Little Murders (1971)

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Blistering performances.

Exact rating: 8.25The pulse of this movie is subversive and menacing, and even though there are many, many great laughs, I think the classification of it as a comedy is wrong. It never feels like a comedy. In terms of tone, it is something like the pilot for Twin Peaks and a Mamet play and an Odets play, but with some strange off off off off Broadway claustrophobia and seventies nihilistic horror. It displays a collapsed and paranoid urban environment in which people are combative with words and isolated by them.I feel it should be essential viewing for any writer, as it contains four of the best-- if not the actual four best-- monologues I've ever heard in a movie. Arkin and Sutherland have amazing monologues that are only marginally upstaged by those given by Gould and Jacobi.I laughed many, many times (as did many people in the sold out screening I attended), but when it ended, the haunting and thoughtful core of the movie lingered more than did the comedy.A rich and allegorical piece that deserves serious study and accolades.(I saw a 35mm print of the movie at Film Forum, N.Y.)

What do you do when the constant onslaught of muggings, defective public services, obscene phonecalls and general disenchantment of the city has crushed your once-promising career as a photographer to the point where you only take pictures of excrement - for which they still give you awards? What do you do when people beat you up just because they notice you, and across the city people are being murdered in their hundreds by unknown assailants with no apparent motive? Why are they doing it? And what, finally, do you do when the one woman you have found whose optimism remains undefeated by all this is shockingly and savagely murdered in your arms, at the very moment you hesitantly tell her that she's made you begin to feel again? This marvellous, blacker-than-soot satire solves all these puzzles with an answer that seems to have put off many viewers with its callous cynicism: why - buy a gun and start shooting people yourself! There's much more to this - the film suggests - than simply joining what you can't beat. More, indeed, than simply fighting back against the incoming bullets. The implication is that - alone among the city's miserable, oppressed citizens - the snipers who are picking off strangers in the streets are actually having fun. The rest are just targets.Brilliant, hysterical and shocking by turns, with spectacular performances all round.

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 ---

I saw this movie in 1971 when I lived in New York City. I still remember it. I bought the book and wish it were autographed by one of the foremost cartoonists of The Village Voice. Perhaps the original, a play, was an extension of a cartoon he had in his mind. Definitely controversial. Hold onto your seat during the first scene. This movie is described as a "black comedy". Somehow,I didn't laugh, but then again I didn't laugh during the The Boy With Green Hair, either. Elliot Gould's role was exceptional as the husband in great despair whose vocation went on a downward spiral as a result of a shocking loss. There is a relationship between the era this movie was made and how life is today.(There is no spell check...sorry for any mistakes.)