Made in U.S.A (1967)

Strong and Moving!

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Good movie but grossly overrated

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

In 1966 Jean-Luc Godard was approached by producer Georges de Beauregard, who said that he had some money he needed to spend and asked if Godard could make a film on very short notice. Godard said sure, and proposed adapting a pulp crime novel (Donald E. Westlake's "The Jugger"). But when Godard made the film, which would get the title MADE IN U.S.A., he did everything possible to break out of a straightforward adaptation, using the novel as a mere skeleton over which he could explore other themes that interested him.Paula (Anna Karina), a journalist, goes to a small town where her estranged boyfriend Richard has died in mysterious circumstances, surely murder. Determined to get to the bottom of things, she takes on the air of a hardboiled detective, wielding a pistol and wearing a Bogartian trenchcoat. She meets the doctor who did the autopsy and has a run-in with the police, but mainly we see her tangled up with two gangsters, played by László Szabó and Jean-Pierre Léaud.Godard maintains just enough conventional dialogue and action to let the viewer know where we are in the crime novel's plot, but most of what transpires before the camera must be understood as only abstract metaphors for what would have happened in the book. The interaction between his characters mainly has other purposes. They have absurdist conversations with a great deal of wordplay. They allude to French politics in a time when Godard was worried about the compromised values of the French Left and the spectres of fascism and consumer society. The Ben Barka affair, where a Moroccan dissident was murdered in France in 1965 with the apparent involvement of the French security services, looms very large over MADE IN U.S.A., almost elbowing Westlake's original story out entirely. As if aware that he had stripped the plot down to such a degree that he now had too much time to be filled, he gives little asides like Marianne Faithful singing "Tears Go By" a cappella in a cameo and Kyôko Kosaka strumming a guitar and singing in Japanese.This is not one of Godard's best films. For one, Godard reused many of the elements of his masterpiece PIERROT LE FOU from the year before. PIERROT LE FOU was itself assembled as sort of a collage of shots from Godard's prior films, which worked well as a wonderful summing up of his early career. But when he does the same with MADE IN U.S.A., it is to greatly diminished effect. But even if this is weak by Godard standards, it is nonetheless a moving experience. Shot in colour and in Cinemascope, this is a feast for the eyes. The very best of what the 1960s had to offer in terms of fashion and product design is on hand here and it just jumps of the screen. The image feels electric. (It is a pity that Criterion's edition is only on DVD, as a Blu-Ray would have yielded even greater pleasures.) Godard's longtime cameraman Raoul Coutard gives us some elaborate long takes that impress. And of course it's Godard's last major celebration of Anna Karina's beauty and poise, which really was something for the ages, still stunning half a century later.

As far as the meaningless images and dialogues let us know it looks like this is the story in the movie: A girl goes to a provincial town to investigate about her lover's murder and take her revenge on that. Once there she involves herself with one and another in obscure dialogues and nonsense sequences, ending up by killing two of them (because she thinks they were the killers or at least belong to the murderer's gang?) The motives of the supposed murder stay obscure and the movie develops itself in intersected images and sequences that explain little. And it finishes with the usual meaningless ending of Godard's movies. Godard is a movie director that most distinguished critics present as one of the greatest of our times who even influenced such directors (these are great indeed) as Altman, Scorsese, Wenders and Tarantino. Since till now I haven't seen a single of Godard's films that I liked I suppose that the fault must be mine. However I am not alone in this appreciation.

Made in U.S.A. (1966) ** (out of 4)Jean-Luc Godard's homage to American film noir has a mysterious woman (Anna Karina) trying to figure out who killed her former lover. The woman travels throughout France questioning various men trying to figure out who was behind the murder while the viewer tries to figure out why they're bothering watching the film. There's no question that Godard is a legend of the screen but there's also no question that many, many people hate him. Hate's too strong of a word but I do admit that I think the director likes to be frustrating and the more people he makes mad I'm sure the happier he is. The story itself really isn't all that interesting and I found it funny that Godard had said in interviews that he was influenced by the Humphrey Bogart classic THE BIG SLEEP. The two films have very little in common and I'd say there's also very little homage to the classic noirs of the 40s and 50s. For the most part the film succeeds in being weird but like most Godard movie it's still well-made no matter how silly, boring and stupid it gets. I think what I liked most about the film were the colors that Godard uses on our main character. When we first see her she's wearing a multi-color dress and throughout the movie her wardrobe is clearly the most interesting and entertaining thing on the screen. I liked the way Godard used this colors to really light up the scene just like filmmakers would use shadow and fog to bring to life their noirs. The story itself I found to be very uninteresting and there wasn't a single second where I cared what was going on and I certainly didn't care who killed the former lover. I'm sure some Godard fans would say that was what the director was going for and I'd personally believe this but at the same time I just don't fall into the group who believes you can be pointless and unconventional and make it entertaining. The performances are pretty good for what they are but none of them really jump out at you. The film has fun mentioning earlier films and we even get Bogart's name thrown up and one character is named Richard Widmark. MADE IN U.S.A. is a film that I'm sure has some fans but I found it rather hard to sit through even though it's well-made.

It's probably useless to say anything against Godard, since it's some kind of an unwritten law, that Godard is a cinematic god, and if you don't confess your belief to him, you're a vulgar idiot. - still I have to say that he's one of the most overrated directors in film history.Yeah, sure I admit his historical value, the man made a huge change in to the course of film making, and I respect him for that. I have also read Godard's book about the structure and nature of film, and found it very fascinating. Still, for a man who knows a lot about the structure of cinema, a decision to throw every single characteristic in storytelling away, feels very strange to me. It just doesn't work. He, if anybody should know, that they don't exist for nothing.I can see why he achieved this "film god" status. He was something never seen before, something outrageous. But hey people, let's face it. An hour long political essay disguised as a movie is not "beutifully poetic" or what ever you want to call it. It's just plain boring. No one ever has anything else to say about Godard's movies, than they are "surrealistic" and have such a "strangely poetic mood" in them. Like it's some kind of a magnitude. Poetic or not, The characters are unidimensional and flat.If you want poetic movies with surrealistic mood, I suggest you to watch for example Robert Bresson's, Andrei Tarkovsky's or Krzysztof Kieslowski's films. They have a lot more in them than just the mood.