4o3v2h

“Charmer”

The English comedy A PRIVATE FUNCTION is like an Ealing Studios comedy of the late-forties, early-fifties period as it might have been skewed by Joe Orton. The picture keeps adding greedy eccentrics and scatological jokes until everything is interconnected and the action seems on the verge of exploding into lewd farce. It never quite makes the final leap (there's something very English about that), but it's pretty funny anyway. The dialogue doesn't let you down. Alan Bennett, who wrote the script, was one of the Beyond the Fringe foursome, with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Jonathan Miller, and has become perhaps the best known (and most prolific) of Britain's television playwrights. In A PRIVATE FUNCTION, he writes lines that make you laugh not just at the line itself but at the knotty mental state of the person who delivers it. The jokes seem to erupt out of the characters. Bennett and the young director Malcolm Mowbray, who worked up the story idea with him, are making their t début in feature films, and the picture has a distinctive zest and virulence.

The action is set in a small Yorkshire town in 1947, during the worst of the postwar austerity, with rationing of bread and eggs, and all kinds of food shortages. The whole country seems to be steeped in petty vice, and for the sake of a chop or a roast just about every character engages in deceit and fraud and other species of moral turpitude. The plot involves the efforts of the local pillars of society—the proudly royalist doctor (Denholm Elliott, the solicitor (John Normington), and the pudgy ant (Richard Griffiths)—to hold a subscription banquet celebrating the nuptials of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. In order to serve something suitable for a patriotic feast, the three leading citizens have made a deal with a black marketeer—a local farmer—to fatten a hidden, "inlicensed" pig. The three, however, have tried to drive out a lowly newcomer to the town, a mild-mannered chiropodist named Chilvers (Michael Palin), who makes his house calls on a bicycle, and when, on a visit to the farmer's wife, he discovers their felonious secret he has an uncharacteristic vengeful impulse: knowing they can't complain to the police, he takes a notion to steal their pig. This material might seem rather basic, but the moviemakers have a streak of the higher insanity: when Chilvers tells his socially ambitious wife—played by Maggie Smith—she's ecstatic about the idea. Though the writing is rather shaky on this point, and it may not make a lot of sense to us in the audience, Mrs. Chilvers is convinced that stealing the pig will change her and her husband's lives and give them the social position she feels is her due. (And because of her maneuverings it does work out that way.)

This woman of steel who bosses and bullies her husband is an Inspired parody of Lady Macbeth. Mrs. Chilvers gives piano lessons, and spends much of her time trying to keep her dotty old mother (Liz Smith) in line, but she has visions of herself as a woman of class and refinement—visions that have been severely tested by her marriage. Maggie Smith and Liz Smith (no relation) make a great mother-daughter comedy team; the mother is like a bleary, befuddled mirror image of the daughter's pretensions. And Maggie Smith can bring you up short by a devastating inflection. When Chilvers polishes the car that for want of fuel he has kept on blocks but will need for the kidnapping, he says, in satisfaction, "I can see me face in that." The mournfulness of all Mrs. Chilvers' disappointment in him comes out in her "So can I."

After Chilvers kidnaps the pig and brings it home, he lacks the callousness to kill it, and the pig, who snuffles like a chugging train and has an upset stomach in addition to normal piggy incontinence, uses the Chilvers living quarters as a pen. Maggie Smith proves herself a sovereign comedienne in the broadest of broad situations. When visitors to the Chilvers home are puzzled by the foul smell, Mrs. Chilvers wrinkles her skinny nose, tightens her mouth, and tries to blame it on her mother's advanced years. Soon the angry town leaders arrive to claim the main course of their banquet, and fall to arguing. The most reasonable is the ant, whose resemblance to the pig makes him seem rather endearing—he's as dismayed as the tenderhearted Chilvers at the prospect of the animal's being butchered. (Chilvers offers the suggestion that the power-élite fellows should set her up somewhere in a sty.)

A PRIVATE FUNCTION is like VOLPONE set in a cabbage patch. The characters cheat and conspire at such a low level that at times you laugh helplessly. About the only person in town who abides by the egalitarian regulations is the inspector for the Ministry of Food (Bill Paterson), and he has no sense of smell or of taste, and seems deficient in other senses, too. At least, he does until his seductive landlady (Rachel Davies) gets him to paint stocking seams on her bare legs. When the bigwigs are shouting and carrying on at the Chilvers place, Mrs. Chilvers dresses up in a horrendous, tarty blue frock, wheels in a cocktail cart, and socks her body around—she's using her idea of feminine wiles. The scene begins promisingly but lasts a shade too long, and the final celebration dinner is too comfy. By not going into wild farce, the movie becomes trivial. It goes nowhere—no further than the Ealing comedies did. But it's alive and unruly; the humor keeps boiling up. The film has quick shifts of tone, and every once in a while there's an effect that's inexplicably, touchingly funny—like the deranged lyricism of a shot of the mother and the huge pink porker side by side looking out of an upstairs bedroom window.

[March 25, 1985]

“Charmer”

Mia Farrow seems just naturally stylized. Weightlessly beautiful, and with a considerable acting technique that she draws upon without the slightest show of effort, she might have been created for the camera. She's both real and unreal—she has a preternatural glowing sweetness. In THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, which Woody Allen wrote for her and directed, she is Cecilia, who lives in a small town in New Jersey.
It's 1935, and her husband is unemployed; he fritters away his days with his buddies and his evenings with womenfriends, and she's lonely. She works in a diner and finds solace in the pictures that come to the Jewel Theater. But Cecilia can't hold a job for long, because she can't keep her mind on it; her thoughts wander away to the glamorous worlds she sees on the screen, and the Hollywood lives she reads about in fan magazines. It's the dreamy-souled Cecilia who's the jewel in this movie. She has been fired, and is watching the week's attraction at the theatre—THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO—for the third day, when one of the characters, the young explorer Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), in his safari suit and pith helmet, suddenly talks directly to her. He tells her that he has been aware of her seeing the picture over and over, and then he bounds down from the black-and-white image and into color, and takes her out of the theatre with him. We're not startled by the confusion of realms—by a screen character entering Cecilia's life—because Cecilia and her Depression town are not quite real, either. And we're eager to see how Woody Allen is going to work things out. Though he doesn't appear in this picture, he doesn't need to: his spirit informs every tickling nuance. And there may be an advantage to his not being physically present: maybe the actor has been holding the director back.

The thirteenth film he has directed, THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO is, I think, the most purely charming of the bunch. And though it doesn't have the sexual friskiness and roughhousing of some of his other come-dies, and doesn't speak to the audience with the journalistic immediacy of his movies in contemporary settings, it may be the fullest expression yet of his style of humor. The movie is a gentle, complex variation of "The Kugelmass Episode," which he published in The New Yorker in 1977—the story in which a City College professor entered Madame Bovary a few pages after Léon's departure and just before Rodolphe's arrival, and had an ecstatic affair with Emma, which ended after he brought her to the Plaza Hotel for a weekend and had trouble getting her back into the book. The movie also bears a relationship to the glorious two paragraphs that Allen published in the Times Book Review last year, in answer to the question which character from a book he'd most like to be. His reply began: "Gigi. I want more than anything to be Gigi. To meander, feather-light, down the boulevards of belle époque Paris in a little blue sailor dress, my sweet face framed by a flat, disk-shaped hat with two ribbons dangling mischievously past my bangs." Woody Allen's parodies and fantasies are inseparable; their unstable union is his comic subject.

In THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, the paradoxical crossovers from one level of unreality to another are played deadpan straight, as they were in Buster Keaton's 1924 SHERLOCK JR., where the projectionist hero dreamed that he became involved with the characters on the screen (and as they were in the 1981 Steve Martin-Bernadette Peters PENNIES FROM HEAVEN). Cecilia, like Keaton as that projectionist, isn't very vivid. (f she were, she wouldn't need to make these crossings.) In her neatly buttoned brown coat, she's a little brown mouse. But she's also self-possessed. In the early scenes, she and her sister (played by Mia's sister Stephanie Farrow) work side by side at the diner, and they talk together in soft, confiding voices; they have a sisterly conversational rhythm, and a trust in each other. When Cecilia is fired, Sis threatens to quit, but Cecilia is practical enough to talk her out of it, and Sis is practical enough to let herself be talked out of it. Mia Farrow's role is written so that she's like the frail, big-eyed waifs that Janet Gaynor and Loretta Young used to play, but she also has a sturdy, independent side. She can see that Tom Baxter, whom she spends some time with, is a romantic simp-she's drawn to him, but she knows he's all hollow gestures and couldn't survive in her world. She refers to him, quite simply, as "a wonderful man" but "fictional."

This is the first Woody Allen movie in which a whole batch of actors really interact and spark each other. It's the first time that he has written a large number of good comedy roles—even if most of them are, like Tom Baxter, only mock characters. When Tom impulsively pops out of the screen at the Jewel, he disappears from the story of the black-and-white movie, just as Emma Bovary disappeared from the novel when she went to the Plaza Hotel. The other characters on the screen at the Jewel—the rich sophisticates who met Tom at a tomb in Cairo and invited him for a "madcap" weekend in Manhattan—can't go on with the story, in which he is supposed to fall for Kitty Haynes (Karen Akers), a slinky, tall torch singer at the Copacabana. Kitty is stranded, and so are a dowager countess, played by Zoe Caldwell, and an assortment of swells, played by John Wood, Ed Herrmann, and Van Johnson, and several other characters, including a blond ninny (Deborah Rush) and the tubby black maid, Delilah (Annie Joe Edwards), who is reminiscent of Hattie MeDaniel in the 1935 ALICE ADAMS. Allen has written these roles so that each recalls a specific type of thirties-movie character. And when Tom Baxter (who's the juvenile lead, the perennial enthusiast in the mold of Charles Starrett and David Manners) takes of with Cecilia, the others lose their high toned diction and begin to bicker about their relative importance in the picture. They also bitch at the Jewel's crabby patrons, who want the story to continue, or their money back. The countess, who has a gilded baritone like Tallulah Bankhead's, gets down to a scary basso when she expresses her disgust at Tom's unprofessionalism. Zoe Caldwell's chest tones and her glare may remind you of such magnificent tough old broads as Constance Collier and Alison Skipworth. And John Wood is immaculately asexual in the hollow-head-under-a-top-hat Edward Everett Horton tradition. (He's funnier than Horton was, because he doesn't overdo it.) Van Johnson has a slightly decayed grandeur and raised eyebrows, and Ed Herrmann, of the aristocratic sloping head, is like an eternal preppy—he looks as if he should be standing next to Rudy Vallée, singing "The Whiffenpoof Song."

Much of the comedy is in the shifts and transactions of the characters on the screen at the Jewel, the townspeople, and the New York and Hollywood people who arrive to deal with the emergency—a group that includes Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels), the actor who played the role of Tom Baxter, and who wants to get Tom and his pith helmet back up on the screen where they belong. Gil quickly realizes that Cecilia is the key to the mystery—that Tom left the screen in order to court her. Woody Allen shows new verve as a director in his work with Jeff Daniels he was Debra Winger's husband in OF ENDEARMENT). As the chaste, quixotic Tom, Daniels has a sequence in which he's picked up by a prostitute named Emma (a nod to "The Kugelmass Episode," perhaps?) and taken to the local bordello, where his good looks and romantic ideals are a big hit. Dianne Wiest is spectacularly touching and funny as Emma, and the bordello scene, though not in a strict sense necessary to the plot, adds to it-brings it some bright hues, some texture. When the girls offer Tom a free roll in the hay and he declines, because he's in love with Cecilia, Emma wants to know if there are "any other guys like you out there." She and the other girls get misty-eyed over Tom; they're far more naïve about his romantic appeal—his niceness—than Cecilia is.

As the skin-deep Tom and the shiny-eyed narcissist Gil, Jeff Daniels comes through with two unmistakably different satiric performances. Woody Allen's cinematographer, Gordon Willis, lights Gil to bring out his avidity for stardom; he's irradiated, like Gene Kelly at the première in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN—his teeth, the whites of his eyes, and his polo coat and spiffy fedora all gleam. Gil is such an actory actor that when he humbly tells Cecilia he isn't really a star yet, you half expect him to spit flashbulbs. He's something of a challenge, and Cecilia livens up when she's with him. He speaks rather patronizingly of his responsibility for Tom, telling her that he "created" the character, and her tone is slyly ingenuous when she says, "Didn't the man who wrote the movie do that?" Of course, Gil is full of anxieties about his career; Cecilia, with her storehouse of movie trivia, advises him as if she were the editor of Photoplay. And he laps up her adulation. 

The movie has been thought out with such graceful intelligence that its flaws seem minor. Cecilia's trip into the black-and-white world at the Jewel doesn't come to much. There's also a lapse in the way Woody Allen handles the film-industry people who show up in the town: except for Gil, they don't have satiric personality traits. The writer didn't create them—they're just lumpy walk-ons, and the energy leaks out of the scenes with Alexander Cohen as the producer. And by not making it clear how consciously manipulative Gil is, Allen leaves a gap that the audience experiences as a sense of dislocation. And though Gordon Willis's black-and-white images are exactly what's needed, his color cinematography—as well as the work of the production designer-seems too rich and shadowed for comedy. The Depression thirties was the era of Deco dishware in cheap and cheerful primary colors, of yellow oilcloth on kitchen tables and red-and-white plaids and checkerboard patterns wherever you looked. The deep GODFATHER browns here are too serious, and they link into a few problems of emotional tone.

There's a central piece of miscasting: as Cecilia's husband, Danny Aiello is too heavy and loutish. Probably he was selected for the incongruity of this big vulgarian's being married to the slight, fine-drawn Cecilia (and her ing him), but we don't have a clue to why she married him or why he married her. Woody Allen has too much taste to let us see the husband smacking Cecilia around, but we hear about his having done it, and his physique is threatening. I waited for Aiello to become more stylized—for his oafishness to be made comic. (He does lighten up—but not enough—when Cecilia comes home and catches him with a giggly, voluptuous flooze.) I rather dreaded Cecilia's scenes with her husband, and after the flooze episode, when you see Cecilia trudging through town carrying her suitease, and then, defeated, going back, because she has no place else to go, the film has a morbid, unfunny subtext. You don't want her to have to go home to this bruiser's surplus gut and his thick, Victor McLaglen arms. (Our image of him makes the resolution of the film cruelly harsh.) It's difficult to know how much of the subtext is intentional. Some of it is surprising: the fairy-tale man, the two-dimensional man from the black-and-white world, is the only one who treats Cecilia decently; the other men abuse her or betray her. (Does Woody Allen believe that young women who claim that they've found someone "nice" are all deluded?)

There's something else that the crushing presence of the husband connects with. Woody Allen knows how to merge his modern sensibility with that of Buster Keaton. (The first step is that what was ed for in SHERLOCK JR. as a dream is now presented in a matter-of-fact manner, with the cunning capper that it's "fictional?") The film is far more Keatonesque than Chaplinesque. Mia Farrow has her plangency, but she's also a hardhead, like Keaton, and with something of his resilience and individuality. (She's the only beauty to have survived Diane Arbus's camera.) But though Woody Allen isn't like Chaplin—he doesn't make you cry—he has a naturally melancholic, depressive quality. It's his view of life; the movie casts a spell, yet at the end it has a bitter tang. It says that sweetness doesn't get you anywhere. And though in acting Mia Farrow carries off her Chaplinesque moment of reconciliation to fate, I think it's a mistake. Woody Allen's full vision here could take a less tidy, airier finish—he needed to pull something magical out of a hat. (He might even have carried through on the illogical plot turns of the movie within the movie.) Most of Buster Keaton's comedies ended happily, and when Chaplin wasn't being maudlin so did his. Woody Allen puts a strain on his light, paradoxical story about escapism when he gives it a desolate, "realistic" ending. The author's voice that emerges from his movies, and from this one in particular, is that of a winner who in his deepest recesses feels like a loser. Happiness and success aren't real to him; painfulness is the only reality he trusts. (Trusting it is his idea of integrity.) And so he sentimentalizes his own make-believe here by trying to give it "real" emotion.

But this PURPLE ROSE has enough true poignancy for us to forgive it its fake poignancy. I watched this movie all but purring with pleasure. It's a delicate classic comedy. It's not a picture to go to with huge expectations; it doesn't have the daring or excitement of a great work. But it has a small, rapt quality, and I think it's Woody Allen's finest creation. It's scaled to Mia Farrow's cheekbones. And it has a surprising warmth.

[March 25, 1985]

“The Artist as a Young Comedian”

In the fifties, when improvisational acts were booked into night clubs and coffeehouses, and the entertainers satirized middle-class interpersonal relations, young actors had a hip edge to their conversation. Freud had got into everything, and acting was now thought of in of awareness. Acting coaches who had been political activists turned into psychiatric philosophers. This is the atmosphere of Paul Mazursky’s new, autobiographical comedy, NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE. The hero, a twenty-two-year-old Brooklyn College graduate, Larry Lapinsky (Lenny Baker), who has never wanted to be anything but an actor, moves out of the Brownsville apartment of his parents (Shelley Winters and Mike Kellin) into an apartment of his own in the Village. The film is about Larry’s acting classes and his relations with his girl, Sarah (Ellen Greene), and his friends. Mazursky knows this scene so well that every word, every hangup, every awkward, flip hesitation rings a bell. NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE gives the best portrait of Village life ever put on the screen; the casualness, the camaraderie, and the sexual freedom are balanced by glimpses of the lives of those who are in the Village because they don’t fit in anywhere else. Yet there’s more to the movie than that. Like Alexander Portnoy, Larry is the son in the Jewish joke, but, unlike Portnoy, he isn’t crippled by it. In both Portnoy’s Complaint and NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE, guilt is funny; but the Philip Roth book is satire from within a fixation, and Portnoy is screaming with rage. Larry Lapinsky is rather like what the young Alex Portnoy might have been if he had recovered from his complaint. He learns to live with his guilt; that’s the comedy of growing up which is celebrated in NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE.

As Larry’s Mom, Shelley Winters is a hysteric on the loose, barging into his apartment in the middle of a party, embarrassing him so much he wants to crawl under the furniture. It is high-mania acting, like Winters’ ever-hopeful Charlotte Haze in LOLITA. Mrs. Lapinsky pours so much brute emotion into every small detail of her life that she has lost all sense of proportion; everything to do with her becomes of world-shaking importance. Her unused brains have turned her into a howling freak, but you can recognize in her the sources of her son’s talent and wit. And, even seeing her through her son’s agonized-with-shame eyes, you don’t get too much of her—or, rather, you can’t get enough of Shelley Winters’ performance. With her twinkly goo-goo eyes and flirty grin, Shelley Winters is a mother hippo charging—not at her son’s enemies but at him. Fat, morose, irrepressible, she’s a force that would strike terror to anyone’s heart, yet in some abominable way she’s likable. She’s Mrs. Portnoy seen without hatred. When Larry visits his parents, she hands him a bag of apple strudel to eat on the plane taking him, first class, to a job in Hollywood. Her husband says to her, “I told you he’d get angry,” but Larry says, “I’m not angry. I’m crazy, but I’m not angry.” When he has said goodbye and is on his way to the subway, he stands on the Brownsville street listening to a fiddler and he eats the strudel.

Larry is crazy in a sane way: as a comedian, he puts his craziness to work for him. And that’s Paul Mazursky’s own greatest gift. What made his earlier films (BOB & CAROL & TED & ALICE, ALEX IN WONDERLAND, BLUME IN LOVE, and HARRY & TONTO) so distinctive was the acceptance of bugginess as part of the normal—maybe even the best part of it. In his films, craziness gives life its savor. When Mazursky makes fun of characters, it’s not to put them down; quite the reverse—the scattier they are, the more happily he embraces them. (His quarrel is with the too controlled.) The star of NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE, the relatively unknown Lenny Baker, looks like a gangly young boy but has had almost a decade of professional experience, and he gives the central character the manic generosity that holds the film together. Starting as a runny-nosed, funny-looking kid, Larry becomes stronger and handsomer. Having survived his mother’s aggression, he’s got the craziness and the strength to make it as an artist.

On his own road from Brownsville through the Village and on to becoming a writer-director, Mazursky performed in improvisational cabaret theatre, wrote skits for “The Danny Kaye Show,” and taught acting. Like Larry, who gets his break when he’s cast as a tough punk, Mazursky got a role as one of the delinquents in BLACKBOARD JUNGLE (1955), though he had gone West earlier, in 1951, to play a leading role as a psychopath who assaults a captive girl, in Stanley Kubrick’s first feature, FEAR AND DESIRE. Mazursky has appeared in several of his own pictures (he was funniest as the itchy, voracious producer in ALEX IN WONDERLAND), and his directing style is based on the actors’ intuitively taking off from each other, as they did in the coffeehouses. He does something that no other American movie director does: he writes, shapes, and edits the sequences to express the performing rhythm—to keep the actors’ pulse. As a result, the audience feels unusually close to the characters—feels protective toward them. Mazursky brings you into a love relationship with his people, and it’s all aboveboard.

