ought to have explicitly stated that in the context of “Then and Now,” a screen cap is by no means to be taken as an implicit endorsement of the film itself. Because “Palm” is indeed pretty bad, and ridiculous.