While I can abide Cousins' anti-Hollywood viewpoint and I can abide the political slant to his series, I cannot abide his trumpeting of the film Hyenes directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty, without even mentioning that it was based on a play by Swiss writer Frederich Durrenmatt. Not only that, but there was a previous film version, The Visit, directed by Bernhard Wicki in 1964, starring Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn. While Mambety created a brilliant film, he did not pull this film out of a vacuum by himself. It was an adaption and Cousins should have made us aware of this fact. It calls into question the veracity of the entire series, which I had enjoyed up until now. I'll need to watch the rest of the series with a far more critical eye.
Review of The Story of Film: An Odyssey
