Film

Little Murders (1971)

Director: Alan Arkin

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A wryly funny parable, scripted by Jules Feiffer from his own play, about a photographer living in a metropolis where murder, rape and arson are so commonplace that nobody notices any more. Happily spending his days shooting shit in all shapes and sizes ('Harper's Bazaar wants me to do its Spring issue'), he naturally gets beaten up from time to time (but the muggers, he says, soon get tired and go away). Into his life comes a happy, beautiful girl who insists that everyone should wake up with a smile in the mornings; and just as he begins to discover what it is to have feelings, a sniper's bullet intervenes. Some of the fun poked at the nervous disintegration of Establishment authority (judge, cop, clergyman) is done in blatantly extraneous revue-type sketches. But the performances are perfection, and at the end you are left with a haunting image of the Feiffer world, where little daily murders done to man's soul have made feeling not merely dangerous but impossible.

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