•^fx

Praising Pauline Kael at this stage of her career is like

announcing that the world is round. As film critic of The

New Yorker, and in the succession of books that began in
1965 with / Lost it at the Movies and has continued to the
present with the recent 5001 Nights at the Movies and
Taking It All In, she has established an unshakable claim
to preeminence.
Pauline Kael is that rarity, a marvellous writer who is
also a marvellous critic. In this new collection, she takes
movies 1983-1985. Flashdance, Terms of
in (takes on?)
Endearment, Yentl, Under Fire, BizeVs Carmen, Purple
Rain, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Amadeus, The Killing
Fields, Stranger Than Paradise, The Makioka Sisters,
Stop Making Sense, Grey stoke, Prizzi's Honor, Rambo:
First Blood Part II — there are more than a hundred
movies here, some wonderful, some terrible, all reviewed
in the manner or method that is uniquely Pauline Kael's.
Indifferent to hype and received opinion, she is true
to what she sees, generous with praise or regret, unspar-
ing (even hilarious) when the occasion warrants, sensitive
to the world in which movies are made and which they
sometimes reflect. Above all, she writes with the convic-
tion of someone who cares about movies.

Among PAULINE kael's other books are Kiss Kiss Bang

Ban^, Going Steady, Reeling, Deeper into Movies (Na-
tional Book Award), and When the Lights Go Down. A
native of northern California, she began writing for The
New Yorker in 1967.

COVER DESIGN BY PAUL CHEVANNES

 mutt
ffflU/JUftt
Also by Pauline Kael

I LOST IT AT THE MOVIES

KISS KISS BANG BANG
GOING STEADY
THE CITIZEN KANE BOOK
DEEPER INTO MOVIES
REELING
WHEN THE LIGHTS GO DOWN
5001 NIGHTS AT THE MOVIES
TAKING IT ALL IN
il Liim I

A William Abrahams Book

E. P. BUTTON NEW YORK

All material in this book originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1985 by Pauline Kael

All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information
storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in
writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages
in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or
broadcast.

Published in the United States by E. P. Button, a division of New American Library,

2 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 100 16

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kael, Pauline.
State of the art.

I. Moving-pictures —Reviews. L Title.

PN1995.K2527 1985 79i-43'75 85-10368

ISBN 0-525-24369-0
ISBN 0-525-48186-9 (pbk.)

Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto

DESIGNED BY EARL TIDWELL

INDEX PREPARED BY TRENT DUFFY

10 98765432 I

COBE
First Edition
 ffiill

Author's Note xi

SILLINESS I

The Man vrith Two Brains

Octopussy
Flashdance

TIME-WARP MOVIES 7
Superman III
Trading Places
Betrayal

HYSTERICS 15
The Survivors
Twilight Zone — The Movie
ANYBODY HOME? 23
Zelig
The Grey Fox

FRAMED 31
The Draughtsman's Contract
Staying Alive

SEX AND POLITICS 37

Pauline at the Beach
Risky Business
Daniel
 31

A BAD dream/a MASTERPIECE 45

The Moon in the Gutter
The Leopard

ON GOLDEN SWAMP 55
Cross Creek
Lonely Hearts

THE SEVENS 6
The Right stuff
The Big Chill

IMAGE MAKERS 7
Under Fire

HAIR 79
Heart Like a Wheel
Educating Rita

THE PERFECTIONIST 85
Yentl
Star 80

RETRO RETRO 93
Terms of Endearment
Never Cry Wolf

A DE PALMA MOVIE 100

FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T LIKE DE PALMA MOVIES
Scarface

BUSYBODY 106
Silkwood
To Be or Not To Be

VANITY, VAINGLORY, AND LOWLIFE 1

1

The Dresser
Uncommon
Valor
Sudden Impact

VULGARIANS AND ASCETICS 122

Broadway Danny Rose
Basileus Quartet

vi
COMEDY, EPIC, SITCOM 1 28
The Lonely Guy
El Norte
Blame It on Rio

THE WOMEN 133

Entre Nous
Footloose

KING CANDY 141

Splash
Against All Odds

HUGH HUDSON OF THE APES 147

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes
Racing with the Moon
Unfaithfully Yours

CIRCUS 155
Moscow on the Hudson

exaltation/escapism 160
Iceman
Romancing the Stone

smaller than life 165

Swing Shift

THE CANDIDATE 169

The Natural
Sixteen Candles

A BREEZE, A BAWD, A BOUNTY 175

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Erendira
The Bounty

THE pop JUNKPILE 1

87
Gremlins
Ghostbusters

vii
 1

SNEAKS, OGRES,^ AND THE D.T.S I94

The 4th Man
Star Trek III: The Search for Spook
Under the Volcano

ETHNICS 201
The Pope of Greenwich Village

THE WOMAN QUESTION 2o6

The Bostonians
Repo Man
THE CHARISMATIC HALF-AND-HALFS 213
Purple Rain
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai

ROGER & ED WIN A, SHEEN A, AND UNCLE JEAN 220

All of Me
Sheena
First Name: Carmen
TIGHT LITTLE THRILLER 23
Dreamscape
Country
Swann in Love
Tightrope

MIRRORS 240
Utu
Places in the Heart

MOZART AND BIZET 249

Amadeus
Bizet's Carmen

FAKED OUT, COOLED OUT, BUMMED OUT 257

The Little Drummer Girl
Stranger Than Paradise
Body Double
THREE CHEERS 265
Stop Making Sense
Comfort and Joy
A Soldier's Story
viii
UNREAL 274
The Killing Fields
Falling in Love
Independence Day

DAVID AND GOLIATH 282

Dune
Beverly Hills Cop
Choose Me

FEVER dream/echo CHAMBER 29O

Mrs. Soffel
The Cotton Club

unloos'd dreams 299

A Passage to India
LOVERS AND FOOLS 3^4
Micki & Maude
Starman
The Flamingo Kid

SCHOOLBOYS 3^1
The Falcon and the Snowman
Birdy

PLAIN AND SIMPLE 3^9

Witness
Blood Simple

GOLDEN KIMONOS 326

The Makioka Sisters
The Return of the Soldier
The Mean Season

CHARMER 335
The Purple Rose of Cairo
A Private Function
CODDLED 343
Lost in America
The Breakfast Club

ix
PASSION „.Q
Heartbreakers
Desperately Seeking Susan

THE MUDDLE AGES ocg

Ladyhawke
TIDAL
ggg
Once Upon a Time in America
SLAPHAPPY AND NOT SO HAPPY
364
What Have I Done to Deserve This!
Dangerous Moves
A View to a Kill
Stick

EXTREMES 060
The Shooting Party
Rambo: First Blood Part II
RIPENESS QYc
Honor
Prizzi's
The Home and the World
Index
ggg
 —

mvs
The title of this book is a deUberate break with my sexually tinged titles
of the past. It seemed time for a change; this has not been a period for
anything like Grand Passions. I hope that State of the Art will sound
ominous and sweeping and just slightly clinical. In the last few years,
the term has been applied to movies as the highest praise for their
up-to-the-minute special effects or their sound or animation; it has been
used to celebrate just about all the technological skills that go into a
production. But what I try to get at in this collection of reviews from
June 1983 to July 1985 is the state of the art of moviemaking.
In the 1970s, people who met me usually said something on the order
—
of "You're so lucky you get to go to the movies." In the 1980s, people
are more likely to say "Do you have to sit through that stuff?" They're
referring, of course, to the infantilization of movies in the 80s. Having
sat through much of that bland, retro "stuff," I've tried to suggest what
it's about. And despite the dubious state of the art, I think I've culled
some pretty good pictures. Whenever people have asked what they
should go to see, there has always been something to recommend
Under Fire or Stop Making Sense or Yentl, The Right Stuff, Splash,
All of Me, Moscow on the Hudson, Lost in America, Indiana Jones and
the Temple of Doom, The Purple Rose of Cairo, A Passage to India,
Iceman, PrizzVs Honor, Mrs. Soffel, Choose Me, Micki & Maude, or
Once Upon a Time in America, Utu, The Makioka Sisters, The Shoot-
ing Party, Bizet's Carmen, The Home and the World, or the full
version of The Leopard.
Once again, I must express my gratitude to William Shawn, Editor
of The New Yorker, and William Abrahams, now of Button, and my
infinite thanks to my daughter Gina and her son William.

xi
SILLINESS

comic's naked desire to make us laugh can be an embarrass-

ment, especially if we feel that he's hanging on that laugh —that he's
experiencing our reaction as a life-or-death matter. Steve Martin is

naked, but he isn't desperate. (He's too anomic to be desperate.) Some

performers can't work up a physical charge if the audience doesn't
respond to them, but Steve Martin doesn't come out on a TV stage cold,
hoping to get a rhythm going with the people in the studio. He's wired
up and tingling, like a junk-food addict; he's like a man who's being
electrocuted and getting a dirty thrill out of it. Steve Martin doesn't feed
off the audience's energy — he instills energy in the audience. And he
does it by drawing us into a conspiratorial relationship with him.

Pop culture is a relatively recent phenomenon. It's only in the last

two decades that moviemakers have come along whose attitudes were
shaped by the movies they grew up on, and whose subjects were often
drawn from those old movies. And it's only in the past decade that a new
generation of comics has been shaping its material as a satirical spinoff
of the Catskill traditions they grew up on. The Steve Martin we see is
a marionette, like the Devo punks; what holds the strings is the pop
culture that he has processed. But he's not protesting the overload of his
nervous system. His core is burned out, and he's a happy idiot, all spasms

and twitches, and videotape for nerve endings.

When Martin comes onstage, he may do, say, just what Red Skelton
used to do, but he gets us laughing at the fact that we're laughing at such
dumb jokes. Martin simulates being a comedian, and so, in a way, we
simulate being the comedian's audience. Martin makes old routines work
by letting us know that they're old and then doing them immaculately.
For him, comedy is all timing. He's almost a comedy robot. Onstage, he
puts across the idea that he's going to do some cornball routine, and then
when he does it it has quotation marks around it, and that's what makes it
hilarious. He does the routine straight, yet he's totally facetious. He lets
usknow that we're seeing silliness in quotes. There he is, spruced up and
dapper in a three-piece white suit; even his handsomeness is made face-
tious. Steve Martin is all persona. That's what's dizzying about him —and
a little ghoulish. He and some of the other comics of his generation make
the idea that they're doing comedy funny.
It's as if Steve Martin's showmanship had two stages
as if first he —
came on and "Imagine a clod
said, like me
Fred Astaire."
dancing like
An old-style comedian would thenfall on his face, or if he were Jack

Benny fancying himself as Heifetz he'd produce one sour note after
another. But Martin's steadfast concentration allows him, in the second
stage, to do just —
what he said he'd do he dances like Fred Astaire. I
admired Steve Martin for the acting and dancing he did in Pennies from
Heaven; what he did was more than a "stretch," it was a consummation,
and he may have been so startlingly right in the movie because of the
doubleness behind its whole conception. Possibly there was also an at-
tempt to achieve some sort of duality in Martin's last picture. Dead Men
—
Don't Wear Plaid a spoof of detective movies which spliced together
footage of Martin and footage from films of the forties. Carl Reiner, who
has directed all three of Martin's star vehicles (but didn't direct Pennies),
worked with dedicated craftsmen and achieved a smooth composite; even
the sound levels were carefully matched. Reiner and the others must
have become so proud of their workmanship that they didn't register
what a monotonous, droning feat they were engaged in. They smoothed
—
out their one big chance for comic friction the contrast between old and
new.
Almost nothing of the new-generation approach is visible in the
Steve Martin of slapstick package movies, such as the first burlesque he
starred in, The Jerk, and his new one, The Man with Two Brains. In
these, he's not very different from the more frenzied and gaga of the
older-generation comedians, yet he gives the impression of being fully
realized. The pictures don't have the sheer wacko splendor of Young
Frankenstein, but something as well thought out as Young Franken-
stein might be a constraint on Martin. When he leers in The Man with
Two Brains, he baby grinning and dribbling
leers triumphantly, like a
milk out of his few teeth. The performance is shameless, stupid fun.
first

