Kerry Kennedy’s book may be called Being Catholic Now, but her opening is pure chutzpah. Given an audience with Pope Benedict a few years back, she asked him, “In view of the tragedy unfolding in Africa, for the sake of the sanctity of life, would you consider changing the Church’s position on the use of condoms?” It’s a great, inescapable moment, one of those times the powerful are called on their own hypocrisy and given the chance to rise above it. At Ms. Kennedy’s audience, His Evasiveness merely “gazed beneficently, imparting ‘God bless you’ as he passed.”

For Being Catholic Now, Ms. Kennedy interviewed a slew of prominent Catholics and ex-Catholics, in politics and letters and show business, from the right and the left. It’s easy to understand how the roster of names—Susan Sarandon, Bill O’Reilly, Donna Brazile, Bill Maher, Nancy Pelosi and others—would have a publisher seeing a chance to appeal to a wide audience. But Ms. Kennedy’s introduction is much more interesting than anything that follows; reading Being Catholic Now, I wished she’d expanded the introduction to make a book-length combination of spiritual autobiography and reportage.

Ms. Kennedy writes that Catholics find themselves torn between the “ingrained principle that members of the hierarchy … are the direct conduits between the laity and God,” and the obvious hypocrisies of the church. She’s not an angry or slashing writer. But within a few pages, she has drawn a portrait of an organization that’s morally culpable of increasing the misery and death on the already besieged African continent. And if we were talking about a big business (and who’s to say we’re not), it would clearly be seen as guilty of obstruction of justice in its handling of the child rape scandals that have rocked the church around the world.

That scandal is implicit in Ms. Kennedy’s scathing treatment of Cardinal Bernard Law, the former Boston archbishop whisked to a job in the Vatican beyond the reach of investigators just as his involvement in covering up the Boston child rape scandals were leading some to speculate that he’d be indicted. Ms. Kennedy, who is Bobby Kennedy’s daughter, recalls the archbishop as a publicity-hungry martinet barging into the spotlight after the suicide of her brother David.

LIKE MANY OF THOSE she interviewed, Ms. Kennedy seems to think it imperative for Catholics to stay in the church because she believes that the presence of such Catholics will finally compel change. But while I respect the work she’s done here—the honest attempt to grapple with the reconciliation of spiritual calling and social progressivism—I can’t help but feel that she and her interviewees are deluding themselves.

It’s simply unrealistic to believe that an antidemocratic institution can be changed by democratic sentiment. If nothing else, the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy shows a church arrogantly disdainful of its parishioner’s wishes.

It would be one thing if, as in the case of Andrew Sullivan, say, or Cokie Roberts, we were reading a variation of the old Groucho joke: people who only want to belong to a club that would never have someone like them for a member. That’s their choice. But when Sister Joan Chittister says that change in the Catholic Church “happens over long periods of time,” or James Carroll blathers that those who say the church will never change don’t know history, you wonder, can they hear themselves? Do they know how close they sound to those people who said America wasn’t ready for civil rights, the people to whom Martin Luther King Jr. addressed Why We Can’t Wait?

You don’t have to know the history of change in the Catholic Church to know the score. The fact is that this institution, which many of Ms. Kennedy’s interviewees are defending as a place that teaches the concept of social justice, is, by the deadly combination of its growing influence in Africa and its blanket prohibition against condoms, adding immeasurably to the poverty of a desperately poor continent, to the environmental crisis caused by population growth, to the burdens of a deepening global economic catastrophe and to the spread of a global pandemic.

And the people who still sit in pews hoping vainly to change the attitudes of a church that cares nothing about their dissent are, by their material and spiritual support, stirring that demon’s brew. Isn’t it time for Catholics who claim a sense of social justice to separate themselves from an institution that, while it claims to follow Christ, ensures the least of our brethren poverty and misery and death?

Charles Taylor is a writer living in Brooklyn. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Jon Savage’s breathtaking history of the punk movement in the United Kingdom, England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond (1992), combined the excitement of a fan caught up in a fevered cultural moment with the perspective of a critic who could stand back and see the big picture.

Mr. Savage’s new book is Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, and the prospect of reading him on that subject was­—for me, at least—almost mouthwatering. So it gives me no pleasure to report that Teenage is a major disappointment. Both too much and not enough, the book is clearly the result of a prodigious amount of research. What it’s lacking is the unifying narrative linking all the byways and ratholes that England’s Dreaming ventured into. It’s simply not clear what story Mr. Savage intends to tell here.

His book ends in 1945, just at the point you might expect any history of youth culture to begin, with Sinatra already a teen idol and Elvis waiting in the wings, with the postwar prosperity looming and the buying power of the American teen just starting to manifest itself.

There’s nothing wrong with a cultural historian who delivers readers to the point at which they’re capable of following the story on their own. And there’s both originality and inspiration in Mr. Savage’s decision to bookend his tale with incidents that highlight the constants of teen life: feverish, melodramatic suffering; reckless, even psychotic lashing out; rebellion and conformism.

Teenage begins in 1875, in Nice, when the 17-year-old Russian émigré Marie Bashkirtseff starts keeping a diary that would, 12 years later (three years after her death from tuberculosis), become the first best-selling chronicle of teen angst. A year before Bashkirtseff began her diary, a 15-year-old named Jesse Pomeroy was sentenced to hang in Massachusetts for 10 killings—nine of the victims were little boys. The punishment was commuted to life in prison, in solitary confinement, but society is still stymied by Pomeroy: How do we reconcile existing notions of juvenile delinquency and the diminished capacity attributed to young offenders with the deliberation of Pomeroy’s crimes?

When Teenage ends, nearly 500 pages later, in 1945, Anne Frank—whose diary portrays adolescent growing pains against the starkest backdrop imaginable—has just died of typhus in a concentration camp. American youth, meanwhile, was set to become the engine of a new pop culture that would reach more lands than even the Allied armies had.

