Also shut down last week was the short but memorable tenure of Cathie Black as schools chancellor. Ms. Black resigned after only 97 days in office, on the heels of a new report citing her dismal 17 percent approval rating (for context, 77 percent of people polled in Rockefeller Center by Us Weekly approved of Khloe Kardashian's choice to wear a body-hugging bandage dress designed to resemble piano keys). Mayor Bloomberg accepted "full responsibility" for the fact that Ms. Black, a magazine executive who had no experience in education and sent her own children to private school, had to be replaced with Dennis Walcott, a former kindergarten teacher and the current deputy mayor for education who is himself a product of the New York City public-school system. But, as Ms. Black herself might say, it was a Sophie's Choice.

Perhaps even more shocking than the Blackout that clogged news wires on Thursday was the announcement that Matt Lauer, everyone's favorite tall, glib drink of water, might be leaving The Today Show after 14 years to (maybe?) host a syndicated talk show with CBS defector and funky chicken aficionado Katie Couric. Meredith Vieira is rumored to be leaving, too, but now, unless she ups her game with a Glenn Beck cross-country travelogue, no one will care. And Regis Philbin, who, at 79, is older than both drive-in movie theaters and the electron microscope, supposedly has his eye on a solo show once he bids adieu to Live With Regis and Kelly later this year. (We hear he's in talks with Harpo, and none too soon--who better to revive Oprah's otiose OWN network than Reeg, the man who, much to Ryan Seacrest's dismay, holds the Guinness World Record for the most time spent in front of a television camera?) Of course, this all begs the question: Whom do we watch now while discreetly reducing the elliptical incline every morning? Pat Kiernan is sexy in a Greg Kinnear hand-puppet kind of a way, but he's not for everyone.

But even as the very cornerstones of our society threaten to crumble to a dust finer than the high-grade narcotics dusting the banquettes of the Boom Boom Room, even as we get mad as hell and entertain notions of refusing to take it anymore (RIP, Sidney Lumet), maybe by signing a MoveOn.org petition, some things simply refuse to shut down. Thanks to his Wikileaking Ukrainian nurse, we learned that Muammar Qaddafi still listens to cassette tapes--quaint! The Boston Red Sox broke their 0-6 losing streak, beating the Yankees two games out of three in a series at Fenway this weekend. The Real Housewives of New York clambered out of their gilded short bus for yet another season of Bravo's pinot grigio-fueled ego trip. And good ol' Mitt Romney officially tossed his hat into the 2012 primary ring, forming a presidential exploratory committee entreating his followers to "Believe in America." Because if the fibers of our democracy can't remain strong enough for a busload of middle-schoolers to snicker at the phallic splendor of the Washington monument, what are we left with, really?

A thanks from Universal, who are distributing the film, is in order to the New York Post, who keep giving wood to organized crime and feeding the city’s unquenchable thirst for news about its dons. Like one of Frank Lucas’ finely tailored suits, this film was made for Manhattan.

It’s hard to say whether Jerry Seinfeld’s countless promos, interviews, and appearances helped or hurt Bee Movie. It did very good business, but failed to wow. In the city, it easily grossed twice as much as Saw IV (No. 3) in its second week, but its per screen average, $29,743, was worse than both Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows Your Dead (No. 5) and Bella (No. 8), which averaged over $30,000. This probably says more about those two films than about Bee’s future prospects. But shouldn’t Seinfeld in some way be punished for those terrible interstitials NBC peppered throughout its Thursday night line-up? Especially, the one which likened finding and hiring animators to capturing Mexican immigrants crossing the border illegally. (Not following? Exactly!)

Although it is in its second week, this is Devil’s first appearance on the top ten. It expanded to three theaters from two over the weekend, and its overall gross in the city jumped 33 percent. Talk about consistency.

This week’s Straight-to-Netflix-Queue Award goes to John Cusack and his saccharine Martian Child, which failed to crack the city’s top ten and the country’s top five. It was the only movie to open wide other than Gangster and Bee Movie. And it even failed by a large margin to outgross its ostensible competition, Dan in Real Life (No. 4). If Cusack can’t carry this sentimental fare, you think the Weinstein Company is getting a little worried about Grace Is Gone, in which Cusack plays another widower? Maybe just a tad.

