Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them. - Pauline Kael

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.

De Mille's bang-them-on-the-head-with-wild-orgies-and-imperilled-virginity style is at its ripest; the film is just about irresistible.

Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) — This New York-set thriller operates on mood and atmosphere and moves so fast, with such delicate changes of rhythm, that its excitement has a subterranean sexiness. Faye Dunaway, with long, thick, dark-red hair, is Laura Mars, a celebrity fashion photographer who specializes in the chic and pungency of sadism; the pictures she shoots have a furtive charge — we can see why they sell. Directed by Irvin Kershner, the film has a few shocking fast cuts, but it also has scabrous elegance and a surprising amount of humor. Laura’s scruffy, wild-eyed driver (Brad Dourif) epitomizes New York’s crazed, hostile flunkies; he’s so wound up he seems to have the tensions of the whole city in his gut. Her manager (René Auberjonois) is tense and ambivalent about Laura — about everything. Her models (Lisa Taylor and Dar-lanne Fluegel), who in their poses look wickedly decadent, are really just fun-loving dingalings.