With bookends like that, there are all sorts of places the story could go—into accounts of teens becoming the heroes they imagine themselves to be, or else allowing themselves to be the villains others fear. But what comes in between feels like nothing so much as a pile-up of incident; there’s no connective tissue to make the jumbled narratives into one story.

The problem may be that the subject has been on Mr. Savage’s mind since 1980, when he began work on a documentary television series—also called Teenage—that never aired. Twenty-seven years is a long time to work on anything, and ample time to lose the thread. (Mr. Savage tells us in his introduction that material on Italy and Russia was cut from what is already a long book.)

Teenage comes alive only towards the end. Mr. Savage does his best writing on the youths who resisted the Nazis in Germany, France and other occupied countries. He writes not just about the White Rose (the group to which Sophie Scholl belonged), and Helmuth Hübener, a Mormon youth executed for producing pamphlets that ridiculed the Nazis’ claims of imminent victory, but about the swing kids whose rebellion was no less dangerous for its insouciance, responding to “Heil! Heil! Heil!” with the likes of “Sing! Sing! Sing!”

Perhaps Mr. Savage felt that to dwell on these stories would have been to fall back too readily on the iconography of teenage rebellion, on stories that are comfortably heroic. But he can’t disguise that these stories rouse something in him that nothing else in the book does. He’s particularly good on the Zazous, the French swing fans living under German occupation. Like the punks who would follow them, these kids practiced a form of what the Situationists called détournement, unmooring the banal and overlooked from their established contexts and setting them adrift in new surroundings where their emptiness spoke like an open secret. Scouring the Vichy papers for the latest mealy-mouthed pronouncement from Pétain, the Zazous passed the marshal’s phrases around as examples of the “crystallised perfume of stupidity,” in much the same way that, years later, a shot of an ordinary family gathered in their ordinary kitchen would provide the cover for the Sex Pistols’ most terrifying single, “Holidays in the Sun.”

INEVITABLY, THE STORY OF the rise of youth culture is the story of the growing economic power of teenagers, particularly American teens. Oddly, uncharacteristically, this fact leads Mr. Savage to some conventional thinking. The faintly disapproving comments on consumerism that crop up throughout the book are summed up by these lines towards the end of Teenage: “The postwar spread of American values would be spearheaded by the Teenager … living in the now, pleasure-seeking, product-hungry, embodying the new global society where social inclusion was to be granted through personal power.”

Those lines, a gloss on George Melly’s observation that pop culture turns revolt into style, are true enough, as far as they go, but they also miss the point. Surely as dedicated and ardent a lover of pop music as Mr. Savage understands that consumer culture has—through Elvis and some of the early rock ’n’ rollers, the Beatles and, later, the first British punks—led to spontaneous outbursts of enthusiasm that call into question the very underpinnings of the society that makes consumerism possible.

It’s a letdown that Jon Savage seems content to believe pop will eat itself, when previously he’s written so brilliantly on a cultural moment when pop damn near swallowed everything around it.

Charles Taylor has written for Salon, The New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications. He’s a frequent contributor to The Observer.

Reading Mr. Buckley’s Boomsday, I kept thinking how perfectly it fits the description set out by Robert Warshow in his 1947 essay “E.B. White and The New Yorker.” Warshow wrote about the tendency to deal with experience “not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted towards it.” He went on, “This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”

A strange tack for a satirist to take, but then Mr. Buckley, perhaps better than any other writer, represents the way satire, which is meant to unsettle us, has been replaced by smug, cynical farce, which means to do nothing more than confirm our prejudices. Thus, in Mr. Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking (1994), the reader is regaled with the unthinkable idea that smoking-industry lobbyists are ruthless enough to stoop to anything on behalf of their clients, and that the politicians who oppose them are often more concerned with enhancing their own stature and power than with protecting the public health.

If you were comforted by that novel, or last year’s movie version, or any of Mr. Buckley’s other works, you’ll likely derive an even greater sense of security from Boomsday, in which we learn that the coming retirement of baby boomers ready to draw Social Security benefits will put a ferocious strain on our national economy, provoking resentment in younger generations and inspiring unscrupulous lobbyists, politicians and demagogues of every political stripe to ever more exploitive and outrageous manipulations of public anger. Put Aunt Tillie to bed.

The “wicked” quotient in Boomsday, just the thing to fire up the blurbs now in the making, comes by way of the portentously named D.C. consultant and blogger Cassandra Devine. Cued to be amused by her heartlessness thanks to her roster of appalling clients (including the C.E.O. of a hospital-administration business who leaves patients with substandard care while raking in a huge salary and stock bonuses), we’re ready for Cassandra’s brainchild, a plan by which the government will offer incentives—paid vacation, estate-tax waiver—to people who agree to kill themselves by the time they hit 75. And when younger people, fired up by Cassandra’s blog, begin attacking retirement communities, the scheme acquires potential political heat. Looking to exploit that advantage is Randolph Jepperson, a Massachusetts Congressman eager for career advancement, who makes common cause and then whoopee with our heroine. (Swap a Humvee and a minefield in Bosnia for a sedan and a bridge in Chappaquiddick and it’s clear who Mr. Buckley has in his sights.)

At this point the reviewer, eager not to spoil the pleasure that awaits you, dear reader, resorts to phrases like “hilarious complications ensue,” followed by a short list hinting at the ingenious plot points: a right-to-life bigwig; Cassandra’s computer-tycoon daddy; Russian hookers; a compromised monsignor; a slick Presidential advisor and his increasingly unpopular President.

As a farceur, Mr. Buckley has a knack for escalating mayhem, but his keen sense of his own cleverness snuffs the spark of delight that farce needs. (The type of thing he’s attempting here has been done much more joyously by Peter Lefcourt in novels like The Dreyfus Affair: A Love Story, Di and I, and Abbreviating Ernie. That Mr. Lefcourt is able to see the absurdity of contemporary culture and still get a kick out of its juiciness is a mark of his generosity.)