List of theaters: Paris, Zeigfeld, Oprheum, East 85th St., 86th St. East, 84th St., Lincoln Plaza, 62nd and Broadway, Lincoln Square, Magic Johnson, 72nd St East, Cinemas 1, 2 &3rd Ave, 64th and 2nd , Imaginasian, Manhattan Twin, First and 62nd St., Angelika Film Center, Quad, IFC Center, Film Forum, Village East, Village Seven, Cinema Village, Union Square, Essex, Battery Park 11, Sunshine, 34th Street, Empire, E-Walk, Chelsea, 19th Street East, and Kips Bay.

Manhattan Weekend Box Office: How moviegoers in the multiplexes of middle America choose to spend their ten-spot is probably a big deal in Hollywood. But here in Manhattan, the hottest movies aren't always the ones making the big bucks nationwide. Using Nielsen numbers for Manhattan theaters alone and comparing them to the performance of the national weekend box office can tell you a lot about our Blue State sensibilities. Or nothing at all! Each Monday afternoon, we will bring you the results.

Perhaps there is a little surprise that Steve Carell and his second foray into serious acting couldn’t pull stronger in the city, but the film did around the business its reviews suggested: above-average. A film that defied expectations, including those of the critics, was Bella (No. 9), a drama set in New York City surrounding a pregnant hostess and a mysterious chef, who seeks to help her. Apparently targeted at Christians and Latin-Americans by Roadside Attractions, the film, which was directed by first-timer Alejandro Gomez Monetverde, averaged a surprisingly strong $36,000 in the city. If the film can keep this up, it’ll be another example (See Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?) of how intelligent niche fare can be successful despite the opinions of the mainstream press or expensive publicity campaigns.

The rest of the holdovers behaved predictably. Michael Clayton (No. 3), in its fourth week, Gone Baby Gone (No. 4), in its second, and The Darjeeling Limited (No. 7), in its fifth, saw very modest declines in overall box office, while 30 Days of Night (#5) and Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married (#6) dropped a bit more precipitously, but maintained healthy B.O. due to a lack of competition.

Notably absent from this week’s top 10 are Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Ryan Gosling's Lars and the Real Girl. Before the Devil, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke, received stupendous reviews and according to Indiewire did very well on two screens, one of which happens to be at the Angelika, the other in LA. As it expands, it should be able to break into the table. Meanwhile, Lars is currently in its third week and showing in 5 theaters in the city, but has yet to crack our top 10. Take from that what you will.

This week’s Straight-to-Netflix-Queue Award has two recipients: Jonathan Demme’s Jimmy Carter Man From Plains and Alison Eastwood’s Rails & Ties starring Kevin Bacon. Both mustered anemic averages at very few theaters. I guess another Eastwood will be pulling the plug this Awards Season.

List of theaters: Paris, Zeigfeld, Oprheum, East 85th St., 86th St. East, 84th St., Lincoln Plaza, 62nd and Broadway, Lincoln Square, Magic Johnson, 72nd St East, Cinemas 1, 2 &3rd Ave, 64th and 2nd , Imaginasian, Manhattan Twin, First and 62nd St., Angelika Film Center, Quad, IFC Center, Film Forum, Village East, Village Seven, Cinema Village, Union Square, Essex, Battery Park 11, Sunshine, 34th Street, Empire, E-Walk, Chelsea, 19th Street East, and Kips Bay.

Manhattan Weekend Box Office: How moviegoers in the multiplexes of middle America choose to spend their ten-spot is probably a big deal in Hollywood. But here in Manhattan, the hottest movies aren't always the ones making the big bucks nationwide. Using Nielsen numbers for Manhattan theaters alone and comparing them to the performance of the national weekend box office can tell you a lot about our Blue State sensibilities. Or nothing at all! Each Monday afternoon, we will bring you the results.

Just Shoot Me! Nihilism Crashes Lumet and Coen Bros.

BY ANDREW SARRIS

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and No Country for Old Men are well suited to our depressing times. But still!

Two of the darkest death-driven films of the 45th New York Film Festival are both American works directed by filmmakers who, though no strangers to noirish projects in the past, have attained new heights, or is it depths, of malignancy and morbidity, which, I suppose, is fitting for the increasingly dismal and depressing times in which we live. And I am not saying this simply because I am too rapidly approaching my 79th year on this reportedly endangered planet.

