boblipton

This two-reel industrial film is from the Ford Motor Company. For the greatest part of its length, it talks about the designing of new cars, including cars that will never be put on a production line. These are "concept cars" intended to be exhibited at car shows and world fairs. The concept cars shown here incorporate sleek designs, new instrumentation, and an awful lot of glass. People who see them would then be polled to discover how many of the radical innovations would be acceptable to the car-buying public.

That done, it's mentioned that Ford's newly released Mustang II is basically a concept car, sent straight from the design team to the production line. We then see the car on roads, turning around snowbanks, and in general behaving like a car should. It's been an advertising movie for the Mustang II all along.

A man and his wife are selling their home in a nice community. The people who want to purchase are pleasant, they like the neighborhood, and they can afford the price. The man doing the selling is pleased. But his neighbors are not, because the people buying the house are Black.

This was called "blockbusting" back then. A Black family would buy a house in an all-White community, and a lot of the people would sell their homes at bargain prices to Black families. Although this film makes the point that home prices don't decline under these situations, that the local banker and the local minister think it's fine, this sort of prejudice was very common back then. I still continues today.

People complain of a smell coming from an apartment. Fireman and police break in. They find the corpse of Emanuelle Riva laying on her bed, surrounded but flowers.

Jean-Louis Trintignant and Fraulein Riva are both retired music teachers. They live a comfortable retired life in their pleasant apartment. Then one morning, she goes silent for a while. She is unaware of what has happened. She has had a stroke; her left side is paralyzed. An operation to deal with it goes awry, and she begins to die. M. Trintignant tries to deal with it, but it is very difficult, and she does not wish to live.

Michael Haneke's movie won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture; it was also up for Picture of the Year. I found it a very tough watch, and took a break about halfway through. Both the leads play tough, unsentimental characters who love each other dearly. Like other movies about old age -- Griffith's What Shall We Do With Our Old?, McCarey's Make Way For Tomorrow spring to mind -- it is daring, telling, unpleasant, and utterly devastating in its honestly.