But Mr. Buckley isn’t content with farce; he wants to be a satirist. And, invariably, someone—I mean someone besides the author of the jacket copy—brings up Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Which, in this instance, is a little like bringing up Moby-Dick in the midst of Gilligan’s Island. Real satire requires a measure of deadly seriousness and steely logic. The Swift essay is so effective precisely because the reasoning in it is so hard to refute. And satire won’t necessarily make us laugh: It should, as the great Terry Southern once said, seek to astonish us. That’s exactly what artists like Michael Tolkin, in his novel Among the Dead and his film The New Age, and Michel Houellebecq, in his superb Platform, accomplish. The astonishment can be mixed with disgust or exhilaration, but there’s the sense that impossible things are happening in an utterly rational manner.

There can be no astonishment in writing when the main goal is to convey to the reader that the writer is onto everyone else’s bullshit, above being surprised by any of it. Like a mom making sure all the kids get the same number of cookies, Mr. Buckley carefully parcels out his jibes among left and right. He drops E! and Paris and Britney and Lindsay references to show us he’s hep to the jive. (But could he identify Arcade Fire, Chamillionaire or Rachel Bilson?) As Warshow wrote back in 1947, “In this human and yet knowing atmosphere, history and destruction and one’s own helplessness become small and simple and somehow peaceful.” Or, to make a pop-culture reference that Mr. Buckley would be unlikely to catch, it’s the end of the world as we know it and he feels fine.

Charles Taylor has written for Salon, The New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications. He’s a frequent contributor to The Observer.

What hadn’t changed was the fairly sexless notion of marriage. Even as grounded a couple as Rob and Laura Petrie slept in separate beds. Without a doubt, the most amorous couple on television was Gomez and Morticia Addams (those sublime canoodlers, John Astin and Carolyn Jones). The makers of that underrated sitcom (whose first season has just come out on DVD) seemed to realize that, in the context of the TV of its time, the fact that Gomez and Morticia were a married couple still turned on by one another was considered as freaky as the rest of their home sweet horror show.

You had to take romance where you got it in 60’s TV. The Diana Rigg–Patrick Macnee seasons of The Avengers were one long duet of sophisticated sublimation. But for the whole megillah—love at first sight to making whoopee to washing dishes and baby clothes—you have to turn to Get Smart.

Luckily, you can turn to it in an absolutely gorgeous new DVD set that collects all five seasons, from 1965 to 1970, on 25 discs. The set is available only from the Time-Life Web site until next fall, when it will be available in retail. At nearly 200 bucks, it’s an investment. It’s also a model of how to do a reissue. A Get Smart collection should feel like a sleek gadget, and the handsome presentation, bounteous extras and crisp remastering accomplish just that.

Created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, Get Smart was a parody of the spy craze generated by the James Bond movies and the TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. On Get Smart, the suaveness of spies was filtered through Mad magazine parody and borscht-belt shtick. Its hero is Maxwell Smart, Control Agent 86 (the peerless Don Adams), an everyputz trying to be the hero we all fantasize being. Manny Farber memorably wrote that Adams’ performance was “at once lower (the voice of a canary spieler), faster (the razzing one-liner of the night-clubs), and higher (originally geared to fewer people) than anything except the more inspired ad-libs of the Allen-Paar-Carson-Griffin variety shows.” It’s no wonder that Adams’ overly articulated, pinging nasality spawned more catchphrases than perhaps any other show of its era.

Part of the genius of Get Smart was that the spy biz was just as quotidian as any other 9-to-5 job. The good-guy (read: U.S.) spy organization Control is a world of time clocks, insurance plans, even a lame orchestra that plays company do’s. And Max’s co-workers are played by an ingratiating group of second bananas—Dave Ketchum, his head popping out of sofas and lockers, as Agent 13; Robert Karvelas as the glum-faced schlep Larabee. The blandness of these nut-brain wage slaves is its own form of eccentricity. Even the most unusual among them, Dick Gautier’s Hymie the Robot, is really just a nice Jewish cyber-sapien. And presiding over them all was Ed Platt’s weary Chief, a baggy-eyed bloodhound of a boss who looks like he could do with equal doses of Geritol and Tums.

But beyond a crew that makes you suspect Langley has become part of the Catskills, beyond the villains with groaningly hilarious names like Abe Fu Yung, beyond the catchphrases and gadgets, like Max’s shoe phone and the Cone of Silence, the five seasons of Get Smart are the extended story of Max’s wooing, winning and marrying Barbara Feldon’s 99.

There are no accurate numbers for how many American men fell in love with Barbara Feldon watching Get Smart (a blissful epidemic memorably spoofed on an episode of Mad About You). And those of us who are crazy for her find her appeal so self-evident that it’s likely never been articulated.

Of course, with those big, bashful eyes and ripe, rounded cheekbones, Ms. Feldon was gorgeous (still is, as you can see from Don Adams’ 2005 memorial service, included here). She’s one of those rare performers who is at her funniest when she is at her most beautiful. Ms. Feldon’s purr marks her as an American cousin to Joan Greenwood. But where Greenwood’s voice betrayed every scheme she was hatching, Ms. Feldon’s tones are that of an eager innocent: 99 sees Max’s every bit of bonehead confidence, every instance of his bumbling, and still adores him.

We have gotten so used to hearing about the male gaze that we have neglected the power of the female gaze. Over the five seasons of the show, Ms. Feldon’s gaze told a story of someone who looks at her mate and loves him for what he is, and who is also able to let him look at her and see himself loved as the man he wants to be. (And when he comes close to losing her, Adams reveals just how much he needs her gaze.) No one has ever made adoration funny and sweet in the way that Ms. Feldon did. She recorded voice introductions for every single episode on this set, every extra. And what you hear is the gratitude of someone who was part of something that has made so many people think of her so fondly. It’s we who should be grateful to her.