Anyway, the two films in question are Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, from a screenplay by Kelly Masterson, and Joel Coen and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. If I prefer the former to the latter, it is because it is ultimately less nihilistic in tone and spirit, and nihilism has never been my strong suit in the cinema, though I imagine younger cultists of a certain type can never get enough of it. MORE ...

Lumet Lights Up

BY REX REED

Sidney Lumet, 83, cements his reputation as a world-class director with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a botched-heist thriller with labyrinthine plot twists, suspenseful character revelations and out-of-sequence narrative elements befitting a grand opera mounted on a massive scale. MORE ...

Sidney Lumet, 83, cements his reputation as a world-class director with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a botched-heist thriller with labyrinthine plot twists, suspenseful character revelations and out-of-sequence narrative elements befitting a grand opera mounted on a massive scale. Two scummy losers who are also brothers plan to rob their family’s jewelry store. Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) needs money to pay back what he has already stolen from his real estate office, feed his drug habit and pacify his restless slut of a wife (Marisa Tomei), who is also sleeping with his kid brother Hank (Ethan Hawke). Hank, with child support payments and a vicious ex-wife (Amy Ryan again), nervously drags in an accomplice (the always fascinating Brian F. O’Byrne) who accidentally kills a store employee, unaware she is the siblings’ own mother (Rosemary Harris), then dies in the gunfire himself. While his murderous family tracks them down, the father (Albert Finney) plots revenge on the robbers who killed his wife, not knowing the killers are his own sons. One snafu follows the next, until rage, fear and grief consumes them like a Greek tragedy. If anyone is still alive at the end, I forget which one it is.

It’s good to see Lumet return to form, but be forewarned: the movie begins with hundreds of pounds of Philip Seymour Hoffman, stark naked, humping away at poor Marisa Tomei in a pool of sweat. It’s a sight not unlike a Sumo wrestler attacking a Barbie doll. Hoffman is a good actor, nolo contendere, but this is a vision grotesque enough to send you flying to the exit doors.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Running time 122 minutes
Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Starring Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin

Two of the darkest death-driven films of the 45th New York Film Festival are both American works directed by filmmakers who, though no strangers to noirish projects in the past, have attained new heights, or is it depths, of malignancy and morbidity, which, I suppose, is fitting for the increasingly dismal and depressing times in which we live. And I am not saying this simply because I am too rapidly approaching my 79th year on this reportedly endangered planet.

Anyway, the two films in question are Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, from a screenplay by Kelly Masterson, and Joel Coen and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. If I prefer the former to the latter, it is because it is ultimately less nihilistic in tone and spirit, and nihilism has never been my strong suit in the cinema, though I imagine younger cultists of a certain type can never get enough of it.

By contrast, Mr. Lumet and Ms. Masterson, with their intricate narrative structure, have fashioned a veritable Greek tragedy with overpoweringly Oedipal overtones. This they have accomplished with an unusually early staging of a terribly botched robbery of a small Westchester jewelry store, which in an ordinary caper movie would constitute the narrative’s suspenseful climax, and then flashing back to the genesis of this crime. So, obviously, Mr. Lumet and company are after bigger game, and after almost two hours of time-juggling, they bag it.

The story centers on two brothers, the elder and more manipulative one played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the younger and more vulnerable one played by Ethan Hawke. The elder brother is married to an attractive woman played by Marisa Tomei, but after a steamy session in the sack, followed by a deflatingly postcoital wifely remark, and a dispiriting session at the office, it becomes apparent that Mr. Hoffman’s character is living well beyond his means, and since his firm is facing an imminent audit by the Internal Revenue Service, he begins desperately looking for some quick cash to forestall his arrest for embezzlement. In the venture he has devised, he enlists the help of his down-and-out younger brother. Needy as he is, the younger sibling is shocked to discover that the older brother is planning to rob the family’s small jewelry store, owned and operated by their parents, played by Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris. The older brother is all breezy reassurance as he insists that it should be a cinch for the younger brother to execute the robbery with a fake gun and a hooded mask to conceal his identity. And why is the elder brother choosing not to become involved in the action? As he patiently explains to his would-be patsy, he is too well known in the neighborhood to be seen there. It becomes apparent from the elder’s practiced manner that he has been conning his brother all their lives.