This picture suggests that for Paul Mazursky (as for many theatre people) acting is at the basis of all judgment. Not all of Larry’s friends are studying to be actors, yet one can interpret almost everything that happens to them in of acting. Ellen Greene’s Sarah is intelligent and quick-witted, but she’s already a little hard in the places where Larry is still sensitive—where you feel he’ll always stay sensitive. (That’s what will keep him an artist.) Sarah violates the rule that Larry’s patriarchal acting teacher, Herbert (Michael Egan), says may be important “‘for the rest of your life”: “The worst kind of joking you can do is to keep life out.” According to Herbert, you shouldn’t use your brain “to keep the stuff out’? but “to take it in.” Mazursky satirizes Herbert’s litany, but very gently. (The famous acting teacher Herbert Berghof appeared in HARRY & TONTO as Harry’s New York friend the aged radical.) And Larry lives by Herbert’s rule. He humors his parents, but he’s really on his own; he has made the plunge—he’s taking life in. Sarah, however, is still at home, and playing the lying-to-your-folks game along with the Greenwich Village game. She’s a compromiser, and so elastic she doesn’t know where she’ll snap. Ellen Greene gives a beautiful, prickly, sensual performance; she has a big, avid mouth, which she uses for comic tics, taking us by surprise each time. The proof of her talent is that it’s Sarah’s hardness that makes her seem poignant. Being independent-minded has got mixed with something sharp and self-destructive; Sarah cuts herself off from people by acting sure just when she’s least sure. This role is written with a respect for the ways in which savvy people with everything going for them can screw up. Mazursky keeps it all light and blowsy, yet the characters have depth, and a lot of damaging things are happening to them while they’re frisking along. Sarah is attracted to Robert (Christopher Walken), a narcissistic, affectlessly calm poet-playwright. He’s the sort of person who destroys a party—the one who says “‘Let’s play the truth game.” Robert is a ive sadist, who draws women to him and shrugs off any responsibility for what happens. And it’s true that they’ve hurt themselves, but it’s his ivity that has invited them to do it. Walken uses his light, high voice for an ambiguous effect, and he gives Robert an air of physical isolation that makes him seem always withdrawn from the rest of the group. When Larry, who has suffered because of him, accuses him of having nothing under his pose but more pose, it’s as if Larry were using the old slang term and saying “‘You’re a bad actor,” meaning that he’s untrustworthy, a crook—someone not in touch with himself. Robert might almost be the Nazi villain—he’s every son of a bitch whose only interest in sex is for power. He’s the only character without spontaneity, and the only one that Mazursky can’t resolve his feelings about.

As a homosexual who is sick of role-playing but too frightened to stop, Antonio Fargas keeps just enough reserve to be affecting without pushing it; Lois Smith finds the archetypal Lois Smith role as the sodden Anita, a depressive who plays at suicide; Dori Brenner’s Connie plays at being everybody’s favorite good sport. And on the fringes of this group there’s Barney (John Ford Noonan), a bearded, soft giant with a striking resemblance to Mazursky’s old writing partner Larry Tucker. (Larry Lapinsky’s first name may also be a nod to Tucker.) Most of these actors have been in movies before, but they didn’t have Mazursky’s lines to speak, or the hip timing he gets. The subsidiary characters help to form just the sort of human zoo that many of us live in. Jeff Goldblum plays a big, handsome young actor named Clyde Baxter—a goofed-up Victor Mature type. Lou Jacobi is the proprietor of a health-food lunch counter, whooping as if his whole life were vindicated when a customer comes in feeling rotten from having eaten a corned beef on rye. And Rochelle Oliver as Dr. Marsha and John C. Becher as Sid Weinberg, a casting director, contribute to making this picture Off Broadway’s finest hour.

In refining his comic style, Mazursky has suffered a few losses. I miss the messy romanticism of BLUME; there Mazursky was “‘too close” to the subject—he was gummed up in it, and the chaos felt good. This movie is set in his past, and the blood has cooled. But Mazursky’s earlier scripts were splotchy; NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE has the intertwining of a classic American play. And if the mechanics seem a little too theatrical when Larry’s Mom waddles into his apartment without knocking and pounces on him, still, in 1953 Village doors weren’t always bolted. (Bolted doors wouldn’t stop Shelley Winters anyway.) As in some other films shot by Arthur Ornitz, there doesn’t appear to be a light source, and the color is muddy. You can’t tell the blacks and browns and blues apart; Ornitz seems to get the shots to match by making them all dark. Luckily, this movie has so much else going for it that it can get along without visual beauty. Mazursky was so smitten by Fellini that his early films sometimes seemed to be commuting between cultures. But NEXT STOP, GREENWICH VILLAGE isn’t an imitation of AMARCORD, it’s Mazursky’s own AMARCORD. And I like it better than Fellini’s. It isn’t showy—Mazursky works on a small scale. Yet this satirist without bitterness and without extravagance looks to be a comic poet. His subject is the comedy of wisdom—how to become a good actor.

[February 2, 1976]

“Kaputt”

If ever a movie needed to be made on location and in a loose, hand-held-camera style, it’s THE BLACK BIRD—an attempted takeoff on THE MALTESE FALCON—because the only base for its humor is the contrast between the lives of Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade and George Segal’s Sam Spade, Jr. In the 1941 John Huston film, the crooked fantasists trying to get hold of the jewelled falcon invaded Spade’s orderly life in the sophisticated metropolis of San Francisco. Spade Junior’s San Francisco is the zonked city of fantasists, and he’s scrounging around for a living in an inherited trade that makes no sense to him. Something could have been done with the idea of a renewed search for the falcon in these changed circumstances if this new film, written and directed (more or less) by David Giler, had been able to roll along, moving among the street people and their throwaway conversations, and parodying modern filmmaking techniques as against the controlled, studio style of the Huston film. There are bits of this attempted, and there’s potential humor in seeing Effie (Lee Patrick), who was Bogart’s proper, adoring secretary, arrive at Segal’s office in a hostessy caftan and make no bones about her loathing of her boss. But the movie was shot in L.A., with only a few days of actual location work in San Francisco, and Giler, a writer making his début as a director, is too inexperienced to achieve anything like the slouchy wacked-out style that might have released the humor in some of his gag ideas. Instead, THE BLACK BIRD is a dumb comedy, with an insecure tone and some good jokes mixed with some terrible ones.

The picture uses a lot of faces from the past—performers such as Lionel Stander (dressed in a frogman’s suit, he’s grotesque to the point of adorability), and the enigmatic John Abbott, and Elisha Cook, Jr., as Wilmer the Gunsel again—but Giler didn’t manage to write roles for the actors which would satirize the roles they used to play, and no character in the movie gets a chance to develop. However, as a red-haired scholar trying to translate an Aramaic fragment for Spade, Signe Hasso is as trim as ever and speaks with a precision that recalls the gilt-edged intonations of the forties. And George Segal salvages scene after static scene. He’s got his comic transparency back, after looking ill and exhausted in RUSSIAN ROULETTE (and letting Richard Romanus, as one of the villains, take the film clean away from him), and though he can’t make THE BLACK BIRD go, his peppiness is so engaging that you keep rooting for the picture to pull itself together. Stéphane Audran makes her American début in the old Mary Astor mystery-woman role, and she’s right on the edge of being charming, though her deadpan makes it apparent that nobody let her in on the mystery, either.

David Giler didn’t initiate the idea of a comedy sequel to THE MALTESE FALCON; the producer Ray Stark bought the sequel rights over a decade ago, and Giler is just one of many people who worked on the project—not even the last, apparently, since he refused to direct the JAWS-joke ending. If this picture seems dumb, it’s because so little of the humor (or the attempted humor) is organic to the subject: people went to work to try to give the producer what he wanted, and the raft of names in the credits suggest that he had fluctuating desires. (It seems an act of kindness that these overflowing credits don’t mention Dashiell Hammett.) THE BLACK BIRD has the same look that some other Ray Stark productions have had: the look of interference. There are movies that go off the track but at least you know you're on a train. With THE BLACK BIRD, someone in a gym suit comes in and blows the whistle and calls out, “All right, everyone out of the pool! This is now a Ping-Pong pavilion.”

[January 19, 1976]

“Kaputt”

Universal has gone back to one of the most primitive forms of movie advertising for THE HINDENBURG—Two years in the making... presented at a cost of $15,000,000. And that’s what it’s selling: a hefty enterprise. Everything’s been done to produce the illusion of a giant zeppelin sailing along, but the film doesn’t have the flotation it needs—we don’t experience the beatific sensations of lighter-than-air travel. In the late twenties and early thirties, before transatlantic plane service, people with enough money could make the crossing by dirigible; smoothly and noiselessly, they were wafted across the ocean in two and a half days. This form of vibrationless travel, perfected by the Germans, got a black eye when the Hindenburg—filled with explosive hydrogen, because the United States wouldn’t sell Nazi nonexplosive helium—blew up while coming down for a landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937, with ninety-seven people on board. Thirteen engers and twenty-two of the crew were killed. Since there were newsreel cameramen waiting there to photograph the arrival, they recorded the disaster, and millions of people saw it in theatres. In thirty-four seconds, this great luxury airship, longer than two football fields, became a mass of flames, and its aluminum-alloy skeleton was exposed as it crashed. The movie is a fictional version of what happened on its last flight.

Zeppelins have an inflated-toy, sci-fi humor. Compared to the structure of planes, the fat-cigar shape seems amorphous, loony—a blob. Yet travel in them, with windows open to the fresh air, must have been intoxicating. There are so many easy ways that THE HINDENBURG could have suggested the giddiness—couldn’t one of the engers have at least picked up the hundred-and-twelve-pound aluminum grand piano in the lounge? But Robert Wise directed with tame, impersonal good taste; there’s none of the blissful trippiness of being carried in the belly of a zeppelin, and none of the carnival vulgarity of the recent disaster thrillers. How can you agree to do one of these disaster epics and then con yourself into thinking that you can do it like a gent? There’s a time-honored Hollywood device that enables those who compromise on all the important things to convince themselves that they’re engaged in something of real importance: they give it social content. Robert Wise turned his disaster picture into an anti-Nazi disaster picture. The plot is an elaboration of the speculative thesis that the Hindenburg was destroyed by a saboteur’s bomb, as an act of resistance to Hitler. But the elaboration of this plausible idea is so pompous that one might think Hollywood was taking credit for the explosion. The film builds up every kind of sympathy for the saboteur, who, being anti-Nazi, didn’t intend for anyone to get hurt; he’s infinitely courageous, and he even loves dogs. Wise brings all his flatulent seriousness to this endeavor. One gasbag meets another.

The introduction of the cast of characters is the most routinized part of the movies of this genre; it’s like the animals going up the ramp to the Ark, and moviegoers have become connoisseurs of this assembling process. Robert Wise’s convocation doesn’t measure up. He was the director of such Academy Award-winning hits as WEST SIDE STORY and THE SOUND OF MUSIC, and even a few pretty good pictures, but he’d never make it as Noah. He dawdles over the gathering of the clan, and the transatlantic swingers in THE HINDENBURG must be the frowziest bunch ever put together outside an ABC “Movie of the Week.” Anne Bancroft plays the blasé doper Ursula, a sneering German countess whose hair has been coiffed to be so authentically thirties that it looks like black potato chips stuck to her head. (If Bancroft takes this SHIP OF FOOLS—Signoret spinoff role, what can the roles she rejects be like?) As soon as she speaks with that familiar New York intonation, her hauteur crumbles, though her eyebrows remain elevated. She’s such a likable actress you want her to come off the great-lady pose. When she uses her classy allure on George C. Scott—a disillusioned Luftwaffe colonel—those eyebrows waggle like Groucho’s. This cast really ought to get the troupers’ award; perfectly good actors like William Atherton, Burgess Meredith, and Charles Durning all hang in there while Wise and his scenarist, Nelson Gidding, shuffle the subplots in order to create the impression of action. Wise tries to force conviction into the hollow characters; and dialogue that might if it were casually overlapped is delivered with such stick-to-itiveness that the actors could be bulldogs playing charades.

It’s obvious that the logistics of this production were a real killer, and Albert Whitlock’s matte effects are very fine trompe-l’oeil. Authenticity has been the keynote of this production—right down to the copying of the pattern of the Hindenburg’s crockery and silverware. When moviemakers don’t have strong feelings about what they’re doing, solid research is the only kind of integrity left. This is a technically complicated primitive film that has been made in such a spirit of self-deception that it fails to work on the primitive level. It’s so dry you begin to feel dehydrated and your mind goes on the fritz. Still, with the promotion it’s got going for it (which may be included in that suspiciously high fifteen-million-dollar figure), chances are that it will do all right at box office anyway—it can be THE GREAT GATSBY of disaster movies.

THE HINDENBURG  has, however, been the cause of a new complaint: some viewers (and of the. press, too) say that they've been gypped—that the disaster footage is real rather than faked. They don’t like the ten-minute climax, which is the famous newsreel footage extended and intercut with newly shot scenes showing the actors—some perishing, some fleeing the wreckage. If the movie had begun with the newsreel material, followed by a large-scale detective story trying to for the crash, probably no one would feel let down, but it’s likely that Universal wanted to retain the formula of the recent fantasy-disaster money-makers, which have big, showcase climaxes. What Wise may not be able to accept is that, despite his efforts at authenticity, the movie is essentially every bit as fakey as EARTHQUAKE or THE TOWERING INFERNO, and the audience sits waiting for the final thrills. So when people complain, they’re not necessarily being stupes: they could be expressing the feeling that the movie hasn’t earned the right to bring in actual suffering; they may want the gaudy finish that would be more appropriate to the twerpy story. If it’s possible to violate the disaster genre, THE HINDENBURG has done it. Blending documentary-catastrophe footage with simulated-catastrophe footage is fundamentally insensitive: how can a viewer look at true horrors and be a jaded connoisseur of movie thrills in practically the same instant? The mixture is like a visual RAGTIME without satire. The original newsreel material is blown up, padded, interrupted, frozen, though when flames are shown in still shots you don’t see more—all you get is the feeling that people are playing around and turning a newsreel into graphics. I had a very strong desire to see the newsreel as it was before all these graphics wizards got to work on it: I wanted the integrity of that famous thirty-four-second catastrophe respected. After the climax, the moviemakers appear to be clowning around when they give a report on which of the fictional characters have survived; when they provide the upbeat news that the pet Dalmatian on board, released from its cage by the saboteur, came through, they seem to be playing the audience for ninnies. At the close, Wise has tacked on to the sound track the words delivered to the 1937 radio listeners by a reporter at the scene: “Oh my, this is terrible. . . . This is one of the worst catastrophes in the world. ... It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. . . . It’s smoke and it’s flames. . . . I don’t believe it... . Pm going to have to stop for a minute. . . . This is the worst thing I have ever witnessed.” Is Robert Wise, recent president of the Directors Guild of America, nostalgic for the relatively innocent days of radio reporting? Probably he is. But this ending may be less naive than it seems. In the film, Scott, who is endowed with wry hindsight, calls the Hindenburg a flying dinosaur. Since the engers who died in the actual explosion were the only enger fatalities in nearly three decades of commercial dirigible service, what purpose does the film’s contempt serve but to reinforce the impression given to the world by the newsreel and radio s? In order to make the disaster seem retribution for the Nazis and large enough to rival the fantasy horrors of recent hit films, this movie omits the most remarkable aspect of the Hindenburg story—that the media coverage of the crash resulted in the end of a mode of air travel which was superior to the airplane, and far safer. The crockery may be authentic all right, but the picture is a crock.

[January 19, 1976]

“Notes on the Nihilist Poetry of Sam Peckinpah”

Sam Peckinpah is a great “personal” filmmaker; he’s an artist who can work as an artist only on his own . When he does a job for hire, he must transform the script and make it his own or it turns into convictionless self-parody (like THE GETAWAY). Peckinpah likes to say that he’s a good whore who goes where he’s kicked. The truth is he’s a very bad whore: he can’t turn out a routine piece of craftsmanship—he can’t use his skills to improve somebody else’s conception. That’s why he has always had trouble. And trouble, plus that most difficult to define of all gifts—a film sense—is the basis of his legend.

Most movie directors have short wings; few of them are driven to realize their own vision. But Peckinpah’s vision has become so scabrous, theatrical, and obsessive that it is now controlling him. His new film, THE KILLER ELITE, is set so far inside his fantasy-morality world that it goes beyond personal filmmaking into private filmmaking. The story, which is about killers employed by a company with C.I.A. connections, is used as a mere framework for a compressed, almost abstract fantasy on the subject of selling yourself yet trying to hang on to a piece of yourself. Peckinpah turned fifty while he was preparing this picture, and, what with booze, illness, and a mean, self-destructive streak, in recent years he has looked as if his body were giving out. This picture is about survival.

There are so many elisions in THE KILLER ELITE that it hardly exists on a narrative level, but its poetic vision is all of a piece. Unlike Peckinpah’s earlier, spacious movies, with Lucien Ballard’s light-blue, open-air vistas, this film is intensely, claustrophobically exciting, with combat scenes of martial-arts teams photographed in slow motion and then edited in such brief cuts that the fighting is nightmarishly concentrated—almost subliminal. Shot by Phil Lathrop in cold, five-o’clock-shadow green-blue tones, the film is airless—an involuted, corkscrew vision of a tight, modern world. In its obsessiveness, with the links between sequences a matter of irrational, poetic connections, The Killer Elite is closer to THE BLOOD OF A POET than it is to a conventional thriller made on the C.I.A.-assassins subject, such as THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR. And, despite the script by Marc Norman and Stirling Silliphant that United Artists paid for, the film isn’t about C.I.A.-sponsored assassinations—it’s about the blood of a poet.

With his long history of butchered films and films released without publicity, of being fired and blacklisted for insubordination, of getting ornerier and ornerier, Peckinpah has lost a lot of blood. EvenTHE WILD BUNCH, a great imagist epic in which Peckinpah, by a supreme burst of filmmaking energy, was able to convert chaotic romanticism into exaltation—a film comparable in scale and sheer poetic force to Kurosawa’s THE SEVEN SAMURAI—was cut in its American release, and has not yet been restored. And Peckinpah was forced to trim THE KILLER ELITE to change its R rating to a PG. Why would anybody want a PG-rated Peckinpah film? The answer is that United Artists, having no confidence in the picture, grabbed the chance to place it in four hundred and thirty-five theatres for the Christmas trade; many of those theatres wouldn’t have taken it if it had an R and the kids couldn’t go by themselves. The film was flung into those neighborhood houses for a quick profit, without benefit of advance press screenings or the ad campaign that goes with a first-run showing. Peckinpah’s career is becoming a dirty, bitter game of I-dumpon-you-because-you-dump-on-me. Increasingly, his films have reflected his war with the producers and distributors, and in THE KILLER ELITE this war takes its most single-minded form.

Peckinpah’s roots are in the theatre as much as they’re in the West; he loves the theatricality of Tennessee Williams (early on, he directed three different stage productions of The Glass Menagerie), and, personally, he has the soft-spoken grandness of a Southerner in a string tie—when he talks of the way California used to be, it is in the reverent tone that Southerners use for the Old South. The hokum runs thick in him, and his years of television work—writing dozens of “Gunsmoke” episodes, “creating” the two series “The Rifleman” and “The Westerner’’—pushed his thinking into good-guys-versus-bad-guys formats. The tenderness he felt for Tennessee Williams’ emotional poetry he could also feel for a line of dialogue that defined a Westerner’s plain principles. He loves actors, and he enjoyed the TV-Western make-believe, but that moment when the routine Western script gave way to a memorably “honest” emotion became for him what it was all about. When Peckinpah reminisces about “a great Western,” it sometimes comes down to one flourish that for him “said everything.” And Peckinpah lives by and for heroic flourishes; they’re his idea of the real thing, and in his movies he has invested them with such nostalgic ion that a viewer can be torn between emotional assent and utter confusion as to what, exactly, he’s assenting to.

As the losing battles with the moneymen have gone on, year after year, Peckinpah has—only partly sardonically, I think—begun to see the world in of the bad guys (the studio executives who have betrayed him or chickened out on him) and the people he likes (generally actors), who are the ones smart enough to see what the process is all about, the ones who haven’t betrayed him yet. Hatred of the bad guys—the total mercenaries—has become practically the only sustaining emotion in his work, and his movies have become fables about striking back.

Many of the things that Peckinpah says in conversation began to seep into his last film, BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974), turning it into a time-machine foul-up, with modern, airborne killers functioning in the romanticized Mexico of an earlier movie era. Essentially the same assassins dominate the stylized, darkened San Francisco of THE KILLER ELITE. In a Playboy interview with William Murray in 1972, Peckinpah was referring to movie producers when he said, “The woods are full of killers, all sizes, all colors....A director has to deal with a whole world absolutely teeming with mediocrities, jackals, hangers-on, and just plain killers. The attrition is terrific. It can kill you. The saying is that they can kill you but not eat you. That’s nonsense. I’ve had them eating on me while I was still walking around.” Sam Peckinpah looks and behaves as if he were never free of their gnawing. He carries it with him, fantasizes it, provokes it, makes it true again and again. He romanticizes himself as one of the walking wounded, which is no doubt among the reasons he wanted to direct PLAY IT AS IT LAYS. (He was rejected by the businessmen as being strictly an action director.) In that Murray interview, he was referring to the making of movies when he said, “When you’re dealing in millions, you re dealing with people at their meanest. Christ, a showdown in the old West is nothing compared with the infighting that goes on over money.”

Peckinpah swallowed Robert Ardrey whole; it suited his emotional needs—he wants to believe that all men are whores and killers. He was talking to Murray about what the bosses had done to him and to his films when he said, “There are people all over the place, dozens of them, Pd like to kill, quite literally kill.” He’s dramatizing, but I’ve known Sam Peckinpah for over ten years (and, for all his ceremonial exhibitionism, his power plays, and his baloney, or maybe because of them, there is a total, physical elation in his work and in his own relation to it that makes me feel closer to him than I do to any other director except Jean Renoir) and m convinced that he actually feels that demonic hatred. I think Sam Peckinpah feels everything that he dramatizes—he allows himself to. He’s a ham: he doesn’t feel what he doesn’t dramatize.