Huston’s film of Carson McCullers’ 1941 novella was shot, by cinematographer Aldo Tonti, in an almost-sepia tinting that added a golden wash to the film. Warners allowed the film to be shown that way for one week in 50 first-run theaters before those prints were pulled and straight Technicolor ones substituted. The film hasn’t been seen in that form since, though, as Huston made clear in his autobiography, An Open Book, he always hoped it would be.

There’s really no reason for the tinting beyond pure aesthetics, a visual play on the title. It looks beautiful, but it adds to the already distanced effect of the movie. The setting is a Georgia Army base a year or two after the Second World War. A late scene of soldiers attending a base boxing match is a shock: Up until that moment, it seems there’s been barely more than half a dozen people in the picture.

Reflections in a Golden Eye feels abstracted (both dramatically and narratively) and only fitfully alive. What carries the film is Huston’s intelligence and craftsmanship and the willingness of the actors to kick against the mainstream, to do something not just unexpected but downright strange. Reflections has a whiff of the excitement that can happen when a group of artists are walking, sometimes precariously, on the edge.

The adaptation, by the Scottish novelist Chapman Mortimer and Huston’s frequent collaborator Gladys Hill, Freudianizes McCullers’ Southern Gothic so that we can draw lines from the characters’ most bizarre behavior to its root causes. When we find out that Alison Langdon (Julie Harris), the emotionally fragile wife of Lt. Col. Morris Langdon (Brian Keith), cut off her nipples with garden shears, we’re meant to see it as the manifestation of her breakdown after the death of her infant daughter. (She destroys the symbol of her motherhood, the part of her that nourished her child, and so on.) Marlon Brando’s closeted homosexual, Major Weldon Penderton, is used as an emblem of the repression that leads to psychosis and violence.

In contrast, his wife Leonora, played by Elizabeth Taylor, is meant to be in touch with her sexuality (she’s having an affair with Langdon). There are also private fetish objects, a whipping, voyeurism, the Langdons’ flamboyantly gay Filipino house boy (Zorro David), even nude horseback riding—the whole picture sometimes seems conceived as a catalog balancing healthy (i.e., open) sexuality with unhealthy (i.e., closeted) sexuality.

Reduced to those explanations, Reflections in a Golden Eye is ample proof of the infantilizing effect that Freud had on American movies: the neat belief that everything can be reduced to a plausible explanation. It’s no wonder that Hollywood embraced Freud in the 50’s: He allowed mainstream movies to seem adult while avoiding any of the ambiguity that the studios discouraged.

And yet for all that, there is a basic strangeness here, probably rooted in McCullers’ Southern Gothic approach, that Chapman and Hill’s adaptation cannot dissipate. As in Huston’s film of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, the director doesn’t try to make a grotesque world any less grotesque than it is. This may be the Williams-Capote South of the late 50’s and 60’s, a kind of antebellum Hubert’s Flea Circus of the bizarre and repressed, but it’s not a put-on, and Huston, whether on purpose or because he hadn’t sorted it out in his own head, keeps its meanings teasingly out of reach.

You can’t say that Huston, a director who both reveled in and explored the madness of masculinity, understands homosexuality. As in Bertolucci’s The Conformist three years later, Reflections uses repressed homosexuality as a symbol of incipient tyranny and violence, and the idea is a wheeze. But you don’t have to buy that equation to make the destructiveness of sexual repression dramatically believable, and no director hidebound by traditional concepts of masculinity would have given Brando the free hand he has here.

It may seem strange talking of Brando’s free hand when he’s playing a character so tightly wound and brutally reined in. Brando immerses himself so completely in Major Penderton that he closes down some of his own resources as an actor. You never see all the way into this man. But when Brando’s Penderton preens before a mirror, or shows us his ungainly backside bobbing up and down on a horse, or sits with a kind of grotesque coquetry in his darkened bedroom awaiting a visit from a young soldier he’s infatuated with (a nearly mute Robert Forster, in his movie debut), you’re seeing an actor for whom vanity is an utterly alien concept, and one for whom taking a risk is simply a matter of what being an actor is about.

It’s worth remembering as you watch this amazing performance that in 1967, the vulgar spectacle of publicity passing as critical judgment—a phenomenon that by now has almost completely overtaken arts journalism in America—had deemed Brando washed up, a caricature of his former greatness. His triumphs in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris (for my money, the greatest performance ever put on film) were only four and five years away. For all the attempts to sell Elizabeth Taylor as the most elegant of stars, she has always seemed most herself as a bawd. She faked that in the gussied-up bitchery of that crummy “classic” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and dove into it whole hog in the Edna O’Brien–scripted X, Y & Zee. She’s far from the beautiful child of National Velvet here, but she wins you over in a different way. Everything about her Leonora, from the voluptuous build to the voluptuous laugh, conveys sensuality and impolite appetite. In some ways, she has never seemed as at ease with herself as she does here.

The best performance in the movie, and still an unheralded one, is Brian Keith, who is so casual, so relaxed that he seems one of those rare actors incapable of forcing a thing. His Lt. Col. Langdon is a straightforward man doing his best to keep his head in a situation outside anything he’s experienced. And though he’s physically suited to Leonora, he loves his wife, and grieves for the way she has mentally gone away from him. Keith’s performance is so clear, his emotions so genuine in a movie that, even at its best, feels willfully oblique, the audience forms a special bond with him. He reminds you of just how deep the tragedy of an ordinary man can go.

Huston’s film of Carson McCullers’ 1941 novella was shot, by cinematographer Aldo Tonti, in an almost-sepia tinting that added a golden wash to the film. Warners allowed the film to be shown that way for one week in 50 first-run theaters before those prints were pulled and straight Technicolor ones substituted. The film hasn’t been seen in that form since, though, as Huston made clear in his autobiography, An Open Book, he always hoped it would be.

There’s really no reason for the tinting beyond pure aesthetics, a visual play on the title. It looks beautiful, but it adds to the already distanced effect of the movie. The setting is a Georgia Army base a year or two after the Second World War. A late scene of soldiers attending a base boxing match is a shock: Up until that moment, it seems there’s been barely more than half a dozen people in the picture.