In his turn, the younger brother cannot bear to brandish even a fake gun at his own mother, and so he solicits a hardened felon of his acquaintance to perform the heist for some of the advance money his older brother has given him to clinch the deal. Unfortunately, the felon doesn’t believe in fake guns, with the result that he and the unexpectedly feisty mother of the two brothers succeed only in killing each other as the younger brother flees in panic from the bloody scene.

The widowed father is bereft at first, but eventually becomes determined to find the killer’s accomplice in the getaway car that was seen speeding away from the jewelry store. To cover his and his brother’s tracks, the Hoffman character has to kill again and again. Inexorably, father and son are drawn into a final, fatal confrontation. The 83-year-old Mr. Lumet, who has handled such immortals as Brando and Magnani in his career, expertly extracts individually charismatic performances from Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Hawke, Mr. Finney, Ms. Harris and Ms. Tomei. Even so, I preferred his 2006 Find Me Guilty, which made my 10-best list that year. It was even less nihilistic.

As for the nihilism on display in No Country for Old Men, the collaboration between the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy was a marriage made in heaven or, more likely, hell. Mr. McCarthy has reportedly praised the movie for remaining faithful to the book, and well he might, if only for all the casting coups, starting off with Javier Bardem’s uncannily apt incarnation of evil as Anton Chigurn, a subhuman killing machine with a touch of whimsy in his expression and in his soothing funeral director’s voice. When the Coen Brothers appeared on the stage of Frederic P. Rose Hall in the Time Warner Center with the members of their cast, they introduced Mr. Bardem as their own Lee Van Cleef, a generally villainous character actor in the Sergio Leone Western cycle. But whereas Mr. Van Cleef’s bad guys always came to a bad end in the final draws of the Leone movies, Mr. Bardem’s Chigurn chugs through Texas like an unchecked force of nature. That is one of the reasons I prefer Leone’s oeuvre to that of the Coen brothers and Mr. McCarthy, despite their aforementioned casting coups with Mr. Bardem, and almost as impressively with Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell; Josh Brolin as Moss, Chigurn’s ill-fated main adversary; Woody Harrelson as the unflappable mob troubleshooter, Carson Wells, who also runs afoul of Chigurn; and Kelly Macdonald as Moss’ tormented wife, the only significant female presence in an overwhelmingly masculine epic with its lavishly detailed explorations of male survival skills.

Mr. McCarthy has won just about every literary honor while being likened to Ernest Hemingway for his minimalist style, and to Samuel Beckett for his volcanic bleakness of outlook on matters of life and death. I happened to find No Country for Old Men an absorbing read, but it left me all empty inside. I must confess that I couldn’t get very far into Blood Meridian, another of his books that was recommended to me. So, I suppose, I have chosen to live out my life without getting involved with Mr. McCarthy’s literary outlook.

Still, I suspect that his clouded vision of existence is somewhat too grim and dark for even the most noirish movie genre. He makes Elmore Leonard look like a barrel of laughs, and Faulkner a beacon of hope. Nonetheless, some of the pithiest exchanges in the movie were taken almost verbatim from the book. I may be clearly in the minority on this movie. It will almost certainly be number one on my list of movies that other people liked and I didn’t. I will not describe the narrative in any great detail both because I would be perceived as spoiling the “fun” of discovering the many surprises for yourself, and because I cannot look at it and write about it in any other way than as an exercise in cosmic futility. Yet, I’m not sorry I saw it over a running time of 122 minutes, just about the length of time I’d like to spend on a quick in-and-out visit to hell.

What can I say? Some thrill to the antiquity of Thebes or Florence—for me, the seminal moment was that first glimpse of the apparently eternal architecture of the Bethesda fountain. Would it be giving the sentimental game away to admit that every time I come to New York, I make a pilgrimage to the fountain? I spend an hour or so reflecting on the long, strange trip from that single still glimpsed decades ago.

I suspect that Scenes from the City may have a similar effect on many people. The cover features the iconic Brian Hamill photo from Manhattan: Woody Allen and Diane Keaton on a park bench just before dawn gazing at the Queensboro Bridge. The shot has lost none of its ravishing power. (If only the same could be said of Woody Allen.)

The essence of New York is that it’s too big to be one thing—it’s the city as schizophrenic, with something for everybody, in any mood. So it’s appropriate that Scenes from the City is sufficiently varied, and luscious enough, to melt the heart of the fiercest partisan of pastoral pleasures.

