Tremendous Trivia

This summer’s films are at least as foolish as estival films usually are. La Cage aux folles (Birds of a Feather) is typical: a young man is introducing his fiancee’s proper family to his father and “stepmother,” who happen to be, respectively, the homosexual owner of a transvestite nightclub and his lover, the drag star of the establishment. We are treated to equal numbers of anti-homosexual and anti-heterosexual jokes, so that there is something cathartic in the film for everybody.

There is also A Little Romance, in which an adolescent American girl living in Paris with her family runs off with a French youth of her own age; they are united by their shared love for the works of Martin Heidegger, except when he writes about that “bore” Hölderlin! These young geniuses are hoodwinked by an elderly French conman (Laurence Olivier, in his worst movie performance to date) who, as an alleged aristocrat, joins them on their travels and steers them toward Venice where, as he tells them, lovers who kiss in a gondola at sunset under the Bridge of Sighs can never be parted. The kids are parted nonetheless, but the old crook is redeemed by them, and, who knows: Paris is only a couple of hours from America as the Concorde flies.

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John Simon

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This summer’s films are at least as foolish as estival films usually are. La Cage aux folles (Birds of a Feather) is typical: a young man is introducing his fiancee’s proper family to his father and “stepmother,” who happen to be, respectively, the homosexual owner of a transvestite nightclub and his lover, the drag star of the establishment. We are treated to equal numbers of anti-homosexual and anti-heterosexual jokes, so that there is something cathartic in the film for everybody.

There is also A Little Romance, in which an adolescent American girl living in Paris with her family runs off with a French youth of her own age; they are united by their shared love for the works of Martin Heidegger, except when he writes about that “bore” Hölderlin! These young geniuses are hoodwinked by an elderly French conman (Laurence Olivier, in his worst movie performance to date) who, as an alleged aristocrat, joins them on their travels and steers them toward Venice where, as he tells them, lovers who kiss in a gondola at sunset under the Bridge of Sighs can never be parted. The kids are parted nonetheless, but the old crook is redeemed by them, and, who knows: Paris is only a couple of hours from America as the Concorde flies.