Despite the sadness in his face, the comic character we see up there has
nothing head but a warped, infantile elan. Martin is as physical a
in his

comic as I've ever seen; the Jerk is the perfect name for him he moves —
convulsively, at angles, his body shooting ahead of his thoughts.
Essentially a series of skits. The Man with Two Brains is indefensi-
ble by any known standard of comedy form or formlessness. It's not—
much of anything, but it moves along enjoyably and allows this Jerk to
stay wired up for the whole picture. Sunny, grinning, lewd, he's Harpo
Marx with a voice and without the harp —a Harpo whose id has chased
out Art. As the world's greatest brain surgeon, he's an exuberantly
dirty-minded kid. This surgeon, who's stuffed with pretensions, per-
ceives himself as a man of the world, but he's a guileless innocent
—
compared with the woman he swoons over a flirty, dimply sadist who
marries him for her convenience. Kathleen Turner, who was so labori-
ously steamy in Body Heat, comes alive in comedy; she coos with pleas-
ure as she frustrates this fool. who
She's a wicked-witch sex goddess
keeps him tense and frazzled. The story ideas Two Brains aren't as
in

inventive as the material in The Jerk, but that was an ugly-looking

picture, with stumblebum pacing. (Martin was funny in it despite its
dead spots and the tedium of his falling over things.) Two Brains at
least has a look. Michael Chapman was the cinematographer, and his
work has a graphic vitality that's unusual for a comedy; it certainly helps
the gags, because we're kept alert between them. And Carl Reiner
seems to be developing a bit of grace: the actors surrounding Martin are
pleasantly subdued. David Warner plays a mad doctor in an offhand,
distracted manner; it's consistent with the pastel colors of the live
human brains that he keeps in candy jars. Some of the gags don't seem
quite pointed enough —Warner's coin-operated transformer (for his lab-
oratory machines that implant human brains in gorillas) doesn't get
anything more than a smile. And the last, fat-bride sequence is hopeless.
But the picture has at least one inspired love scene (between Martin and
—
a brain, in a rowboat). And Martin himself whatever he does has the —
fascination of a man moving in an energetic trance.
This movie has the kind of maniacal situations that are so dumb they
make you laugh, and since much of what children find hilarious has this
same giddiness, they'd probably like the film a lot. But it also has the
kind of raunchiness that may worry their parents (though it will proba-
bly just make the kids giggle). It has an R rating, so the kids may need
their folks to get them in. That's a pickle.

% 'illiness is also

(and least elegantly titled)

the chief charm of Octopussy, the fourteenth
of the James Bond movies. It's part parody
and part travesty, and it's amiably fatigued. Those of us who keep going
to the Bonds (even after the last two, the apathetic Moonraker and For
Your Eyes Only) have probably become resigned to Roger Moore. He
doesn't move particularly well, and, at fifty-five, he doesn't move very
fast, either. We know (and his sheepish, self-deprecating manner tells us
that he knows we know) that he has been playing the role because the
producer couldn't find anybody more exciting. He still goes through
(some of) the motions of a modern swashbuckling hero, but he gets most
of his effects now by the spark in his worried, squinched-up eyes. He may
not be heroic, but he's game. And he rises to the occasion of his one
first-class joke. It's part of a sequence that might be a spoof of Raiders
of the Lost Ark running just a few steps ahead of a hunting party that's
:

out to get him, he encounters a series of standard old-movie dangers,

including an attack by a deadly animal. Moore lifts his index finger in
the Barbara Woodhouse style of disapprovaland subdues the beast with
a single word.
The picture rattles along. It's not the latest-model Cadillac; it's a
beat-out old Cadillac, kept running with junk-yard parts. (I never
thought a Bond movie would actually resort to a suffering man in
clown's makeup.) The director, John Glen, seems to lose track of the
story, and neither he nor the writers (George MacDonald Fraser, with
Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson) appear to have thought out
the women's roles. Magda, a mysterious, tall, greasy-lipped blonde
(Kristina Wayborn, who played Garbo on TV), has an amused manner;
she seduces Bond, then disappears without any explanation, and when
she turns up again he barely gives her a nod. The naughty, chic perver-
sities that are promised by the title and some of the decor are left to

—
our minds as if the moviemakers had no idea they'd planted them
there. As the title character, the beautiful amazon Maud Adams is
—
disappointingly warm and maternal she's rather mooshy. At one mo-
ment, Octopussy is a leader, and the next moment she's a dupe, who
doesn't know what's going on around her. The role is a washout, and
the performance is so smiley-innocuous that when she leads Bond to
her octopus-shaped bed it must be to lie back against the pillows and
have a nice cup of tea and milk. But this is a joke book of a movie, set
against a tourist-paradise India (it seems to be all palaces), and Glen
keeps the small jokes humming. As an exiled Afghan prince, a disso-
lute schemer, Louis Jourdan doesn't have much to do but look an-
—
noyed, though he has one sly bit he puckers up when he pronounces
the amazon's name, giving it an ironic caress. Some of the other vil-
lains are more prominently displayed. There's a bright, blue-eyed Eng-
lish actor, Steven Berkoff, who plays the fanatic Russian general
 —

Orlov. When Orlov speaks English, he takes a gleeful pride in his own
precision, and listening to him wrap his tongue around English sylla-

bles is one of the slaphappy pleasures of this movie —he's like the mad
Russians who were popular on American radio in the thirties. Kabir
Bedi, a —
handsome Anglo-Indian actor a monument of a man, who tow-
ers —
over Roger Moore has a fine villainous curve to his mouth; as the
prince's major domo, he looks alarming even when he isn't doing a
thing. Among the lesser villains, I rather liked the identical David and
Tony Meyer, who have the perfect profession for twins: they work for
a circus, throwing knives at each other. There's also an agreeable ap-
pearance by the famous Indian tennis star Vijay Amritraj, who plays
an agent assisting Bond; you won't have any trouble spotting him
he's called Vijay,and he smacks a pursuer with a tennis racquet.
Octopussy probably the most casual of the Bonds. It features a
is

chase sequence in a crowded marketplace with a great camera angle on

a camel looking up and doing a double take as an automobile flies over
its head. In some ways, Octopussy is more like the Bob Hope and Bing

Crosby Road comedies than it is like the Bonds. (Among Bond's dis-

guises here are a gorilla suit and an alligator outfit that doubles as a
boat.) The pet octopus that the amazon keeps is a pretty little thing
blue, with markings so discreet that you might expect to find them on
decorator sheets. What this woman is doing with a harem full of cuties
(who are sometimes dressed as slave girls) isn't clear; at times they
appear to be a feminist sisterhood, with Octopussy as their den mother.
When they're forced to use their skills in the martial arts, they over-
power their male enemies very sweetly, while moving about in grace-

fully choreographed patterns.

The movie little schizzy. It gives us Bond as a gorilla and as a
is a
gator; it Bond swinging on ropes in the forest while yodelling
gives us
like Tarzan. This Bond slides down a bannister while firing a machine

gun and travels in a balloon equipped with a bank of television screens

so he can monitor the action below. But the moviemakers also have him
deliver a virtuous speech expressing anger at the possibility that thou-
sands of innocent people will be killed if the atom bomb that Orlov has
planted goes off. It's as if a teacher had been entertaining us with crazy
stories and then reprimanded us for laughing. You can feel a collective
slump in the audience.
 R lashdance has Cuisinart movie technique: the perfection
the slicing, not the food. The girl can't dance, but she's got a face.
is in

No
problem: the moviemakers put her face on another girl's body —a dancer
who moves so fast you can't see whether she's even got a face under her
frizzy curls. And the strobe editing makes her even faster. This dancing
doesn't go the way a body goes; this dancing goes the way an eggbeater
goes.
The girl is eighteen, and working-class Catholic, like Rocky, and
Tony Manero, and the girl in An Officer and a Gentleman, and she's
proud. She's all alone in Pittsburgh, but she's got a dream. She's a
welder by day and a dancer at night, and though her dances look choreo-
graphed down to each flutter of the frizz, we're meant to understand
that they're an explosion of her instincts. But she doesn't want to dance
this "natural" way. In her dream, she's a ballerina, handed bouquets,
like a princess. The music throughout is synthesizer pop some of Gi- —
orgio Moroder's throbbing specials along with bits of other whiplash
disco songs (including some that were already on the charts); basically,
the movie is a series of rock videos. When this girl dances in a neighbor-
hood beer joint, the neon-framed stage looks like the latest design for
a convention center. The picture has Vegas sound, thumping, thumping.
Our wistful heroine has a darling smile, which is deployed very carefully
during a long, provocative eating scene, with bits of lobster hovering on
her perfect lips. Hot is in. And she isn't the only girl. For this picture,
the producers have put together a prime collection of rumps: girls'
rumps, but small and muscular and round, like boys'. These androgy-
nous buns are kept busy at an ice-skating rink, at a body-building work-
out in a gym, and on the streets, where everything pulses, and a group
of boy dancers perform on the sidewalks, spinning on their backs like
tops. (Richard Colon, one of this group of black "breakers," who do the
only real dancing in the movie, is so fast that he isn't subjected to the
chop-chop editing —he's allowed to perform in his own time.)
The picture is a lulling, narcotizing musical; the whole damn thing
throbs. It's a motorized anatomy lesson, designed to turn the kids on and
drive older men crazy. It's soft-core porn with an inspirational message,
and it may be the most calculating, platinum-hearted movie I've ever
seen. Flashdance is selling the kind of romantic story that was laughed
off the screen thirty years ago, and then made a comeback with Rocky
and ///. Life is simple for the
If II, courageous. Our poor little girl wins
—
her young, handsome boss the owner of the steel mill. It's O.K. for him
to be rich, because he worked his way up from poverty (with record-
breaking speed), and she wins him because she sticks to her principles
—
and is true to her vision yes, she really is going to become a ballerina.
(You may think it a little late for her to start taking her first ballet

classes, but she's been dancing every night in her dreams, so who needs
practice?)The public is buying this picture; millions of people probably
don't see anything wrong with it. They may even think that the critics
—
are panning it because it's too sexy for us, and God help us too gritty —
and honest for us cocktail-swilling urban sophisticates.
Flashdance is like a sleazo putting the make on you. It gives a hard
sell even to the heroine's confessions to her priest. How tender she is,

how dewy-eyed and passionate. She confesses that she has been thinking
of sex, and —oh, yes—she told a lie. This girl is all underdog, and she's

got a real, scene-stealing dog besides. The dog's soulful expressions

have more depth than anything else in the picture.

