21st May 1971, The Dutchman, ‘Kensington Post’ page 54
THE DUTCHMAN, Electric Cinema Club, Portobello Road. Brilliantly spare, edgily directed adaptation of LeRoi Jones’ flaring racial-sexual dialogue between a white girl (Shirley Knight) and a coloured man (Al Freeman Jnr.) on the New York subway. Anthony Harvey’s dazzling first film (56 minutes) was made in 1966, and by the way, it’s British.
Plus NO MORE EXCUSES. By the director of PUTNEY SWOPE, this 1967 movie was the surprise hit of the Electric’s OZ benefit nights in April. A zany look at some aspects of Americana: singles bars, the assassination of President Garfield, the Society for the Improvement of Naked Animals, etc. Today (Thursday) at 7 and 11 p.m.: tomorrow at 7 p.m.: Saturday at 3 and 7 p.m.
THE PAWNBROKER. Electric Cinema Club, Portohello Road, Saturday, at 5 and 9 p.m. Sidney Lumet’s brilliant 1964 movie from the novel by Edward Lewis Wallant presented Rod Steiger with the chance to give the performance of his life. Steiger plays Sol Nazerman, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz who has nursed his bitterness over many years as an uncharitable Harlem pawnbroker. The film, which co-stars Geraldine Fitzgerald and Brock Peters, traces the return of Nazerman’s sense of human dignity. A moving experience which is recognised as one of the landmarks in American cinema.
THE STRANGER. Electric Cinema Club, Portobello Road, Sunday at 5 and 9 p.m., Monday at 7 p.m., Tuesday at 9 p.m., Wednesday at 7 and 11 p.m. Luichino Visconti’s film from the novel by Albert Camus was described as “a thin, sharp tale which stabs exactly and deeply into the moral nerve points of a century which is emptily agnostic but still not emancipated.” The Franco-Italian production, 1967, is acutely attuned to switches of impulse and mood and transposes them brilliantly into visual terms. With Marcello Mastroianni and Anna Karina.
Mary Lear