Pckinpan has been simplifying and falsifying his own terrors as an artist by putting them into melodramatic formulas. He’s a major artist who has worked so long in penny-dreadful forms that when he is finally in a position where he’s famous enough to fight for his freedom—and maybe win—he can’t free himself from the fear of working outside those forms, or from the festering desire for revenge. He is the killer-élite hero played by James Caan in this hallucinatory thriller, in which the hirelings turn against their employers. James Caan’s Mike, a No. 1 professional, is mutilated by his closest friend, George Hansen (Robert Duvall), at the order of Cap Collis (Arthur Hill), a defector within the company—Communications Integrity Associates—that they all work for. Mike rehabilitates himself, however, by a long, painful struggle, regaining the use of his body so that he can revenge himself. He comes back more determined than ever, and his enemies—Hansen and Cap Collis—are both shot. But when the wearily cynical top man in the company (Gig Young) offers Mike a regional directorship—Cap Collis’s newly vacated position—he rejects it. Instead, he sails—literally—into unknown seas with his loyal friend the gunman-mechanic Mac (Burt Young).

There's no way to make sense of what has been going on in Peckinpah’s recent films if one looks only at their surface stories. Whether consciously or, as I think, part unconsciously, he’s been destroying the surface content. In this new film, there aren’t any of the ordinary kinds of introductions to the characters, and the events aren’t prepared for. The political purposes of the double-crosses are shrouded in a dark fog, and the company itself makes no economic sense. There are remnants of a plot involving a political leader from Taiwan (he sounds off about democratic principles in the manner of Paul Henreid’s Victor Laszlo in CASABLANCA), but that fog covers all the specific plot points. Peckinpah can explain this disintegration to himself in of how contemptible the material actually is—the fragmented story indicates how he feels about what the bosses buy and what they degrade him with. He agrees to do these properties, to be “a good whore,” and then he can’t help turning them into revenge fantasies. His whole way of making movies has become a revenge fantasy: he screws the bosses, he screws the picture, he screws himself.

The physical rehabilitation of the hero in THE KILLER ELITE (his refusal to accept the company’s decision that he’s finished) is an almost childishly transparent disguise for Peckinpah’s own determination to show Hollywood that he’s not dead yet—that, despite the tabloid views of him, frail and falling-down drunk, he’s got the will to make great movies. He’s trying to pick up the pieces of his career. Amazingly, Peckinpah does rehabilitate himself; his technique here is dazzling. In the moments just before violence explodes, Peckinpah’s work is at its most subtly theatrical: he savors the feeling of power as he ticks off the seconds before the suppressed rage will take form. When it does, it’s often voluptuously horrifying (and that is what has given Peckinpah a dubious reputation—what has made him Bloody Sam), but this time it isn’t gory and yet it’s more daring than ever. He has never before made the violence itself so surreally, fluidly abstract; several sequences are edited with a magical speed—a new refinement. In ALFREDO GARCIA, the director seemed to have run out of energy after a virtuoso opening, and there was a scene, when the two leads (Warren Oates and Isela Vega) were sitting by the side of a road, that was so scrappily patched together, with closeups that didn’t match, that Peckinpah appeared to have run out of zest for filmmaking. Maybe it was just that in Alfredo Garcia his old obsessions had lost their urgency and his new one—his metaphoric view of modern corporate business, represented by the dapper, errand-boy killers (Gig Young and Robert Webber as mirror-image lovers)—had thrown him off balance. He didn’t seem to know why he was making the movie, and Warren Oates, who has fine shadings in character roles, was colorless in the central role (as he was also in the title role of John Milius’s Dillinger). Oates is a man who’s used to not being noticed, and his body shows it. When he tried to be a star by taking over Peckinpah’s glasses and mustache and manner, he was imitating the outside of a dangerous person—the inside was still meek. And, of course, Peckinpah, with his feelers (he’s a man who gives the impression of never missing anything going on in a room), knew the truth: that the actor in ALFREDO GARCIA who was like him, without trying at all, was Gig Young, with his weary pale eyes. In THE KILLER ELITE, James Caan is the hero who acts out Peckinpah’s dream of salvation, but it’s Gig Young’s face that haunts the film. Gig Young represents Peckinpah’s idea of what he will become if he doesn’t screw them all and sail away.

Peckinpah is surely one of the most histrionic men who have ever lived: his movies (and his life, by now) are all gesture. He thinks like an actor, in of the effect, and the special bits he responds to in Westerns are actors’ gestures—corniness transcended by the hint of nobility in the actors themselves. Like Gig Young, he has the face of a ravaged juvenile, a face that magnetizes because of the suggestion that the person understands more than he wants to. It’s a fake, this look, but Peckinpah cultivates the whore-of-whores pose. He plays with the idea of being the best of men and, when inevitably betrayed, the worst of men. (He’s got to be both the best and the worst.) Gig Young has the same air of gentleness that Peckinpah has, and the dissolute quality of an actor whose talents have been wasted. Gig Young’s face seems large for his body now, in a way that suggests that it has carried a lot of makeup in its time; he looks rubbery-faced, like an old song-and-dance man. Joel McCrea, with his humane strength, may have been Peckinpah’s idealized hero in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, and William Holden may have represented a real man to him in THE WILD BUNCH, but Gig Young, who represents what taking orders from the bosses—being used—does to a man of feeling, is the one Peckinpah shows the most affection for now. Gig Young can play the top whore in THE KILLER ELITE because his sad eyes suggest that he has no expectations and no illusions left about anything. And Peckinpah can identify with this character because of the element of pain in Gig Young, who seems to be the most naked of actors—an actor with nowhere to hide. (Peckinpah’s own eyes are saintly-sly, and he’s actually the most devious of men.) Peckinpah could never for an instant identify with the faceless corporate killer played by Arthur Hill. When you see Arthur Hill as Cap Collis, the sellout, you know that it didn’t cost Collis anything to sell out. He’s a gutless wonder, something that crawled out of the woodwork. Arthur Hill’s unremarkable, company-man face and lean, tall body are already abstractions; he’s a corporate entity in himself. In Peckinpah’s iconography, he’s a walking cipher, a man who wasn’t born of woman but was cast in a mold—a man whose existence is a defeat for men of feeling.

James Caan goes through the athletic motions of heroism and acts intelligently, but he doesn’t bring the right presence to the role. His stoicism lacks homicidal undercurrents, and he doesn’t have the rawnerved awareness that seems needed. The face that suggests some of what Peckinpah is trying to express—the residual humanity in killers—is that of Burt Young, as the devoted Mac. The swarthy, solid, yet sensitive face of Burt Young (he played the man looking at pictures of his faithless wife at the beginning of CHINATOWN) shows the weight of feelings. Mac’s warm, gravelly croak and his almost grotesque simpleness link him to the of the Wild Bunch. His is a face with substance, capable of dread on a friend’s . In THE KILLER ELITE, his is the face that shows the feelings that have been burnt out of Gig Young’s.

Fecuinpah has become wryly sentimental about his own cynicism. When the Taiwanese leader’s young daughter pompously tells the hero that she’s a virgin, and he does a variation on Rhett Butler, saying, “To tell you the truth, I really don’t give a shit,” the director’s contempt for innocence is too self-conscious, and it sticks out. Peckinpah wants to be honored for the punishment he’s taken, as if it were battle scars. The doctor who patches up the hero says, ““The scar looks beautiful’ —which, in context, is a sleek joke. But when the hero’s braced leg fails him and he falls helplessly on his face on a restaurant floor, Sam Peckinpah may be pushing for sympathy for his own travail. From the outside, it’s clear that even his battle scars aren’t all honorable—that a lot of the time he wasn’t fighting to protect his vision, he was fighting for tortuous reasons. He doesn’t start a picture with a vision; he starts a picture as a job and then perversely—in spite of his deal to sell out—he turns into an artist.

Much of what Peckinpah is trying to express in THE KILLER ELITE is probably inaccessible to audiences, his moral judgments being based less on what his characters do than on what they wouldn’t stoop to do. (In Hollywood, people take more pride in what they’ve said no to than in what they've done.) Yet by going so far into his own hostile, edgily funny myth—in being the maimed victim who rises to smite his enemies—he found a ferocious unity, an Old Testament righteousness that connects with the audience in ways his last few pictures didn’t. At the beginning of THE KILLER ELITE, the lack of sunlight is repellent; the lividness looks cheap and pulpy—were those four hundred and thirty-five prints processed in a sewer? But by the end a viewer stares fixedly, not quite believing he’s seeing what he’s seeing: a nightmare ballet. In the free-form murderous finale, with guns, Samurai swords, and lethal skills one has never heard of before, there are troops of Oriental assassins scurrying over the phantom fleet of Second World War ships maintained in Suisun Bay, north of San Francisco. Wrapped up in their cult garb so we can’t tell one from another, the darting killers, seen in those slow-motion fast cuts, are exactly like Peckinpah’s descriptions of the teeming mediocrities, jackals, hangers-on, and just plain killers that Hollywood is full of.

The film is so cleanly made that Peckinpah may have wrapped up this obsession. When James Caan and Burt Young sail away at the end, it’s Sam Peckinpah turning his back on Hollywood. He has gone to Europe, with commitments that will keep him there for at least two years. It would be too simple to say that he has been driven out of the American movie industry, but it’s more than half true. No one is Peckinpah’s master as a director of individual sequences; no one else gets such beauty out of movement and hard grain and silence. He doesn’t do the expected, and so, scene by scene, he creates his own actor-director’s suspense. The images in THE KILLER ELITE are charged, and you have the feeling that not one is wasted. What they all add up to is something else—but one could say the same of The Pisan Cantos. Peckinpah has become so nihilistic that filmmaking itself seems to be the only thing he believes in. He’s crowing in THE KILLER ELITE, saying, “No matter what you do to me, look at the way I can make a movie.” The bedevilled bastard’s got a right to crow.

[January 12, 1976]

“Brotherhood is Powerful”

John Huston’s THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, based on the Rudyard Kipling short story, is an exhilaratingly farfetched adventure fantasy about two roughneck con men, Danny and Peachy (Sean Connery and Michael Caine), in Victoria’s India, who decide to conquer a barbarous land for themselves, and set out for Kafiristan, a region which was once ruled by Alexander the Great, to make themselves kings. With twenty rifles, their British Army training, unprincipled rashness, cunning, and a few wild strokes of luck, they succeed, for a time. As a movie, this Empire gothic has elements of GUNGA DIN and of a cynical LOST HORIZON, along with something that hasn’t been a heroic attribute in other Empire-gothic movies: the desire to become the highest-ranking person that one can envision. The heroes are able to achieve their goal only because of the primitiveness of the people they conquer, and this is very likely the stumbling block that kept the movie from being financed for the twentyodd years that Huston wanted to do it. Maybe he was able to, finally, on the assumption that enough time has ed for the heroes’ attitude toward the native populations of India and Kafiristan—the benighted heathen—to seem quaint rather than racist. Huston’s narrative is both an ironic parable about the motives and methods of imperialism and a series of gags about civilization and barbarism. When savages in war masks are hit by bullets, the image is a sick-joke history of colonialism, and when the vulgarian heroes try to civilize the tribes they conquer, they obviously have not much more than their own military conditioning to draw upon. Danny and Peachy are British primitives who seek to turn the savages into Englishmen by drilling them in discipline and respect for authority. Danny becomes as sanctimonious about that mission as Victoria herself, and is baffled when the natives show ingratitude.

The script, by Huston and Gladys Hill, is a fine piece of craftsmanship, with every detail in place, and with some of Kipling’s devices carried further, so that the whole mad, jinxed adventure is tied together. But THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING isn’t rousing, and it isn’t a comedy, either. It’s a genre movie made with full awareness of the campy pit into which it will sink if the laconic distancing ever lapses. Huston has to hold down the very emotions that most spectacles aim for; if he treated the material stirringly, it would take the audience back to the era when we were supposed to feel pride in the imperial British gallantry, as we did at some level, despite our more knowledgeable, disgusted selves, at movies like the 1935 LIVES OF A BENGAL LANCER. This film doesn’t dare give us the empathic identification with what’s going on inside the heroes which we had with Gary Cooper and Franchot Tone in BENGAL LANCER. And Huston, who has never been interested in spectacle for its own luxurious sake, doesn’t make a big event of the adventure, the way Capra did with the arrival at Shangri-la—when he practically unveiled the city. Shot in Morocco, with Oswald Morris as cinematographer and Alexander Trauner as production designer, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING is in subdued reds and browns, and the persistent dusty earth tones underscore the transiency of the heroes’ victory. There are no soaring emotions. Huston tells his whopper in a matter-of-fact tone, and he doesn’t play up the cast of thousands or the possibilities of portentous spectacle in the bizarre stone “‘sacred city” of Alexander the Great, built on a mountain.

The director’s love of the material is palpable; it makes one smile. Yet the most audacious parts of the film don’t reach for that special clarity which makes action memorably poetic. There are lovely, foolish poetic bits—a panoramic view of warring armies pausing to genuflect when holy men walk through the battlefield, and the brave last flourish of Billy Fish (Saeed Jaffrey), the interpreter for the heroes, who dies charging their enemies, pointlessly, in the name of British military ideals—but these episodes are offhand and brief. Huston’s is a perverse form of noblesse oblige—he doesn’t want to push anything. He won’t punch up the moments that are right there waiting, even though we might have enjoyed basking in them, and getting a lift from them. He sets up the most elaborate, berserk fairy-tale scenes and then just sits back; he seems to be watching the events happen instead of shaping them. Huston has said that Danny and Peachy are destroyed because of folie de grandeur, and that’s what he risks, too. I ire his pride; he treats the audience with a sophisticated respect that’s rare in genre films, and this movie is the best sustained work he’s done in years. Even Edith Head’s costume designs and Maurice Jarre’s musical score rise to the occasion, and the animal noises (they sound like cows lowing through giant megaphones) that accompany the primitive rites are terrifyingly creepy. But Huston’s courtliness has its weakness. No doubt he believes in telling the story as simply as possible, but what that means in practice is that he shoots the script. It’s exemplary, and he’s a good storyteller. But he’s not such a great movie storyteller here. I don’t think Huston any longer plans scenes for the startling sprung rhythms of his early work. The camera now seems to be ively recording—intelligently, beautifully, but without the sudden, detonating effects of participation. Huston has become more of an illustrator. And so the ironies in THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING go by fast—when we want them to vibrate a little.

Huston’s even-tempered narrative approach doesn’t quite release all that we suspect he feels about the material. It may be that he’s so far into the kind of thinking that this story represents that he doesn’t take us in far enough. If he had regressed to an earlier stage of movie history and presented Kipling’s jingoism with emotional force, the film might have been a controversial, inflammatory epic. If he had rekindled the magical appeal of that jingoism and made us understand our tragic vulnerability to it, it might have been a true modern epic. The way he’s done it, the story works only on the level of a yarn. But it’s a wonderful yarn. Huston shares with Kipling a revelling in the unexpected twists of behavior of other cultures, and he doesn’t convert the story into something humanistic. The ignorant natives are cruel and barbaric; if they’re given a chance, they don’t choose fair play. And Huston leaves it at that—he doesn’t pussyfoot around, trying to make them lovable. Huston has a fondness for the idiosyncrasies of the natives, and he doesn’t hate the heroes who go out to exploit them. Huston is cynical without a shade of contempt—that’s why the film is likable. Yet when you play fascinated anthropologist, equally amused by the British and the natives, you may have licked the problem of how to do Kipling now without an outcry, but you’re being false to why you wanted to film the story in the first place. Despite the film’s ironic view of them, Danny and Peachy, who can sing in the face of death, represent courage and gallantry. Huston may spoof this when he has Peachy bawl out Danny for rushing in to attack an enemy army, and Danny, who has won the battle single-handed, apologize that his “blood was up,” but the love of this crazed courage is built into the genre, and even if you leave out the surging emotion of the arrival of the British relief column, it’s the Britishers here—and their devoted Billy Fishes—who represent civilization. Their ways of killing are cleaner—they don’t kill for pleasure. Huston’s irony can’t remove all this—it merely keeps it from being offensive.

The theme of THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING gets at the essence of the attitudes underlying John Huston’s work. Huston might be the man without illusions on a quest. Here, as in THE MALTESE FALCON, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE, his characters are after money. But when Danny and Peachy are battling mountain snowstorms, risking blindness and death to get to the backward country they mean to pillage, one knows that it isn’t just for gold—it’s because conquering and looting a country are the highest score they can imagine. And when they view Alexander the Great’s treasure, the jewels and gold pieces seem a little ridiculous; the treasure will be scattered, like the gold dust in THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE. What matters in Huston films is the existential quest: man testing himself. It’s a great pity that Huston didn’t get to film Mailer’s An American Dream, which is also about a man who would be king. (All Mailer’s writing is.) Mailer’s book, being in contemporary , might have challenged Huston right to the bone. The Kipling story, with its links to old adventure-genre movies, and its links to the childhood tastes we have disowned, doesn’t quite.

Huston finds a grisly humor in the self-deceptions of ruthless people chasing rainbows; that might almost be his comic notion of man’s life on earth. He earns esteem by not sentimentalizing that quest. (Yet his inability to show affection for characters who live on different shows how much the rogues mean to him.) Huston isn’t too comfortable about any direct show of emotion; he’s in his element (and peerlessly) with men who are boyishly brusque, putting down their own tender feelings shamefacedly. When he first prepared this script, Gable was to be in the Connery role and Bogart in the Caine role. Connery is, I think, a far better Danny than Gable would ever have been. Gable never had this warmth, and never gave himself over to a role the way Connery does. With the glorious exceptions of Brando and Olivier, there’s no screen actor Pd rather watch than Sean Connery. His vitality may make him the most richly masculine of all English-speaking actors; that thick, rumbling Scotsman’s voice of his actually transforms English—muffles the clipped edges and humanizes the language. Connery’s Danny has a beatific, innocent joy in his crazy goal even when he’s half frozen en route; few actors are as unself-consciously silly as Connery is willing to be—as he enjoys being. Danny’s fatuity is sumptuous as he throws himself into his first, half-embarrassed lofty gestures. Connery plays this role without his usual hairpieces, and, undisguised—bare-domed—he seems larger, more free; if baldness ever needed redeeming, he’s done it for all time. Caine has the Bogart role, which means he’s Huston’s protagonist; Peachy is the smarter of the two, the wise-guy realist, loyal to Danny even when he’s depressed by Danny’s childishness. We see through Peachy’s sane, saddened eyes the danger in Danny’s believing himself a man of destiny, and Caine manages this with the modesty of a first-rate actor. He stays in character so convincingly that he’s able to bring off the difficult last scene, rounding out the story conception, when it becomes apparent that Peachy has “gone native.”

The central human relationship is between these two uneducated working-class blokes, who at first share a fantasy, and who remain friends—brothers, really, since they re Masons—even when their fantasies diverge. The entire plot hinges on Freemasonry—not however, used philosophically, as it was in THE MAGIC FLUTE, though Kipling himself was deeply involved in the brotherhood, and Christopher Plummer, who plays him here, wears a Masonic watch fob. Plummer, hidden by a thick brush mustache, gives a blessedly restrained performance as the straitlaced young editor in India. In of historical accuracy, however, he’s not young enough for the part. Brother Kipling—an “‘infant monster,” Henry James called him—was only twenty-two when he published the story. In the movie, it seems appropriate that the watch fob should set the whole adventure in motion; the brotherhood that links the two rowdy crooks, the nearsighted journalist, and the shaven-headed monks in the temple of Kafiristan is like a schoolboys’ secret society that has swept the world. In the story, Kipling was able to satirize his own gnomic vision of fraternity, and at times Huston and Gladys Hill, ringing changes on the mysticfraternity theme—“rejuvenating”’ it—might almost be borrowing from Edgar Rice Burroughs. Huston seems to be enjoying himself in this film in the way he hasn’t for a long time. It communicates the feeling of a consummated dream.

One of the incidental benefits of movies based on classics is that filmgoers are often eager to read the book; Allied Artists, which produced this film, and Bantam Books have just struck a low note by putting out a gold-covered paperback novelization of Kipling’s story. This makeshift Kipling, written by Michael Hardwick, combines the story and the screenplay, unnecessary descriptions, and bits from Kipling’s life to fill a hundred and thirty-seven pages. The whole new practice of film novelizations is a disgrace. It sickens the screenwriters who have written original screenplays to see their dialogue debased into a prose stew, but at least they are alive and in a position to fight against it. If they’re suckered, it’s partly their own damned greedy fault. But here is a movie inspired by love of Kipling—apparently, Huston first read the story when he was twelve or thirteen, and it meant enough to him to nag at him many years later—and this love has had the effect of temporarily displacing the story and putting drivel in its stead.

Hunger cannot be the excuse: Allied Artists and Bantam Books are not poor and desperate, and the profit to be made from this venture is not likely to be vast. What is the rationale for this garbagizing of literature? I don’t think “The Man Who Would Be King” is a great story, but it’s a good one—good enough to have turned people into Kipling readers, maybe, if it had been made readily available in an edition with one or two other Kipling stories, and with the movie-photo tie-ins that will attract readers to this gold beauty. Since Kipling’s work isn’t in screenplay form but in a highly readable form, the motive for this mass-marketed paperback seems almost like giggly mischief—a folie of debasement. That could be another term for business as usual. Allied Artists and Bantam Books, why are you doing this?

