Town Bloody Hall 08/22/20

An excellent choice for an election year where women’s rights are at stake: Charlie Largent eagerly reviews this epochal vérité classic by D.A. Pennebaker, capturing a feisty, hilarious, consequential town hall-style debate between feminists Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Diana Trilling, and the unreconstructed, grandstanding self-styled intellectual Norman Mailer. In the photos, everybody is laughing, even though Criterion bills Mailer as ‘the pugnacious rabble-rouser and literary lion at the center of it all.’ With extras featuring more commentary by the principals and Mailer’s own appearance on Dick Cavett’s TV show. On Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
08/22/20