June 27, 1983

TIME-WARP MOVIES

hen we go into the theatre to see Superman III, we know that

whatever else happens we're still going to have the pleasure of seeing a
man fly without an airplane and without wings. But when I (for one) came
out of the theatre it was with the distinct feeling that if the director,
Richard Lester, had been able to deprive us completely of this pleasure he
would have done so —not because he didn't want us to have a good time
but because he loses touch with the simple, basic elements of his material.
For roughly the first forty minutes of Superman III, during which
Richard Pryor as Gus Gorman, who has been a flop at every job he has
ever had, discovers that he's a computer wizard, Lester provides an
agreeable mixture of the grandiose and the everyday. Our expecta-
tions are aroused: he must have some tricks up his sleeve. And he does.
but the scattered impulses behind the movie cancel each other out.
Superman/Clark Kent (Christopher Reeve), who grew into a touch-
ing character in Superman II, is presented here as a blank —he's what-
ever is needed to fit the gags. Clark Kent is a bore with a simpering grin,
and Superman has been doing his good deeds for so long that the people
of Metropolis are jaded and take him for granted. Clearly, he needs a
change, but it doesn't come from within. Richard Pryor's Gus, who has
used a computer to embezzle from the conglomerate he works for, is
caught by the boss (Robert Vaughn) and ordered to work out the ingredi-
—
ents of kryptonite the only substance that can destroy Superman. Gus
isn't that much of a wizard, though; the computer gives him all the

ingredients but one, and so he fakes it, and the green chunk he hands
to Superman, as if it were an award, is only near-kryptonite. It doesn't
kill Superman; it demoralizes him, and he begins to perform dirty deeds.

What's strange about the movie is that the best things in it aren't
developed, and what Superman and the other characters do doesn't seem
to have any weight. Robert Vaughn's polished smarminess is scaled to
television; his villainy doesn't fill the big screen, and when he tries to ruin
the Colombian coffee crop or succeeds in stopping the world's flow of oil,
Lester treats what happens so flippantly that nothing appears to be at
stake. Vaughn's harridan sister and business partner Annie Ross as —
—
the black-haired, witchlike Vera might be something left in cold stor-
age since the era of the Munsters. And a potentially amusing bosomy
blonde, a floozy-intellectual named Lorelei Ambrosia (Pamela Stephen-
son), just sits around. Lester may think that these women are gags just
in themselves —
there are no payoffs. And when Gus hands Superman the
chunk of green near-kryptonite. Superman doesn't have any idea what
it is —it's as if he'd never seen Superman and Superman II.

Despite the film's anti-mythic tone, it's entertaining (in the early
part) when we see Superman perform heroically. There's a dangerous
fire in a chemical plant, and the firemen have no water. Superman
freezes a lake and flies it over the site; the which turns
fire melts the ice,

into rain and puts out the fire. This comic-book fairy-tale fantasy is funny
—
and enchanting this, in essence, is what we've come to see for the third
time. But although Lester had a hand in the first film and directed the
—
second, he steps on our reaction here he doesn't give us time to be
exhilarated. He keeps his light, objective touch, which at times is indis-
tinguishable from directorial indifference. Too many scenes are treated
as if they were just obligatory, and because of that air of indifference,
verging on disdain, the movie's sight gags and special effects — even the
biggest ones —aren't particularly exciting. The splashy scenes that we
look forward to don't seem to show up, because Lester has devalued
them; everything feels marginal.
So when the soul-sick Superman is being prankish or surly —putting
out the Olympic torch or straightening the Leaning Tower of Pisa or
punching a hole in a tanker and causing an oil spill —we don't know how
to react to this lecher with stubble on h^z chin and a soiled-looking cape.
A funky, sexy-sheik Superman could have audiences squealing with
pleasure, and a Superman with a vendetta against the world could be
awesomely neurotic, but themovie has no sooner suggested the pos-
sibilities than it drops them. (When he sits alone in a bar, boozing and

exploding bottles by flicking roasted almonds at them, we get more of

— —
a sense of how dangerous and attractive Superman could be than at
any other time. The bad Superman has burning dark eyes; he looks like
an Etruscan warrior.) We're not intended to take what happens to Super-
man as a genuine psychological crisis; the picture even loses track of the
near-kryptonite. We're not intended to care about the victims of his spite.
We don't know what we're meant to respond to.
It's a real loss that Clark Kent is shunted offscreen during these

—
sequences, because we miss him we wonder how he feels about what's
going on. (Is he suffering? Or has he turned bad guy and told off his
fellow-workers at the Daily Planet^) At last, Superman's headachy
conflict with himself becomes so intense that he splits into two: a scene
that needs to be crazed and funny —
if only because the two identities are

already split in our minds, so that we've been waiting for Clark. But
what we get is a conventional battle of the titans, like John Wayne and
Randolph Scott pounding each other in a frontier saloon. The setting
here is an automobile junk yard. Superman keeps throwing Clark Kent
into grind-up machines and demolishing him; he kicks him unconscious,
and Clark keeps coming back for more punishment, like Wile E. Coyote
in a Road Runner cartoon. It isn't comic, though, and it isn't satisfyingly

worked out, either, but there's at least some psychological resonance in

this battling, and when Clark Kent triumphs the scene is affecting.
(We've come to trust him more than we trust Superman.) There's noth-
ing to redeem the film's final big brawl when the healed, integrated
Superman, who is once again at the service of mankind, goes up against
a monster computer that Gus has designed and Vaughn has had built.
Like Luke in Return of the Jedi, Superman is repeatedly fried by zigzag
bolts of electricity.
Lester hasn't gone back to the heaviness of How I Won the War or
the disaffection of Petulia, and he doesn't do the obvious subverting
that he did on his Musketeers pictures, but he undermines the mystique
of Superman as an ideal father image and an ideal self-image. (Lester
almost seems to think that he's letting the material subvert itself.)

There's an idea here: that Superman is a victim of his own do-gooding

—
and needs to be liberated needs to discover that he has the same im-
pulses and drives as other men. But this violates all the information we
have stored up about him, which starts with the given that he isn't
—
human he's superhuman. We can accept the bad-guy Superman as a
casualty of kryptonite, but the notion that when Superman is idealistic
and helpful he's an asexual Mr. Square violates our memories of what
was charming about Christopher Reeve's performance in the first two
films. There was deadpan wit in Superman's impersonation of the

clumsy, inept Clark Kent; here he doesn't seem to be in on the joke. And
it doesn't make any sense that when Clark Kent goes back to Smallville

to his high-school class reunion, everyone except Lana Lang (Annette

O'Toole), who, we're told, has always had a crush on him, treats him
contemptuously. In the first Superman, the schoolboy Clark Kent was
physically strong and he was always considerate and sweet why would —
he have been unpopular? Lester wants us to see Clark as a nerd and
Superman as a virtuous clod, but all that does is drain the mythic life out
of the movie. By not allowing the people on the screen to be enthralled
by Superman's flights and miraculous rescues, Lester puts himself in the
position of pooh-poohing the movie's special effects, and pooh-poohing
the hero. He robs the picture of its chance to stir the viewer's imagina-
tion. He may also (out of impatience, or a willingness to sacrifice story
points to pacing) have truncated episodes —such as Clark Kent's reenter-
ing Lana Lang's life —which are left suspended. Annette O'Toole (who
has an American-goddess profile) makes Lana's small-town-girl infatua-
tion with Clark seem perfectly natural. She's the only member of the cast
who appears to believe in her role yet stays in a comic-book frame. As
Brad, the fifties-style jock who wants to marry Lana, Gavan O'Herlihy
is believable, too, especially when he tells Clark Kent he hates him for
being so nice, but O'Herlihy doesn't have the knack of comic-book style.
The logistical horrors of directing actors around special effects that
are put in later may why Lester can't give this movie
help to explain
anything like the visual shimmer of many of his earlier films. And those
effects may also be part of the reason he can't give it his jazzy, leapfrog-
ging editing style. Superman have much of a look, and the
III doesn't
editing clumps along. (When a movie
heavy on special effects, you
is

don't get much for forty-two million dollars anymore.) But all those
technical problems don't explain why Lester, who tosses off a number
of lovely visual gags, also uses so many labored tricks, such as a forties-

10
style montage showing the results of Gus's fiddling with his computer:
it ends with a man monthly statement
at the breakfast table opening his
from Bloomingdale's and shoving a half grapefruit in his wife's face.
—
Lester does better with a gag sequence a chain of mishaps that sus- —
tains life for us during the lengthy opening credits, but the sequence
doesn't have anything like the zest of the similar gag at the start of
Richard Rush's The Stunt Man, And this attempt to get the
film moving
is marred by the credits themselves, which come sloshing up from the
bottom of the screen and disrupt the action.
Lester, and the scriptwriters, David and Leslie Newman (who have
been involved in all three films), are working with an insane disadvan-
tage: they're trying to fuse two incompatible or, at least, conflicting
legends. Christopher Reeve isn't the star of Superman III. Richard
Pryor is. He's the box-office insurance that the producers, the Salkinds,
bought for four million dollars. According to the Newmans, they and
Lester dreamed up the idea (along with everyone else who was planning
a new movie). And so, of course, once Pryor agreed, the Newmans tried
to shape the story around him. At times, it isn't clear whether the action
we're watching is in Metropolis or in Smallville, and at other times the
central characters are apparently wandering in various directions
around the Grand Canyon. What makes the picture seem so addled is the
need to bring Gus and Superman together. They never do get to have
a dramatic confrontation, and they don't actually become enemies or —
friends, either —but Lester keeps so much fringe action going on that
viewers don't have a chance to question what Pryor and Superman, who
don't even belong to the same era, are doing in the same movie.
There's noway that this clean-language, family picture could use
the Richard Pryor who used to do a "Supernigger" routine (which was
spun off Lenny Bruce's "Superjew"). When Pryor puts on a pink shawl
in imitation of Superman's red cape, he's rather forlorn. What the film
uses is Richard Pryor playing
off his rich white master (Vaughn) in the
scaredy-cat way that Mantan Moreland and other earlier, eye-rolling
black comics did. Pryor's Gus isn't a villain; he only works for the villain.
(And he does everything but steal chickens and have his hair shoot up
straight 'cause he's 'feerd of ghosts.) He cringes and acts cowardly, and,
yes, the audience laughs and finds him endearing. (Pryor as a computer
genius doesn't ring any bells; I wondered why the moviemakers hadn't
tried the ploy of using Pryor to wise up Superman, or as the demoralized
—
Superman's tempter that way he wouldn't have had to be so limp, and
he and Superman could have had more scenes together.) Pryor doesn't
give a bad performance, but it's a hesitant and bowed performance, as

II
if he were trying not to be noticed. And it's a one-joke role. Gus's mind
is so fogged in that he does everything he can to please his slimy master;
it's pretty close to the end of the movie before he — ever so tentatively
—shifts his allegiance. First, his boss totes him; then Superman (liter-

ally) totes him. He never does go out on his own. And when Superman
is flying with Richard Pryor they look the way they do in the ads for the

movie that show Pryor openmouthed and pop-eyed with terror. The
romance is gone; the flying has become just another gag.