[January 5, 1976]

“Kubrick’s Gilded Age”

BARRY LYNDON is a mistake, but it’s not disreputable. It’s not a mangy insult, like LUCKY LADY, which is an agents’ picture—everybody’s rip-off. The only drama involved was in the deal. It started with a script financed by an agent and manufactured by Willard Huyck and his wife, Gloria Katz. They’d worked on the script of the money-making AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and that meant that their new script would be read as if it were a target map to the mother lode. Probably it hardly mattered that this script has no basis in experience and owes nothing to imagination, either. It’s an example of a new cottage industry—the handwrought computerization of movie hits. 1930... rum-running between Mexico and Southern California...a blond floozy-singer with two rival lovers—one canny-eyed and knowing, the other a well-meaning stupe .. . a fast boat... a darling orphaned “native” boy for a deckhand... action... little guys against the mob... high society... “native” boy killed by the dirty mob... vengeance... action climax... big. The idea was so aggressively charming that Twentieth Century-Fox was persuaded that the film would be another THE STING, and put up $450,000, which, in perfect justice, considering the picture, went to the agent, with the writers receiving a sixth of it. And the agent, Michael Gruskoff, now became the producer. It’s too bad that we don’t have access to the dialogues of all the agents involved, because they must have been inspired.

By the time Stanley Donen was hired as director and Liza Minnelli was slinging her body around in sleazy glitter and a blond wig, and Gene Hackman and Burt Reynolds were playing her competing lovers, something between $13,000,000 and $15,000,000 had got pyramided onto the shifty base. The mother lode is what this picture cost. When sneak previews revealed some dissatisfaction, the company tried to protect its huge investment by arranging to have a new ending shot. That new ending is like the desperation finishes on comedies of the forties, but it’s no worse than the original finish (as described in the novelization of the screenplay). And it’s not much worse than the beginning or the middle. A new new ending is now being pieced together out of the older footage; it can’t make any aesthetic difference—there’s no good way to end a picture that should never have been begun. However, the film has some handsomely shot, reassuringly fancy destruction scenes—boats exploding, burning, sinking, people shot up, blown to bits—and maybe audiences will go for that. Maybe, with a big enough campaign, LUCKY LADY can combine the audience for THE STING with the audience for THE TOWERING INFERNO.

It’s a movie for people who don’t mind being treated like hicks: the audience is expected to shudder with delight every time it hears an obscenity or sees a big movie-star grin. Gene Hackman keeps a low profile and comes off better than the others, but it’s not much of a contest. Reynolds does the same simp act he did in AT LONG LAST LOVE, letting you know he’s miscast. He’s willing to play a twit, but he plays it a little cute, so you'll know Burt Reynolds could never be convincing as a twit. There’s nothing to be done with the role anyway, and he isn’t obstreperously offensive; he and Hackman are both forgettable. What isn’t is the deformation of Liza Minnelli’s personality and appearance. To take a woman whose only sin is her naked overeagerness to make with an audience, and to turn her into a strident, selfish bitch, and then to sentimentalize that, as if her viciousness and rasping out at everyone were really adorable—that’s tying Liza Minnelli to a block of cement. I know she consented to do this role, but I was offended for her. She has not earned LUCKY LADY, and she does not deserve to be made so crude. She plays a scene of comic feminine incompetence—she’s unable to light a match—that would be a low point in the annals of women on the screen if one could for a moment believe that the characters in this movie were men or women. The plastic is so thick that-when Liza Minnelli puts on a record of Bessie Smith singing “Young Woman’s Blues” you can barely that it’s really Bessie Smith’s voice. This mercenaries’ film is so coarsely conceived it obliterates any emotion, any art.

[December 29, 1975]

“Kubrick’s Gilded Age”

Stanley Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON, from Thackeray’s novel, is very deliberate, very smooth—cool pastel landscapes with small figures in the foreground, a stately tour of European high life in the mid-eighteenth century. The images are fastidiously delicate in the inexpressive, peculiarly chilly manner of the English painters of the period, and the film is breathtaking at first as we wait to see what will develop inside the pastoral loveliness. An early bit of sex play between Barry (Ryan O’Neal) and his teasing cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton) is weighted as if the fate of nations hung on it. While we’re still in a puzzled, anticipatory mood, this hushed atmosphere is intriguing, but then we begin to wonder how long it will take for the film to get its motor going. Thackeray wrote a skittish, fast-moving parody of romantic, sentimental writing. It was about the adventures of an Irish knave who used British hypocrisy for leverage; unscrupulous, he was blessed and cursed with too lively an imagination. However, it must have been Barry’s ruthless pursuit of wealth and social position rather than his spirit that attracted Kubrick. The director may also have been drawn to the novel because of its externalized approach; Orwell was describing Thackeray’s gift for farce when he said that one of Thackeray’s heroes was “as flat as an icon.” Kubrick picks up on that flatness for his own purposes and tells the story very formally. After an hour or so, Barry has deserted the British Army, only to be impressed into the Prussian Army and then into service aS a police spy in Berlin, and we have begun to long for a few characters as a diversion from the relentless procession of impeccable, museum-piece compositions. All we get is Patrick Magee, encased in the makeup of a noble in the time of George III and wearing an eye patch, as the gambling Irishman that Barry is sent to spy on. The two of them head for the Prussian border, to begin a cardsharp partnership that will keep them travelling, and, with Barry at last a free man, the mood could lighten. It doesn’t. O’Neal looks slack-faced and phlegmatic—exhausted from the effort of not acting—and one gets the feeling that Kubrick is too good for a light mood. Instead, in Spa, Belgium, Barry sets his sights on the rich, walking-doormat countess he will marry, and the film’s color fades ominously to a colder tone. This ice pack, coming at the end of the first half, warns us that in the second half there will be none of the gusto we haven’t had anyway.

As it becomes apparent that we are to sit and ire the lingering tableaux, we feel trapped. It’s not merely that Kubrick isn’t releasing the actors’ energies or the story’s exuberance but that he’s deliberately holding the energy level down. He sets up his shots peerlessly, and can’t let go of them. There are scenes, such as the card-room argument between Barry and the gouty old Sir Charles Lyndon (Frank Middlemass), that just sit there on the screen, obsessively, embarrassingly. Kubrick has worked them out visually, but dramatically they’re hopeless. He has written his own screenplay, and the film lacks the tensions and conflicting temperaments that energized some of his earlier work and gave it jazzy undercurrents. Has he been schooling himself in late Dreyer and Bresson and Rossellini, and is he trying to turn Thackeray’s picaresque entertainment into a religious exercise? His tone here is unexpectedly holy. The dialogue, taken from the book, is too light to this, so, right from the start, there’s a discrepancy between what the characters are saying and the film’s air of consecration. If you were to cut the jokes and cheerfulness out of the film TOM JONES and run it in slow motion, you’d have something very close to BARRY LYNDON. Kubrick has taken a quick-witted story, full of vaudeville turns (Thackeray wrote it as a serial, under the pseudonym George Fitz-Boodle), and he’s controlled it so meticulously that he’s drained the blood out of it. The movie isn’t quite the rise and fall of a flamboyant rakehell, because Kubrick doesn’t believe in funning around. We never actually see Barry have a frisky, high time, and even when he’s still a love-smitten chump, trying to act the gallant and fighting a foolish duel, Kubrick doesn’t want us to take a shine to him. Kubrick disapproves of his protagonist. But it’s more than that. He won’t let Barry come to life, because he’s reaching for a truth that he thinks lies beyond dramatization. And he thinks he can get it by photographing externals.

The film says that all mankind is corrupt. By Kubrick’s insistence that this is a piece of wisdom that must be treated with Jansenist austerity and by his consequent refusal to entertain us, or even to involve us, he has made one of the vainest of all movies. He suppresses most of the active elements that make movies pleasurable; he must believe that his perfectionism about the look and sound of BARRY LYNDON is what will make it great. It’s a coffee-table movie; we might as well be at a three-hour slide show for art-history majors.

Ryan O’Neal has worked on his Irish lilt, he knows his lines, he’s all psyched up for the assignment, his face straining with the effort to be what the Master wants—and all that Kubrick wants is to use him as a puppet. As Lady Lyndon, Marisa Berenson is just a doll to hang the lavish costumes on; her hairdos change more often than her expressions. In Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Malcolm McDowell brought his own vitality and instinct to the bullying hero; here Kubrick manipulates the actors the way he did in 2001. The men are country bumpkins or overbred and ugly (they’re treated rather like the writer—Patrick Magee—in CLOCKWORK); the women, long-necked and high-breasted, are lovely, but they’re no more than the camera’s ing fancies. Kubrick doesn’t want characterizations from the actors. It’s his picture, in the same sense that Fellini’s pictures have become his. Where Fellini, the caricaturist, hypercharges his people, makes them part of his world by making them grotesque, superabundant, Kubrick, the photographer, turns actors into pieces of furniture.

Even the action sequences in BARRY LYNDON aren’t meant to be exciting; they’re meant only to be visually exciting. But when we have no interest in who is fighting a battle, or what the outcome will mean, the action must make an appeal to the senses all by itself, by its graphic strength and visual-emotional movement. It won’t do to have soldiers being moved in patterns just to see what original effects a director can get. When Barry, as a soldier, is in a military skirmish during the Seven Years’ War, Kubrick proves that even a battle can be pastel—the British Army’s red coats are blanched to a photogenic rosy pink. This aestheticizing touch is symbolic of Kubrick’s folly; the soldiers are pink toys—they don’t die, they merely fall over. And this isn’t used for its satiric potential: there’s no comedy in it. The opposing line of soldiers wears lavender-pink cuffs, and that seems to be the reason they’re on the field—so we can see the ravishing pinks and greens. Yet there’s nothing like the extravagant sensuousness of THE LEOPARD. When Barry is wenching, with his arms around two half-naked bawds, the scene is so statically composed that it’s pristine, and when Kubrick looks at the wanly bored Lady Lyndon, palest pink in her bath, and you notice abstractly how her flesh tones blend with the appointments of the bathing salon, all you can say is “Pretty.”

War has its own graphic power; we can turn on the TV and be moved by a combat scene in an old movie even if we don’t know anything about the issues. Obviously, Stanley Kubrick does not have a gift for sensual fury—he’s interested in the contemplative spectacle of war. Yet he’s indifferent to the possibilities in the interaction of images and doesn’t build his sequences by editing—which is how memorable war sequences are made—so his beautiful images are inert. If they seem like slides (certainly the narrator, Michael Hordern, seems like one of those museum tourguide machines), it’s because they don’t do anything for each other. The episode of Barry’s entrapment by the sly, grinning Prussian officer (Hardy Krüger), which is hammily obvious anyway, is so laborious because Kubrick spells it out instead of making the point by editing. The sequences of the gambling partnership might have been entertaining if they’d been telescoped, like Welles’ of Charles Foster Kane’s first marriage.

But Kubrick’s mode in this film is oracular and doomy: the narrator tells you what’s going to happen before you see it—you’re even told long in advance that the end is going to be unhappy. The music, off-puttingly classical under the titles (an omen of a consequential film), gets to be enough to make one want to fight back. What with the marches, dirges, and adagios, there’s so much foreboding and afterboding that the music might as well be embalming fluid. Kubrick is doing the opposite of what the revolutionary Russian directors of the late teens and early twenties were attempting: he’s going back to the pageant—to using film as a procession of images. And he’s going back to impressing people by the magnificence of what is photographed; he’s taking pictures of art objects. That antiquesfilled room at the end of 2001 must have been where he wanted his own time machine to land. Kubrick seems overwhelmed by the cool splendor of the great manor houses, with their rich interiors and sweeping vistas. The people are repulsively corrupt, but the style in which they live is treated with reverential longing. He simply thinks they’re the wrong people to be living there. The star of the picture is the aristocratic domicile.

The misanthropy is right on the surface. Kubrick makes no attempt to hide it; he thinks too highly of it. The few amiable characters—Captain Grogan (Godfrey Quigley) and the compliant German girl (Diana Koerner)—are dispatched quickly. Kubrick is on a hanging-judge trip. When he lets Barry’s son, Brian, have sparkling, gamin eyes, you can guess that he’s going to kill the kid off and make us suffer. He takes forever over the boy’s dying, though at last, in the deathbed scene, Ryan O’Neal, telling the child a terminal tale, gets his one chance to do a Ryan O’Neal specialty: he smiles through tears marvellously. If Irving Thalberg had hired Antonioni to direct MARIE ANTOINETTE, it might have come out like this film—grayish powdered wigs and curdled faces. Some people may go along with it, because it is beautiful—if you like chilly fragility. And, since it’s essentially a bloodless, elongated version of a thirties costume picture, it could have a camp appeal. One’s response will probably depend on one’s tolerance for the Kubrick message that people are disgusting but things are lovely. The trend in Kubrick’s work has been toward dehumanization, and when Barry and Lady Lyndon have their dry-as-dust courtship and then a wedding that is so lifeless it could be a frozen image, Kubrick seems to have reached his goal: the marriage of robots.

This film is a masterpiece in every insignificant detail. Kubrick isn’t taking pictures in order to make movies, he’s making movies in order to take pictures. BARRY LYNDON indicates that Kubrick is thinking through his camera, and that’s not really how good movies get made—though it’s what gives them their dynamism, if a director puts the images together vivifyingly, for an emotional impact. I wish Stanley Kubrick would come home to this country to make movies again, working fast on modern subjects—maybe even doing something tacky, for the hell of it. There was more film art in his early THE KILLING than there is in BARRY LYNDON, and you didn’t feel older when you came out of it. Orwell also said of Thackeray that his characteristic flavor is “the flavor of burlesque, of a world where no one is good and nothing is serious.” For Kubrick, everything has become serious. The way he’s been working, in self-willed isolation, with each film consuming years of anxiety, there’s no ground between masterpiece and failure. And the pressure shows. There must be some reason that, in a film dealing with a licentious man in a licentious time, the only carnality—indeed, the only strong emotion—is in Barry’s brutally caning his stepson. When a director gets to the point where the one emotion he shows is morally and physically ugly, maybe he ought to knock off on the big, inviolable endeavors.

[December 29, 1975]

“Killing Yourself with Kindness”

An inhuman amount of judgment is required of a comedy writer-director-star. In his first attempt at a tripleheader, THE ADVENTURE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES’ SMARTER BROTHER, Gene Wilder fails on the level of judgment, though he’s got the talent. He might have brought the film off if only he’d thought out the script. The premise—Sherlock Holmes’ bringing in his insanely jealous younger brother, Sigerson, to help on a case involving Queen Victoria’s state secrets—is so lushly promising that Wilder must have somehow skipped over the fact that he needed to work it up into a story, and gone right on to dream up comic situations without any underpinnings. Or did he perhaps have a story and then panic, discarding the essentials and substituting a batch of lopsided ideas? Whichever way it happened, the plot never thickened. There’s no mystery, and since you can’t have a parody of a mystery without a mystery to solve, there’s no comic suspense. We don’t have the expectations that help laughter build and make it satisfying.

The idea has such mouth-watering possibilities that I imagined Wilder’s Sigi would be a demented caricature of his suavely assured brother—more brilliant by far but so neurotically indecisive that he didn’t follow through on his own deductions. I thought Sigi might be so pettish that he’d resent Watson’s position as his brother’s confidant, and I visualized competitive fraternal feats of outlandish deduction, and the brothers triumphing over England’s enemies by the intuitive exchange of key information, with Sigerson becoming at last a master detective. But the film is a series of missed opportunities. As Sherlock, Douglas Wilmer, who has done the part on British TV, has that fearfully precious Basil Rathbone assurance, the camp polish of the actor whose role gives him all the smart answers, yet the relationship of the brothers isn’t developed. Wilder seems scarcely aware of the comic potential in the contrast between his limply wavering expressions and Sherlock’s cool fixity—an ideal situation for a satire of sibling rivalry. He just ed it over. He didn’t even do anything to for his American accent vis-a-vis Sherlock’s impeccably British snootiness, though what American doesn’t feel that sibling rivalry? Wilder forgot what he had seemed so conscious of in the script he and Mel Brooks wrote for YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN: the necessity of building on the conventions of the genre and of playing the jokes off against those conventions. Abandoning the beautiful comic idea that’s ready to hand, he goes spinning off at cross-purposes into swashbuckling fencing scenes and low-comedy excursions that are so unrelated to anything that in the middle of big showcase sequences you can’t how you got to them or what they’re supposed to lead to.

As Orville Sacker, Sigi’s helper, who has a “photographic memory” for conversations, Marty Feldman bats himself on the head to get his instant-replay machine running; he’s like one of The Three Stooges making himself his own victim. Feldman doesn’t grab the camera as insistently as in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, but he still uses his eyes too much. He doesn’t pop them (like Giancarlo Giannini in the screechy SWEPT AWAY); they look fully popped by nature—those white marbles are so startling they seem almost a deformity, and he might be funnier if he deémphasized them. But Feldman’s awareness of his own cunning is converted into eccentricity here; Orville has a secret, locked-in self-satisfaction that just misses being hugely funny. As Jenny, the red-haired mystery-woman songstress, Madeline Kahn misses, too, though she looks sweetly upholstered, in her Gay Nineties costumes, and, with that ladylike control of hers that goes a little awry, she’s a perfect comic cupcake—ready to parody Jeanette MacDonald in THE MERRY WIDOW if only she had the material. Wilder made the awful mistake of thinking that Feldman, Kahn, and he himself were already comic characters. He wrote the roles for the actors but didn’t write characters for them to play. He provided lots of lovely, sideswiping bits of business but no conceptions that would allow the actors to surprise us with something new. One longs for their scenes to come off better, particularly Madeline Kahn’s, because her comic element of sham seems on the verge of exploding into something marvellous. Too bad that there is no logic behind the villains’ attempts to bump her off, so we don’t even feel scared for her.

Wilder’s direction in the carriage-top fight between Sigi and a minor heavy (Roy Kinnear) suggests that when he gets going he may have a directing style halfway between Mel Brooks’ and Woody Allen’s—not as free-form as Brooks’ or with as much concentrated wild energy, yet more all-out, old-movie nutty than Allen’s. That’s one of the few sequences here that really work. The running gags—such as Orville’s replays of conversations and Sigi’s feeding lines of a song to Jenny—are dropped before they really pay off, and though Wilder uses flash cards for furtive communication between Sherlock and Watson, he fails to use them between Sherlock and Sigi. And there’s real discomfort for the viewer when Sigi, Jenny, and Orville suddenly break into a vaudeville number, “The Kangaroo Hop” — because the format is too much like that of the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” specialty in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. Whether Wilder is taking from himself or from Brooks hardly matters: the device isn’t fresh—it was probably a mistake to use a composer (John Morris) and a choreographer (Alan Johnson) who have done three of Brooks’ films. It was probably also a mistake for Wilder to work in England and to attempt an expensive period picture his first time out as a director; the anxiety about the visually over-rich production (there are enough camera setups to have fatigued a veteran director) must have got to him. Sometimes it’s better for comedy not to go first class: without the fanfare, the director is forced to keep his attention on what counts, and the performers don’t get overpowered by the fruit and flowers. From the way this picture looks, the planning must have gone into the non-essentials.

Wilder is a deadbeat as Sigi. In the ages where he presses Jenny to tell him the truth about her identity, he doesn’t have the seer’s demented intensity that the scenes seem to require—Sigi’s ion for the truth does not appear to be out of control. The characterization is so perfunctory that it’s never clear whether he’s smart or traumatically stupid. What Wilder seems to want to show is that he, Sigi, is brave, loyal, and good. And where’s the humor in that? As the director, Wilder is fatally kind to himself as a performer. In the past, he has had a demonic tenseness in his blurry personality—something so strange we couldn’t puzzle it out. Nor did we want to; we wanted to experience that inspired, moony hysteria that is the modern clown’s lyricism. Wilder’s facial glissandos between confused emotional states expressed the total uncertainty we all sometimes feel. But in HOLMES’ SMARTER BROTHER we can see him sanely producing each effect—acting funny. As he directs himself, he’s a second-rate clown playing the hero. Wilder must be trying to fulfill a dated aspiration to be glamorous; he doesn’t seem to understand that the heroes we believe in now are the clowns. But, as Wilder demonstrated in the sheep-lover episode of Woody Allen’s EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX, he’s far from a second-rater. I can’t think of any other clown, past or present, who could have done that routine so well. His shyly obsessed sheep-lover was the comedy variant of the mad killer who cries out, “Lock me up—I can’t stop myself!’ His ecstatic, smudgy face said, “You think that the way I look is crazy? If you only knew what I feel in my heart!”

Wilder loses his performing rhythm by keeping his director’s eye on his responsibilities, but his inventiveness as a writer and a director is evident in the many nice, leafy touches—such as Madeline Kahn’s lead-in to the first rendition of “The Kangaroo Hop,” and the episode featuring an arch, doggerel version of A Masked Ball, with Kahn and Dom DeLuise. The words they sing suggest what opera sounds like to people who can’t stand opera, and it might be a gem of a sequence if the sound hadn’t got inexplicably garbled and the effect lost. As the mustachioed opera-singer crook Gambetti, Dom DeLuise doesn’t need to be a character, and he’s in his best form—like a highbrow Lou Costello—particularly in his scenes with Leo McKern, who plays a goopy, comic-strip Moriarty, gigglingly evil. Wilder’s direction makes McKern more acceptable than he’s ever been before. HOLMES’ SMARTER BROTHER isn’t the kind of failure you write an artist off for; it got out of hand in the way that ambitious projects by talented people sometimes do, but there’s always something to watch in it. With luck, a simpler approach, and less self-romanticizing, Gene Wilder could make it next time.

