THE ANNIVERSARY (Roy Ward Baker, 1968)

A Hammer film, The Anniversary is a British black comedy starring Bette Davis, who is wonderful as the one-eyed, unmotherly widowed matriarch of a brood of grown weaklings and their more combative wife and girlfriend. (One of the sons, fixated on women’s undergarments, remains unattached.) This film is wickedly funny and more entertaining, perhaps, than it has any right to be, with some astute asides on competitive business practices. It is elegantly directed by Roy Ward Baker (he provides commentary on the DVD), the gent who ten years earlier directed the best of the three sinking-of-the-Titanic movies, A Night to Remember. Mrs. Taggart’s anniversary party is also “a night to remember”! With something of the same back-and-forth family one-upmanship as in The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, also 1968), this is two billion times a better movie.

WHO KILLED BAMBI? (Gilles Marchand, 2003)

Doctors, hospitals and such, because of their essential inhumanity, are not my cup of tea. Therefore, I should have warmed up to the medical thriller Qui a tué Bambi? (a title that turns out to be the key to the movie’s last cheap trick), about a surgeon who after hours roams hospital halls, undressing and violating pretty drugged patients before dispatching them. The suspense enters when the heroine, a nurse-in-training, begins to suspect the doctor even as she is attracted to him. At a party she makes the move on him, and he repels her, calling her “a little slut.” The film is scary as all get-out in spots—two patients awake on the operating table—and there are lots of visuals to induce queasiness. The whole thing is ridiculous, naive, inexplicable and dead-ended, but the star, who plays the student, is a plucky piece of eye-candy, and this is one film in which at least three young things are naked, frontally, below the waist. (Or is that waste?) Their being unconscious kinda cuts into and drains the fun.
     This god-awful movie was written and directed by state film school professor Gilles Marchand, who collaborated with director Laurent Cantet on the script for Human Resources, a work that had him pegged as a good guy. Not around girls, it turns out!