I
n Trading Places, Dan Aykroyd plays a snooty young blue-
I

bloodwho runs a Philadelphia brokerage house, and Eddie Murphy plays

a con man-beggar who disguises himself as a blind, legless Vietnam
veteran. The two don't exactly trade
places; they're traded, by a pair of
Bellamy and Don Ameche) who have
heartless, rich old brothers (Ralph
—
made a heredity-versus-environment bet something we've been spared
in movies of the past few decades. Trading Places, which was written

by Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod and directed by John Landis

{Animal House, The Blues Brothers), is reminiscent of the kind of
"classic" that turns up on TV at Christmastime, and it looks like a
Christmas classic on a TV set that needs adjusting. It's drab. It's also
eerily arch and static. Landis must think that he's achieving a mock-
thirties formal style; for the first hour he italicizes each scene, fixing it

in place as if he wanted us to take an inventory of everyHe seems detail.

to be saying, "I'm smarter than where you may

this." It gets to the point
want to stand up in the theatre and say, "Yeah? Prove it." The picture
is pompous —
the setups are so rigid I wanted to kick the camera to get
it moving.
The comedies of the thirties and forties from which this movie was
hatched were often based on Broadway plays, and they carried over
stage devices, such as the valet-butlers with impeccable diction who
were a great convenience to playwrights. (Preston Sturges parodied this
tradition in The Lady Eve, where Henry Fonda's valet William Demar- —
—
est talked like a gangster gargling and was indignant when told to stay
in his place.) The recent hit Arthur, which was derived from the same

movie period as Trading Places, gave us John Gielgud as a valet father

figure, and now we've got Denholm Elliott, coddling and grooming first
Aykroyd and then Murphy. (Elliott hasn't been given the lines he would

12
need to make anything of the but when the camera gloms onto him
role,

he obliges with little grimaces.)One snag in antique dramaturgical de-

vices such as butlers to populate an empty stage and manipulative mil-
lionaires to put a plot in motion by toying with men's lives is that they
push a movie into a time warp, and this one, with its stodgy look, sug-
gests no period of the past or the present. And when Eddie Murphy
speaks in modern slang he has a startling effect. He's the only person

in the movie who belongs to our era, and he's a man of the eighties only
in his speech. What he does in this movie is totally circumscribed by the
plot mechanics.
The —
two men's lives the representative of white
trajectories of the
privilege sinking into crimeand craziness while the black con artist rises
to —
the heights of the establishment are crosscut. The new, young
scriptwriters don't have the built-in clocks that the best screenwriters of
the thirties had. Aykroyd's descent to bumhood is rather blurry, and
each time the movie cuts back to him he doesn't seem to have deteri-
orated by more than two minutes. Murphy, on the other hand, whips
through his initial changes, but then he has a nasty, humorless sequence
inwhich he invites the people from a seamy ghetto bar to his town house
for a party and promptly throws them all out, because some of them
don't use ashtrays, or coasters for their drinks, and a couple of the
women are dancing topless. From the way this sequence is directed, you
get the feeling that the con man has learned the value of fine posses-
sions, and that the ghetto crowd would wreck any decent place they got
into. That can't be what was intended, can it? But the audience laughs

contentedly. In a crude, dogged way, the movie has a sense of humor:

it keeps telling you how terrific its sense of humor is. And it has that big,

chugging structure working for it: the whole apparatus picks up some
speed toward the end and comes to a rousing, slapstick finish, with the
younger guys rich and the old skinflints punished. The audience ap-
peared to like it.

This may seem

like the attitude of a killjoy, but I wish the audience
had groaned, because Landis's timing is deadly he makes everything—
obvious. And he doesn't do much for his actors. Aykroyd uses one fairly
effective comic shtick: he plays rich by keeping his face tilted up, the nose
high, sniffing purer air, like a snobby dog in a cartoon. (Amusingly, it's

the very same trick that Don Ameche is still using for his rotten-rich
character.)And Aykroyd the broker has a suggestion of a flabby, inse-
cure boy who wants the praise of his employers it makes him rather—
touching. Confusingly, though, he's less appealing when he's on the
skids. Dan Aykroyd is all exteriors; he's big and beefy, and, inspired as

13
he has often been on TV, he doesn't seem to have a strong personality,
(That may be part of why he's such a great impressionist.) I think he
really is insecure playing the Harvard-educated young pup in three-piece
suits, and we respond to the nervousness under the bluff of assurance.
But when this plutocrat is stripped of everything and he turns into a
low-comedy slob in loud plaids or a Santa Claus suit, Aykroyd falls back,
relieved, on TV-sketch acting; he's no longer a character, and we have
no particular feeling for him. Eddie Murphy's new-style savvy carries
Trading Places, but this is only his second movie and he's already just
one step away from being in a niche. Murphy is like a child performer
who's too accomplished. His cockiness is uncannily knowing; he gets to
your reflexes, like those Vegas veterans who make you feel that you're
enjoying them even while you're pulling back. This isn't a man pos-
sessed; this is a man who knows his audiences —he plays completely off
their expectations. (White people couldn't really learn anything of what
it is to be black from Eddie Murphy; he's playing off their ideas of what
it is to be black.)
My most vivid recollection of Trading Places is of the faces of the
two cops at the beginning who lift the supposedly legless con man off
his rolling platform. His legs dangle in the air, but the two cops haven't
been directed to laugh or to look puzzled or to have any particular
reaction. They just stand there —two stone-faced, bewildered actors,
who have no wanted of them and we see them in closeup
idea what's —
after closeup. Some of the people in the audience assume that the direc-
tor is hip and knows what he's doing, so they resolve their embarrass-
ment in chuckling.

1. thelo letter writers who have asked why I haven't reviewed

Betrayal, the answer is: Because I couldn't sit through it. My body
wouldn't let me. The best I can do is explain why. In the very first
images, people were leaving a party, and I wanted to go off with them
rather than go into the hideously proper upper-middle-class house where
the party givers were obviously going to be full of hate for each other.
Inside, the wife was was watching her. She
tidying up, and the husband
slapped him, and he slapped her right back. She sat down in despair, then
got up when their child, who had awakened, came in. I was already
overdosed on Pinter, and the dialogue hadn't even started. I stayed long

14
 —

enough to learn that the three characters are engaged in semi-parasitic

cultural work: the husband is a publisher, the lover a literary agent, the
woman an art dealer. So we know what Pinter thinks of them right off
the bat. And, as usual, Pinter's drama is in the pecking order, which
keeps shifting. I was surrounded by a quiet, attentive audience. People
were listening to the ping-ponging vocal rhythms as if to be certain of
not missing a single sinister nuance. As if you couldl Every grim, frozen
syllable is lobbed into your lap, along with Pinter's patented pauses
those ticktock silences that (famously) reverberate with what isn't said.
The three actors all had the stricken look that is proper to a Pinter play;
he doesn't bother writing about anyone who's alive. And there's nothing
else going on in this movie —once you've noticed how ugly the lamps are,
you're left with the stiff, stilted talk that's so calculated it's a parody.

If the lines ever overlapped, it would be cataclysmic. This story of adul-

tery told backward is a perfectly conventional corpse of a play given a
ceremonious funeral on the screen. It's from Beckett by way of Terrence

Rattigan. Maybe not even from Beckett. When I deserted my post, the
husband was acting superior and malevolent (in the Ian Holm game-
playing manner), and the lover was being callow, and their eyes were
darting as each watched the other's reactions. And I had got to the point
of staring at their thin brown lips and wondering if the two actors had
been made up with the same lipstick.
July 11, 1983

HYSTERICS

1 Ihe banner line on the ad for The Survivors, the new Michael
and Walter Matthau, says, "Once
Ritchie film, starring Robin Williams
You could die laughing." The
they declare war on each other, watch out.
advertisers might as well be saying, "We dare you to see this dud."

15
Everything about the pubhcity campaign for the picture has been at this
(From time to time, you'll read about how a strikingly clever trailer
level.

or a TV commercial helped to sell a movie, but nobody writes about the

ones that repel audiences the way a plague warning would.) I doubt if
there's any way that the public perception of The Survivors can be
turned around, but some people may discover the movie when it gets to
HBO and the networks. (That's how a lot of people discovered Ritchie's
Smile. ) The Survivors isn't about two men declaring war on each other;
it's about two New Yorkers without anything in common who become

friends. The advertisers probably didn't know what to do with it because

it's a comedy for grownups. That may strike them as a contradiction in

terms: all comedies are now presumed to be fodder for adolescents

(unless they have the runaway charm or star appeal of a Tootsie). I don't
mean to suggest that adults will necessarily like The Survivors I have—
—
several good friends who hated it but simply that it isn't shaped for the
teen-age market.
The Survivors may be too unpredictable for some people. There's
a unconventional humor in the writing, by Michael Leeson. (This
lot of

is his first movie credit; he won awards for his work on the TV series

"Taxi.") Leeson and Michael Ritchie may compound each other's faults:
Leeson doesn't appear to be experienced in building a plot to a climax,
and Ritchie {Downhill Racer, The Candidate, The Bad News Bears,
—
Semi-Tough) tends to be at his sharpest and most involved in diver- —
tissements on a theme, rather than on the theme itself. This slapstick
social satire may have needed someone more square than either of them
to give it a center. The movie flits about, and there are spots where a
viewer might nod off, but I enjoyed a surprising amount of it, and I think
that Robin Williams' work in it transcends the film's flaws.
Williams plays Donald, a junior executive who gets fired on the
same day that Matthau, as Sonny Paluso, the owner of a service station,
loses his business. They meet at a lunch counter, where each man is
trying to drown his sorrow in a cup of coffee. Being fired seems to have
thrown a switch in Donald's skull, and when a masked holdup man (Jerry
Reed) tries to rob the coffee shop he puts up such a squawk that Paluso
goes to his aid, and together they disarm the bandit and, briefly, become
media heroes. The whole experience of being fired and feeling helpless
in front of the armed robber and getting on television turns Donald's
head. He becomes gun-crazy, buys an arsenal, and goes off for a course
of training in survival tactics at a camp in New England; he wants to
learn how to be violent, so he can live in the wild and protect himself
when the social order collapses. The comedy is in the contrasting natures

i6
 a

of Donald and Paluso. Everything surprises Donald. He's a sweet-

natured hysteric who overresponds to every stimulus. He has the ner-
vous system of an infant; the transitions between mood changes aren't
visible —he doesn't consider, he reacts. Paluso is the opposite. Nothing
surprises him; he gives the impression of having learned all there is to
know about survival (in the big city) long ago. He's cautious and jaun-
diced, with the kind of cynicism that used to be ascribed to Manhattan
cabbies. And when the would-be robber (a sociopath with delusions of
being a big-time hitman and of having killed Jimmy Hoffa) is released
from custody and goes after the two men, Paluso tries to get Donald to
— —
behave rationally i.e., cravenly so they won't both be killed.
The best thing about this framework is that it permits Robin Wil-
liams to be himself and yet to be Donald. He acts with an emotional
purity that I can't pretend to understand. Williams expostulates all

through the movie; he sputters out his short-circuited thoughts. He

seems to be free-associating twenty-four hours a day; you know that his
mind is racing even when he sleeps. And this seems false
spritzing never
or prepared. He spritzes in character. It's like a child's stream of con-
sciousness: you see him making mad comparisons and landing from
mental leaps, but you never see him take off. A lot of the comedy comes
from his being a grownup with this ranting little kid inside him.
One of the few times Donald slows down is when he's on TV doing
an "editorial reply" and discussing crime and criminals. His squashed
rubber face is intent. He has a veneer of reasonableness and he articu-
lates impeccably, but what he says is carefully thought out gob-
bledygook. Smiling into the TV camera, with a clenched-teeth smile —
cross between a grin and a grimace —he has a faintly gloating expres-
sion, as if he's sitting on something and wants to keep it a secret. This
is —
one of several monologues each different in emotional tone that he —
delivers in the picture. There's a great one in a telephone booth up in the
woods; when he goes into the booth we know what he's going to do but
we don't know how, and so we're like eager connoisseurs of lunacy. At
this point, Donald feels he has become a master of gunmanship and the
martial arts; he has an assurance we've never seen before as he reaches
for the phone and sneeringly challenges the crazy robber to come up and
fight it out. I don't think I've ever heard just one side of a sneering
dialogue before. It's much funnier than hearing both: the macho brag-
gadocio in a void is clearly nutty. Donald is turning himself on; he
emerges from the booth triumphant.
Throughout most of the picture, Williams' Donald is a child in panic
who needs to be soothed. (Sometimes he looks as if his teeming little