[December 22, 1975]

“Political Acts”

When Costa-Gavras made his first film, THE SLEEPING CAR MURDER, practically all he needed to think about was how to give it verve and a high-strung pace. A few years later, when he made his political detective-story thriller Z, he had such fierce conviction about the urgency of its message, and he was still so young, that he tore right through it, using every trick he knew to get the ideas across. He heated up the material explosively, and the film’s muckraking energy was almost impossible to resist. In those years, it was as if he were on a sensory binge, doing what his instincts told him. When he came down, he wasn’t free anymore. He was too intelligent not to see the danger in using films for rabble-rousing, and he became more scrupulous in his methods of affecting the audience. Z had the simple point of view appropriate to melodrama. Costa-Gavras has never been so simpleminded or so sensationally successful since. Obviously, he could have used his percussive, bruising narrative techniques to make smash crime thrillers. (THE FRENCH CONNECTION, borrowing liberally, proved how profitable a cops-and-robbers jam session could be.) But Costa-Gavras has sought to make films that are political acts—films about power and justice. Like Z, his two subsequent pictures, THE CONFESSION and STATE OF SIEGE, and his new one, SPECIAL SECTION, all deal with different faces of the same horror: a legal government in the role of a crime ring plotting against its own citizen-victims.

A cross between an investigative journalist and a melodramatist, Costa-Gavras lays out a dossier, and as the data accumulate, the audience begins to perceive the implications. SPECIAL SECTION is set in the Second World War, in Occupied . In 1941, after the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, French Communists organized acts of resistance against the Nazis in their midst, and a young German naval cadet was killed in the Paris Métro. As the film tells it, the French Secretary of the Interior (Michel Lonsdale) was a toady who decided that German reprisals would be forestalled if the French took reprisals themselves and sent six men to the guillotine for the one dead cadet. The six were to be selected from prisoners who had been convicted of minor political offenses. In order to provide a veneer of legality for this maneuver, the French government had to a new anti-terrorism law, to be applied retroactively and to be istered by a newly created court called the SPECIAL SECTION; the court was to hold quick trials and convict the prisoners, who had actually been condemned in advance. The question that the film raises is why highly placed officials (Cabinet ministers, judges, and prosecutors), who were in no immediate danger themselves, cooperated in this scheme, which flagrantly violated the system of justice they had been trained to uphold. It’s an Augean subject—the same one that Americans were confronted with as the Watergate scandal unfolded—but the film hardly gets near it.

Costa-Gavras has dropped most of his techniques for hyping an audience but hasn’t got rid of the melodramatic thinking that lay underneath. The prisoners brought to trial are touching and heroic figures—they shine with humanity—while the judges who condemn them are vain, ambitious, militaristic weaklings, easily soft-soaped. The collaborators are smaller than life, and we feel contemptuous of them from the first glance. The casting and the writing are so prejudicial that the film’s purpose is undercut. In STATE OF SIEGE, the cartooning of the representatives of the different forces was like a pamphleteer’s shortcut; the demonstration that the repressive U.S.-ed government of Uruguay drove the Tupamaros to terrorism wasn’t dependent on our understanding of the individuals involved. But in SPECIAL SECTION the whole point is an investigation of the character of collaborators, and if you cartoon them there’s no point left. After we’ve seen THE SORROW AND THE PITY, with actual collaborators discussing what they did and why, and seen the fears, moral confusions, and stresses they succumbed to, how can we have any respect for this simplistic vulgarization of history?

Actually, Costa-Gavras and his co-scenarist, Jorge Semprun, blew the movie in the early stages, when they decided to shape the story to make it appear that the French were merely fantasizing the danger of large-scale reprisals. There’s no possibility of examining the psychology of collaboration and resistance if the French officials are obviously fools, cowards, and climbers. With the situation that Costa-Gavras and Semprun set up, they’d have done better to make a satiric farce about the craven eagerness to collaborate, and among the officials the standout performance—that of stooped-over, old Louis Seigner as the doddering Minister of Justice, who imagines that the Nazis are going to make hostages of the most highly placed Frenchmen—is a farcical Chicken Little skit. But for a great many people in Europe at that time the sky did fall. Some historians say that the Germans did in fact want to take a hundred lives for the one, and gave orders for fifty hostages to be executed immediately, and that the French bargained the number down to six. Costa-Gavras claims a solid basis for his interpretation, but it’s ruinous to the movie. In condescendingly shucking off the officials’ moral dilemma, he and-Semprun are left with no core for their seriousness, and the film’s emotional weight shifts to the wrong places. We become unnecessarily involved in the trials and fates of the small-fry political offenders—Trzebrucki (Jacques Rispal) and Bastard (Yves Robert) particularly—and the flashbacks to their lives, which are the only sequences with any sense of personality, are detours. We don’t need to have our sympathies aroused—we already understand that the prisoners are innocently caught in a net. The movie wastes its time and our emotions on what should be the given of the situation. (There are no lyrical flashbacks to the early lives of the judges.)

Costa-Gavras’ specialty has been visceral journalistic immediacy— quasi-documentary techniques that were like newsprint leaping off the page. We wouldn’t expect (or want) a Second World War film to jump at us that way, but we do expect a visual style that brings the collaborators close enough for us to get the scent of what breed of men they are; we need to feel them so vividly near that we can understand why others in positions of authority will do what they did, whenever there’s an opportunity. That must be why he’s made the film: to show us the terrifying possibilities in law-abiding people. Yet he’s at his most prosaic and least involving when he’s dealing with the judges, and he keeps sidetracking us: we follow a lawyer (Jacques Perrin), a pale offshoot of Trintignant in Z, as he dashes off to Vichy in the hope of getting Pétain to stop the parody of justice, and we listen to one of the prisoners—the fearless editor of L’HUMANITÉ (Bruno Cremer)—as he denounces the court and shakes up the judges. When this editor proclaims ringingly that there will be no more convictions, he seems to be speaking out of Costa-Gavras’ knowledge, and he convinces us. But the drama and the politics don’t climax together: after this stirring speech, the closing titles tell us that the prisoners not yet convicted at the film’s end died in concentration camps or were executed, and that other Special Sections were formed.

After the earlier Costa-Gavras films, we ed the forward drive rather than specific images. He sped us through, showing us just what was necessary to get the political situation into our heads; there was no waste. (He had to freeze a frame to catch his breath.) In SPECIAL SECTION, he packs in the information at the beginning, staccato, as if he were in a great hurry, and then he pauses and loiters, without framing the compositions well enough for us to know why. When he gives us time to look, there’s nothing to see and nothing to reflect on. Without the graphic excitement of his streaking frames, Costa-Gavras has no temperament. This film is lifelessly worthy, like those André Cayatte pictures showing the injustices perpetrated in French courts. Pamphleteering about an ongoing crime, STATE OF SIEGE had shocking vitality; it wasn’t a great movie, but it had valuable repercussions—it was a political act. SPECIAL SECTION is ineffective politically, congratulating you on your virtuous indignation over the hypocrisy of officialdom, with its legalized cruelty to the warm, harmless Communist-Jewish-Anarchist victims. This movie doesn’t put even one scummy person among them to test your sympathies. As in old Hollywood, victims of injustice are lovable little men or heroic big ones. Trying to avoid squeezing audiences’ guts, Costa-Gavras winds up squeezing their hearts. He’s going to turn into the European Stanley Kramer if he doesn’t pull himself together.

[December 15, 1975]

“Poses”

Joseph Losey directed THE ROMANTIC ENGLISHWOMAN, so it naturally has very long pauses, time in which to ask yourself why Michael Caine, a pulp writer who is successful enough to live in high-swank style—a glass gazebo-greenhouse, a swimming pool, couches and chairs that crush down just right, a French au-pair (Beatrice Romand) for his little boy, and black chiffon trailing around his sexy, restive wife (Glenda Jackson)—has such awful, sticky hair. Is it because he’s a self-made bourgeois, or is it to indicate that he hasn’t settled into the bourgeoisie and never will, quite? Or is it something else altogether, such as the actor’s negligence? This may not be a big issue, but it’s as big (and as clearly motivated) as anything else that you run up against in THE ROMANTIC ENGLISHWOMAN, another flaccid essay on infidelity with prissy-mouthed Helmut Berger as the gigolo-intruder. Caine, who’s writing a film script about a discontented wife, pushes Glenda and Helmut together, and whammo! They take off for the Continent, leaving him to suffer the consequences of his blockheadedness. Losey persuaded Tom Stoppard to do the rewrite on Thomas Wiseman’s adaptation of his own novel, and Stoppard has given the dialogue a few Noël Cowardish bitch-nifties, but not enough to keep the viewer’s blood coursing. The movie is a twist on life imitating art and vice versa; here it’s life imitating pulp and vice versa—which might be an entertaining premise for a light comedy. In Losey’s brand of mystification melodrama with leftish overtones, it’s a very parched conceit. There may be some giggly amusement in the Pinteresque, cerebral chic, but the floundering scenes aren’t improved by pinning them on Caine’s infertile imagination; besides, we recognize these screwed-up, smoldering connotations as Losey’s. As usual, he empties everything definite out of the characters, as if that would make them richly suggestive. Themes such as women’s liberation are tossed in as part of the décor. Losey is deep on the surface.

Glenda Jackson is a warped choice for the conventionally acquisitive wife, but that warping is the only distinction the attenuated movie has. With her slitted eyes showing malice and her teeth on edge for grating, she’s certainly not a woman that a man need feel he has to be gentle with. That could be quite a come-on, and so you can almost believe her stodgy husband’s jealous obsessiveness about her—or is it meant to be just rotten bourgeois possessiveness? She flashes a handsome rump when she strolls nude away from the camera. You watch Glenda Jackson, all right, though she and the role—which provides no excuse for her affectations—never mesh. Glenda Jackson is a coiled-tight actress, who articulates each shade of emotion with such exactness that she has no fluidity and no ease. She carries no-nonsense precision to the point of brutality; she doesn’t just speak her lines—she flicks them out, disgustedly. And Joseph Losey casts her as a housewife who has nothing to do except complain about the rigors of shopping, a woman who’s unaware of her own emotions and has never had a clear thought in her life. Glenda Jackson is a limited screen actress, because she doesn’t transcend her own conscious technique—she doesn’t let go and allow us to see into her character; she’s so actively in control that her performances are choppy. Yet Losey uses her as a wife who drifts with the tides, like Jeanne Moreau in the wet of THE LOVERS. The casting is so deceptive that it takes a while before one realizes that Jackson’s cold, macabre quality expresses Losey’s inchoate hostility to the character she’s playing. He has no sympathy at all for the wife (after all, she’s bourgeois); he tries to score against both the clod novelist (who yells when angry) and his wife by romanticizing the sponging Berger with tender suggestions that he’s a free man and a generous-hearted poet. Can Losey really be the director who made MODESTY BLAISE? What’s happened to his camp sense of humor? The key ages of Berger’s winning Jackson’s flinty heart take place offscreen, for which one duly records one’s gratitude. But what is Losey thinking of when he uses Helmut Berger, in his Yves Saint Laurent ensembles, to denounce bourgeois possessions? The title THE ROMANTIC ENGLISHWOMAN is ironic; the film’s oblique message is that the bourgeois wife consumes everything—even her lover. (But Berger is hard for the audience to swallow.) Losey’s irers interpret the nebulous politics, congealed nastiness, and languorous visual style of his movies as artistic intellectuality. I guess we don’t need to ask why the sex couplings in THE ROMANTIC ENGLISHWOMAN are always interrupted, but those who wonder why almost every sequence in the house and grounds of the bourgeois couple involves mirror reflections may be interested in Losey’s explanation: “I wanted to convey that their reality was totally unreal.” And if you can go for that, you’re ready for a Joseph Losey retrospective, to include BOOM!, SECRET CEREMONY, FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE, THE GO-BETWEEN, and THE ASSASSINATION OF TROTSKY.

Both RANCHO DELUXE and THE ROMANTIC ENGLISHWOMAN are gilded with dialogue about boredom and dialogue about movies. When Helmut asks Glenda “Why have you come to Baden-Baden?” she answers “I came for the waters.” When Sam Waterston asks Jeff Bridges “Did you ever see Cheyenne Autumn?” Bridges mutters that he did, and Waterston says “Well, in a few years they’re going to make Aluminum Autumn.” Did Tom Stoppard and Tom McGuane—the peacocks of English and American letters—actually write these spuddy exchanges? They’ve turned boredom and movies into the same subject—if God is good, for this week only.

[December 8, 1975]

“Poses”

RANCHO DELUXE, from a jaunty, picaresque original script by the novelist Thomas McGuane, played around the country last spring and summer, but it is just now opening in New York. Shot against the regal Montana Big Sky country by the elegiac cinematographer William A. Fraker, it is a flip, absurdist modern Western. Jack (Jeff Bridges), a dropout from the upper middle class, and Cecil (Sam Waterston), a wryly bemused Indian, are rip-off artists—cattle rustlers. They rustle cattle because the facetious machismo of it appeals to them. They do it, Jack says, ‘‘to keep from falling asleep.” McGuane’s specialty is the comedy in the disparateness of American life, and he provides idiosyncratic dialogue and laconic juxtapositions. Jack and Cecil dismember steers with a chain saw and shoot up a shiny Continental Mark IV with a buffalo gun; the cow-country girls they date work in a factory tying flies for fishermen and chatter about the I Ching. Brown (Clifton James), the cattle baron that Jack and Cecil rustle from, calls a press conference to announce that he’s declaring war on the rustlers; and his twitchy wife (Elizabeth Ashley) isn’t getting the action she hoped for when they sold their beauty-parlor business in Schenectady and headed West. The only charge Brown is getting is from the tingles that the rustlers are giving him; as the movie sees it, they’re doing him a favor. RANCHO DELUXE is far from stupid, but it isn’t very likable. In its view, the world is divided between the Browns—clowns who get piggishly worked up about their distractions—and the bored, lost-generation heroes for whom the West is a carnival wasteland and rustling is a trip.

McGuane updates the star-novelist romanticism of earlier eras. Hemingway appeals to the little boy in readers, that little boy who feels he must be tough and win the fight and prove himself a man; Fitzgerald appeals to the adolescent in readers, that adolescent who believes in the ideal girl and moonlit romance. McGuane seems to see himself as the inheritor of both attitudes—with a difference. Jack and Cecil kill animals cleanly and perfectly but with a wanton casualness; they don’t feel more manly for it. And they’re mock-courtly with their girls, Betty Fargo (Patti d’Arbanville) and her sister Mary (Maggie Wellman), because they don’t feel connected to them. Jack and Cecil do what they do as a joke; that’s what makes them McGuane heroes. McGuane’s pose is romantic absurdism, and disconnectedness—maybe of necessity, since he’s miserably lost when he tries to establish ordinary human relations (as in a scene where Jack goes home and has dinner with his parents and his estranged wife). Jack and Cecil—stoned aristocrats—consider themselves “the last of the plainsmen,”’ and they have their own, existential noblesse oblige. RANCHO DELUXE is rooted in Nick Carraway’s naive, snobbish “A sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth,” but for McGuane hipness is included among the decencies. Fitzgerald, like his Gatsby, was defenselessly, blindly romantic. McGuane may be just as much of a victim, but his writing here is all jumpy defenses and elliptical throwaway jokes to smarten up the attractiveness of the doomed. (His Gatsby would have had a million frizzy retorts.)

The movie medium has a way of exposing snobbery right down to its puerile roots. One of the most offensive films I’ve ever seen—THE SPORTING CLUB, directed by Larry Peerce—was based on a small, trim McGuane novel. It dealt with a similar situation: a private deer park in northern Michigan where the grotesque affluent frolicked. When I saw it, the audience booed. RANCHO DELUXE isn’t as antipathetic as that was; it’s sputteringly enjoyable. But I gather that it has had a negative response in some theatres, and I can see why. It isn’t just because of Frank Perry’s lusterless direction and unvarying pace. It’s because when McGuane is stripped of the prose style of his novels, what’s left is self-conscious, self-protective cleverness. As in THE SPORTING CLUB, the hero is a rich boy contemptuous of his own class and playing tricks on it. McGuane uses American self-mockery to glamorize the young who dig the crazy incongruities and turn alienation into sport. Jack’s and Cecil’s sly asides are too kicky, too pleased. Sitting in the audience, we’re not as charmed as we’re meant to be. If the Big Sky area has been defiled by being turned into a backdrop for the macho posturings of nouveau-riche yokels, McGuane’s romanticized macho posturings aren’t much of a step up. The film is too dandyish to be satirical about the desecration of the West which the pickup-truck-and-gun-rack culture represents; McGuane and Perry are busy showing off their world-weary distaste for the vulgarity of the pink-shirted slobs, though it’s not the slobs who do the killing in this movie—it’s the heroes. Cecil shoots a grazing steer just to try out a gun, and we’re supposed to ire his grace, because he perceives the comedy in his own acte gratuit. We're supposed to believe that there’s no alternative between ing the pompous, paunchy middle class and trashing yourself mad. I think that at least some of the people in the audience reject this film because of its spoiled-schoolboy bravura. Like Gatsby, the greatest arrested adolescent in our literature, the heroes of RANCHO DELUXE have no possibility of growing up. Pranksters forever, they have no past and no future—just a stoned limbo. McGuane is saying that he finds the world boring, and that it’s the world’s fault.

If the picture had had a roller-coaster drive to it, it might have been a hit with young audiences, who could enjoy the parent-baiting. If it had had even a few big, combustible comic scenes, Perry might have got by with it, because McGuane sets up some funny situations—his situations are much wittier than his near-beer epigrams. But the deadpan distancing makes everything seem anti-climactic, and the stunt of leaving the audience off-balance—not knowing what’s going on in some of the vignettes until they’re almost over—backfires; the moviemakers appear to be staying ahead of us for their own amusement, and we feel left out. The whole movie happens too far away for us to react. It’s an undramatic, literary conception, with emblematic heroes, and Jeff Bridges, the most “natural” of young actors, couldn’t be more wrong for it. Except in the scene of Jack and Cecil bowing to their ladies, Bridges looks physically uncomfortable; he’s pudgy—his chin flows softly into his neck—and you can see him glumly struggling to find a face for a character that is no more than an attitude. As the author’s mouthpiece, Bridges has to demonstrate that some ways of keeping from being bored have more style than others, and this fakery isn’t in his range. He’s also trapped in a hateful scene: when the Fargo girls’ father breaks in on the four of them in bed and denounces the girls, Jack, the virile cavalier, forces the father to kneel and beg his daughters’ forgiveness. (McGuane and Perry ought to be the ones kneeling in penance—for tainting the picture with this ugly self-righteousness.) Sam Waterston, who gave such a fossilized, unresonant performance as Nick Carraway, is surprisingly appealing as the smily pothead Cecil. Waterston is generally detached and recessive when he shouldn’t be; here everything he is fits. He’s got the McGuane cool—Cecil seems to be the apple of his own eye—and this relaxed, flyblown performance gives the film a hum.

In an ideal world, Frank Perry would probably be a producer rather than a producer-director; he has the taste to go after real writers, but he doesn’t know how to shape the material they give him, or what to discard. This film has no emotional center; it wakes up when the minor characters are on the screen—particularly Slim Pickens as a detective specializing in livestock thefts, a tough old bird who pretends to be a folksy fool, and Harry Dean Stanton and Richard Bright as the Browns’ clumsily companionable ranch hands. They don’t have the theme-carrying burden that the heroes and the villains do; McGuane wrote woozily inventive scenes for them, and Perry’s directing is more conventional but also warmer and livelier in this material—he seems on more secure comic ground. Stanton, who is one of the best character actors in American movies right now, gives the film its high spots—a conversation with Bridges in which they test each other while playing a game on a TV Ping-Pong machine, and some spaced-out-on-love routines with a smooth floozy (Charlene Dallas, who signals the audience too energetically).

RANCHO DELUXE wouldn’t be worth talking about if McGuane weren’t so talented and so elegantly controlled, even here. The picture is an oddity, because he has turned in on himself, diddling his talent, and when you play games with yourself in a movie script it shows up on the screen on an enormous scale. The film is a genuine curiosity, which is the only genuine thing about it.

[December 8, 1975]

“Becoming an American”

The British studio workmen employed on Ken Russell’s LISZTOMANIA must have had some debonair conversations when they got home. A carpenter’s wife asks, ‘What did you do today?” and he explains, “Well, Mum, we built this phallus twelve feet long, so it would come out of this actor, Roger Daltrey, who’s playing Liszt. It had to be a cannon strong enough to five dancing girls, who get to kick and strut on it.” Or he describes building a giant-size model of the crotch and legs of Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein (Sara Kestelman), so that Liszt can disappear in her voracious vagina. These adolescent demonic high jinks are the two funniest sequences in LISZTOMANIA—they erupt with a wholehearted, controlled comic-strip craziness that the picture in general lacks. Russell was in better control in TOMMY, which was enjoyable at a dumb pop level; the pre-recorded score gave the picture drive, and the director found a showy crudeness that worked for him. Russell didn’t even begin to get at the Dionysian-Wagnerian possibilities of the rock-opera form that the three-image footage of the songs from TOMMY in WOODSTOCK had had, but he did have Tina Turner, and there was one great shot of her, from her vibrating ankles on up. Tina Turner is what Ken Russell has always needed in a performer: she starts at climax and keeps going. In TOMMY, her Acid Queen was like pure, concentrated acid sex—the high may have even got too high for some viewers, and scared them. In LISZTOMANIA, Russell tries to use Sara Kestelman for some of the same wild, ecstatic Cobra Woman effect, but she doesn’t have it in her. And he doesn’t have a rock-opera score—only a mash of rocked-up Liszt and Wagner themes, plus some new songs that are so forgettable you barely them.

