Woman of Vapors, Man of Stone

The National Society of Film Critics has picked as best film of the past year Bertrand Blier’s Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Now, I realize that 1978 was a disaster year for movies, and that the Blier film made it as a compromise to keep some other films, which various reviewers found even more hateful, from winning. Under the circumstances no film should have been proclaimed worthy, but, perhaps by analogy with politics, some candidate always gets elected, be he ever so questionable.

Blier’s first film, Going Places, was an offensive piece of misogynistic claptrap, celebrating the alliance of two thoroughly worthless petty criminals at the expense of the bourgeois world, particularly its females. Blier’s next, evidently, was so appalling that it sank before it could cross the ocean. Handkerchiefs, his third, is less overtly woman-hating and antisocial, but the basic stance of Going Places is present in a somewhat disguised or diluted form.

JS

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John Simon

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The National Society of Film Critics has picked as best film of the past year Bertrand Blier’s Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Now, I realize that 1978 was a disaster year for movies, and that the Blier film made it as a compromise to keep some other films, which various reviewers found even more hateful, from winning. Under the circumstances no film should have been proclaimed worthy, but, perhaps by analogy with politics, some candidate always gets elected, be he ever so questionable.

Blier’s first film, Going Places, was an offensive piece of misogynistic claptrap, celebrating the alliance of two thoroughly worthless petty criminals at the expense of the bourgeois world, particularly its females. Blier’s next, evidently, was so appalling that it sank before it could cross the ocean. Handkerchiefs, his third, is less overtly woman-hating and antisocial, but the basic stance of Going Places is present in a somewhat disguised or diluted form.