On Stage Angela Denoke exposed a breast in Sunday's performance of Parsifal in Vienna The Fox 1967 Two free-spirited young ladies decide to buy a farm after they graduate from college, and are really struggling to break even with a few chickens, a few ducks, and one cow. The greatest obstacle to their success is a predatory fox who is always after their birds and eggs. With the onset of a harsh, snowy winter, they are essentially completely isolated from civilization. At times they are even unable to traverse the snowy, desolate roads to the nearby village. Into their lives comes an itinerant seaman, a strapping young man who visits the farm because he grew up there and has come to visit his grandfather, with whom he had had no contact in three years. He did not realize that the old man had passed on, and that the two women had purchased his estate in an auction. Since the sailor is only on a two-week leave from his ship, the two women offer him free room and board in exchange for his help in fixing up the portions of the farm which have falled into disrepair. The sailor falls in love with one of the women, and the other woman's jealousy turns out to be quite different from what we originally anticipate. It turns out that she does not have sexual feelings for the man, but rather for her partner on the farm. It tunrs out that the partner is ambivalent about everything, including her own sexuality, and is willing to have sex with both of them. Melodrama ensues. The Fox is a loose adaptation (and geographic relocation) of a D.H. Lawrence novella. Roger Ebert called it a "quite, powerful masterpiece" and assigned to it a perfect 4-star rating. I must respectfully disagree, although I might have come closer to agreement if I had seen the movie in 1968, when he wrote his review, since the lesbian scene and Anne Heywood's naked masturbation scene were probably daring portrayals within the context of the mainstream American movies of the time. The Fox contains the full litany of excesses from the filmmaking of the late sixties and early seventies. The characters' motivations and actions are lacking in credibility, and every situation is imbued with far more melodrama than the conflicts should warrant. The acting is also quite poor, featuring two of the worst performers of that era: Keir Dullea is wooden and off-kilter, while Sandy Dennis's readings and reactions are, as always, too petulant and immature to represent a sophisticated, grown woman. At least we can be thankful that the other woman was not played by Kim Darby. That would have been the 1960s trifecta of bad acting. Two weak performances can be absorbed in some types of films, but they spell disaster for this movie, because it is essentially a filmed version of a three-character play, meaning that those two characters have 2/3 of the screen time. Worse still, they probably have 90% of the dialogue because the other woman is the strong, silent type who only speaks when spoken to, and even then replies tersely, maintaining a great deal of emotional distance from the others. That hollow performing, when coupled with a heavy-handed score, excessive and obvious symbolism, a contrived ending, and a glacial pace, makes the film a real chore to watch now, about 50 years after it was released. The cinematography, however, is quite beautiful, atmospheric and evocative. SPOILER: it must be the only film in history in which one of the characters apparently commits suicide by placing herself deliberately in the presumed falling trajectory of a tree being chopped down, then refusing to move when the other characters point out the precarious nature of her position. Although the film did little at the box office in its day, and is all but forgotten now, the director was Mark Rydell, who received a Golden Glovbe nomination for this picture and did many films which were considerably better. He was nominated for the Best Director Oscar for On Golden Pond, and also did such successful films as John Wayne's The Cowboys, Bette Midler's The Rose, and Steve McQueen's The Reivers. The nudity is quite good. Anne Heywood, whom we saw a few days ago in Good Luck, Miss Wycoff, performs a two-minute sequence in which she strips stark naked and masturbates while standing in front of a mirror. Here is the film clip. Still below Stay current Check Other Crap for updates in real time, or close to it.