17
head is about to burst.) The soothing is Matthau's function, and he gives
a quiet, old pro's performance; he rehes on his winces and his sleepy
slouch, and he can't get in much trouble with that. But there's nothing
particularly funny in the way he takes Donald's scrambled conversa-
tions in his stride. Matthau can't be budged —
even Robin Williams can't
budge him. The other characters in the movie are all loco, and Paluso's
thinking man's strategy for survival in the city cowardice would — —
come across as loco, too, if Matthau didn't seem so grand and imperturb-
able. Actually, it's more than that: he's implacable, and that's a little
dreary. There are other weaknesses. The revelation that the leader of
the survivalist camp is a phony and a con man is too easy a way to
dispose of what he represents. (Besides, para-fascists who are honest to
the bone are much scarier.) And the plot, for symmetry, could use consid-
erably more of the third key character —^Jerry Reed's bullying thug; we
need to know more of what's going on inside his handsome hard head.
Reed (better known as a country musician) has a fine maniacal presence
here, and his performance is so promising that I regretted that there
wasn't more for him to do. That was also true for several of the actresses
— especially Kristen Vigard, as Paluso's sixteen-year-old daughter,
whose spacy mixture of knowingness and childishness adds up to some
new configuration that superficially, at least, resembles sanity. The
movie does a pretty fair job of demonstrating that the way things are
now you'd have to be wacko to be sane. And Robin Williams carries it
along by his cock-a-doodle-doo eagerness. He uses his hairy, broad-
chested, no-neck body for the naked ''universal" emotions that mimes
strive for, and he achieves them (in a speeded-up form) without attaching
big labels to them. He may be that rarity, a fearless actor.

Rod Serling TV
'hen stories like the ones that were told on the
show "The Twilight Zone" grow become Borges fables meta-
up, they —
physical hoodwinks. I didn't expect (or want) Twilight Zone The Movie —
to be Borgesian, but I did rather hope that John Landis, Steven Spiel-
—
berg, Joe Dante, and George Miller the four young directors who are
—
paying homage to the TV series would tease us with more artful maca-
bre games than the ones of the old shows. It's a naive (and dubious) sort
of tribute that sets out to do essentially the same thing with the implicit
expectation of doing it better; what they've given us is simply a remake.

i8
The which ran from late 1959 to 1964, and have been in
original shows,
rerun ever since, were ingenious partly because of how economically
they got their effects. There were few characters sometimes no more —
than two, or even one, and rarely more than eight or nine. They were
ordinary people — little guys, anonymous Americans —and the meagrely
furnished shows had a sort of cardboard realism. This was cottage-
industry sci-fi fantasy. For the first two seasons, the half-hour shows
were budgeted at sixty thousand dollars each; that meant one day for
rehearsal and three days for shooting. (The budget sometimes got so
tight that for a while the directors weren't allowed to use film; they had
to use videotape —
which in its early years was a miserable medium and —
stage the shows the way live television plays were staged.) By necessity,
the mysterious was made homey, almost comforting. Sometimes it might
seem as if Rod Serling's message were that the U.S.A. was so demo-
cratic that demons visited even the common man. Serling was always
trying to make a statement about the human condition; it generally
turned into a lesson in how to be a good neighbor. The shows —there are
a hundred and fifty-six of them —packaged an endearingly corny mix-
ture of supernaturalism and civics. There are probably millions of people
who as kids learned the cliches from "The Twilight Zone."
The new movie takes off like a breeze, with Dan Aykroyd and Albert
Brooks —hitchhiker and driver— in a car at night on a dark country road,
passing the time by playing trivia games, quizzing each other about the
theme music for old TV series, and inevitably getting to "The Twilight
Zone." Written and directed by John Landis, this prologue is a beauty,
but the happy rush of fright we get from it has to sustain us for a long
stretch, because the first two episodes are embarrassments. The first,
which was suggested by some of the old shows (rather than adapted
from them, like the three others), is a painfully blunt sermon on the evils
of racism and prejudice. The central character, a loudmouthed bigot, is
played by Vic Morrow, who, along with two Vietnamese- American chil-
dren, was killed in a helicopter accident during the filming; that may be
why we don't get the turnaround that we expect when this — bigot, after
experiencing the terrifying plight of being a Jew trapped by the Nazis
in occupied Paris, and a black chased by a lynch mob
in the South, and

a Vietnamese gunned down by would metamorphose

G.I.s in a paddy,
into a decent person. I assume that the moviemakers considered the
possibility of dropping this segment, but that its writer-director, Landis,
who was co-producer (with Spielberg) of the whole film, probably felt
that it —
would be a memorial to Vic Morrow that he wouldn't have
wanted his last performance to be scrapped. It is, after all, a starring

19
role in one-fourth of an A-budget movie. And there's nothing the matter
with his scowHng bad-guy performance, except there's no shading in it

—that would probably have come with the twist.

The episode has no real ending, but that isn't what makes it so awful.
What does is that the production is overscaled for its dinky, dull idea.
Probably the quality that makes the original shows tolerable is their
bareness; their emptiness is eerily restful, and viewers extend good will
to Rod Serling's preaching because of the amateurish, tacky, school-play
look. The black-and-white photography doesn't suggest the sixties it's —
an indefinite past, a synthesis of thirties and forties and fifties, when
everybody was Eisenhower-gray. Here, as soon as we see crowds on the
screen and elaborate camera setups, Landis's thin pretext of a script
collapses. With big colored images on a movie screen, and even images of
Vietnam, the characters, who talk like throwbacks to that gray age, don't
make any sense. This section is like an unconscious parody of the old
shows; its straightness is a deadweight on the viewer's head.
In some ways, the lump of ironclad whimsy directed by Spielberg,
which follows, is a worse embarrassment. It's about how through their
willingness to engage in youthful play a group of people in a home for
the aged become children again (which the moviemakers regard as a
great break for them). And as if the whole idea (it's adapted from the
1962 show ''Kick the Can," written by George Clayton Johnson) weren't
darling enough, a good-fairy black man, played by Scatman Crothers,
has been added, so that he can bare his choppers and smile angelically
for what certainly feels like eternity. (A friend commented, "I guess
we're going to have to accept Song of the South as another of Steven
Spielberg's formative experiences.") There are a few pleasant jokes
involving the old people's voices, which they carry over into their new
kiddiehood. (Selma Diamond's whiny, nasal rasp is a perfect match for

the comes out of.) But this is a coy and twinkling piece of
little girl it

work. Having become children, the people can go back to their aged
—
bodies with "fresh young minds" like the sugarpuss minds of the
moviemakers who worked on this segment? With the gloppy rich music,
and what might be (laughingly) described as the ensemble acting, the
tone here is sentimental-comic, and horribly slick. It's as if Steven Spiel-
berg had sat down and thought out what he could do that would make
his detractors happiest.
The third segment, directed by Joe Dante, from a script by Richard
Matheson, is loosely based on the 1961 show "It's a Good Life," from a
short story by Jerome Bixby. It's a risky attempt at using a style derived
from animated cartoons for an insidious, expressionist effect, and after

2(0
the two latent parodies it's a relief to see something that —unresolved
—
as it is is at least clearly and unmistakably a parody. There are so many
startling good things in it —
one of them is the alert, graceful Kathleen
—
Quinlan as a strong-willed young schoolteacher that I wish it were
fully successful, but the half hour seems long. Matheson, who wrote a
number of the original shows, hasn't lived up to his own formulation that
"the ideal 'Twilight Zone' started with a really smashing idea that hit
you right in the first few seconds; then you played that out, and you had
a little flip at the end. That was the structure." There's more than one
smashing idea here; there's also a misleading prelude, and then the ideas
(which don't quite complement each other) pop up, hit you, and recede.
No one seems to have known how to get this segment started, and it
dwindles away, as if no one knew how to finish it, either. (It badly needs
a little flip.) The theme is how horrible life might be if a ten-year-old boy
(Jeremy Licht) could run everything just as he liked, on the basis of what
he has learned from TV, and this may be too fertile a subject for the
half-hour form; there are also too many different kinds of parody (mostly
of television and of acting, but also of American child-centered family
life) buzzing around in the material.

This Looney Tunes segment is eccentric and unsettling; it has a

couple of spooky images —
one of the boy's mute older sister, who has
had her mouth wiped off her face (so she can't talk back to him), and one
of a cartoon rabbit who is skinned and fanged. He could give you the
screaming meemies. And there are some tingles. For example, we catch
a glimpse of the isolated house (where most of the action takes place)
in a TV cartoon, and this house —
Victorian, with a parking lot has a —
long hallway that's a cartoon version of the passageways in The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari There may even be a tingle in the fact that Kevin
McCarthy, who plays the boy's guffawing Uncle Walt, has an obvious
affinity for cartoon-style acting, and his big jaw and huge teeth look just
right here. And a little bell rings when we meet the boy's family, because
we already know them and their double takes from the cheery, bland
characters these actors have played in family-centered sitcoms; it's a
while before we recognize that they're so frightened they're hysterical.
The notion of the boy's controlling people and turning them into two-
dimensional figures in a cartoon world is powerfully creepy; somebody
has slipped acid into our lemonade. Joe Dante and his helpers (one of
them is the animator Sally Cruikshank) have created an insane atmo-
sphere, and for those people in the audience whose childhood included
a TV set that was always going this half hour may reawaken all sorts
of childhood feelings. Dramatically it doesn't work, but the pieces are

21
almost all there and you can put it together afterward; it's better when
you think it over than when you're watching it.