Reflections in a Golden Eye feels abstracted (both dramatically and narratively) and only fitfully alive. What carries the film is Huston’s intelligence and craftsmanship and the willingness of the actors to kick against the mainstream, to do something not just unexpected but downright strange. Reflections has a whiff of the excitement that can happen when a group of artists are walking, sometimes precariously, on the edge.

The adaptation, by the Scottish novelist Chapman Mortimer and Huston’s frequent collaborator Gladys Hill, Freudianizes McCullers’ Southern Gothic so that we can draw lines from the characters’ most bizarre behavior to its root causes. When we find out that Alison Langdon (Julie Harris), the emotionally fragile wife of Lt. Col. Morris Langdon (Brian Keith), cut off her nipples with garden shears, we’re meant to see it as the manifestation of her breakdown after the death of her infant daughter. (She destroys the symbol of her motherhood, the part of her that nourished her child, and so on.) Marlon Brando’s closeted homosexual, Major Weldon Penderton, is used as an emblem of the repression that leads to psychosis and violence.

In contrast, his wife Leonora, played by Elizabeth Taylor, is meant to be in touch with her sexuality (she’s having an affair with Langdon). There are also private fetish objects, a whipping, voyeurism, the Langdons’ flamboyantly gay Filipino house boy (Zorro David), even nude horseback riding—the whole picture sometimes seems conceived as a catalog balancing healthy (i.e., open) sexuality with unhealthy (i.e., closeted) sexuality.

Reduced to those explanations, Reflections in a Golden Eye is ample proof of the infantilizing effect that Freud had on American movies: the neat belief that everything can be reduced to a plausible explanation. It’s no wonder that Hollywood embraced Freud in the 50’s: He allowed mainstream movies to seem adult while avoiding any of the ambiguity that the studios discouraged.

And yet for all that, there is a basic strangeness here, probably rooted in McCullers’ Southern Gothic approach, that Chapman and Hill’s adaptation cannot dissipate. As in Huston’s film of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, the director doesn’t try to make a grotesque world any less grotesque than it is. This may be the Williams-Capote South of the late 50’s and 60’s, a kind of antebellum Hubert’s Flea Circus of the bizarre and repressed, but it’s not a put-on, and Huston, whether on purpose or because he hadn’t sorted it out in his own head, keeps its meanings teasingly out of reach.

You can’t say that Huston, a director who both reveled in and explored the madness of masculinity, understands homosexuality. As in Bertolucci’s The Conformist three years later, Reflections uses repressed homosexuality as a symbol of incipient tyranny and violence, and the idea is a wheeze. But you don’t have to buy that equation to make the destructiveness of sexual repression dramatically believable, and no director hidebound by traditional concepts of masculinity would have given Brando the free hand he has here.

It may seem strange talking of Brando’s free hand when he’s playing a character so tightly wound and brutally reined in. Brando immerses himself so completely in Major Penderton that he closes down some of his own resources as an actor. You never see all the way into this man. But when Brando’s Penderton preens before a mirror, or shows us his ungainly backside bobbing up and down on a horse, or sits with a kind of grotesque coquetry in his darkened bedroom awaiting a visit from a young soldier he’s infatuated with (a nearly mute Robert Forster, in his movie debut), you’re seeing an actor for whom vanity is an utterly alien concept, and one for whom taking a risk is simply a matter of what being an actor is about.

It’s worth remembering as you watch this amazing performance that in 1967, the vulgar spectacle of publicity passing as critical judgment—a phenomenon that by now has almost completely overtaken arts journalism in America—had deemed Brando washed up, a caricature of his former greatness. His triumphs in The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris (for my money, the greatest performance ever put on film) were only four and five years away. For all the attempts to sell Elizabeth Taylor as the most elegant of stars, she has always seemed most herself as a bawd. She faked that in the gussied-up bitchery of that crummy “classic” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and dove into it whole hog in the Edna O’Brien–scripted X, Y & Zee. She’s far from the beautiful child of National Velvet here, but she wins you over in a different way. Everything about her Leonora, from the voluptuous build to the voluptuous laugh, conveys sensuality and impolite appetite. In some ways, she has never seemed as at ease with herself as she does here.

The best performance in the movie, and still an unheralded one, is Brian Keith, who is so casual, so relaxed that he seems one of those rare actors incapable of forcing a thing. His Lt. Col. Langdon is a straightforward man doing his best to keep his head in a situation outside anything he’s experienced. And though he’s physically suited to Leonora, he loves his wife, and grieves for the way she has mentally gone away from him. Keith’s performance is so clear, his emotions so genuine in a movie that, even at its best, feels willfully oblique, the audience forms a special bond with him. He reminds you of just how deep the tragedy of an ordinary man can go.

“We saw the Fellini film,” he begins, and forget the blather about La Strada being a great film for its use of “negative imagery” (whatever that is). The cineaste showboat’s complaints about self-indulgence, about the lack of a cohesive structure, about Fellini not knowing what he wants to say, sums up much of the director’s career.

There are few great filmmakers—and Fellini certainly was one—who went so wrong so resolutely. Through Nights of Cabiria in 1957, Fellini built on the neorealism that Vittorio De Sica had brought to Italian cinema, mixing it with a lyrical and sometimes whimsical strain that never devolved into sentimentality or into the ickiness of what’s come to be called magic realism.

It all changed with 1960’s La Dolce Vita, one of those enormous critical and commercial successes that, as 2001 did with Stanley Kubrick, set a director on a path that negates everything that had been good about his work. Everyone remembers the pleasure of watching Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg gambol in the Trevi Fountain. Unfortunately, that interlude is surrounded by three hours of moralizing about the spiritual emptiness of modern life—as if we should be shocked that the rich indulge in casual sex and shallow luxury. As with the decadence that Antonioni would show in Blow-Up, what we’re meant to view as bad actually looks like a lot of fun. (If rolling around with a naked, teenage Jane Birkin is the path to hell, I know a lot of us who are going to be stocking up on sunblock.) In Pietro Germi’s great 1961 comedy Divorce, Italian Style, the inhabitants of a rural Italian town flock to a showing of La Dolce Vita and, as Germi shows us their shocked and envious faces taking in all this moral corruption, he speaks the truth about Fellini’s opus: It’s a movie for hicks.

