Little Murders is a film about the 'little deaths' we all live - in order to survive.I love this move for so many reasons - including it's terrific cast - of many great character actors, the script/screenplay by Jules Pfeiffer is top-notch, and it takes place in somewhere near and dear to me - 'my' NYC - and my neighborhood; the upper west side.Back then, it wasn't yuppies, sky-high prices, it was young families, - middle-class, primarily, and older families as well. This film was made just a few years before the infamous 'Ford to NYC: Drop Dead' cover of the Daily News, as the city was dying, our finances were a shambles, chaos was everywhere,e but, we all tried to lead some semblance of normalcy amid the chaos.So many people when they found out I was from NYC, they'd say; it's it as dangerous as they say,' and I was a kid, and I wasn't scared, nor were the many others - kids, families - it was our home, and it pulsed its a life, which is now - so, so sadly - almost gone - replaced by vacuous big-box chains, hollow-eyed people from 'elsewhere,' who - well, they're not like we were. We all died little deaths back then.As this film is a black ConEdy (uproariously so - Lou JacobI's ('endless) speech about how hard it was for his parents and family, back at the turn of the century (in which every fact, including the number of relatives, rooms in the apartment, and street where it was) change with each telling, but, amidst the changes, facts don't; people came here, and it was hard But, they persevere in order to make a better life for their families.Another standout is Donald Sutherland as Rev. Dupas, who's wedding sermon is so funny, so biting, but, 'that's okay,' as, wed just about ended the 'Summer of Love' era, and were moving into the 'me decade,' - the 'do your own thing'-era.Alfred Chamberlain (Elliot Gould - in the ONLY film I can tolerate him, and, the ONLY role - I think, aside from MASH - he's perfect in) says he's a nihilist, but, I think the reality is, he's more emotionally dead, because, it's easier to not feel. Feeling things is much harder. It leaves one open to - yes, love, but, also hurt, pain, but, if one doesn't feel, doesn't allow this bad and good to happen, they become static, unchanging.Marcia Rodd - so wonderful, and so, so underrated is Patsy - the woman who's going to change Alfred from the unfeeling man he is, into the vision manhood she wants him to be.Many of the other reviews here will tell you much more in depth about this marvelous film than I want to. I want you to watch it, oh, most definitely, but, what I want you to take from this little entrée is to try and peel a little bit away the surface, and try to feel for yourself what it is Alfred so desperately doesn't want to.

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 ---

Sort of like a manic cross between a pointless and overrated Harold Pinter play, Ken Russell (minus the sexual stuff), and farce. LM starts off rather badly, with the quasi-beating up of Gould by a group of punks (he should have had all of his bones broken by the time the "cavalry" arrived). Rodd comes down to his aid, but he just walks away, uninterested in helping her when they attack her. That absurd scene set the tone for the following 30 minutes which aren't that great, especially Gould's first encounter with Rodd's parents: that was embarrassing to watch, with rather bad overacting by most involved. Gould's character makes very little to no sense; even if this is meant to be a comedy, there has to be an underlying reality in the characterization for it to be funny/poignant/whatever, but there is barely any in his case. While the other characters are exaggerated, at least it is clear who and what they are meant to represent. This is not the case with Gould's character.Still, as mostly unfunny and absurd as the movie is, there are some highlights, such as Sutherland's wedding monologue, and then, later, Arkin's. The rest of the movie is an uneasy and mostly unsuccessful mix of comedy and drama (the toughest mix to achieve). The problem with the comedy aspect is that barely anything was funny. Some smile-worthy moments, but that's all. Not a good sign in a comedy. Semi-clever one-liners just aren't enough. Additionally, the movie was directed in such a heavy-handed manner that it can barely elicit any laughs or smiles. Arkin's direction is good, stylish even, but not appropriate for a comedy, not even for a heavy satire. Actors constantly shouting out their lines does not make the script any funnier. "Manic, loud humour" is old-fashioned and dull. The transition from farcical dialogue to the overly dramatic scenes of Rodd's murder and the scenes after it, simply does not work. Feiffer, the writer of this muddled script/play, was obviously highly dissatisfied with American society (as any self-respecting Left-winger has to be, the disappointment basically stemming from the fact that Marxism didn't prevail), and on the DVD commentary he says that in LM he was trying to show where America was going, and he concluded that America had now reached that point. Feiffer, the self-proclaimed Nostradamus! He also added that the movie wasn't just about New York and its violence (and other ills) but the country as a whole. There are, of course, HUGE problems with these statements/opinions.First of all, New York was as violent as it was back in the 60s and 70s mainly due to Feiffer's liberal friends, with their soft policies on crime and punishment. Feiffer is from New York, or so he says, but I find it hard to believe that he ever set foot there. After all, the DVD was released after Mayor Giullliani - a Repubican - had cleaned up NY, so what was this nonsense about America "getting there". New York is safer than it's been in many decades - no thanks to Feiffer's Leftist ways of dealing with crime (a slap on the hand for every hard criminal). Feiffer even comments that Gould and the misfit son (and even Gardenia) are victims of this awful, awful American society, hence that their lashing out by killing pedestrians, at the end of the movie, is "self-defence". No kidding, that's what Feiffer called it! That sounds just like the kind of idiotic drivel other leftists say when they try to justify terrorists as "freedom fighters".Secondly, how can anyone use New York - of all places - to portray the "state of the nation"?? New York is very atypical for most of the rest of the country, hence the film's message was doomed from the moment Feiffer decided to place the setting in NY. Perhaps Feiffer wasn't lying about having been born and having spent all his life in NY. And I mean, ALL HIS LIFE. Perhaps he never visited other parts of the States, hence so very naively thought NY was how it was in all of the 50 states. The moral of the story rings hollow. This seems to be yet another in a long line of scripts written by dissatisfied, neurotic liberals who could never get over the fact that America chose Capitalism over Socialism. Such people/writers have nitpicked through EVERY pore of American society, looking for the tiniest (and less tiny, more obvious) faults, while raising their hypocritical hands and shouting "see?? see?! I told you it was no good!". However, Capitalist America is still thriving so I have no idea what Feiffer is talking about. Sure, every society has its ills, but if someone is seeking for a perfect society then he'd be best served by taking heavy drugs and day-dreaming about Utopia, a non-existent place.Overall, a message (or messages) that holds no water in the real world, in a mostly unfunny comedy. Nevertheless, the movie is quite watchable. It is unpredictable and fairly interesting (aside from the first third).This movie is based on a play that flopped on Broadway. But LM is critical of U.S. society so obviously it was irresistible for Hollywood's producers and other "intelligentsia"...

When they were all in their heyday, Elliott Gould, Alan Arkin (who also directed) and Donald Sutherland collaborated on the over-the-top black comedy "Little Murders", in which Gould plays emotionally vacant New York photographer Alfred Chamberlain, hooking up with vivacious young Patsy Newquist (Marcia Rodd) in the midst of several hundred unsolved homicides in the Big Apple. In the process of everything, the series of events exposes the flaws in all the characters, especially Patsy's parents (Vincent Gardenia and Elizabeth Wilson).I think that my two favorite scenes are the appearances of Sutherland and Arkin. Sutherland plays a priest who seems to be a cross between Sutherland's characters from "MASH" and "Kelly's Heroes"; Arkin plays a detective who spouts out the craziest monologue explaining why there's a conspiracy behind the murders. Overall, this is very much a New York kind of movie. I should identify that there are several very long scenes during the movie, but it's certainly not a flick that you'll forget anytime soon. Impressive.