Matheson up to his formula for an ideal "Twilight Zone" in the

lives

fourth episode, which is a reworking of his script for the 1963 "Night-
mare at 20,000 Feet," and, with the Australian George Miller (the direc-
tor of The Road Warrior) in charge and John Lithgow as star, the result
is a classic shocker of the short form —
something that ranks with the
Alberto Cavalcanti segment of Dead of Night, the one with Michael
Redgrave as the ventriloquist. Miller can't get any distance from his
subject: almost all the action takes place in the confines of a plane during
a storm, and most of it in the tight space where Lithgow, as Valentine,
isseated squirming and wriggling, sick with fear. The whole episode is
about this one passenger's freaking out. (Redgrave's ventriloquist was
coming apart, too, and Matheson and Miller may be paying their respects
to Dead of Night by including among the passengers a little girl with
a ventriloquist's dummy.) Working within strict spacial limits, and with
Lithgow almost always on camera, Miller builds the kind of immediacy
and intensity that Spielberg built at the high points of Jaws. Miller's
images rush at you; they're fast and energizing. And it's in no sense a
putdown to say that the short format is perfect for him. The mechanical
virtuosity he sustains here would be too overwhelming in a full-length
—
movie it would seem inhuman. Here, Lithgow makes everything credi-
ble. You're never aware of his pumping himself up; hysteria seems to

come naturally to him. He does something that's tough for an actor to

do: he shows fear without parodying it and yet makes it horrifyingly
funny to us. And when you see an actor with this kind of finesse working
inside such bizarre material, the finesse itself is outlandish and makes
us laugh.
John Lithgow is six foot four, and he's built large, and cuddly, like
a Teddy bear. Onscreen (and on the stage, too), he has a special gift for
far-out characters, such as the transsexual Roberta Muldoon in Garp.
Lithgow domesticates flakes; he lets us observe which screws are loose
and which are fixed firmly in place. Valentine, the respectable author of
a book on computer microchips, is about as far out as a role can get.
Valentine has been shaking too much to shave; he has soft stubble on
his chin. Those who are subject lo anxiety attacks may have a double
anxiety attack when they recognize that an attack is starting. Valentine
is soaked in cold sweat. He isn't fat, but he's fleshy, and when the sweat

pours he's like —

an animal in terror a baby-faced ox. And he's writhing
with shame because he can't control himself. He knows that the other
passengers and the stewardesses (who had to help him back to his seat

22
 —

after he'd panicked in the John) think he's distraught, and maybe they
think he's crazy. What else would account for the squalling sounds he
has been making, or the way he has been twisting himself on the tiny
seat, like a human pretzel? And now, looking out his window, he thinks
he sees a form outside, skittering about on the wing of the plane. Peering
through the wind and the heavy, sleeting rain, he can't be sure if it's an
animal or a person. The other people on the plane look where he points
and see nothing. Can it be just an illusion —a projection of his fear?
Abject and humiliated as he is, sedated by the head stewardess and
trying to act rational, he nevertheless has a compulsion to see what's out
there. He lifts his drawn window shade. The shadowy gremlin is attack-
ing the plane, clawing at the wing and tearing out an engine.
Lithgow's performance is like a seizure; the art is in the way he
orchestrates it emotionally. With his white face all scrunched up, and
anxiety burning out his brain, he takes us with him every step of the
way, from simple fear to dementia to stupor, and every step is funny.
Valentine never stops embarrassing himself. It's a comic orgy of terror.
July 25, 1983

ANYBODY HOME?

\elig, the new picture by Woody Allen, is a lovely small com-

edy, but it can't bear the weight of the praise being shovelled on it. If

it's a masterpiece, it's a masterpiece only of its own kind; it's like an
example of a nonexistent genre, or a genre from another country
something mildly eerie that feels Eastern European, about a man who's
on the verge of disappearing and finally he does. Allen had a vertiginous,
original idea for a casual piece, like his Madame Bovary story, and he
worked it out to perfection. The film has a real shine, but it's like a teeny
 —

carnival that you may have missed — it was in the yard behind the Metho-
dist church last week. Insignificance is even its subject.
The son of an Orthodox Jewish actor, Leonard Zelig (played by
Allen) wants to be safe, accepted, liked; being a nothing himself, he takes
on the characteristics of whatever strong personalities he comes in con-
tact with. In the faddist twenties, his freakish transformations (which
are beyond his conscious control) make him a celebrity he becomes the —
rage. The movie, which is in the form of a documentary about Zelig, the

Human Chameleon, is worked out meticulously, using trick effects that

put Allen into old newsreels and stock footage, as well as into expertly
faked footage that looks old. Mia Farrow, who, like Woody Allen, is seen
only in simulated found bits of film, plays a young psychiatrist. Dr.
Eudora Fletcher, who tries to cure Zelig, and, falling in love with him,
isloyal even when the press and the public turn against him. And this
mock documentary, which is an intricately layered parody, includes in-
terviews "today" with people who knew him, including the elderly
Eudora (played by Ellen Garrison), who reminisces about him, in her
levelheaded way. And it has its guest-star savants. In a takeoff of Reds,
—
Allen uses modern cultural figures such as Susan Sontag, Irving
—
Howe, Saul Bellow, Bruno Bettelheim as "witnesses" to Zelig's career,
and they each interpret that career in terms of their specialty. (A few
of them are perhaps too self-aware —too smiley about satirizing their
own But Woody Allen has got one thing exactly right: as soon as
ideas.
they talk abstractions we tune out on what they're saying.)
in

The picture is thoroughly charming. It's quick and deft and it races
along. I admired the delicate care with which it was made, I kept smiling
happily, and I laughed out loud once, at something so silly I wasn't sure
why it got to me. But when I see comparisons with Citizen Kane in the
papers, I don't know what the writers are talking about. When you went
to the movies in the pre-television days the picture would come on right
after the newsreel. And at the end of the newsreel in Citizen Kane the
picture does start up. At the end of the newsreel in Zelig, the picture is
over. I felt good, but I was still a little hungry for a movie. There's a

reason Zelig seems small: there aren't any characters in it, not even
Zelig. It's a fantasy about being famous for being nobody. Zelig is played
humbly and gracefully; Woody Allen never disrupts the movie's smooth,
neutral surfaces —at times he's as meek and abashed as Stan Laurel.
Even when Zelig has taken on the black skin of a jazz trumpeter, or the
blubber of a fatty, or the profile of a Mohawk Indian, he isn't really
strong or sure of himself. There's something frail and shy —and still

about him in any guise. He's emotionally mute.

24
 an end-of-the-alphabet man, the one who comes last, and he's
Zelig is

so anonymous that he can be everywhere. He melts into any situation.

Yet whether he's on the field at spring training in Florida waiting his
turn at bat after Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth, or innocently causing a
fracas by showing up next to Pope Pius XI on the balcony at St. Peter's,
or peeking from behind Hitler on the stage at a giant National Socialist
Party rally, he's always looking into a camera, looking for himself. The
movie is so densely about a man's obsession with himself —with his
misfortune, his nothingness —that it's suffocatingly sad to think about.
(Maybe that's why it suggests an Eastern European sensibility.) One of
the newsreel announcers tells us that Zelig continues to "astound scien-
tists" who observe his transformations, and for a while eminent doctors
use him like a guinea pig; his half sister takes him away, and she and
her husband put him in sideshows, exhibiting him as a freak, like the
Elephant Man. We see him at one zero point when the doctors are
conducting experiments on him: He's sitting by himself in a hallway, "a
human cipher," eating a hard, unbuttered roll that has been handed to
him. People walk past on their errands without registering his existence;
he barely registers it. Woody Allen is poignant here in the way that
Chaplin was often poignant, and it's creepy, because you feel that these
rich, gifted, accomplished writer-director-comedians who have won their
artistic freedom, who have many friends and are attractive to lovers,
who are admired the world over, are showing you the truth of how at
some level they still feel utterly alone and lost, like wormy nothings. And
you don't know how to react to it. Zelig is fastidiously controlled and dry,
but at the core —that lonely figure chewing dutifully, without pleasure
— it's bathed Yet that, too, is presented fastidiously.
in tears.

This film an unusually gentle, modulated comedy. It could be

is

rambunctious, what with Zelig having not just one but two ticker-tape
welcomes to New York, and inspiring Jazz Age songs and dance crazes,
and all of this coming to us as part of the stylized, hyperbolic past that
we see in old newsreels. But Allen plays everything off against Zelig's
sad nothingness. It's an ingenious stunt. Like the unbuttered-roll scene,
which is totally visual (its strength comes from the placement of the
walkers-by camera), the whole movie has been thought
in relation to the

out in terms of the film image, turning American history into slapstick
by inserting this little lost sheep in a corner of the frame. (The effect is
something like what you get when you read Ragtime. ) Allen couldn't
have told the story of Leonard Zelig any other way the pathos would —
have been crushing. It's the fakery that dries it out and keeps it light.
Zelig is always just glimpsed, and the movie darts on. It's incredibly

25
artful; it's all touches — like the enlightened-modern-woman expression
on Eudora's face as she publicly smokes a cigarette. The clothes, the
paraphernalia seem exactly right yet funny the care that has gone into —
the trivia is itself absurd. The movie is said to be about modern man's
anxiety and his quest for identity, about conformism, the emptiness of
celebrity, the fickleness of the public, etc. And it is about all these
themes, but it's very "real"; you don't have to have read Kafka or
worried about existential predicaments to get it.

Zelig has a literary precursor — Melville's Confidence Man, whose

appearance also kept changing, but Zelig is the Confidence Man without
a game (and without the author's passion). Zelig has relatives, too, such
as Chekhov's Olga, in "The Darling," who changes to suit her husbands,
and Toto, in the Zavattini-De Sica film Miracle in Milan, who tries to
make physically afflicted people feel better by imitating their afflictions.
Woody Allen's originality is in shafting the almost universally accepted
idea that everyone is someone. His movie is a chiding demonstration that
everyone is not someone. That's real subversion. (At least a third of all

Tin Pan Alley lyrics may be shot to hell.) Allen doesn't build up any rage
about it, or much hilarity, either. Even the hysteria that might be ex-
pected to accompany such drastic role confusion as Zelig's is missing;
Zelig' s nothingness is simply a given —an idea that Woody Allen gets to
play with. And he puts it through its permutations.
At one level, the picture is a skewed fairy tale about a patient
winning his shrink: she's the best person in the world, she cares for you,
she's faithful to you and follows you all over the globe to help you. And
the movie is at its most inventive and its wittiest, I think, when Mia
Farrow's Eudora is having difficulty treating Zelig because he, with his
adaptation mechanism, thinks that he, too, is a psychiatrist. She devises
a strategy to get through to him. Since she cannot convince him that he
isn't one, she does it indirectly —
she tells him that she is a sham, an
impostor, that she has been deceiving him and isn't really a psychiatrist.
Zelig is visibly upset, and we see his distress as he begins to feel that
he's an impostor, too. But her cleverness backfires: his only way of
dealing with his agitation is to disappear.
Throughout the movie, Zelig keeps disappearing, and Woody Allen's
conception of him is of a very withdrawn, recessive person. Though
Eudora pursues Zelig and there's an apparently happy resolution of his
troubles —he learns to use his disorder and, presumably, gains an iden-
tity —
that doesn't quite jibe with what we see. Mia Farrow, perhaps the
—
most thin-skinned of actresses luminously so is unearthly, weight- —
less, a Peter Pan. She has refinement in her bones. And hand in hand she

26
and Woody Allen play together with tactful ease. She has never seemed
more finely chiselled or more beautiful, but she wears huge specs and
her slender face seems to disappear behind them. She's the invisible,
shrink. I got the feeling that Woody Allen as director was changing her,
—
making her more like himself that he was making her recede. And that
she, like a chameleon, was becoming as faded and indistinct as he is. But
she also changes him. She doesn't challenge him (as Diane Keaton did
in her pictures with him); she frees him from stress, and he comes up

with fresh, delicate scenes, like the one in which, under hypnosis,
he murmurs, "I love you," and then, in a whimper, "You're the worst
cook . .those pancakes. I love you ... I want to take care of you. No
.

more pancakes." When he's with her, they're both childlike, withdrawn,
far away. The whole picture goes by so fast and the people are at such
a remote distance that it seems evanescent, and though the aged Eudora
is still around to be interviewed, Zelig seems to have vanished evapo- —
rated. He should be back, though. The term "Zelig" will probably enter
the language to describe all the nonpersons we meet.

A
'ill Miner is one of nature's noblemen. His hair and his thick

mustache are turning white; his face is weathered, and his eyes are
bright pale blue. They shine with joy of life, and he makes us feel that
we can read his emotions in them. This is the sort of outdoors face that
inspires trust, a face with "character." (It's amazing how often con
artists have this clear-eyed, guileless look — it helps to account for the
way voters are taken in by the snake-oil salesmen they elect to office.)

