Playing the Tens : The New Yorker

Playing the Tens : The New Yorker:


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From the text:

JasonRoss gives the list the kind of penetrating read that is a great privilege for a writer—the kind that really reveals something and adds a dimension to my thinking about movies:

I find a peculiar and particular trend running through Brody’s top ten. Almost all of them feature the director as an actor. Godard gives his third and final wacky comic performance in King Lear; director John Cassavettes stars in Husbands with his two friends playing his two friends; directors Chaplin and Tati play their iconic comedic personas in their respective films; Roberto Rossellini directs his wife, Ingrid Bergman; Jean Renoir gives one of the greatest performances in cinema in The Rules of the Game; and Claude Lanzmann is a considerable presence in Shoah. Brody inadvertently points out how many of the greatest films are films by singular artists who fully immerse their lives into their work. Strange then that a great artist whose life and work are forever intwined, Orson Welles, whose Citizen Kane has topped the sight and sound poll for the last fifty years, is not mentioned by Brody in this article.

He’s exactly right; and, for that matter, Alfred Hitchcock’s doomed personal relationship with Tippi Hedren is, I think, one of the reasons for the astonishing charge packed by “Marnie.”

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