Does Russell’s love-hate relationship with composers have any connection with his lack of a musical sense (his editing is chopsticks) and his tin ear for language? The dialogue he wrote for THE DEVILS was dumbfoundingly flat; in the middle of porno orgies, people talked like pedants. The dull schoolboy slang (with puns) of LISZTOMANIA sounds so remote and disembodied that you feel you’re looking at Captain Marvel while somebody translates the captions from Russian or German. For all his lashing himself into a slapstick fury, Russell can’t seem to pull the elements of filmmaking together, and it’s probably inconceivable that he’d let a writer become a full collaborator. Since he doesn’t use actors as creators, either (the last performance in a Russell movie was probably Dorothy Tutin’s in SAVAGE MESSIAH), we’re getting nothing but Russell’s own hangups, in the form of sacrilegious-mischief comics. Why is he making a movie about Liszt, whom he has contempt for, and Richard and Cosima Wagner (Paul Nicholas and Veronica Quilligan), whom he despises? Giggly hate of one’s betters is not promising motivation for an artist. LISZTOMANIA is more entertaining than BLACK MOON, but then Malle is out of his element. Russell is in his—so far in that who wants to follow him? He’s disappearing in a giant crotch, too.

[November 24, 1975]

“Becoming an American”

Sometimes you can tell from the very first shot that a movie is going wrong. Louis Malle’s BLACK MOON opens with a badger snuffling along a road; the image is ominous, as a speeding car approaches and you wait for the animal to be smashed. There isn’t anywhere for a movie to go after a deadpan zinger like this, and BLACK MOON is a collection of such wayward effects, set in a future war between men and women, which is also no more than a whammy. Louis Malle is a director in search of new stimulation; his projects are often so different from each other that, seeing a new Malle film, one can’t quite tell how he got to that. (It’s as if he were trying to astonish himself.) With BLACK MOON, he appears to be travelling with the sixties zeitgeist, trying to loosen up and become an American underground man. This is a post-apocalypse film, in which the few characters in the scarred landscape speak mainly by body language and gibberish—a Warholian view of the future that’s reminiscent of Jim McBride’s GLEN AND RANDA and Jodorowsky’s druggy EL TOPO.

But Malle is a sane man trying to make a crazy man’s film. He’s temperamentally unsuited to the disordered, meandering vision he’s aiming for, and his meticulously planned chaos has no visionary compulsion. You can feel that this is a cultivated, rational artist striving for perverse, enigmatic innocence. Talented directors often have bad ideas— Altman with BREWSTER MCCLOUD and IMAGES, Coppola with THE RAIN PEOPLE, Truffaut trying to be Hitchcock—but there’s generally an obsessive quality in the films, a sign of something the director is trying to work out. That isn’t the case with BLACK MOON. The surreal effects Malle uses don’t connect with anything in his imagination, so there’s no instinctive wit in them, no ambivalence, no friction. It’s deadly. Fifteen-year-old Cathryn Harrison plays Alice in this bombed-out Wonderland; as brother and sister, Joe Dallesandro and Alexandra Stewart have a handsome, blank twinship; the late Therese Giehse is a bedridden old woman who bawls out her whimpering, apologetic rat companion. This rat and a talking unicorn—a mangy, plump old Shetland pony wearing a horn—are the two liveliest characters. You get the feeling that the animals want to talk, which is more than you get from the people. A pussycat who plays the piano and two kids who sing Tristan and Isolde are happy surprises; the flowers who squeal when they’re stepped on are, however, of a whimsey that may haunt Malle. He’s carried eclecticism too far with this apocalyptic FRANCIS, THE TALKING UNICORN. Not everyone has it in him to be a fantasist, and when a civilized director like Malle tries, the results may, as in BLACK MOON, be colder, less inspired, less fantastic than in any other movie he’s ever made.

[November 24, 1975]

“Becoming an American”

Like Czech movies of the mid-sixties (LOVES OF A BLONDE, INTIMATE LIGHTING), the independently produced American film HESTER STREET is essentially an anecdote—a small, ironic story told without much attempt at depth of characterization. Adapted from a story by Abraham Cahan, the movie is about the assimilation process among a group of Russian Jewish immigrants living on the Lower East Side in 1896. When Jake (Steven Keats), who works at a sewing machine in a sweatshop, has been in New York for three years, his wan little wife, Gitl (Carol Kane), comes to him with their tiny, bird-faced son, who looks just like her—a silent, watchful child with a promising gleam. But Jake wears his saloon sport’s derby with his prayer shawl; he has fallen for Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh), a flashy dresser, who works at a dancing academy that is a social center for the greenhorn Jews trying to become more “‘American.”’ Jake doesn’t want anything to do with Gitl; a pious waif in drab clothes and an Orthodox wig, speaking only Yiddish, she reminds him of everything he’s trying to break away from. The film begins lamely; most of the performers—Steven Keats especially—have a terrible time with their accents, and he and Dorrie Kavanaugh are awkward in their shallow roles. It takes a little while for the picture to get under way and to win one over.

Carol Kane’s shy, tentative Gitl gives the film an unusually quiet center; perhaps she is too slow in her responses at first, a shade too expressionless, but she has a lovely pale-eyelashed bewilderment. And as Bernstein, the scholarly boarder who sleeps in Jake’s and Gitl’s kitchen, Mel Howard manages to make stillness rather sexy. The writer-director Joan Micklin Silver handles the anecdote form very well: she has an instinct for how long a scene should run, and though she filters folk-tale material through current attitudes too pointedly, the scenes are underdramatized in a likable way. The narrative simplicity is defenselessly appealing. Joan Silver may not have a very large talent (at least, in this first feature there’s no evidence of shattering vitality), but she is gifted. The black-and-white cinematography and the simple characterizations recall Hollywood’s early talkies in which the city bad girl lured the hero away from the ingenuous country girl, and bumptious Irish immigrants got into brawls at wakes. But HESTER STREET is without the melodramatic elements of those films; it’s less practiced, more pure.

The slightness of the film comes out of its condescension to Jake; he has been made to stand for vulgar American materialism, and he speaks such lines as “I don’t care for nobody. Pm an American fella.” The audience can laugh knowingly. Jake’s best scene—his animal high spirits at a picnic, playing ball with his son—suggests what is missing from his character elsewhere. It’s what the freedom to enjoy sports, to enjoy oneself physically, to play at anything, must have meant to a semi-literate Jewish peasant who grew up in a tradition that valued learning above all. A rawboned, long-jawed worker like Jake was escaping not only from persecution by the Russians but also from that oppressive messianic Jewish tradition, with its stress on worthwhile activities. Mamie, in her coarseness, would represent freedom and gaiety to him; Gitl, ive, superstitious, impressed to have Bernstein mumbling over his book at their table, would recall him to a world in which he would never be respected. The film—nostalgic for what the immigrants lost—never shows us that there are grounds for Jake’s wanting to be Americanized. Instead, he’s a fool, abandoning a jewel for a flashy pastework imitation of ‘‘class.”” Mamie is done up as if she were a woman of the world—practically a madam. A young shyster lawyer hired by Jake to offer Gitl a cash settlement if she’ll agree to a divorce is an amateurishly acted cartoon. The aggressive characters don’t have enough sensitivity—or juice—to come to life; the problem appears to be in the casting, in the director’s not knowing how to bring more out of the performers, and in her own feelings.

Joan Silver’s modest, restrained directing style is in tune with Gitl and Bernstein. The movie is on their side; that’s probably part of the secret of its commercial success. (Blue-collar people might react to this film very differently from the audiences who are seeing it now, because there is an element of class put-down in it.) Gitl’s peasant docility may seem pensive and sweet to us, and refined, but that’s because Joan Silver presents her as we might see her, not as Jake experiences her. Gitl’s slender body and her Pre-Raphaelite face are beautiful in modern counterculture , while Mamie’s buxom, hourglass-figure flirtatiousness went out a long time ago. And while Jake is a bullying, dumb jock, Mel Howard’s gentle, bearded Bernstein is the classic Jewish type that has come back into fashion in recent years—a Talmudic flower child. Gitl, who learns English practically in front of our eyes, has our good will, and her accented speech is soft and doesn’t sound coarse. Mel Howard, who speaks Yiddish with ease, is even more fortunate. Bernstein’s sarcasm and defeatism, which might have been considered reactionary a few decades ago—the mark of an embittered man who couldn’t adapt—sound hip now. Howard underplays quietly, with enough authority to get by with the lines that cue the audience to the derisive view of the immigrant experience that is expected of them. He curses Columbus and complains, “When you get on the boat, you should say, ‘Goodbye, O Lord. I’m going to America.’ ”

It is to the director’s credit that she manages to hold down Doris Roberts’ performance as the yente; Joan Silver allows herself such audience-pleasers as the yente’s lacing Gitl into a merry-widow corset with the words “If you want to be an American, you gotta hurt,” but at least she doesn’t linger—she gets the ironic laugh without squeezing for it. At the end, the go-getters are left to a graceless, yokels’ future; we see that Mamie has accumulated her capital by penny-pinching, and that life with her won’t be the good times Jake had expected. The timid Gitl, who has been betrayed and humiliated, comes out with everything—even with the better man, Bernstein. Has ever woman won so much by doing so little? Gitl even gets Mamie’s money, and without having to raise her voice.

As a commentary on the American experience—the materialist loses the real prizes, etc.—the film has the pedagogic folk humor and the appreciation of the “old ways”? which had me wriggling in discomfort at school whenever a story was presented as a fable. I feel measly-minded when Įm put in the position of identifying with Bernstein’s view—his traditionalist’s suspiciousness about the New World, which blends all too neatly with late-sixties counterculture cynicism. But within the limited that Joan Silver has set she’s brought the movie off—and, by the end, with a flourish. When Gitl slowly flowers, we don’t get the sense that she has been transformed; rather, we see that she was so uprooted, and was so hurt by Jake’s rejection of her, that she was almost paralyzed—her character is only now being revealed. And Bernstein’s rueful wisdom—the eyes on the ready for lamentation, the praying head that nods in recognition of thousands of years of folly—is a fragrant conceit.

[November 24, 1975]

“Walking into Your Childhood”

THE SUNSHINE BOYS is Neil Simon’s variation on his own THE ODD COUPLE; this time it’s the old couple—a vaudeville team, Lewis (George Burns) and Clark (Walter Matthau), who, eleven years back, broke up after fortythree years and haven’t spoken to each other since. Decrepit, semi-senile, Lewis and Clark are brought together again to appear on a big TV special. It’s a risky play to have attempted to put on the screen—a small play, no more than an extended sketch, a Broadway Jewish version of what John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson did in Home. Cracking jokes has become a reflex for these ancient clowns, and the play itself is written in the form of rapid-fire one-liners—snappers as routinized as the doctor-patient question-and-answer routine they did eleven thousand times on the stage. We know that they always fought in the past, we’re briefed on what they fought about, and we wait for the inevitable. They’re walking into their second childhood; if anything could make this situation funny, it would have to be supreme timing.

Richard Benjamin is the unlucky actor who wound up playing Matthau’s agent-nephew, who arranges the TV-show reunion. His role is really that of a matchmaker, and Neil Simon (who also did the adaptation) hasn’t provided even halfway plausible pretexts for his actions. Benjamin is obliged to run around in such hysterical devotion to his uncle that he gets chest pains from being upset, yet he must always take off when he’s most needed, so the doddering old men can have their flareups and mishaps. Matthau is supposed to be the aggressive, energetic member of the team—the one who wanted to go on when his partner was tired of the act. But there’s none of the old vaudevillian’s spring to his movement, no élan to his compulsive jokes, and his chinlessness and stooped-over walk are tedious. Matthau needs his swaggering height and the forelock on his face; he needs to be sneakily adroit, scruffy yet suave. Here he seems to depend almost entirely on that bullhorn voice, which keeps blasting us.

George Burns’s Lewis has the repose of a tortoise, his eyes gleaming and alert; he has a rhythmed formality in his conversation, as a trouper of his generation might. Burns creates the only character in the movie—or, at least, an impersonation of a character. He can’t quite bring it to life, because Simon provides no levels for Lewis—no vitals, no insides. We’re tipped that as soon as the partners start their act, Lewis will ram his forefinger into Clark’s chest and spit at him. But Burns’s Lewis seems so gentle and rational that we don’t know where this calculated aggression comes from; it almost seems as if he were acting out Clark’s paranoia. What was needed, I think, was for Lewis to turn into a different person as soon as he was rehearsing or onstage—for something wild to break out of him, some domineering, manic charge.

All along, we’re cued to recognize that underneath the fraternal hatred Lewis and Clark show for each other there’s fraternal love—and Clark comes right out with it: “One person, that’s what we were.” We imagine that when we see their act we’ll feel the love between them, and not a personal love so much as a fellowship of the theatre, a glorious, idiotic joy in performance. Because if their act doesn’t have the effortless snap of two people who transcend their crabbing and become a magical team onstage, what have we been watching them for? What is the meaning of the title The Sunshine Boys if the daily meannesses don’t turn into something happy onstage? Is it no more than a sour irony? When Lewis and Clark finally do their act at a dress rehearsal at the television studios, and it’s cloddishly unfunny, we feel confused, let down. What it says to us is that Neil Simon cannot believe that the show business of which he’s a kingly part has any possibility of transcendence. He thinks he’s being honest and authentic when he shows these famous vaudevillians to be klutzes. It’s a twist on the usual show-biz sentimentality: his Pagliaccios crack jokes to hide their misery and can’t even make people laugh.

The film collapses when the two men quarrel during the TV rehearsal and don’t even finish their act. After that, Simon, having failed to give the material the climactic lift it needed, uses every bit of shtick he can dredge up to keep the picture going: a heart attack for Matthau’s Clark, Lewis devotedly sending flowers and candy, the prospect of the two reunited in a home for old actors. It’s all sentimental friendship, as if their decades of quarrelling—and Lewis’s final round of poking and spitting, which causes Clark’s heart attack—had been nothing but the stubborn irascibility of two dear old codgers. Simon has refused to make them talented, as if that would be sentimentalizing show business, but he has no compunction about sentimentalizing their relationship. In his “light” comedies, Simon fills a stage with soreheads who get upset over little things, and he keeps the jokes coming. When he’s dissatisfied with that and wants to write a more serious play (like The Sunshine Boys), he makes the people despondent cranks—glum, out-of-work, moping wet blankets. And so the more serious his plays are, the worse they are. You can convert dissatisfaction, quarrelsomeness, and outright meanness into vaudeville but not into drama.

However, you can’t even convert them into vaudeville with Herbert Ross directing. There’s a comic tradition behind this gag material; we ought to be able to respond to THE SUNSHINE BOYS as if it were a berserk ballet, and Ross’s background as a choreographer should have helped. But the worst thing you can do with broad stage comedy is to play it close to the camera, belting the audience, and that’s what he does: he uses shouting in place of timing, and each line crashes on its own. A gag such as Matthau’s repeated struggle with the lock on his hotel-room door needs to become a number; merely repeated, it’s contemptible. As a director, Ross is an unintentional minimalist; he just doesn’t seem to have many ideas, and he’s negligent in handling the simplest movie setups. When Matthau yells and carries on at the Friars Club, no one in the background even looks up at him—Matthau’s histrionics might be taking place in a void. When he has his backstage heart-attack scene, Ross can’t summon up any reactions. Maybe what’s missing in Ross is a feeling for the craziness in vaudeville shtick; under his direction, it becomes loudmouthed New York abrasiveness.

I’m a very easy laugher, and I didn’t laugh once at THE SUNSHINE BOYS. The only part of the movie I enjoyed was the footage during the titles—clips of vaudeville headliners from early short subjects and HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929. The clips went by all too fast—dozens of old stars, and then, surprisingly, Arthur Freed. (There’s a little inside joke involved here: Freed and Nacio Herb Brown wrote the song “‘Singin’ in the Rain” for that 1929 revue, and in 1952, for the movie Singin’ in the Rain, they wrote “Make ’Em Laugh,” which is the theme song for the opening of this picture.) Why, with this opening, and with the talk all the way through of the greatness of Lewis and Clark and their place in theatrical histor, (the ten thousand dollars that ABC is offering them to do their old act for the special is probably the funniest joke in the movie), are they made so lousy? The meaning of the movie seems to be that show-business people aren't artists but, since they’re depressed and quarrelsome, they’re human, and should be loved. We’re asked to identify with their weaknesses, with their lack of talent. Do we really need to? George Burns’s presence in this movie invalidates Simon’s maudlin view. Burns is living proof of the transcendence that Simon can’t believe in.

[November 17, 1975]

“Walking into Your Childhood”

 Since the only thing about reviewing movies that makes me unhappy is that I can’t get to the opera often enough, Ingmar Bergman’s film version of THE MAGIC FLUTE is a blissful present. Filmed operas generally “open out” the action or else place us as if we were spectators at a performance, looking at the entire stage. Bergman has done neither—he has moved into the stage. He emphasizes the theatricality of the piece, using space as stage space, but with the camera coming in close. We get the pixillated feeling that we’re near enough to touch the person who is singing; we might be dreamers sailing invisibly among the guests at a cloud-borne party. Bergman has often delighted in including little plays (plummy satires of stage acting) within his movies, and even movies (silent slapstick comedies) within his movies. He’s used them not only to comment on his characters and themes but also for the joy of re-creating different performing styles. This time, the play inside the movie has become the movie, and he’s sustained his ironic juggling all the way through. He can use what he knows (and loves) about the theatre.

Although the film was actually made in a studio, it is set within the Drottningholm Court Theatre, and at the beginning we see details of the baroque décor. Bergman retains the sense of the magical theatrical machinery of Mozart’s time. When the three cherubim ascend in the basket of a balloon, the ropes don’t move smoothly, and all through the film he calls our attention to toy moons and suns, to trick entrances, to what’s going on backstage. We get the story of the performance as well as the story of the opera. The dragon who threatens Prince Tamino prances for applause; the three flirty temptresses who compete for Tamino also compete for the audience’s approval. For Bergman, who says that he usually doesn’t begin to write a part until he knows who’s going to play it, it must have been like a game to find the singers he did, who look the roles to perfection. He must have used everything he’s learned about how to get actors to trust him, because they act as if working in front of the camera were a natural thing. They don’t have the wild-eyed dislocation of so many singers—that crazed stare that seems to be their amazed response to the sounds coming out of them. Those cherubim are the most winning cast ; they’re three rosy-cheeked Pucks yet three child hams, and Bergman wants us to see the conscious pleasure they take in performing. They sing as if each note marked the happiest moment in their lives; you absolutely can’t not grin at them.

Unlike Don Giovanni or Cosi Fan Tutte, The Magic Flute, Mozart’s last opera, makes a special claim on one’s affections, because its libretto is high camp. It’s a peerlessly silly masterpiece: sublimely lucid music arising out of a parodistic fairy tale that celebrates in all seriousness the exalted brotherhood of the Freemasons. In most of the first act, the story seems to be a conventional romantic quest—a fairy Queen of the Night sends Prince Tamino to rescue her daughter, Pamina, from the evil sorcerer, Sarastro, who is holding her by force. But by the time the second act was written, Mozart and Schikaneder, his librettist, had shifted directions, and now Sarastro is the lord of enlightenment, High Priest of the Temple of Wisdom, and he’s protecting Pamina from her demonic mother. This confusion arising from the belated decision to convert a fairy tale into a story about the mystic brotherhood (Mozart was a Mason) seems to add to rather than take away from the opera; the confusion serves as an ironic comment on the tangled stories of most librettos. In Bergman’s version, Sarastro is Pamina’s father—which does give the conflict between him and the Queen more substance, and even a bit of logic.

One could, if one wished, see all Bergman’s themes in this opera, because it is a dream play, with many of the same motifs as SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT, THE SEVENTH SEAL, WILD STRAWBERRIES, and CRIES AND WHISPERS. In WILD STRAWBERRIES, the doctor, Isak Borg (I.B., like Ingmar Bergman), walked into his childhood, and that’s what Bergman is doing here. But he isn’t doing it realistically this time. In THE MAGIC FLUTE, the need for love, the suicidal despair of loneliness, ambivalent feelings about one’s parents, the fear of death are already ritualized, so Bergman can play with them, in mythological fantasy form. THE MAGIC FLUTE takes place in a philosophical bubble in which you recognize your love—your other half—at once, because the names are in pairs. It’s heavenly simplicity, in parody: Tamino is sent to rescue Pamina, and he’s accompanied by the bird-catcher Papageno, who finds his Papagena. We know that we should identify with Prince Tamino—he’s the pure-at-heart hero of legend, and Bergman has found a tenor (Josef Köstlinger) who looks like the handsome knights in the storybooks of one’s childhood—but in THE MAGIC FLUTE nothing works quite the way it’s meant to, and it comes out better. Tamino goes through the trials and performs all the proper deeds, but he’s a storybook stiff compared to Papageno, who flubs his tests. There’s a lesson implicit in Tamino’s steadfastness: he accepts his responsibilities and earns his manhood. But Papageno doesn’t want responsibility—he just wants pleasure. He’ll never be a “‘“man’’—he’s an impetuous kid, a gamin, a folk hero. I think the reason Papageno isn’t tiresome, like other buffoonish-everyman squires (and I include Sancho Panza), must be that he hasn’t been burdened with practical, “earthy”? wisdom; he’s too goosy for that. He has his own purity—he’s pure, impulsive id. Although Papageno isn’t initiated into the priestly brotherhood with Tamino, and so will presumably never experience the divine wisdom of the consecrated, he is forgiven for his flimsy virtue. Papageno doesn’t earn his prize, but he gets it anyway: his Papagena is easy as pie, a pushover, as carnally eager as he.