The book takes as its start date 1966, when John Lindsay established the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting—one-stop shopping that cut a Solomonic swath through what had been an impossibly complicated sequence of permissions, a labyrinth that kept filmmakers from working easily in New York. (The bureaucratic hurdles never stopped the good people who populated the Biograph, Vitagraph and Astoria studios, or filmmakers like Rouben Mamoulian—but none of them are featured here, because this is a book that carries the imprimatur of the Mayor’s Office, which apparently wants to give the impression that hardly anybody shot films in New York before John Lindsay smoothed the way.)

Attention is paid to Jules Dassin, who shot The Naked City all over town, and to Billy Wilder, who filmed Ray Milland’s harrowing walk in The Lost Weekend under the Third Avenue el on New Year’s Day 1944. Abraham Polonsky went to the trouble of coming to New York for some key shots for Force of Evil. And there’s the great opening sequence of West Side Story.

But—and I find this extremely odd—only cursory attention is paid to Sidney Lumet, the patron saint of New York film production, who began his love affair with the place tangentially in 1957 with 12 Angry Men, his first movie, and comprehensively the next year with Stage Struck. But then, nothing is said about other New York–centric movies like Selznick’s Portrait of Jennie.

Scenes from the City is organized by area, which is as good as any other principle. This is a coffee-table book, and coffee-table books live or die by the pictures, the meat for which the words are only seasoning.

Editor James Sanders, a practicing architect and the author of Celluloid Skyline (2001), lets the pictures take flight while he supplies the information that makes the book a useful reference tool. (I spotted one error: Abraham Polonsky wrote Madigan, a good 1968 policier, but he didn’t direct it—the director was Don Siegel.) Mr. Sanders documents where the stills—and scenes they represent—were shot.

For the dedicated cinephile, these are Stations of the Cross. Marilyn Monroe’s dress billowing up over the subway grating in The Seven-Year Itch was shot along Lexington between 51st and 52nd streets. (Mr. Sanders proceeds to ruin our re-enactment fantasies by telling us that the scene was reshot back at the studio.) Dog Day Afternoon was shot on Prospect Park West between 17th and 18th streets, just south of Park Slope in Brooklyn. The chase in The French Connection was shot in 30 blocks of 86th Street in Brooklyn, ranging from the Bay 50th Street Station to the 62nd Street Station of the D line. The delicatessen scene in When Harry Met Sally … was shot at Katz’s Deli at 205 East Houston Street. And that bridge shot from Manhattan was taken at the foot of 58th Street on Aug. 14, 1978, at about 4 in the morning.

Beyond the cold, hard facts, there’s the intrinsic romance of the images: Albert Finney and Diane Venora—clearly unaffected by vertigo—climbing to the top of the Manhattan Bridge with the World Trade Center towers in the background. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, again, silhouetted in the old MoMA garden. (“If you don’t get good stills on a Gordon Willis movie,” Mr. Hamill observes, “then you’re not doing your job properly.”)

No differentiation is made between the sainted and the shonda: Hudson Hawk gets a still, as does Annie Hall, and the strange, forlorn Vanilla Sky—remember Tom Cruise running through an eerily beautiful, abandoned Times Square? (We get a background primer from Lt. John Battista, former commanding officer of the city’s TV and movie unit: The Times Square scene was shot in about an hour and a half on a Sunday morning, beginning at first light. No C.G.I.—a real actor in a real location. Pure magic.)

As lagniappe, there’s a Q&A with Martin Scorsese, and also a short piece by Nora Ephron. But again I say: Where’s Sidney Lumet, who was making movies in New York when Mr. Scorsese was a kid watching punks blow up mailboxes in Little Italy?

Scott Eyman, a film historian and biographer, reviews books regularly for The Observer.

In his early films, Malle, a contemporary of the French New Wave directors, showed a proficiency for the sort of commerciality they disdained. The distrust of his professionalism was compounded by the shibboleth that a filmmaker who, like Malle, couldn’t be pinned down in terms of style or subject was ipso facto shallow. And in the second half of Malle’s career, his fellow Frenchmen resented him for working in the U.S.

