Little Murders [1971] Alan Arkin

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Little Murders (1971)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067350/

English and Spanish subs separate files.

Little Murders is a 1971 black comedy film starring Elliott Gould and Marcia Rodd about a girl (Rodd) who brings home her boyfriend (Gould) to meet her parents amidst a series of random shootings, garbage strikes and electrical outages ravaging the neighborhood and the family's severe dysfunction.


Elliott Gould ... Alfred Chamberlain
Marcia Rodd ... Patsy Newquist
Vincent Gardenia ... Mr. Newquist
Elizabeth Wilson ... Mrs. Newquist
Jon Korkes ... Kenny Newquist
John Randolph ... Mr. Chamberlain
Doris Roberts ... Mrs. Chamberlain
Lou Jacobi ... Judge Stern
Donald Sutherland ... Rev. Dupas
Alan Arkin ... Lt. Practice

"Little Murders was conceived as an essay on what I perceived to be going on in America in the mid-1960s…'inspired,' if you will, by the assassination of JFK and the shooting of Oswald a week later. The post-assassination climate of urban violence made me realize this country was in the process of having an unstated and unacknowledged nervous breakdown. All forms of authority which had been previously honored and respected, on every level of society, were slowly losing their validity."—Jules Feiffer

Jules Feiffer's Little Murders failed both as a play that closed within a week, and a film that didn't last much longer in movie theaters. Black comedies make you cringe and laugh at the same time—then a few seconds later, they make you feel a little guilty for having laughed. Peter Berg's Very Bad Things is a perfect example. Little Murders, on the other hand, is an ultra-black comedy that makes you cringe and want to run for cover. The urban landscape has become dangerous ground—and only a sniper's bullet away from the one depicted in John Carpenter's Escape from New York. Explosions shatter buildings and rock nearby homes, vigilante squads patrol the streets, blackouts and power failures are commonplace, and there have been 345 unsolved murders in the last six months. Can two people fall in love—and survive—in this no man's land?

While the play took place entirely in the Newquist's apartment, Feiffer thought it best to provide some backstory for the couple so he had them "meet cute and fall in love in a traditional Hollywood style." He admits disliking this "prologue" and, for him, the film begins when Patsy and Alfred enter her apartment that had been savagely vandalized during their absence. "This is the first 'little murder' that takes place…the murder of our safety, our sense of security, and an assault on who and what we are as social beings." I thought this opening worked beautifully. As the sounds of Alfred's mugging get louder, the viewer becomes apprehensive. When Patsy rescues him and decides to mold his life to her expectations, we get a great deal of insight into their burgeoning relationship. The long idyllic sequence at the country club and their strolls through the park lull the viewer back into a false sense of security. The return to her devastated apartment delivers the shock effect Feiffer was aiming for, and portends more danger and violence. By the end of the film, everyone has become so callous and accustomed to living in a "war zone" that the 345 unsolved deaths are all simply "little murders."


The film originated as a play written by cartoonist Jules Feiffer which he attempted to stage in New York City in 1967 but it lasted only seven performances. He made another attempt, this time at the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Christopher Morahan at the Aldwych Theatre in London, which was much more successful. Feiffer brought the play back to the United States in 1969 where it was performed at the Circle in the Square in New York City with a cast that included Linda Lavin, Vincent Gardenia, Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland, and David Steinberg.

Jules Feiffer, cartoonist, playwright, author and illustrator, is so multi-talented and so refined and brilliant in each of his talents that it's perversely easy to underrate him. For instance, as screenwriter of Mike Nichols' film Carnal Knowledge and Robert Altman's film Popeye, his work brackets the celebrated New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s. Add to that one screenplay for Alain Resnais (I Want to Go Home, 1989) and 1971's disturbing family comedy Little Murders, directed by Alan Arkin, and Feiffer's contribution to cinema becomes a small but vital one.

Of course, billed as Jules Feiffer's Little Murders, this film sits oddly amid the American cinema of its era: a writer's film. And Alan Arkin, while dabbling in filmmaking every so often, has not built up a reputation in that field to match the acclaim he has rightly earned as an actor. And in terms of the movie's cinematic language, credit must be given to cinematographer Gordon Willis, fresh from Hal Ashby's The Landlord but with Klute, The Godfather, All the President's Men and Annie Hall still to come—the man who would do perhaps more than anyone else to define the look of American film in that era.

Feiffer is known as a satirist, and Little Murders was sold as a "terrifying comedy," and somewhere between these terms the film can be located. The subject is urban alienation and the breakdown of society, random violence and the disintegration of the personality. And love. For all its grotesque exaggeration and surrealism, it has, at least some of the time, a direct truthfulness and insight.

Comfortable in its innate strangeness, Little Murders is also a snapshot of gaudy ’70’s fashions. The furniture and costumes are so unmistakably out of the textbook of apartment tenements of that era, yet to criticize the outdated sets would be to sidestep the message. Point being: the message is more important than how the film looks. The characters in this piece are obsessed with the city’s infested violence, often are victims of it, and are even harassed in their own homes by perverted crank callers. The characters inhabit a city that is unlivable, and are ordered by authorities at one point that they can’t leave the city. Little Murders is avante-garde comedy, it pushes provocative buttons with its viewers and doesn’t follow standard plot beat conventions. New York has been depicted in other movies with far worse ridicule, but in this film it does get a merciless send-up.

The film opened to a lukewarm review by Roger Greenspan, and a more positive one by Vincent Canby in the New York Times. Roger Ebert's review in the Chicago Sun Times was more enthusiastic, saying, "One of the reasons it works, and is indeed a definitive reflection of America's darker moods, is that it breaks audiences down into isolated individuals, vulnerable and uncertain.".