The brotherhood is clearly strictly male; like Papageno, women are considered too talkative. But Bergman tries to integrate the order by including women, from nowhere, among the men at the final ceremonial, when Sarastro retires as the leader, putting his spiritual kingdom in the hands of Tamino and Pamina. Bergman’s gesture is understandable but a bit specious. The opera is based on strict polarities, turning on malefemale. The Queen of the Night (Birgit Nordin) is a glittering coloratura harpy, served by witches-in-training, while Sarastro, the deep, friendly bass (Ulrik Cold, whose face belies his name), and his priests stand for sunlight, justice, and reason. Not surprisingly, the Queen and her vamps are a delight, while Bergman has to use all his ingenuity to keep the solemn priests from grinding the show to a halt. This is where his cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, turns wizard; since a film of The Magic Flute wasn’t expected to create pandemonium at box offices around the world, it had to be shot in 16-mm., yet Nykvist got such extraordinary quality that even in the 35-mm. blowup for theatres there’s a tactile dimension to the contrasting forces. This saves the dignified temple scenes, which are dull stretches in most live performances. Sarastro’s dark-eyed, sympathetic face looks as if it would be warm to the touch, and Bergman’s emblematic composition of two overlapping faces—used here for father and daughter—adds psychological shading to Sarastro’s stepping down from his office. Though Sarastro defeats the nightmare-canary Queen (whose high trilling is a wickedly funny vocal metaphor for neurosis), the ending represents a new harmony of male and female, with t rule by Tamino and Pamina. The melodic line of this opera, with its arias of men and women yearning for each other, is one of the rare perfect expressions of man-woman love.

THE MAGIC FLUTE is a fairy tale that is also a parody of fairy tales; the libretto says that when you have your counterpart you'll never be lonely again. The working out of the story is so playful that you never forget you’re in an enchanted landscape, yet the music—airily poignant— expresses the ionate desire for all this seraphic happiness to be true. The music is the distillation of our giddy longing for ideal romantic consummation; when we listen, we believe that there are partners ordained for us. THE MAGIC FLUTE is a love poem that teases love; the women’s costumes, cut low, show off the plushiest soft bosoms—it’s all a teasing dream. The emotional quality of the music—delirium expressed in perfectly controlled, harmonious phrasing—may perhaps be compared to the flights of language in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, but this music byes the mind altogether and goes right to the melancholy, rhapsodic core. THE MAGIC FLUTE is about love as the conquest of death—and about love of the theatre as the conquest of death.

Eric Ericson conducts the Swedish State Broadcasting Network Symphony; the voices may not have the depth of feeling—that special rounded sweetness—that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, as Papageno, and Fritz Wunderlich, as Tamino, bring to the Deutsche Grammophon recording, with Karl Böhm conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, but they’re wonderful enough, and Håkan Hagegård, who has a bright-eyed, crooked-toothed smile, is just what one wants Papageno to look like and to act like. Bergman was able to spare us the usual views of tongues and tonsils by having Ericson record the score first (in Swedish, which sounds remarkably pleasing), then playing it bit by bit while photographing the singers, who move their mouths in a more genteel manner than is feasible in actual performance. The synchronization is as close to impeccable as seems humanly possible.

THE MAGIC FLUTE uses to the fullest that side of Bergman which I missed in SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (and I saw the complete, six-episode TV version). The telegraphic naturalism of that film seemed condescending, as if it represented Bergman’s vision of how ordinary, uncreative people live; I responded most to the few minutes when Bibi Andersson was onscreen, because she appears to be closer in spirit to Bergman—she expresses the tensions of intelligence. Bergman seems more complexly involved in THE MAGIC FLUTE, with only one exception: in the framing device, when he goes outside ironic theatricality to documentary-style shots of the “audience.” During the overture and at the break between the acts, and a few times during the opera itself, he gives us family-of-man portraits of this audience, with special emphasis on a celestial-eyed little girl. The faces tell us that people of all ages, colors, and creeds enjoy Mozart; it’s fiercely banal, like his sticking those modern youths in WILD STRAWBERRIES so we’d have something to identify with. This production, which is apparently the consummation of a dream Bergman has had for more than two decades, was financed to commemorate fifty years of Swedish broadcasting, and was presented on both Swedish and Danish television last New Year’s Day. His cutting to the reactions of that princessy little girl, whom one wants to strangle, suggests that the production is designed to introduce opera to children. Some years back, I found The Magic Flute a wonderful first opera to take a child to, but for Bergman to institutionalize this approach— treating The Magic Flute as if it were Peter and the Wolf—devalues the opera and what he has done with it. He’s undersold himself, for, apart from this visual platitudinizing, the picture is a model of how opera can be filmed. The English translation of Bergman’s adaptation (he clarifies the text) is graceful, and the titles are unusually well placed on the frame. Having the titles there in front of you, you follow the libretto without losing anything; the story comes across even more directly than when you hear the opera sung in English. Bergman must have reached a new, serene assurance to have tackled this sensuous, luxuriant opera that has bewildered so many stage directors, and to have brought it off so unaffectedly. It’s a wholly unfussy production, with the bloom still on it. He recently said, ‘Making the film was the best time of my life. You can’t imagine what it is like to have Mozart’s music in the studio every day.” Actually, watching the movie, we can.

[November 17, 1975]

“A Dream of a Woman”

That color imagery of Satyajit Ray’s DISTANT THUNDER is so expressive that I regretted the need to look down to the subtitles; it took precious time away from the faces and bodies, with their hint of something ive, self-absorbed—a narcissism of the flesh. The setting is a torpid Bengali village in the early 1940s. Gangacharan (Soumitra Chatterji), a newly arrived Brahmin, is the only educated man for miles around; he’s the schoolteacher, the priest, the doctor. The ignorant villagers treat him with reverence. “You are the jewel in our crown,” they tell him, and he agrees. His condescension is all of a piece with his umbrella, his mustache and specs, and his preoccupied manner. He strokes himself in the moist, wilting heat; he sucks on a water pipe, inhaling wherever he goes—Gangacharan wants every kind of gratification he can get.

Soumitra Chatterji, Ray’s one-man stock company, moves so differently in the different roles he plays that he’s almost unrecognizable. He was the ionately romantic Apu in the last film of the trilogy, the husband in DEVI, the suitor in tartan socks and English boots in TWO DAUGHTERS, the guest in CHARULATA, the handsome, arrogant leader of the four young men in DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST. At first, his Gangacharan is almost physically dislikable—thin yet flabby, contemptuously pedantic; in the course of the film, as the feudal system that sustains this contempt is eroded, his body seems to change. The Second World War, which is so remote from the villagers that they don’t know who is fighting, destroys the traditions that bind the community. The area is idyllically lush, but it isn’t self-sufficient. When faraway supply ports for grain fall to the Japanese, and large shipments of food are needed for the Army, the price of rice soars. Speculators send it higher, and starvation and cholera will shortly follow. Famine approaches with the force of a natural disaster; the villagers are helpless.

During the early stages, the light is so soft, and the lily pads, the flying insects, the bathing women are so tranquil, that even when the women are hungry and picking snails out of the mud or digging for wild potatoes, the images are still harmonious. The film is delicately, ambiguously beautiful; the shadowing comes from our knowledge—and Gangacharan’s knowledge—that the people we’re looking at are endangered. It is a lyric chronicle of a way of life just before its extinction, and Ray gives the action the distilled, meditative expressiveness that he alone of all directors seems able to give. We’re looking at something that we feel is already gone, and so the images throb. Or is it that we do? It comes to the same thing.

Whether intentionally or not, Ray has put something of himself into Gangacharan—of his own sense of guilt, of weakness, and of commitment. And something even more personal—his seeing the beauty in the Indian past almost completely in the women. The men in this village are ignorant and obsequious, and physically very unprepossessing; the rich ones hoard and profiteer, the poor panic, become violent, riot. But the women are conceived of as in a dream of the past—they might be iridescent figures on a vase. These women are uneducated and superstitious, they know nothing of the world outside; yet they’re tender and infinitely graceful. Moving in their thin, clinging saris, they create sensuous waves of color in the steamy air. Gangacharan’s bride, Ananga, is innocently childlike, undulant, luscious, with a pouty ripe-pink underlip; the brilliant orange-red spot in the middle of her forehead is like a cosmic beauty mark. Played by the actress Babita (that should mean Baby Doll), Ananga is the Indian version of a Hollywood darling. She seems to have been created for the pleasure of men; she has been bred to think of nothing but her husband, and she finds her pride and her fulfillment in pleasing him. She wants to be a tempting morsel so that her husband can take a juicy bite.

Ananga is just the ornament to his existence that this preening Brahmin would have found; everything in the society appears to be designed to assuage his ego. Yet he’s intelligent, and he’s not a bad fellow—merely infantile. When he realizes that he can’t fulfill his end of the bargain, and his wife must do demeaning work to get food for them, the whole basis of their relationship changes. Gangacharan begins to care about someone besides himself. He loves her now not because she takes care of him but because of how she feels about taking care of him. There are other actresses in the film with a fine-grained quality that goes beyond Babita’s almost pornographic charm—the one who plays Moti, the Untouchable, and another who plays a woman who gives Gangacharan food to take home to his wife. They, too, are gentle and undemanding— ideal traditional women.

Ray is one of the most conscious artists who ever lived, and in this film he means to show us the subservient status of women; the children Gangacharan teaches (by rote, drumming information into them) are, of course, all boys. The women remain illiterate, and locked into the vestiges of the caste system—Ananga and Moti are friends, but if they touch each other Ananga bathes. However, I wonder if Ray realizes the degree to which he shows a deep-seated distrust of Indian men and an equally deep trust in the selflessness of women. (Even Ananga’s friend Chhutki, who trades her favors for food—giving herself to a hideously scarred kiln worker—wants to share the rice she gets.) Ray is not a vulgar chauvinist, exalting subservient women; quite the contrary. While the men in his films are weak and easily flattered—dupes, self-deceived by vanity and ambition—the women have conflicts that are larger, more dignified, involving a need for love, for independence, for self-expression. They are morally stronger than the men. This may, in part, reflect a belief that the women, having always been in a subservient position, were not corrupted by English rule in the way that the men were.

Still, in DISTANT THUNDER, in a village far removed from that emasculating Anglicization, Ray perceives the women with such love that they become figures in a vision, and since he sees the men without that etherealizing intensity, there’s an imbalance—poetry and prose. In the Apu trilogy, the hero was the embodiment of poetry, but here it is only at the end, when Gangacharan accepts a group of famine victims as his family, that he becomes as comionate (and as fully human) as the women were all along. For Ray, the source of their strength is humility. And although one wouldn’t propose any other course of action for Gangacharan, the way Ray sees him—made whole by his ive, chivalrous acceptance of what’s coming—suggests a rather attenuated attempt at universalizing his situation. Satyajit Ray has rarely before dabbled in having his characters do what he so obviously believes is symbolically right; you expect a faint white light to begin whirring around Gangacharan’s head. And when, with famine victims approaching their home, Ananga, with a shy, flirtatious smile of pride, speaks of the child she is Carrying, this, too, seems to be symbolic of endurance in the midst of extreme adversity.

The music, which Ray composed, is also used portentously, signalling “distant thunder.” And Ray has developed an alarming affection for melodramatic angles and zoom-fast closeups; when there’s a violent action—the scarred man’s overtures to Chhutki, or a rapist’s assault on Ananga—he wants us to feel the dislocation. But it’s intrusive, pushy; his style can’t accommodate this visual abrasion. When a movie director suddenly loses his tact, he can shock viewers right out of the movie: cameras are cruel to the disfigured, and when Ray forces us to look close at the enlarged burned face of the kiln worker, we don’t understand why. He’s introduced like a Quasimodo, and though the more we see him, the easier it 1s to look at him, his becoming more sympathetic—so that we notice how attractive the good side of his face is—is too pedagogic, too symbolic. The rapist appears even more abruptly; we don’t see his face—all we know about him is that he smokes cigarettes, like a Westerner. He remains a plot device, an illustration of the horrors these women experience, and hide, guiltily. Ray’s use of emphatic techniques to heighten the impact of his material actually lowers it. When Ananga first mistakes planes flying overhead for insects, that’s naive and halfway acceptable, but when, later, the noise of the planes drowns out her screams as she’s being raped, that’s ladling it on. The ironies are too charged, as in the situations that American television writers come up with; this cleverness is the dramatist’s form of yellow journalism. In Ray’s work, what remains inarticulate is what we ; what is articulated seems reduced, ordinary.

DISTANT THUNDER is not one of his greatest films, yet it’s still a Satyajit Ray film, and in how many directors’ films does one anticipate greatness? With Ray, you puzzle if a picture is a little less than a masterpiece. If this one lacks the undertones of a DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST, it’s probably because he’s trying to do something that sounds straightforward but isn’t quite clearly thought out. Ray wants to show us how war changes people (Bergman brought it off in SHAME), but he also wants to make an indictment. And somehow he fails on both counts. Probably he fails on the first because he doesn’t endow the villagers with enough complexity. And maybe he didn’t think of them in complex enough because he had that second, social purpose in mind. When Gangacharan learns political lessons—when he discovers that what’s wrong is that “the peasants do all the work and we live off them’—it’s just plain fake. Gangacharan’s sponging off the peasants—in the sense that he served them with bad grace, contemptuously, demanding a little more than was fair—is hardly a factor in the starvation. When we get the closing title, telling us that five million Bengalis died in the man-made famine of 1943, Ray uses the term “man-made” because it implies that the famine was a crime. But it looks more like a horrible pileup of accidents, plus some criminal greed, and thousands of years of no planning. His statement seems forced; his whole structure is forced, and yet the film is astonishingly beautiful. The character of Gangacharan—a mixture of slothful peacefulness and a sense of dissatisfaction which he takes out on the peasants and an inquisitive, modern mind—is a fine creation, except for terminal loftiness. And there’s also a character Ray can’t quite get a grip on: a beggar Brahmin with a gap-toothed rabbity smile that Gangacharan calls sly. It’s that, and worse. Throughout the movie, whenever he appears, he seems to suck life away. He creates the most disturbing images, maybe because Ray sees him as both the life force and as dirty Death itself. At the end, it’s he who arrives with his tribe of dependents—eight in all—to Gangacharan’s household. With his rags hanging on him and his staff in his hand, he’s all four horsemen rolled into one. In the final image, the silhouetted figures of this old man leading his family are extended into a procession of the starving advancing on us. It’s a poster design, and yet we’re also prey to unresolved feelings about that sly beggar. The film is more puzzling than it seems at first; Ray is such an imagist that even his poster art slips into ambiguities.

I don’t know when I’ve been so moved by a picture that I knew was riddled with flaws. It must be that Ray’s vision comes out of so much hurt and guilt and love that the feeling pours over all the cracks in DISTANT THUNDER and seals them up.

[November 10, 1975]

LET’S DO IT AGAIN is like a black child’s version of THE STING—an innocent, cheerful farce about an Atlanta milkman (Sidney Poitier) and a factory worker (Bill Cosby) who go to New Orleans and pull off a great scam. They outwit the black mobsters (John Amos, Julius Harris, and Calvin Lockhart) and win enough money for their lodge back home, The Sons and Daughters of Shaka, to put up a new meeting hall. Nobody is hurt, and everybody who deserves a comeuppance gets it. Their con involves hypnotizing a spindly prizefighter, played by Jimmie Walker, of TV’s “Good Times,” in his first screen role. The elder of their lodge (it’s their church, too—as if it were the Benevolent and Protective Order of Muslim Elks) is played by Ossie Davis; and the cast also includes such well-known black performers as Mel Stewart, playing the fighter’s manager, Denise Nicholas and Lee Chamberlin, as the heroes’ wives, and George Foreman. The film was scored by Curtis Mayfield, and the rather patchy script was written by a black scenarist, Richard Wesley.

It’s apparent why Sidney Poitier set this project in motion and directed it: he’s making films for black audiences that aren’t exploitation films. LET’S DO IT AGAIN is a warm, throwaway slapstick, and the two leads are conceived as black versions of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in the Road series. Poitier is trying to make it possible for ordinary, lower-middle-class black people to see themselves on the screen and have a good time. The only thing that makes the film remarkable is that Poitier—who has been such a confident actor in the dozens of roles he has played under other people’s direction since his first film, in 1949—gives an embarrassed, inhibited performance. As casual, lighthearted straight man to Bill Cosby, he is trying to be something alien to his nature. He has too much pride and too much reserve for low comedy.

Clearly Poitier is doing something that he profoundly believes in, and there can’t be any doubt that he is giving the black audience entertainment that it wants and has never had before. Probably there was no one else who was in a position to accomplish this. One cannot simply say that he is wrong to do it. Many groups have been demanding fantasies in their own image, and if this often seems a demand for a debased pop culture, still it comes out of a sense of deprivation. But for an actor of Sidney Poitier’s intensity and grace to provide this kind of entertainment is the sacrifice of a major screen artist. In a larger sense, he’s doing what the milkman is doing in the movie: swindling like a Robin Hood, for the good of his lodge, his church. But it’s himself Poitier is robbing. For Bill Cosby, snug in a beard, there’s no sacrifice. Cosby doesn’t feel that the-hipster he’s playing is a degrading stereotype, and so the way he plays it it isn’t. He has to be a family-picture hipster, but Cosby is spaced out on his own innocent amiability anyway. He’s so little-boy antsy that when he stands still he can’t resist mugging; it’s all right, though, because he’s floating along. The format here is too repressive for him to fly, but Poitier lets him run away with the show; maybe he’s allowed to be a little too disarming, too droll—which is always a danger for Cosby. As a director, Poitier is overly generous with the actors: he isn’t skilled enough to shape sequences so that the actors can benefit from their closeups (nobody could benefit from all those tacky reaction shots). Jimmie Walker is used unimaginatively, but he’s well cast—you can’t help wanting him to win his fights, and he has a Muhammad Ali routine in his dressing room, shouting “I am the champ,” that is very funny. Ossie Davis has one lush moment: at the feast celebrating the opening of the new meeting hall, he eats his chicken with ceremonial pleasure, and in his great rumbling basso announces, “I tell you, I knew this bird from another life.”

It’s not a disgraceful movie—I liked the people on the screen better than I liked the people in THE STING—but what I can’t get out of my head is the image of Sidney Poitier doing primitive-fear double takes, like Willie Best in the old days, only more woodenly. For the fact is that black audiences roar in delight at the very same stereotypes that have been denounced in recent years. It’s true that the context is different in these movies, but the frozen, saucer-eyed expressions when Poitier and Cosby are caught doing something naughty or something they can’t explain go right back to little Farina in the OUR GANG comedies. LET’S DO IT AGAIN isn’t the first of Poitier’s two-black-buddies features: he also directed and appeared in BUCK AND THE PREACHER and UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT. It amounts to a doggedly persistent skewering of his own talent. What a strange phenomenon it is that the actor who rose through sheer skill and became as elegant as a black Cary Grant should now, out of his deepest conviction, be playing a milkman, bug-eyed with comic terror, hanging outside a window by a sheet. And looking sick with humiliation. If Ralph Ellison were to found a new, black-oriented Saturday Evening Post and write innocuous stories for it, he might find that he had less talent for light fiction than dozens of writers who couldn’t write anything else. Poitier is fighting what he’s doing with every muscle of his body; he’s fighting his own actor’s instinct, which is telling him that this cartoon role is all wrong for him.

Poitier has always had drama going on under the surface of his roles—you could sense the pressures, the intelligence, and the tension of self-control in his characters; that’s part of why he became the idealized representative of black people. Now he’s trying to make himself an ordinary black man, in comic fantasies for black audiences. But in low comedy you have to abandon yourself and be totally what you are; you can’t have a sense of responsibility under the character—or banked fires, either—and be funny. And so this vivid, beautiful actor casts himself as the square, because he knows that in slapstick he comes across unhip. He can’t even hold the screen: he loses the dynamism that made him a star. Sidney Poitier, who was able to bring new, angry dignity to black screen acting because of the angry dignity inside him, is violating his very essence as a gift to his people.

[November 3, 1975]

“Horseplay”

If there was any reason for Barry England’s play Conduct Unbecoming to be filmed, I couldn’t discover it in Michael Anderson’s movie. The play was a hit in London and had a moderate run on Broadway, in 1970, probably because it has the contrived tautness of a sealed-in courtroom situation, with big themes lurking around; every now and then a line of dialogue pushes a button marked military hypocrisy, or corruption of colonialism, or subterranean sex perversion. The setting is a cavalry outpost in India, in 1878. At the opening, there are troops parading, but that’s just for production values; we’re really at a play, and the story starts when two characters enter, let us know who they are, and then wait for the next characters to come in the doors. Millington (James Faulkner), a newly arrived junior officer—a dark, long-lashed wastrel who looks a little like Jean Simmons—is bored and wants to be sent home. He makes advances to Mrs. Scarlett (Susannah York), the promiscuous widow of a regimental hero, thinking that that will get him a discharge, but when she is sexually brutalized she says that he did it, and he’s in serious trouble. His trial is held in secret so the scandal won’t leak out and damage the honor of the regiment. Drake (Michael York), also a new arrival but an exemplary soldier, who has grown up idolizing this regiment, is ordered to defend him and told to make no more than a perfunctory defense. Trevor Howard, Christopher Plummer, Stacy Keach, Richard Attenborough, James Donald, and Michael Culver are in the cast, and this may suggest that the film is impressive, but actually it’s a convenience to have all these famous people playing the officers, because you couldn’t tell the characters apart if you didn’t recognize the actors. Enunciating their stage dialogue in professional, letter-perfect fashion, they keep the film at a tolerable level, but there’s not a new performance from any of them. Anderson’s staging is barely functional, and the actors keep stoking the plot. It turns out that the assault was uglier than we had at first supposed. The officers have a sport—pigsticking a stuffed pig on wheels—and it seems that Mrs. Scarlett, and another regimental widow, have been jabbed with a saber as if they were the pig. We wait to find out who the assailant really was, and why Mrs. Scarlett is protecting him by accusing Millington.

