Canada
Shown in 1968
CREDITS
- dir
-
Eric Till
- prod
-
Martin Rosen
- scr
-
Terence Heffernan
- cam
-
Jean-Claude LeBreque
- cast
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Reni Santoni, Louise Latraverse, Paul Sand, Marcy Plotnick, Gerard Parkes
- prod co
-
Argofilm, Canada
- source
-
United Dimensions, Inc.
OTHER
One of the most delightful revelations at the Berlin Film Festival this year was this wry comedy, a debut film by a young English director—one that managed to convey the floundering aspirations of an urban Canadian without being artificial or self-consciously hip. It is a formless, riotously humanistic slice of Montreal life in which one observes 23-year-old Vinny Shea, trying to find out how to live happily ever after and still do his thing (whatever it might happen to be). He is a roguish, hustling sort of individual who dreams of becoming a successful novelist, but recognizes, too, his inability to conform to the average ways of society. His relationship with Michele, an old high-school girlfriend; his conversations with one of his buddies, whose chief ambition is to watch the effect of any aphrodisiac upon any girl; and a charmingly disastrous experience as a babysitter—all add up to the portrait of a genial misfit. Eric Till's flair for comic direction is admirably interpreted by Reni Santoni, in the role of Vinny. Santoni is a brilliant comic actor (he is a former member of the Chicago Second City group), and made his screen debut last year in the film, Enter Laughing. One watches his performance with amazement because it is not really controlled by the episodic, lyrical style of the film. He has dissected all the stages of adolescence struggling toward manhood and kept the ability for laughter as his irreplaceable life force. Santoni makes A Great Big Thing an immensely successful, genuinely touching human comedy.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #134
The 1986 San Francisco International’s Discovering Mike Leigh was the director’s first retrospective in the U.S. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Festival Artistic Director Peter Scarlet compared the then-unknown Leigh to Yasujiro Ozu before his work had achieved international recognition; while the latter director had been considered ’too Japanese’ for global audiences, Leigh was considered ’too British.’