Malle died in 1995 at the much-too-young age of 63, and many of his films have been unavailable on DVD. This new Criterion box, 3 Films of Louis Malle, as well as the company’s April release of Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, finally makes some of his most important films available for home viewing.

The films in this new collection are all coming-of-age stories, a theme Malle returned to again and again. Two of them revolve around war. The 1974 Lacombe, Lucien, the story of a French peasant boy who goes to work for the local Gestapo during the waning days of the occupation, more resembles what Hannah Arendt wrote on the banality of evil than the way movies had previously discussed the subject.

It must have taken enormous confidence for Malle to make a film this open-ended. For the first time, he was bringing the spirit of inquiry that had characterized his documentary Phantom India to a dramatic film. Lacombe, Lucien gives the impression that the director is standing by the camera, watching as we’re watching, unsure what will be revealed. Malle certainly didn’t know what to expect of Pierre Blaise, the French farm boy who had never acted before, whom he cast as Lucien. Blaise’s face is open, guileless yet opaque; the startling thing about the moment Lucien dons a pair of sunglasses is that it creates almost no change in him. He’s already closed off from us.

Lucien is a diabolic innocent, utterly without conscience. Malle cuts from Lucien tenderly stroking the hide of a dead horse to his happily shooting rabbits, and it’s clear he makes no connection between violence and pain. He acts solely on mysterious impulse, not conviction. Even Lucien’s work for the Gestapo comes about by chance. What attracts him is not Nazi ideology, which he is nonetheless happy to parrot, but belonging to something.

Malle is scrupulous, though, about not enlarging Lucien’s motives beyond that. It’s as if he understood that giving credence to the psychobabble about the inferiority that informed Nazism is to commit the morally and intellectually repugnant act of rendering the irrational comprehensible.

Which is why Malle’s 1987 Au Revoir les Enfants feels like such a betrayal of the previous film’s integrity. Malle called this the most personal of his movies. But because it’s the closest he came to the conventional morality he always found so limiting, it feels his most impersonal. In 1944, as a 12-year-old student at a Catholic boarding school, Malle had seen the Gestapo arrest a Jewish student hiding under an assumed name and the headmaster priest. Both later died in the camps. In this reimagining, Malle’s stand-in (Gaspard Manesse) befriends the Jewish student (Raphael Fejtö) and then unintentionally betrays him.

Malle’s self-portrait of his younger self here is troubling—aggrandized for the purpose of self-flagellation (as if a 12-year-old boy could have stood up to the Gestapo). And the character of Joseph, the picked-upon kitchen boy who joins the Gestapo, falls back on all the reductive clichés that Malle’s portrayal of Lucien avoided.

If Lacombe, Lucien stands as an intellectual and moral rejoinder to the simplifications of Au Revoir les Enfants, then the high spirits of the third film in this collection, the 1971 Murmur of the Heart, shows up the remote and joyless prestige filmmaking of Au Revoir.

Set in 1954, as French rule in Indochina was collapsing, Murmur of the Heart is perhaps the most sophisticated act of effrontery the movies have given us. It’s the story of 14-year-old Laurent (Benoît Ferreux), the precocious youngest son of a prosperous family, budding intellectual and jazz enthusiast, and his soulmate, his Italian mother Clara (the radiant Lea Massari). Clara tries to keep up a front of bourgeois propriety for the sake of Laurent and his two older brothers, but the outsider in her, the Italian refugee who was barefoot when she met her gynecologist husband (Daniel Gelín), feels a kinship with their pranks against that propriety.

Murmur of the Heart came out at a time when American movies were sucking up to youth’s romantic view of itself as rebellious and free of society’s hypocrisy. Malle’s movie is set a generation earlier, yet it understands the hypocrisy of the kids whose playacting at rebellion (as opposed to the ones who put themselves on the line for their convictions) has the cushion of upper-middle-class comfort beneath it. Here, though, it’s a happy hypocrisy.

Malle doesn’t despise Laurent and his brothers because he knows that, in time, they’ll settle down to the sort of lives they are tweaking. Malle knew that spiritual torment over material comfort was a rich man’s privilege. (It was the false torment that bedeviled Bertolucci for years.) None of the good bourgeois snobbery Laurent and his brothers indulge in prevents them from feeling real affection for each other.

