Hello-Goodbye (1970)

Very best movie i ever watch

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Legendary producer and Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, at the end of his career, supervised the production of this vanity project for his latest "protege", Genvieve Gilles. There's obviously no real script here, just an excuse for a location shoot in the south of France with lots of Genvieve naked, the result of an over-the-hill producer having a mid life crisis as his studio was being taken from his control. This film has nothing at all going for it, other than showing off Gilles' rather ample endowments, and even THAT gets boring after awhile, because she's so laughably bad, and not sensual or sexy at all. Film gets a slight lift from the presence of Curt Jurgens, and when he first appears about 40 minutes into the proceedings, you realize that finally, there's a real actor in this thing.Hello-Goodbye was a major reason why 20th Century-Fox almost went under again in 1970, just barely having survived the Cleopatra debacle seven years earlier. This, from the man who produced "The Grapes of Wrath", proves what we all know: that a c%nt hair CAN pull an ocean liner.....

Lame, charmless and pointless film that seems more like a vacation for the cast and crew than a serious attempt at movie making. Puckish Michael Crawford is dull and bland and has no chemistry with Genevieve Gilles in her first and only film; it was a hello-goodbye for her film career. And the film seems to have put an end to Michael Crawford's big screen career as well. They are a notably lackluster pair, and Jurgens as he did in Mephisto Waltz waltzes away with the picture or what's left of it. Pretty backdrops with undeveloped characters and their uninteresting dilemmas does not constitute a film.. The film is bad for tourism; worse for film-goers. I wouldn't be surprised if the film opened and closed on the same day. There's nothing at stake here, no characterization, no palpable conflict...I dare you to give a damn! The film was deservedly given a 1 star (out of 4) rating by Roger Ebert.

Cheeky chappy Michael Crawford manages to keep his jolly-o-meter under control for once in a serious role as a car salesman out to bed the beautiful wife of aristocrat Curt Jurgens. She's played by the preposterously proportioned (and acting impaired) Genevieve Gilles, whose frequent nude scenes must have pushed the limits of the GP rating in America. Francis Lai's score is breathtakingly beautiful, and it's a shame that Henri Decae's cinematography is compromised by the pan and scan print currently airing on the Fox Movie Channel. Approach with low expectations and you may enjoy Hello-Goodbye--though fans of late '60s pop psychedelic cinema will be more enthusiastic than others.