La Dolce Vita is the type of success that kills a director. After it, Fellini was a ringmaster collecting his grotesques, the very lack of structure and discipline in his movies acclaimed by his adherents as the fulfillment of a phantasmagoric vision. The empty-headedness, as in 8 1¼2, could be fun to let wash over you. Hardened into habit, whimsy becomes leaden, and that makes later films like City of Women and Ginger and Fred nearly unwatchable.

Fellini’s 1973 Amarcord, just released by Criterion on one of its typical—i.e., immaculately restored—DVD’s, has many of the same problems other Fellini films do: The picture is populated by caricatures instead of characters; there’s that damn controlling metaphor of life as a carnival; the episodes are strung together without any sense of dramatic structure or pacing. If you took away the “Felliniesque” touches, what you’d be left with would be terribly sentimental. Inevitably, the argument has been made that Fellini’s usual mishegas is here a way of emphasizing how imagination affects memory. It’s not; it’s habit. But in Amarcord, for once, Fellini’s self-indulgence doesn’t overtake the movie, doesn’t wear you out. You can see everything that’s wrong with the picture and it remains a pleasure to watch.

The title, a neologism invented by Fellini, according to Sam Rohdie’s accompanying essay, translates roughly as “I Remember.” Based on Fellini’s reminiscences of growing up in Rimini, Amarcord follows a year in the life of a seaside town, from spring to spring, in the late 30’s, when Mussolini was in power and Italy had made common cause with Germany. The poster for the movie showed the characters in tableaux staring out at the viewer. Watching it is like seeing them step out of tableaux for an episode, then fade into the background.

Some of the more promising characters—like the fat schoolboy hopelessly in love with a lithe, pampered classmate, or the mama’s boy who, in his teens, already has the dark circles under his eyes of a haggard middle-aged man—don’t get enough screen time. And there’s far too much of others, like the town idiot who spins endless tall tales. Although his big episode, a story of sneaking into a sultan’s harem for the night, is at least visually amusing: As the idiot plays his flute, the concubines rise from their bed one by one in what looks like Busby Berkley directing The Arabian Nights.

Some characters immediately call up the worst in Fellini, like Volpina, the town nympho, who licks her lips and leers into the camera. Fellini didn’t do great by women. There’s the inevitable huge-breasted woman who bares them to the camera. Magali Noël has the role of Gradisca, the town beauty, and her twitching backside gets as much screen time as the rest of her.

Perhaps Amarcord works because, in mining his memories of growing up, Fellini connects with the adolescent impulse to make fun of everything, to jeer at authority. The town lawyer, a friendly, pleasant fellow, turns up to relate the town’s ancient history to us—and gets a raspberry or a snowball in the head for his troubles. Those missiles represent the best timing in the film, a schoolboy’s response to the endless crap our teachers always bored us with. And what should be a groaningly loud section—a family dinner that erupts into chaos—instead plays as explosively funny, with the father (Armando Brancia) essaying the type of slow burn we might have enjoyed had Edgar Kennedy been Italian.

It all blows away as easily as the dandelion puffballs that float through the air at the beginning and end of the movie. Fellini’s stand-in (Bruno Zanin) has no more weight than any other character, and he certainly shows nothing of the artist in utero. And though individual scenes are touching—as in the tender solicitude of a wife caring for her husband after an interrogation by the local Fascists—Fellini’s decision to treat the Fascists as no more than clowns just seems part of his inability to get outside his own head. (Even clowns can cause destruction and terror.)

Finally, though, the picture’s good nature wins you over. It’s like spending time with a wearisome old relative who, for once, recovers the charm that used to make his stories a pleasure instead of a trial. Fellini may have left the church behind decades before Amarcord, but this time out, he earned an indulgence.

“We saw the Fellini film,” he begins, and forget the blather about La Strada being a great film for its use of “negative imagery” (whatever that is). The cineaste showboat’s complaints about self-indulgence, about the lack of a cohesive structure, about Fellini not knowing what he wants to say, sums up much of the director’s career.

There are few great filmmakers—and Fellini certainly was one—who went so wrong so resolutely. Through Nights of Cabiria in 1957, Fellini built on the neorealism that Vittorio De Sica had brought to Italian cinema, mixing it with a lyrical and sometimes whimsical strain that never devolved into sentimentality or into the ickiness of what’s come to be called magic realism.

It all changed with 1960’s La Dolce Vita, one of those enormous critical and commercial successes that, as 2001 did with Stanley Kubrick, set a director on a path that negates everything that had been good about his work. Everyone remembers the pleasure of watching Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg gambol in the Trevi Fountain. Unfortunately, that interlude is surrounded by three hours of moralizing about the spiritual emptiness of modern life—as if we should be shocked that the rich indulge in casual sex and shallow luxury. As with the decadence that Antonioni would show in Blow-Up, what we’re meant to view as bad actually looks like a lot of fun. (If rolling around with a naked, teenage Jane Birkin is the path to hell, I know a lot of us who are going to be stocking up on sunblock.) In Pietro Germi’s great 1961 comedy Divorce, Italian Style, the inhabitants of a rural Italian town flock to a showing of La Dolce Vita and, as Germi shows us their shocked and envious faces taking in all this moral corruption, he speaks the truth about Fellini’s opus: It’s a movie for hicks.

La Dolce Vita is the type of success that kills a director. After it, Fellini was a ringmaster collecting his grotesques, the very lack of structure and discipline in his movies acclaimed by his adherents as the fulfillment of a phantasmagoric vision. The empty-headedness, as in 8 1¼2, could be fun to let wash over you. Hardened into habit, whimsy becomes leaden, and that makes later films like City of Women and Ginger and Fred nearly unwatchable.