The Grey Fox opens in 1901, when

Miner (Richard Farnsworth) is
Bill

released after thirty-three years in San Quentin. He had been let out
twice before, in 1870 and again in 1880, but had barely sniffed free air
when he got into trouble again and was returned to prison, where he
served his full time. (He might have been eligible for parole if he hadn't
continually tried to escape.) Now he's a living anachronism, a legendary
stagecoach bandit —the outlaw whom William Pinkerton, the head of the
notorious agency, credited with initiating the "Hands up!" — released
call
into the twentieth century.
There may never have been photographs of trains more exultant
than the shots here of the old Northern Pacific steaming through moun-
tain forests. This mechanical chugging, rolling beast makes its own

27
cloud formations as it Miner north to the Puget Sound area
carries Bill
to see his sister. A courteous old gentleman, Miner has no reason (yet)
to hide his background, and when a fellow-passenger, a drummer selling
a labor-saving gadget, a mechanical apple peeler, asks him what line he's
in, he replies that he's "between jobs," and when he's asked what he did,

he says, "I robbed stagecoaches."

The Grey Fox isn't a lament for the last of a breed. Miner isn't
hostile to the new technology that has antiquated him —
he's fascinated
by it, and he buys an apple peeler. In this movie, the objects that repre-
sent twentieth-century ingenuity and "progress" are infused with the
wonder they had for the people who first set eyes on them. In 1903,
Miner, who has been working for a living and feeling degraded by it, as
if he'd stooped beneath his class, goes into a Seattle nickelodeon and sees

his first movie. It's The Great Train Robbery, and it transforms his life.
We see the light from the screen on his face as he realizes that there is
a way for him to adapt his professional expertise to the new era. One
man in the theatre can't contain his enthusiasm; he's so charged up that
he jumps to his feet and fires his gun. Miner's exhilaration takes a
quieter form; his eyes are dancing, but he's thinking. When the picture
is over, he goes directly to a store to buy a Colt revolver, and we see the
gleaming dark metal as he touches it, feels its heft, spins the cylinder.
The way the cinematographer, Frank Tidy, lights the Colt you see the
beauty in its deadly craftsmanship. And Miner respects it as the tool of
his trade; with this small, compact gun a man is grandly equipped to cry
"Hands up!"
There were sixty-three train robberies recorded in the United States
and Canada between 1870 and 1933. (Movies and TV have, of course,
made us feel as if there were thousands.) Thirty-three of them took place
— —
before 1914 the year Bill Miner died and he was definitely responsible
for six of these, and was probably involved in a few others. He was only
sixteen, in 1863, when he robbed his first Pony Express, but he was about
sixty when he robbed his first train. So he had to be a busy, agile old
fellow. He was also dignified and smart, and he never killed anybody. In
British Columbia, where he fled after the Pinkertons got on his tail, he
became a folk hero — the Gentleman Bandit, the Grey Fox. For a period,
he lived there, pretending to be a mining engineer, in and around a town
called Kamloops.
This first feature directed by Phillip Borsos (at twenty-seven, after
a number of highly regarded documentaries) is based on a script by John
Hunter that stays fairly close to the historical accounts. It concentrates
on Miner's stay in Kamloops, where he came to know a cultivated

28
 —

woman, a free-lance photographer whose life was to be entwined with

his. He's in the local newspaper office when he first sees Kate Flynn, a
suffragette and "free spirit," with thick curly auburn hair that's like
frazzled brain waves pushing against her ladylike big hat. She is telling
off the editor for his refusal to print a letter she has written to him about
women's not being paid what men are for the same jobs. At first, Jackie
Burroughs, the celebrated Canadian stage actress who plays the role, is
a little irritating, as if she's trying for the mannered spunk of Katharine
Hepburn but is slipping down to Cloris Leachman. She very quickly
maybe it's Kate's awareness of her own foolishness, maybe it's her big,
—
toothy, sensual smile won me over. Also, I realized how badly the
—
movie needs Jackie Burroughs' flamboyance she gives it some artifice,
and some musk. Richard Farnsworth, who was born in Los Angeles in
1920 (and has a definite resemblance to the actual Bill Miner), was a
stuntman for more than thirty years in Hollywood, until he began to get
—
speaking parts in the seventies the best known is that of the arthritic
ranch hand in Comes a Horseman who needs a kitchen chair to mount
his horse. (He was recommended to the Canadians who made this movie
by Coppola, and it is presented under the aegis of his Zoetrope Studios.)
Farnsworth is a superb camera subject, and I don't think we ever feel
that he isn't doing enough here. He has an almost lewd, secretive grin
and a lulling sexual presence. He can certainly play cagey. But Jackie
Burroughs is an actress and accessible; Farnsworth is an icon and inac-
cessible. His acting is almost all in the way he attracts the camera, and
—
without Jackie Burroughs to spark things the two of them do some
—
highly photogenic flirting the picture might be too stately. (It might,
in fact, seem like a silent film.) In their first encounter, at the newspaper

office, Kate exits telling the editor that he has "the mentality of a gro-

cery clerk," and the editor proves she's on target by saying, "Nothing
wrong with her a husband wouldn't fix." Actually, it's what's right with
her that a man would probably try to fix, and though Miner's eyes glisten
in response to her anger at social injustice, when they become lovers she

is more subdued (which seems to prove the editor right), and her role

diminishes. The picture could have used more of her warmth, and addi-
tional scenes between the two. One problem: the scriptwriter doesn't fill
in the historical gaps in Miner's life, so we never find out how he became

this civilized, sensitive man or a lover who would appreciate this free-
—
thinking woman. Even plot points such as how the Pinkertons track
—
him to Kamloops aren't filled in.
Though the influence of The Great Train Robbery in altering the
—
course of Miner's life is just an entertaining supposition and I rather

29
doubt if the canny Bill Miner we see here needed a movie to show him
the true path —Borsos returns to footage from it toward the end of The
Grey Fox, when a pursuit scene from the 1903 film (shot in the forests
of New Jersey) is intercut with Miner's attempted escape from a posse.
I think it's too obtrusive a device; it interposes the filmmakers' intentions
between us and the and it turns The Grey Fox into some sort of
story,
mystical tribute to movie mythology and the photographic image
(though the scenes from The Great Train Robbery are run in wide-
screen). It's almost as if Borsos and his collaborators were saluting
themselves. But I doubt if any of this really bothers anybody, because
there's so much to look at.
Frank Tidy, who is British, has the cinematographer's credit on
Ridley Scott's The Duellists, and his work here is equally spectacular.
This picture has the most lovingly photographed rain since McCabe &
Mrs. Miller, and there are wonderful scenes with snow on frozen dark-
green grass. The images are dense and ceremonious. Even the extras
and bit players have the air of awkward formality that we associate with
an earlier era; the men got up in old Mounties uniforms stand stiffly, as
if the coarse wool were itching them. The actress who plays the sister

isn't well directed, and her plucked eyebrows may make you think of a

"What's wrong with this picture?" contest. And Jackie Burroughs wears
modern eye makeup with her period clothes. But the whole movie has
a sense of occasion. As a Western, it isn't as much fun as last year's
Barbarosa; it isn't fulfilled dramatically. But then it isn't exactly a
Western. Borsos replaces the familiar landscapes of Hollywood West-
erns with his own interpretation of the Pacific Northwest. The story of
the "badman" is told by means of historical facsimiles and through the
use of authentic-looking locations that suggest the damp chill of the
British angry-young-working-class-hero films circa 1960. The shots often
have the stabbing eloquence of old photographs — especially those of
starved, underpaid workers.
Unlike the conventional Western, The Grey Fox gives honest hard
work a bad name. When Miner reaches the farm of his sister and her
husband, he earns his keep by picking oysters from the Puget Sound
mud flats, and it's bleak drudgery. You feel as if the row of rain-soaked
pickers must have chilblains right through to their souls. And each job
Miner gets is grinding misery; the employers are mean, petty exploiters,
cheating their workers in every way they can. When the Kamloops police
corporal (Timothy Webber) asks Kate Flynn to take a picture, it's of the
slaughtered family of a Chinese worker —
presumably he couldn't feed
them and killed them to end their suffering. (The movie is like the book

30
Wisconsin Death Trip with a romantic bandit as its center.) Miner
acquires the confederates he needs for his holdups as if he were bestow-
ing the gift of independence on them. After a robbery, Shorty (Wayne
Robson), a stumpy Uttle boozer Miner has Hberated from exploitation in
a lumber mill, can't believe his luck —he's got real money, even if they
have to bury it for a while. Much of the movie is tinged with irony, but
Borsos might be a left-wing rhapsodist with flowers blossoming from his
temples. He puts a gold frame around Bill Miner without revealing a
thing about him. Borsos himself seems to be taken in by the nobility of
Miner's countenance; this old robber looks courtly even when he's steal-
ing a farmer's horse — his manner suggests regret at the incivility of his
action. In this movie, robbery is the only honorable profession for a man
of style. Borsos appears to have a dandy's approach to crime and injus-
tice, but he's an inspired image-maker. The Grey Fox somehow manages
to be an art Western without making you hate it.

August 8, 1983

FRAMED

m
^et on an idyllic English estate in the summer of 1694, The
Draughtsman's Contract was written and directed by Peter Greena-
way, a British filmmaker whose previous work was in non-narrative
forms, and though he's working with narrative here, the film is a formal-
ist tease —a fantasia of conceits about perspective, and about the rela-
tionship between the artist, his art, and the world. The artist in this case
is a punctilious draughtsman, Mr. Neville (Anthony Higgins), who lives

in one manor house after another, producing, for the owners, a series of
topographical drawings of their holdings. The matronly Mrs. Herbert
(Janet Suzman) requests him to come to the Herbert estate to do twelve
drawings in twelve days as a present for her husband (who will be off

31
whoring in Southampton). Mr. Neville demurs, but she presses him and
he accepts her offer —
on condition that he will have "the use" of her
body. She agrees, and the contract is drawn up and signed. Upon his
arrival,he takes out his optical grid and, looking through the attached
view-finder (as if he were a movie director), selects his twelve vistas of
the house and grounds, and orders that on the appointed days these
views be kept free of intrusion. But when he sits down to work, unex-
pected objects —a ladder, a shirt, a pair of boots —keep marring his line
Annoyed at these blemishes on his chosen landscapes, he
of vision.
includes —
them in the drawings anyway out of a mixture of literal-
mindedness and pique. The film is designed so that we keep comparing
Neville's drawings of the grounds with the photographic images of those
grounds, and there's a definite suggestion of Antonioni's Blow-Up in the
mysterious blots, which, it turns out, are evidence of the murder of the
absent Mr. Herbert —
evidence that points to the draughtsman, the arro-
gant plebeian outsider, as the murderer.
The movie is a lesson for (or a joke on) the draughtsman, who,
limited to his single perspectives, isn't aware of what's going on. Nei-
ther —for quite a stretch— is the audience. The beginning is a Hogar-
thian vaudeville show— it's a series of comedy blackouts and al- —
though a number of clues are planted in the prissy-mouthed, cadenced
speeches about defecation and other cloacal concerns, we're not likely
to register the import of what is being said. The speeches are so arch
and twitty they seem to be pitched higher than a dog whistle, and the
people talking are popinjays in perukes shaped as geometrically as the
shrubs at Marienbad. If Last Year at Marienbad had been directed by
Joseph Losey, it might have been much like this movie, which sits on
the screen like an implacable pastry. After it's over, you may not find
it difficult to piece together the rough outlines of what Peter Greena-

way is doing, but while you're watching it you may be too busy
fighting off sleep to care. What kept me awake was the fun of seeing
perhaps a third of the audience slumbering so peacefully. (It's in an
East Side art house —nobody snores.) It seemed to me that people took
their little sabbaticals at four or five distinct times; they didn't miss
anything vital. The Draughtsman 's Contract puts you in a narcoleptic
trance even if you're paying attention. Some of its idiosyncrasies may
—
sound amusing for example, there's a naked man jumping about
from one pedestal to another, serving (as I have read that some men
actually did serve in the period) as a living statue. But Greenaway's
impishness congeals, because there's no dramatic motor in the se-
quences. A movie for him is a set of theorems to be demonstrated by