Eventually, Millington is cleared, and he undergoes a character change (as people used to do in well-made plays). He’s transformed from a ne’er-do-well cynic to an officer proud to be accepted by the other men, while Drake, his courageous defender (and the central character), loses his innocence about regimental honor and, clearheaded, resigns his commission. Is anybody really interested in this kind of neat dramaturgy? In CONDUCT UNBECOMING, the neatness is fake anyway. We’ve never had a clue as to why Millington took such a cynically bored view to start with, and what exactly has soured Drake, since justice did win out? Because nothing basic about the military is actually revealed in the trial, his resignation seems no more than a wounded idealist’s pique. And when Stacy Keach, as the captain in charge of the trial, shifts from heavy villainy of the no-neck, powerful-malignity variety to confused good intentions, it’s as if Keach had flipped a page in the script and suddenly discovered he’d got the character all wrong. The big letdown of the film is that when, after much hocus-pocus and hushed talk and dimming of lamps, we find out who the pervert really is, we can’t see why the women didn’t name him to start with, or why he gave the trial testimony that he did. The only thing that held us was the promise of a logical solution, and we’ve been betrayed.

So what is the point? Is the attack on Mrs. Scarlett an illuminating metaphor for the rot of imperialism, or is it just a kKinked-up gimmick for a courtroom-chat drama? Susannah York gives one of her lewd-mouthed, flirty performances; the invitation “You can get dirty with me” is spelled out in her lipwetting smiles. During the court-martial she pushes a women’s-lib button, crying out that all the men in the regiment treat women like pigs, but this doesn’t relate to anything that we can observe. The final explanation of why the psychopath has attacked her is so farfetched Gothic (involving schizophrenia and “‘possession” by a dead man) that it can hardly be politicized. CONDUCT UNBECOMING doesn’t begin to know what it’s about.

[November 3, 1975]

“Horseplay”

ROOSTER COGBURN, a Western shoot-’em-up produced by Hal Wallis and starring John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn, was filmed in the spectacular scenery of Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest and Rogue River area, but it looks as if it had been shot by a tourist with a Brownie. The color, from Universal’s back-lot Technicolor lab, is reminiscent of Cinecolor at its most vagrant; the shots don’t match, and the long-distance ones are out of focus. This cheesiness might not be so noticeable if the combination of Wayne and Hepburn set up some cross fire, but when they spar it’s mortifyingly blunt vaudeville, and their inevitable mutual iration comes all too coyly soon. He acts the grumpy old dear, and she gives an overeager performance—all arch, anxious charm, and with the resolute, chin-tucked-in, tomboy perkiness made famous by the young Katharine Hepburn and the even younger Shirley Temple. (Her head is wrapped in scarves, as if she had the mumps.) The director, Stuart Millar, can’t seem to find a discreet enough distance for the camera: you can tell when Wayne has shifted hairpieces, and for a while he wears one that gives him the inch-and-a-half forehead of a teen-age werewolf.

Wayne wallows in his role, grinning and slopping his big jowls around, and so the character of one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, carried over from TRUE GRIT, loses the bit of tall-tale fantasy it had: the suggestion that Rooster, the United States marshal feared by ben, was a relic of a mythic era. There was a moment in TRUE GRIT when the old fighter galloped into battle, twirling his rifle; the rays of the sun flashed off the spinning metal, and he was a comic deity. There’s no myth in ROOSTER COGBURN; it’s just a belch from the Nixon era. Rooster is stripped of his badge for being too quick on the trigger (he’s killed sixty-four suspects), and the whole picture is a vindication of his methods. He talks like a frontier Spiro Agnew, describing his court-appointed deputies as “them lily-livered lawbookers”; they don’t show up to help when he is sent on a special mission to bring in the mean varmint Hawk (Richard Jordan), the leader of a gang of robbers who sell liquor to Indians and then murder them. Hawk kills a saintly reverend who has his mission in the Indian settlement; Hepburn, her role lifted bodily from the 1952 THE AFRICAN QUEEN, is Eula, the missionary’s daughter, who has been teaching the Indian children. (In THE AFRICAN QUEEN, when she was forty-four, Hepburn played the missionary’s sister; the troupe of screenwriters here—including Hal Wallis and his wife, Martha Hyer—who are lumped together under the face-saving pseudonym Martin Julien, seem determined to make her ridiculous.) After Eula’s father is murdered, Rooster comes along and takes her with him, and the script forgets all about the orphaned schoolchildren she has shooed off into the tall grass to escape the robbers’ gunfire; they may still be there. She and Rooster and a drearily virtuous adolescent Indian boy set off to track down the ben. Eventually, Wayne and Hepburn get to a perilous river and ride the rapids on their own African Queen—a log raft loaded high with cases of nitroglycerin—while being shot at. Wayne makes goo-goo eyes at her, as the script requires, but you can see what he’s really in love with: it’s the Gatling gun he’s got on the raft. He blasts away with it exultantly—this is lusty man’s work. His bluster seems to have got to Richard Jordan, who plays Hawk as a greedy-for-gold mad dog. Popping his eyes, Jordan delivers such beauts as ‘‘Nothin’s gonna keep me away from that gold! Nothin’, ya hear me? Nothin’!”’ It’s an atrocious exhibition from a generally intelligent actor. There are two performers who manage to shine even in this muck. As Breed, an outlaw with a streak of affection for Rooster, Anthony Zerbe is almost as hammy as Jordan at first, but then he pulls in a bit and shows some class. He gives his character a reflective, rueful element that keeps it from getting sticky. But in acting the only real hero of the piece is Strother Martin; he’s onscreen for just a minute or two, but as the crusty, anti-social old geezer whose raft Rooster commandeers he gives the picture its one burst of vitality. (I began to speculate about what the movie might be like if this old coot were the man Eula was trying to charm. Those girlish wiles wouldn’t win him over; Hepburn would have to act to hold her own with Strother Martin.) At the end, Rooster and Eula—the lovebirds—make their farewells, giving us to understand that they will soon resume their courting, though these two are hardly at a time of life to postpone romance.

The two principal subjects of the script’s attempts at humor are Wayne’s gut and Hepburn’s age, which is to say that the film tries to make jokes of what it can’t hide. This insult badinage would sit a whole lot better if the film weren’t at the same time trying to cover for the debilities of the stars. Wayne is supposed to be the match for any gang of outlaws, but when he lurches toward his horse the scene cuts away just as he should be swinging up into the saddle. Hepburn is playing a steely-eyed crack markswoman, but she looks lost—frightened—and she hops about weightlessly, twittering. As it is difficult for her to remain still, or to be seen listening, Wayne is given stale jokes chiding women’s talkativeness. We know what John Wayne is doing here; this role is just a further step in the career of a movie star who was never an actor. Once upon a time, he had a great, rugged, photogenic body, and his transparency as an actor—his inability to convey any but the simplest emotions—gave him a frank, American-hero manner. We got used to his gruffness and his sameness; since he’s always got by on “naturalness,” recently he’s been trying to turn his bulk to , using his huge, puffy face as a Wallace Beery comic mug, and going for softhearted slob effects. There’s probably nothing left for him to do but this horseplay. What, however, is Katharine Hepburn doing in this movie—in essentially the same relationship to Rooster Cogburn as the little girl in TRUE GRIT? Hepburn’s ravaged beauty doesn’t connect with John Wayne’s broad-beamed affability. She was once a defiantly odd actress—curt one moment, exposed the next—and not always popular; now she plays up her oddness. When she goes all breathless with determination to speak her piece and then tells Wayne he’s “a credit to the whole male sex,” she’s drawing upon her reserves of good will, asking us to ire Katharine Hepburn no matter what she’s doing.

One wants to believe that in the right roles this great actress could still surprise us—Gladys Cooper found parts that were appropriate. But it’s possible that Hepburn is so mannered by now that there’s nothing she can play but her younger self. Because of how she looks in ROOSTER COGBURN— shiveringly thin, with that face, which was always tight-skinned over the fine bones, now gone beyond gauntness into some form of gallantry—her performance suggests a bewildered self-parody.

Are people going to accept this movie as a happy low comedy? I suppose some will. There are films that get by because they give people a secure feeling, and people can take in ROOSTER COGBURN the way they take in TV movies—inattentively, satisfied that everything’s going according to plan. What they’re seeing on the screen is the saga of two rich, world-famous people who are still competing in a popularity contest. If you don’t mind seeing indomitable old stars go through their most infantile tricks—snuggling into your favor at whatever cost—you can enjoy ROOSTER COGBURN. The demoralization seems to have gone very far: shouldn’t the studio that produced this picture have paid a little attention to how it was mounted? When Eula pleads Rooster’s case in a court hearing at the end (and persuades the judge to exonerate him for not taking any prisoners), couldn’t Universal afford a few extras, so there’d be some people in the courtroom? There’s practically nobody in the whole movie, and if there were, with Universal’s color processing you couldn’t see them anyway.

[November 3, 1975]

“Bodies”

In the past, moviemakers who were casting the role of a beautiful black woman generally looked for a black actress with perfect Waspy features; essentially, they were looking for a beautiful white woman with a tan.
The twenty-nine-year-old Spike Lee, who wrote, directed, and edited the sex comedy SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, breaks the pattern. Tracy Camila Johns, from the Negro Ensemble Company, who plays his pivotal character, Nola Darling, has almond-shaped come-hither eyes, a short nose with an inquiring tilt, full lips, hair that's cut like a wedge (it shoots up about five inches above the top of her head), and a smooth, sinuous walk. Nola, who works as a graphic designer and lives alone in the black bohemian world in Brooklyn—it's like a black Greenwich Village—is voluptuous and easygoing. She has no guile or deceit in her. She attracts men without working at it, and she's happily juggling three lovers when she's faced by a mock crisis: each of the three men has turned possessive and wants to be her one and only.

The movie is almost continuously quick-witted. This is one of those rare textbook cases of an artist's being able to use limitations to his advantage. Spike Lee wrote the script in a hurry, after the funding for a more complex project fell apart; he shaped the key roles for actors he already had lined up, and in order to keep costs down to next to nothing he had to write a script that wouldn't require sets or costumes and in which almost everything could be shot within a one-mile radius. The script also had to allow for several sex scenes, so that he and his friends in the cast and crew could be sure of eventually getting some pay for their work. He began shooting (in 16 mm.) in the summer of 1985 with only about $22,000 on hand ($18,000 from the New York State Council on the Arts and $4,000 from private investors); raising more money as he went along, he finished shooting in twelve days. The picture was completed on a final budget of $175,000, of which all except about $60,000 was deferred. Nola, her three lovers, and her family and friends explain themselves directly to the camera, because this is just about the fastest, most economical way of setting up a shot, and the film's basic set is Nola's bed—the story begins and ends with her alone under the covers. What makes this on-the-cheap method work is partly that Lee has a fine cinematographer—Ernest Dickerson, his close friend and former classmate at the New York University film school. Dickerson's textured images (the film is in black-and-white) and the soft lighting he uses for the sex scenes help to give the film a lyrical, lilting feeling. And Lee himself is endowed with something more than training and imagination: he has what for want of a better term is called "a film sense." It's an instinct for how to make a movie move-for how much motion there should be in a shot, for how fast to cut the shots, for how to make them flow into each other rhythmically. (John Sayles has many gifts but not a film sense—he doesn't gain anything as an artist by using film—and this probably explains why Ernest Dickerson's work for him on THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET looks stiff and pedestrian.) A great many movie directors don't have it, but when they find the right collaborators they can get by. When a director has it, though, it's as if nature intended him to make movies.

Spike Lee gives SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT a syncopated pulse, and he keeps it sparking and bouncing along. When Nola complains that most men's come-ons tell you that they're dogs, we get a quick comedy routine—a series of twelve sheiks looking into the camera and giving us their best shots at propositioning a woman. (She's right: they're dogs.) Lee is ingenious about varying the film's tempo, and he does it playfully—percussively—so that we enjoy his enjoyment of shooting and editing film. (It's scored to jazz by his musician father, Bill Lee, who also appears as Nola's father.) The director is pretty smart about the casting of Nola's three men: Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks), who's a conventional narrow-minded middle-class romantic; Greer (John Canada Terrell), a male model who's such a vain and pretentious social climber that he's sort of amusing —grooming is his religion; and Mars (Spike Lee himself), who wears oversize aviator glasses on his skinny face, has an arrow shaved out of the back of his hair, and flits about on his ten-speed bike in a satin baseball jacket. A gold nameplate around his neck spells out "Mars," which is where this jive artist seems to be from, and he talks so fast, using words repetitively in a rat-tat rhythm, that he sounds like a scat stutterer. Mars, who's blithely unemployed, talks his way into Nola's bed (with his high-top basketball shoes on), and he makes her (and us) laugh.

Mars isn't a big role, but when he's wheedling Nola or rattling on telling her lies the rapster's push that propels SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT is incarnate. Lee doesn't get the same live-wire crackle from the other performers, and sometimes he lets their scenes run on into obviousness. (When Nola, doing exercises with Greer, flings herself on the bed eager for sex, and the clothes-conscious dolt takes so long folding his underwear that her ion burns out, Lee extends the scene so long that the joke burns out, too.) The movie also has a couple of bum patches: a switch to color for a dance number in Fort Greene Park that's as misconceived as the romantic duets in forties and fifties Hollywood musicals which it imitates, and the final stretch-fifteen minutes or so in which Lee takes the film's crisis situation too seriously. His idea seems to be that Nola can't choose among the three men because each has an element of what she wants in a man—and, besides, she likes sex with all of them. But Lee doesn't seem to know how to develop the story. He might have sustained his snappy, satirical tone. (If one or two or all three dropped away, others might have turned up to replace them.) Instead, he bears down on feminist issues. The picture starts going wrong in an ugly scene in which Jamie (who is the dreariest character anyway) goes into a rage about Nola's promiscuity and shows her how a tart should be treated by mounting her brutally from the rear. All the previous sex scenes have been sensuous and lighthearted, so this comes as a violation of the film's infectious spirit. After it, Lee fumbles around: Nola tries to define herself and considers celibacy before she and the picture regain their sanity in a rather perfunctory finish. (Lee doesn't get things swinging again until the closing credits.)

Part of what goes wrong is, I think, Lee's rather desperate stab at commerciality: he must have been so determined to have the film make some money that he gave the script the structure (and the title) of an exploitation film. Nola Darling (it's a porno-pic name) has three lovers and is courted by a leering lesbian, whom she pushes away; she consults a woman sex therapist, who tells her she's healthy; when she doesn't have a man around, she plays with herself; and so on. These are all standard ploys in the soft-core market. Most of this material, though, is handled with such grace that it transcends the attempt to play things corny and safe.

The movie's exuberance builds up so much audience good will that you don't feel too Serden by the fum bing comes out of Spike Lee's fresh, loose way of using the filmmaking itself as part of the subject (and the fun) of the movie: we can see how he's made do without funds. And a lot of the good will comes from his tapping a whole new subject matter. Whites don't exist in this movie. It's about the young black middle-class professional women and their new kinds of sexual problems with men. It's a screwball comedy of sexual manners set in a world that's parallel with the white world. For whites, it's like seeing how people sound and look in another country that's a mirror image of the terrain we know. For many young blacks, it must be like seeing themselves on the screen for the first time and liking what they see.

[October 6, 1986]

“Bodies”

Jeff Goldblum has a gift for playing innocently self-absorbed goofs, and, luckily, he carries over a bit of the goof to the loner character he plays in THE FLY—a brilliant, eccentric scientist whose intellect is always racing. As Seth Brundle, he wears his thick, curly hair Einstein-aureole style, and he delivers his lines as if queries were piling up in his mind about what he's saying—he does broken-rhythm double takes on his own dialogue. In the opening scenes, as the tall young Brundle is idly looking over the displays at a science exhibition he catches sight of the tall, pretty Veronica (played by Geena Davis, a reporter for a science magazine. Once he focusses on her, his enormous dark eyes don't take in anything else. He invites her to come back to his lab to see what he's working on—a discovery that will "change the world as we know it"—and she's too eager a reporter to up the invitation. After she gets to see this prodigy in his natural habitat—the lab, which is in a loft in an old brick warehouse—she's impressed by his work and charmed by his childlike directness, by his unworldliness, and maybe, too, by his muscular physique and remarkable height. Goldblum is six foot five, and Davis is a neat six feet; they both have masses of dark hair and "generous" mouths with similar occlusions (though he can't match her dimples or her cleft chin). Brundle and Veronica are a heroic pair. They become totally devoted to each other, and they look as if they could produce a race of giants. But when she becomes pregnant it isn't their offspring's probable height that worries her.

Brundle has two telepods spaced apart in the lab-machines that Veronica accurately describes as looking like "designer phone booths." He explains that he got carsick as a child and he has devised a method of instant, painless travel: when an object is put in a booth, a computer analyzes its molecules, disintegrates them, and reintegrates them in the other booth. Brundle has no difficulty transmitting inanimate objects, but he still runs into snags with the flesh of living creatures. He works with baboons, and perhaps the scariest shock-cut in the movie comes when an elegant, affectionate baboon is beamed from booth to booth and an error is made in the reintegration process. In the 1958 version of THE FLY, which was based, like this one, on a short story by George Langelaan, the lab animals were less photogenic—guinea pigs. The 1958 script (by James Clavell) had more principal characters than this new one, which was written by Charles Edward Pogue and then reshaped by the director, the Toronto-based horror specialist David (THE BROOD) Cronenberg. Here, surprisingly, there are only Brundle and Veronica and, generally in the background, John Getz as her former lover Stathis, who is the editor of Particle, the magazine she writes for. With so few characters and almost no crosscurrents in the story, Cronenberg takes his time about setting things up. He doesn't bother with the character of Stathis, who barely makes sense; Stathis is needed just to explain why, at a critical point, Brundle gets stupidly jealous and drunk and, alone in his lab, decides that the time has come to transmit a human being. He pops into one of the booths, too intent on the daring step he's taking to notice that he has a fellow-enger, a fly. Elated at his success, he strides out of the other booth completely unaware that his genetic and molecular structure has been fused with that of the fly.

This is the major departure from the 1958 version, in which the man and the fly emerged mix-matched, with their body parts altered in size: the little fly with the tiny head and arm of the man, and the man's body with a big fly's head and foreleg. Here the fly takes over the man from inside, and it's Veronica who first notices changes in her lover's body and in his temperament. The opening half of the movie has had a romantic-comedy edge, and it's still fun when Brundle is suddenly doing gymnastics, jumping up and down out of sheer kinetic drive, and swinging around in the high-ceilinged loft. But when his skin is mottled and his appetite for sexual intercourse has become as insatiable as his new mania for sweets it's less fun, and by the time he's walking on the ceiling and scrambling down the side wall the quirkiness is gone and the shocks are just about all that's left. By then, the computer has told him what has happened—that he has become Brundefly. He has enough of the scientist left in him to keep a record of his physical changes and to collect the parts of his body that fall off; he's fascinated by them—he treasures them like a gloating miser. For the remainder of the movie, though, there is essentially nothing for the audience to watch except his hideous physical deterioration.

The only other plot element is the matter of Veronica's pregnancy and her fear of giving birth to a pupal monstrosity. (Her gynecologist is played by Cronenberg; those familiar with his work—with his obsessions about flesh and biological disorders—will recognize this as a sick, sick joke.)

Probably the picture is having it huge box-office success because it's so single-minded. It's like a B horror movie given new weight by Cronenberg, and for what it is it's very well done. He narrows the film down to one man's decaying body, and concentrates your attention on one stage after another of poor Brundle's becoming bent over double and de-formed. And although the successive jobs of makeup don't really make Goldblum look any more like a fly, the spectacle of ever-worsening rot has its own effectiveness. The movie can be taken as a metaphor for AIDS or cancer, or simply as a metaphor for what happens in the normal aging process. Yet on its own it has no real vision—nothing that lifts it out of the horror-shock category. There's humor in the early scenes between Brundle and Veronica, and the idea of their attachment's being so powerful that they go on loving each other even when he's rotting is funny and stirring. They're like Wagnerian superlovers, and Goldblum has some powerful, creepy moments. In the scene where Brundlefly tells Veronica to leave the lab—he says, "I'll hurt you if you stay"—there's pain in his voice, along with a breathy-buzzy sound. But the movie is extremely literal-minded about physical decay. Cronenberg wants to drive you to revulsion; that's his aim. It's as if ROSEMARY’S BABY were remade without its nasty edge of satirical humor, or as if either Don Siegel's or Phil Kaufman's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS were remade without the idea that the pods represented all the social pressures to conform and that when you closed your eyes and gave in to them they destroyed your soul, your individuality—as if the pods were just monsters who wanted to kill you.

THE FLY is being called Kafkaesque, but the resemblance to Kafka's "Metamorphosis” is superficial. When Kafka's man woke up as a bug, it was an actualization of how he felt about himself, and the story stays with us because we all have our miserable, guilt-ridden moments of feeling like bugs. THE FLY is just pulp that sets out to shock you. It features a love relationship, but that's not what it's about. If THE FLY has a power, it's simply in our somewhat prurient fixation on watching a man rot until finally he's pleading for a coup de grâce. So, despite Goldblum's terrific performance and despite the graceful romantic teamwork between him and Geena Davis, moviegoers may not feel that they're having such a great time. THE FLY is so determinedly concentrated that it certainly holds your attention, though. As a moviemaker, Cronenberg is a bondage freak; you feel that if he could he'd tighten the action until the screen burst, if not the heads of the people watching it.

[October 6, 1986]