Fellini’s 1973 Amarcord, just released by Criterion on one of its typical—i.e., immaculately restored—DVD’s, has many of the same problems other Fellini films do: The picture is populated by caricatures instead of characters; there’s that damn controlling metaphor of life as a carnival; the episodes are strung together without any sense of dramatic structure or pacing. If you took away the “Felliniesque” touches, what you’d be left with would be terribly sentimental. Inevitably, the argument has been made that Fellini’s usual mishegas is here a way of emphasizing how imagination affects memory. It’s not; it’s habit. But in Amarcord, for once, Fellini’s self-indulgence doesn’t overtake the movie, doesn’t wear you out. You can see everything that’s wrong with the picture and it remains a pleasure to watch.

The title, a neologism invented by Fellini, according to Sam Rohdie’s accompanying essay, translates roughly as “I Remember.” Based on Fellini’s reminiscences of growing up in Rimini, Amarcord follows a year in the life of a seaside town, from spring to spring, in the late 30’s, when Mussolini was in power and Italy had made common cause with Germany. The poster for the movie showed the characters in tableaux staring out at the viewer. Watching it is like seeing them step out of tableaux for an episode, then fade into the background.

Some of the more promising characters—like the fat schoolboy hopelessly in love with a lithe, pampered classmate, or the mama’s boy who, in his teens, already has the dark circles under his eyes of a haggard middle-aged man—don’t get enough screen time. And there’s far too much of others, like the town idiot who spins endless tall tales. Although his big episode, a story of sneaking into a sultan’s harem for the night, is at least visually amusing: As the idiot plays his flute, the concubines rise from their bed one by one in what looks like Busby Berkley directing The Arabian Nights.

Some characters immediately call up the worst in Fellini, like Volpina, the town nympho, who licks her lips and leers into the camera. Fellini didn’t do great by women. There’s the inevitable huge-breasted woman who bares them to the camera. Magali Noël has the role of Gradisca, the town beauty, and her twitching backside gets as much screen time as the rest of her.

Perhaps Amarcord works because, in mining his memories of growing up, Fellini connects with the adolescent impulse to make fun of everything, to jeer at authority. The town lawyer, a friendly, pleasant fellow, turns up to relate the town’s ancient history to us—and gets a raspberry or a snowball in the head for his troubles. Those missiles represent the best timing in the film, a schoolboy’s response to the endless crap our teachers always bored us with. And what should be a groaningly loud section—a family dinner that erupts into chaos—instead plays as explosively funny, with the father (Armando Brancia) essaying the type of slow burn we might have enjoyed had Edgar Kennedy been Italian.

It all blows away as easily as the dandelion puffballs that float through the air at the beginning and end of the movie. Fellini’s stand-in (Bruno Zanin) has no more weight than any other character, and he certainly shows nothing of the artist in utero. And though individual scenes are touching—as in the tender solicitude of a wife caring for her husband after an interrogation by the local Fascists—Fellini’s decision to treat the Fascists as no more than clowns just seems part of his inability to get outside his own head. (Even clowns can cause destruction and terror.)

Finally, though, the picture’s good nature wins you over. It’s like spending time with a wearisome old relative who, for once, recovers the charm that used to make his stories a pleasure instead of a trial. Fellini may have left the church behind decades before Amarcord, but this time out, he earned an indulgence.

Luckily, Warner Bros. home video has shown substantially more sensitivity to the catalog of films it controls. On Nov. 7, they honor Huston’s long-stated wish that the film, which he considered one of his best, be seen in its original color. The story of life on a Southern Army base in the years after World War II will be released as part of The Marlon Brando Collection (which, among other films, also includes Brando’s turn as Fletcher Christian in the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty). It’s a baroque, fascinating picture with uniformly fine performances from Elizabeth Taylor, Brian Keith and Julie Harris. And as the closeted homosexual major married to Taylor, Brando is fearless. But then, when wasn’t he?

The release of Reflections highlights one of the paradoxes of DVD’s: If we believe in seeing movies in the form they were intended, is a ragged repertory print better than a restored DVD? (It’s an open question depending on the movie, I’d say.) There’s no doubt, though, that DVD releases are returning larger and larger chunks of our movie heritage. Among the most significant of the fall releases is the Nov. 21 Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection (Universal). The set includes Christmas in July, The Great McGinty, Sturges’ little-seen (and studio-butchered) dramatic film The Great Moment, the astonishing home-front war satire Hail the Conquering Hero, his Hollywood comedy Sullivan’s Travels, the fractured romantic comedy The Palm Beach Story, and his masterpiece—or one of them— The Lady Eve.

Along with Buster Keaton, Chuck Jones and Ernst Lubitsch, Sturges remains the greatest comic filmmaker—and no one better understood the deep eccentricities of the people we think of as ordinary. Add the already available DVD of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek to this set and you’ve got one of the seminal bodies of work in American movies.

Sturges’ Lady Eve—Barbara Stanwyck—turns up in Turner Classic Movies’ Forbidden Hollywood Collection #1, a gathering of pre-Code movies that includes one of Stanwyck’s greatest moments, Baby Face, as well as Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman.

Also coming out are a second volume of Astaire-Rogers musicals (from Warner Bros., on Oct. 24); a first volume of the comedies of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (from Paramount, on Oct. 31)—we’ll have to wait for their swan song, and best picture, the 1956 Hollywood or Bust; a newly remastered DVD of The Maltese Falcon (Warner Bros., Oct. 3, and also part of volume two of “The Humphrey Bogart Signature Collection”); “Cary Grant: Screen Legend Collection” (Universal, Nov. 14), which includes some of his little-seen 30’s comedies.

