Made in U.S.A.
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Year Released: 1966
Rating: 1.0
Colorful but frustrating and mostly vacant Godard picture with his muse Anna Karina captured in full color: while he trains his camera on her admittedly lovely face, you're expected to come up with a reason to care about his slapdash detective "story." The great irony is that because JLG and his people never paid Donald Westlake for the rights to the novel that this is based on, this picture was in legal hell for a while before the folks at Criterion snapped it up. This brings up two questions: did Westlake actually watch this and feel his work was being insulted by Godard? Or was he just money-mad? Even though it goes without saying that this isn't JLG's finest achievement, if I were Westlake I would have been highly amused by the picture - I mean, who else could take this kind of material and so brazenly craft something so ridiculous and (borderline) incoherent?