Most of the attention paid Murmur was focused on the finale of the film, when, following a drunken Bastille Day celebration, Clara and Laurent fall into bed together and make love. For Malle, this scene is the apotheosis of a career that broke taboos and conventions and assumptions about human behavior. It’s done with such casual impudence that you’re too charmed and moved to be shocked—which is exactly when the shock of what you’re being charmed by hits you. There are few films as joyous as Murmur of the Heart. Available again in a time far more explicit but far less sophisticated than when it first appeared, it stands ready to upend a whole new set of hypocrisies and sensitivities. Let’s hope those holding them have a sense of humor.

Mediated Men

Our leaders are dishonest, the news is unethical, TV is clogged with sensationalism—welcome to 1976! Warner Brothers recently rolled out two-disc editions of Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men and Sidney Lumet’s Network and Dog Day Afternoon, accompanied by timely promotional campaigns like “The Government Is Lying.” Now, taking the bid for relevance a step further, Warner Brothers has collected them all together in Controversial Classics Volume 2: The Power of Media.

Socially engaged and cinematically reserved, Pakula and Lumet were almost uniquely qualified to provide deadpan documents of society gone awry. Their brand of pessimism included an aloofness that contributed to the gravity of their dystopian visions. With spare soundtracks, a dearth of close-ups and charisma-challenged protagonists, there’s little sense of persuasion going on: It feels like the truth.

In All the President’s Men, Pakula places Washington, D.C., before the unblinking, judgmental camerawork of Gordon Willis, lending a sinister patina to the mechanisms of bureaucracy. The investigation into the Watergate break-in by Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) unfolds as a solemn detective procedural, with long takes and long shots accentuating the needle-in-the-haystack frustration of the reporters. The perverse lesson never learned by Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass—that investigation is the work of banality—is central to Pakula’s story. Where the journalist hero of Pakula’s previous film, The Parallax View, overcame barroom brawls, shootouts and car crashes only to fall prey to a shadowy organization, it’s Woodward and Bernstein’s dull shoe leather that finally prevails—not just over the Nixon administration, but over the entity whose name is cursed most passionately: The New York Times. Still, there remains a cool, stoic terror that lingers longer than the ostensibly happy ending: Richard Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell’s cameos are limited to their televisual apparitions, a reminder that the corruption they represent exists in the ether. The invisible villains are too busy to be bothered with personal appearances anyway.

In Network’s nihilistic post-Watergate vision, multinational corporations have swallowed everything else—government presence is limited to a mention of Gerald Ford’s status as a shooting survivor. The story of UBS, a fictional fourth network that competes with NBC, CBS and ABC, Network arrived almost exactly 10 years before a real fourth network, Fox, began a crass ascent that would soon rival UBS for fairness and balance. What Fox still doesn’t have is a raconteur like Howard Beale (Peter Finch), who upon learning of his impending firing announces that he will kill himself on the air, and sends executives Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) and Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) scrambling to capitalize on the ratings frenzy. “There are no nations, there are no peoples,” UBS’s owner (Ned Beatty) explains in a speech that’s Samuel Huntington meets Monty Python. “It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet.”

The applauding crowds, not unlike those that Lumet wrangled in Dog Day Afternoon, are darkly comic in their anonymous groupthink: Even when they shout that they’re “mad as hell,” they’re smiling, happy to be part of a trend.

But if these movies as a whole tell us anything, it may be that the media is no place for a person to find communion. “Go to yourselves, because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth,” preaches Howard Beale, as if the lonely protagonists of the Me Decade weren’t already trapped inside themselves. Al Pacino’s Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day has left his overbearing wife for a Bellevue-registered drama queen who’s ready to leave him anyway. Bob Woodward, with no time for a girlfriend (or, apparently, to clean his apartment), tolerates Carl Bernstein but betrays no warm feeling toward him. Howard Beale’s a widower with no place to live, while his best friend Max (William Holden) directs his romantic energies toward a woman who needs to talk about ratings to have an orgasm.

It should come as no surprise that these prestigious films lost in the Best Picture categories to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (in 1976) and Rocky (in 1977), each a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. During this year’s Oscar telecast, host Jon Stewart noted that two of this year’s Best Picture nominees, Good Night, and Good Luck and Capote, were “about determined journalists defying obstacles in a relentless pursuit of the truth. Needless to say, both are period pieces.” Is it also needless to say that they were both about lonely men?

—Sean Howe