The Criterion Collection, the gold standard for all DVD releases, continues its seemingly never-ending release of treasures. The Sept. 5 upgrading of Akira Kurosawa’s epic The Seven Samurai will be followed in early December by newly remastered versions of Kurosawa’s wonderful collaborations with Toshiro Mifune, Yojimbo and its sequel, Sanjuro. And though various versions have come out on DVD, on Nov. 21 Criterion releases Louise Brooks in her indelible performance as Lulu in G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, the most powerful of all the screen’s erotic presences.

One of the biggest catalog overhauls comes by way of MGM, who have remastered the James Bond films, added new bonus features and will be releasing them as four separate box sets, two on Nov. 7 and two on Dec. 12. Though it will probably change, the films will not be available individually, and you can’t help but wonder if part of that is a way to boost the sales of some of the lesser films by including them in sets with the ones everyone wants.

The franchise’s future with Daniel Craig remains to be seen. But the best entries of its past—at the top of the class, Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, George Lazenby’s sole Bond outing, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and The Spy Who Loved Me—remain some of the yummiest pop entertainments ever put on film.

And since movies go through theaters so fast these days that their runs often feel like previews for their DVD release, DVD’s have become a sort of instant repertory. Several of the year’s terrific movies that you probably missed include André Téchiné’s masterful romantic drama Changing Times (Oct. 3), starring Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve (always at her best working with Mr. Téchiné), and the great Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times (Sept. 26), with an incandescent performance from Qi Shu.

And finally, though it’s finally too sweet-tempered for its own good, Paul Weitz’s American Dreamz (Oct. 17) reminds you that satire shouldn’t be anybody’s friend. It features Dennis Quaid doing a befuddled President Bush, but the show is stolen by Hugh Grant as the Simon Cowell–like host of a TV talent competition, and Mandy Moore as the show’s idol-in-the-making. They’re flabbergasting together—so thoroughly self-centered and opportunistic and insincere that they’re practically pure. They’re so rotten that you’d have to be a complete cynic not to love them.

A few New Yorkers will get a chance to see Marie Antoinette (which opens Oct. 20) early: It’s been selected for this year’s New York Film Festival, which also includes Stephen Frears’ The Queen (Sept. 29), starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth in a drama set during the week that followed Princess Diana’s death. The festival also brings some movies that have not yet found a distributor, like David Lynch’s new Inland Empire, shot over the last two years with a cast that includes Laura Dern and Jeremy Irons, and Syndromes and a Century, the new film from the brilliant Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady). If that name stumps you—as he tells everyone—you can call him Joe.

For the cineaste event of the fall, though, you have to go to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, where the first-ever complete U.S. retrospective of the great French director Jacques Rivette gets under way on Nov. 11. Rivette’s most famous film, the great 1974 Celine and Julie Go Boating, will be shown, along with lesser-known gems like the 1995 musical Haut Bas Fragile (Up Down Fragile) and the 1984 melodrama Love on the Ground. The centerpiece, though, is undoubtedly only the third-ever showing of Rivette’s 1971 Out 1: Noli Me Tangere over Dec. 9 and 10. It clocks in at 12 hours and 40 minutes.

Literary adaptations are a dependable part of every fall movie season. December brings us the film of Zoe Heller’s comic novel Notes on a Scandal, with Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, and Bill Nighy. The director is Richard Eyre, who made Iris and the woefully underrated Stage Beauty. Ms. Blanchett also stars in another book-to -film translation, Steven Soderbergh’s film of Joseph Kanon’s terrific spy thriller The Good German (Dec. 8), set in Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Ms. Blanchett is an anti-Nazi German who survived the war and is reunited with her lost love, an American journalist played by George Clooney. A knockout cast—Diane Lane, Thomas Jane, Mickey Rourke, Johnny Knoxville, Rosario Dawson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt—star in the film of Elmore Leonard’s book Killshot (Oct. 20). And Gary Winick, whose last film was the delightful comedy 13 Going on 30, directs a live-action and animatronic version of Charlotte’s Web (Dec. 20), starring Dakota Fanning and the voices of, among others, Julia Roberts and Steve Buscemi.

And while Chicago did not usher in a spate of wonderful film versions of hit stage musicals (smell that? It’s The Producers), Bill Condon, who wrote the screenplay for Chicago, takes the helm of Dreamgirls (Dec. 21), in which Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy and Beyoncé star. Not a musical, but with much the same cast you can see for a little while longer on Broadway, is the film of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys (Nov. 24). And no matter what looms large in year-end 10-best lists and awards, Christopher Guest and his wonderful troupe—Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Eugene Levy, Jennifer Coolidge, Fred Willard and added guest jester Ricky Gervais—satirize the quest for award-season recognition in their latest mockumentary, For Your Consideration (Nov. 17).

It’s always a little troubling when the producers of the James Bond franchise start talking about returning the series to its gritty roots, mainly because Ian Fleming was a lousy writer. If anything, Bond movies need to stop being thought of as action movies and return to the dirty, luxurious adult comic books they originally were. But Bond fans are becoming like Red Sox fans, and I’ll be there to see Daniel Craig make his Bond debut in Casino Royale (Nov. 17), and especially to see the luscious Eva Green, who was so astounding in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers.

An action movie that stands a good chance of being terrific is Ronny Yu’s Fearless, starring Jet Li in what he says will be his last martial-arts role. Mr. Li is not just an amazement to watch in action, but his performance in last year’s Unleashed was simply astounding. Martin Scorsese turns to Asian filmmaking, the terrific Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs to be exact, which he has remade as The Departed (Oct. 6), starring Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson. And one of the directors of Infernal Affairs, Andrew Lau—not to be confused with that film’s star, Andy Lau—makes his American debut with The Flock (Nov. 3), starring Richard Gere and Claire Danes. Mr. Gere also stars as Clifford Irving in Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax (Nov. 17), the story of Irving’s attempt to peddle the phony memoirs of Howard Hughes.

And to top it all off, Dec. 8 brings us Mel Gibson’s Mayan epic Apocalypto. Guess Disney couldn’t wait for Hanukkah.