rokcomx Last night's Fox Move Channel gem was Little Murders, an obscure 1971 flick based on a play by one of my favorite authors and cartoonists, Jules Feiffer (Unicorn in the Garden and the terrific "lost" TV show My World and Welcome To It, with William Windom as the cartoonist). Little Murders has Elliott Gould as a mild mannered guy living in the big city who gets beaten and robbed all the time, but he just smiles and daydreams thru the beatings - It's mainly about how violent urban life eventually inures people to the horror, to the point where even a little old lady says things like "Gunshots? So what? I get shot at every time I walk out the door." It's very sharp satire, with several amazing bits of dialogue, mostly monologues by Gould but also a wonderfully wonky scene with young longhaired Donald Sutherland as an alternate lifestyle preacher, conducting an insane wedding ceremony with ridiculous hippie-slash-anarchist vows being recited by the increasingly manic Sutherland. I sometimes think Feiffer thought hippies and anarchists were the same thing (kinda true, on some subtle and ultimately superficial levels), but his terrific writing - and Gould's equally terrific reading - made the film a sweet treat for me! I'd never even heard of it before the credits rolled ----- yay FMC!After I looked it up on IMDb, I found someone had transcribed the wedding scene - while it loses a lot without Sutherland's performance, you can get an idea of just how dark and funny author Feiffer was ---- what a wonderfully bitter, cynical, and brilliant man!Little Murders may have been a little cerebral and dark for audiences coming out of the '60s who'd soon pledge their troth to Dirty Harry, Easy Rider, the Exorcist, et al (three fine films, but with none of the artistry, wit, intelligence, and pitch-perfect performances of Little Murders).As someone who still considers film-making first and foremost (ideally) an artform, rather than mere entertainment, it was great to find these IMDb posts for Little Murders - more and more, it turns out, people DO appreciate these movies, even/if it's a quarter or half century later. Few master painters were ever lauded in their own lifetimes either ---

Yxklyx Little Murders (1971, Alan Arkin) was excellent (except for Alan Arkin) I'm really surprised at the below 7 rating for this movie on IMDb. The only thing I can think of is that the characters don't really come across as people but as allegorical ideas - and while I usually don't care for up-front allegory in movies (most movies do a better job at hiding it), here it works. The comedy in this one is not dated at all (except for Alan Arkin's over-the-top humor bit - but his scene is just a minor cameo). Donald Sutherland has this incredible scene as an existential live and let live (go with the flow) wedding ceremony presider where the "deity is not to be mentioned". Elliot Gould (who I'm not a big fan of) here is at his best. He's got a monologue sequence reminiscent of Nicholson's in The King of Marvin Gardens. It all wraps up excellently - it's absurd, it's dark, it's evocative. 9/10

Lee Eisenberg When they were all in their heyday, Elliott Gould, Alan Arkin (who also directed) and Donald Sutherland collaborated on the over-the-top black comedy "Little Murders", in which Gould plays emotionally vacant New York photographer Alfred Chamberlain, hooking up with vivacious young Patsy Newquist (Marcia Rodd) in the midst of several hundred unsolved homicides in the Big Apple. In the process of everything, the series of events exposes the flaws in all the characters, especially Patsy's parents (Vincent Gardenia and Elizabeth Wilson).I think that my two favorite scenes are the appearances of Sutherland and Arkin. Sutherland plays a priest who seems to be a cross between Sutherland's characters from "MASH" and "Kelly's Heroes"; Arkin plays a detective who spouts out the craziest monologue explaining why there's a conspiracy behind the murders. Overall, this is very much a New York kind of movie. I should identify that there are several very long scenes during the movie, but it's certainly not a flick that you'll forget anytime soon. Impressive.

mdm-11 Elliot Gould is stunningly attractive, which is one of only a few reasons why I watched this insane film all the way through. Each of the characters introduced are in their own right neurotic or uniquely nuts. The only fairly sane person is the young woman who falls in love and marries Gould in order to "change him". The brief appearance of Donald Sutherland as a very progressive minister, who prides himself on the high failure rate of the ceremonies he performs is amusing, as he frankly insults everyone gathered by pointing at their peculiarities, causing an eventual riot.It takes the film more than half of the running time to get a close up of the "little murders". The most shocking moment is when a blood-drenched Gould takes a subway ride, his visibly near-death appearance raising not a single eye-brow among the many commuters. A middle aged woman matter-of-factly announced that she was shot at, the bullet stopped by her her shopping bags. "Open up, I have leaking groceries". Bizarre! An irate police detective investigating the random murder spree is one of the "bigger nuts" in the cast. WOW! If you enjoy "shock value", then this film is for you. To me, the entire cast was made up of zombies who wander about their existence and can't be bothered by anything. The final scene is the culmination of bizarre occurrences. See for yourself, but for me, this was definitely a one-time-view.