USA,
1971, 93 min
Shown in 2004
CREDITS
- dir
-
Milos Forman
- prod
-
Alfred W. Crown
- scr
-
Jean-Claude Carrière, Milos Forman, John Guare
- cam
-
Miroslav Ondrícek
- editor
-
John Carter
- cast
-
Lynn Carlin, Buck Henry, Georgia Engel, Vincent Schiavelli, Tony Harvey
- source
-
US DISTRIBUTOR Universal Pictures, 100 Universal Plaza, Bldg. 488-8H, Universal City, CA 91608.
OTHER
Forman's first American film combines the bemused humanism of his Czech work with the satirical force of his new international collaborators: writers John Guare (House of Blue Leaves) and Jean-Paul Carrière (Luis Bunuel’s frequent screenwriter) and comedian Buck Henry. Henry stars as Larry, a buttoned-down New Yorker faced with a suburbanite’s most terrifying nightmare: tracking down his runaway daughter in a dropped-out, doped-up Greenwich Village. Where some directors would focus on stern moral lessons or melodramatic evils, Forman instead turns a sympathetic gaze towards all sides, wryly observing that “normal” culture is usually far stranger—and far more amusing—than any subculture. As Larry and his wife explore this hippie wonderland, their journey takes on progressively more bizarre tones: a parents-only meeting turns into a pot-smoking session (to “better understand”), search parties get sidetracked into local bars and anguish over the sexual revolution disappears into experimental games of strip poker. Its casual realism heightened through its use of now-infamous Manhattan locales and nonprofessional extras, Taking Off hilariously captures American life, hypocrisy and exasperation circa 1971, thanks in great part to Forman’s unobtrusive, nonjudgmental style, which allows his characters the space to define, and damn, themselves in the most entertaining ways possible.
—Jason Sanders
FACTOID #51
The first silent film screened at the Festival (now an annual tradition) was The Scarlet Letter (1924) by the great Swedish director Victor Sjöström, on October 24, 1968. The film’s star, Lillian Gish, was honored with an in-person tribute two days later.
