[on Catherine Deneuve's performance in Mississippi Mermaid (1969)] Mlle Deneuve can portray a cool clotheshorse with a schoolgirl emotion or two very nicely, as in La Chamade; beyond that her histrionic pittance will not stretch.
2
[on Stéphane Audran's performance in Les Biches (1968)] Stéphane Audran (Mme Chabrol - which explains a thing or two, though not everything) combines the vacuous, far-off gaze of a blind explorer with a surly, pinched delivery of lines as if they were shoes several sizes too small.
3
[on Les Biches (1968)] As stupid, ugly and mean-spirited a film as you can find this side of [Jean-Luc] Godard and that side of [Joseph] Losey. You can almost see tubes attached to the heels of all the characters, through which the meaning has been sucked out of them and Chabrol pumped in. The one purveyor of pretentious tripe who can almost hold his own against Godard is Claude Chabrol, who gave Godard his first real break. Credited with fathering the New Wave, Chabrol hit his stride with his initial film, Le Beau Serge, and the rest was downhill. Whereas Godard takes all human knowledge and endeavor for his province, Chabrol's satrapy is the depth of the human soul, which he sounds without the slightest regard for psychology but with a voracious zeal for perversion, for whose logic he shows equal disregard. A film by Chabrol is like a game of chess where, at Chabrol's whim, a pawn can get knighted, and a bishop can carry on like a raving queen.
4
[on Diana Rigg's performance in The Hospital (1971)] A hippie from Boston [is] played without a shred of credibility or aptitude by Miss Rigg. Pretentious and preposterous as the part is in the writing, she manages to make it even more ludicrous in the acting. She is, moreover, far too British, old, and smug for the role, and would seem much more competent to freeze vital fluids than to release them.
5
[on Maggie Smith's performance in Washington Square (1997)] Maggie Smith's fluttery and unctuous caricature of Aunt Lavinia (Miss Smith's performances have become quite unwatchable), further shifting the emphasis toward vulgarization.
6
[on Alain Delon's performance in Spirits of the Dead (1968)] If there is anything worse than Alain Delon in a starring role, it is Alain Delon in a dual role.
[on Glenda Jackson's performance in Women in Love (1969)] Glenda Jackson gives the most interesting performance of the film, but is, alas, almost frighteningly plain. Her features are heavy and somehow malevolent in their irregularity; her body is like a block of uncarved stone except for her much-revealed breasts, shaped like collapsing gourds; and her thick arms and legs might as well be those of the West African fetish that figures so prominently in the novel but is cut from the film.
9
[on Barbra Streisand) A full-screen close-up of Miss Streisand is a truly terrifying experience; as the camera moves closer and closer you know what Sir Edmund Hillary [who successfully climbed Mt. Everest] must have felt.
10
[on Jean-Luc Godard] Since Godard's films have nothing to say, perhaps we could have 90 minutes silence instead of each of them.
11
Any attempt in America to make a film a work of art must be hailed. Usually, in the same breath, it must be farewelled.
12
[on Walter Matthau] He looks like a half-melted rubber bulldog.
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Fact
1
Longtime film / theater critic for New York Magazine (as distinguished from the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, and the New Yorker).
2
Film and theatre critic for "New York Magazine" for thirty-five years, a position from which he retired in 2005. He is an ardent champion of the films of Ingmar Bergman, whom he considers the greatest director to work in films. He has covered foreign cinema just as extensively as American cinema.
$15 Million
