Willie & Phil is a 1980 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Paul Mazursky and starring Michael Ontkean, Margot Kidder, and Ray Sharkey.
Willie & Phil | |
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Directed by | Paul Mazursky |
Written by | Paul Mazursky |
Produced by | Paul Mazursky |
Starring | Michael Ontkean Margot Kidder Ray Sharkey |
Cinematography | Sven Nykvist |
Edited by | Donn Cambern |
Music by | Claude Bolling |
Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
Release date |
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Running time | 115 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $5.5 million[1] |
Box office | $4,400,000[2] |
The film is set in late 1970s New York City, amidst the counterculture chic of that era. Willie, a high school English teacher who plays jazz piano, and Phil, a fashion photographer, meet coming out of the Bleecker Street Cinema, where Jules et Jim has just been shown, and become friends. They both fall in love with Jeannette, a girl from Kentucky.
The film was reviewed by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. "It could be that the theme of Jules et Jim, which preoccupies Mazursky - woman as the source of life and art, and woman as destroyer - is just what he can't handle. The ad for Willie & Phil does bring out the film's latent subject: we see the open mouth of a giant goddess who is holding two men in the palm of her hand. They reach up to her with their offerings - one with a bottle of wine, the other with a bunch of flowers. She may be breathing life into these dwarf suitors or preparing to devour them along with their gifts. Either way, she's a source of awe and terror. All through the picture, Mazursky has been trying to demystify what he experiences as mystifying. This movie is a little monument to screwed-up notions of what women are."[3]
Films directed by Paul Mazursky | |
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