32
tableaux. His mind may be active, but his camera is dead, and so are
his actors.
If this stultifying picture is being received with the kind of respect-
ful seriousness that marked the reception of some of Losey's films (such
as The Go-Between), it may be because audiences can see it as a revela-
tion of the disgusting true natures of the landed gentry, and because it
makes everything to do with sex ugly. There must be junkies for Eng-
lish-upper-class movies (just as there are Nazi-movie junkies) people —
who want to see over and over again the gardens, the halls, the finery,
and the politesse, and, of course, the poisonous, warped behavior. No-
body has put together a more vicious, dispassionate crew of schemers
than the unproductive bunch at the Herbert establishment; their every-
day life is like a weekend in the country, and they expend their small
—
energy plotting they don't intend to lose an ounce of their privileges.
The men's faces are powdered to match their wigs, and their costumes
are so stiff and ornate I kept expecting the actors and the costumes to
disassociate and go their own ways. Mrs. Herbert and her daughter,
Mrs. Talmann (Anne Louise Lambert), who draws up her own sexual
contract, wear towering headpieces that look like skyscrapers designed
in old Cathay. There's an element of class revenge when the draughts-

man, who is garlanded in a wig of lavish black curls that puts Loretta
Lynn to shame, orders Mrs. Herbert to assume the positions that he
requires for whatever means of access strikes his whim. He pulls her
heavy brocades open contemptuously in one scene, and the poker-faced
woman may stir an empathic reaction when she comes back to her
chambers after a session with him, gagging. Intercourse has nothing to
do with pleasure here: it's about who is using whom — it's about power.
And young Mr. Neville mistakenly thinks he has some.
the foolish
The women stoop beneath their class because they're trying to hang
on to their property. Mrs. Talmann hopes to produce a male heir and save
the estate from being managed by her fool of a husband. In this movie,
as in so many other movies with an ideological slant, the poor are potent,
the rich desiccated. The virile artist, Mr. Neville, will be used, and then
punished for his effrontery. Since the characters are stylized monsters,
it's startling when Greenaway lets this victimization fantasy go the full
masochistic course. The reprisals against Mr, Neville are very fast and
brutal, and the sudden burst of Jacobean violence disrupts the film's
attempt at Restoration-comedy artifice. The violence seems to be saying,

"Did you think all this was only a game?" Of course we did, because,
despite the lurking seriousness, Greenaway's tone was so superior. Now
—
he switches to "realism" a move you might have thought beneath him.

33
What's beneath him from beginning to end is, apparently, the whole idea
of motivation. By having all the characters involved in Mr. Neville's
entrapment, he ducks out on solving the murder mystery of who killed
Mr. Herbert and who hatched the plot against the draughtsman. Greena-
way simply pins it all on the rotten upper class.
Underneath this film's mannerisms and hauteur, it's a very conven-
tional, calculating may seem closely related
movie. The surface, though,
to painting and to literature. You stare at fixed views of English gardens
and listen to remarks that sound as if the characters had rehearsed them
all day. And when Greenaway wants to introduce symbolic objects first —
—
a pomegranate and then a pineapple the characters underline the sym-
bolism. (Mr. Neville is offered what must be the most significant pineap-
ple since the Twyla Tharp dance film The Catherine Wheel. ) And precise
explicit social chatter is now highly valued by educated moviegoers; the
audience often perks up when characters talk like books, Eric Rohmer
has prepared the way, but he's light-years away from this stuff. With
Rohmer, you don't feel the chill of a metaphysician breathing down your
neck.
Greenaway (who himself did the drawings) presents the draughts-
man as a lover of landscape who is attacked and destroyed by those who
love only property. If Greenaway doesn't show Mr. Neville so much as
a twinge of sympathy, this may be because he believes he's subverting
bourgeois aesthetics by not allowing his characters any emotions beyond
vanity, greed, pettishness, and lust. Subversive or not, there's an honor-
able tradition behind this approach to character. But if you see a produc-
tion ofVolpone you know what Ben Jonson is getting at; there's nothing
abstract about it. With Greenaway, you have to contend with so many
kinds of abstraction that there's no human comedy left in the material;
he has deliberately squeezed it dry. Yet there's no clarity in the abstrac-
tions, either. When we see the landscapes through the metal grid, the
effect is perfectly pleasant, but no big perceptions jump to mind. What
the movie has to say about art and framing doesn't add up to anything
overwhelming. You can get The Draughtsman's Contract and still feel
that getting it isn't enough.

/A friend of mine does a great Sylvester Stallone —he does Stal-

lone reciting Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raisin." What can be done about

34
 —

this mock writer-director-producer-actor? He has become the stupidos'

Orson Welles. Stallone turns everything into a fight, and Staying Alive,
his sequel to John Badham's Saturday Night Fever (1977), with John
Travolta once again playing the dancer Tony Manero from Brooklyn's
Bay Ridge, is a weirdly stripped-down-for-action musical. Stallone doesn't
bother much with characters, scenes, or dialogue, and he runs out of
story in the first eight minutes. He just puts the newly muscle-plated
Travolta in front of the cameras, covers him with what looks like oil slick,

and goes for the whambams. The publicity has centered on Stallone's
—
remaking of Travolta's body getting him to pump iron and develop a
chest that's a modified version of his own. (What for? Dancers don't need
the big, body builders' muscles that Travolta has now. What would they
—
do with them lift ten-ton ballerinas?) I didn't know there was that much
the matter with Travolta's body. He looked pretty jazzy coming down
the street in Saturday Night Fever, and he wasn't a bad disco hoofer.
Now that he's all built up, he doesn't do any dance numbers that we
—
might enjoy he's too busy spinning and prancing in split-second flashes
to music that's trying to pound the audience into submission. Travolta
still has his star presence; he holds the screen more strongly than ever
—but too flagrantly, because Stallone doesn't give the other performers
a chance. Stallone has somehow projected his own narcissism on Tra-
volta, who's in danger of turning into a laughingstock if he doesn't put
some clothes on and stop posing for magazine covers as though it were
Hiawatha Night at the O.K. Corral.
Staying Alive, in which Tony gets his big break and becomes a
Broadway dancing star, is a cross between Flashdance and Rocky III.
But, in their own sleazo ways, those movies work Staying Alive
doesn't. (It works only at the box office.) Stallone is lazy: he doesn't pilfer
from out-of-the-way places. He stays on the main road from All That
Jazz via A Chorus Line, and on to Fame. And his repertory of gimmicks
is so hmited that each of his Rocky movies has essentially been a re-

make, while several sequences here are like homages to dear Rocky.
—
There's a single good idea in the movie but, maddeningly, it isn't devel-
oped. Tony has an only modestly gifted dancer girlfriend, who works as
a chorus girl; waiting for her backstage, he watches a woman dancer
(Finola Hughes), the British star of the show, and is awed by the
woman's artistry. He's suddenly hit by the aphrodisiac qualities of talent
and success; his eyes light up with excitement, and he tries to get to
know her. Since he's still struggling to become an artist, it makes perfect
sense that he would be drawn to other artists — it's evidence of the depth
of his commitment. Mediocrity would be a horrible thing to a man trying

35
 —

to become as good as he possibly could. But Stallone proceeds to turn

the woman artist into a condescending, promiscuous rich bitch. (Her
skyscraper apartment iswhere she seethes venomously.)
a deluxe lair

This way, Stallone can stick to his Rocky formula: the hero and the
heroine must both be underdogs. Tony must learn to appreciate the
qualities of his over-devoted, hardworking Jackie (rhymes with
"lackey"), who is modelled on Rocky's ever-loyal Adrian. Jackie is played
very appealingly by Cynthia Rhodes, who has a velvety singing voice,
and I kept waiting for Tony to notice that if Jackie wasn't a great dancer
she could at least sing. But Stallone seems fixated on the idea that a
driven good-Catholic boy like Tony (who wears a king-size cross around
his neck) needs an untalented woman. The details are equally repugnant.
For example, a slinky, metallic zhoom sound whooshes across the pul-
sating track now and then; it turns up first with Bob Mackie's credit for
—
some of the costumes the S-M tatters worn in the Hell scenes near the
end.And it isn't enough for Stallone to do a Hitchcock-like appearance,
—
bumping into Tony on a city street he has Tony recognize him and do
a double take.
Julie Bovasso, who once again plays Tony's mother, has a couple of
remarkable moments. She seems almost to have internalized Travolta's
face, and in one scene she and Tony, whose self-esteem is at a low point,
sit very quietly facing each other across the kitchen table, and they are
uncannily alike —mother and son, with matching anxious eyes. There's
a suggestion of a Samuel Beckett character in her despairing silence. In
another scene, Julie Bovasso, sitting in the theatre on the opening night
of Tony's Broadway show Satan's Alley —delivers a dumb line with
such pure, innocent surprise that she makes us laugh despite the awful
numbers from the show that we have been watching. Satan's Alley,
which is supposed to catapult Tony to stardom, is so close to the modern-
day Faust that is parodied in The Band Wagon that I waited for the
famous shot of that Faust laying an enormous egg, just before the
audience emerged ashen-faced, as if stricken by a wasting disease. But
Sylvester Stallone imagines that his vision of the sweaty agonies of Hell,
staged in in by what looks like heavy ground fog, is
a cellblock socked
a triumph. We movie audience are stricken, all right, but luckily
in the

we get a last-minute reprieve: about two minutes of Travolta on the

street moving to the "Stayin' Alive" music from Saturday Night Fever.
If it weren't for that, I don't know whether audiences would have the
strength to crawl out of the theatre.
Stallone was born too late and has missed his vocation. If the studio
system were still in operation, he could be the man in charge of transfor-

36
mations. Whenever the studios wanted to punish a star, they could give
him to Stallone. A Timothy Button might emerge as the Incredible Hulk;
Sissy Spacek might be built up to be a dominatrix like Lisa Lyon and
scare us all.

August 22, 1983

SEX AND POLITICS

moviegoer can vegetate fairly comfortably at Eric Rohmer's

innocuous sex roundelay Pauline at the Beach. Rohmer's psychological
observations are so precise and tiny and he is so distanced from his six
characters that the film has a cooling effect. There's no danger here of
not understanding everything the six are up to. Rohmer doesn't just

—
show you he also tells you. In fact, he tells you more than he shows
you. You listen to the chat or read the subtitles, and feel "civilized."
Rohmer has an amazing gift for finding (or creating) actors who
embody the observations that he wants to make, and, with the help of
the cinematographer Nestor Almendros, he establishes a loose, sum-
mery atmosphere that the characters fit right into. (The lighting is the
best work by Almendros that I've seen in several years.) The six convey
a sense of ordinary, ongoing life. The belle of the beach, the voluptuous
—
blond fashion designer Marion (Arielle Dombasle she was the heroine's
friend in Le Beau Mariage), is a self-centered divorcee with an unpleas-
ant tinkle in her voice. She seems to take pleasure in her own affectations
—she flirts and shoulder with a fluttering hand
coyly, touching her face
as she talks of wanting to "burn with love." Rohmer tells us what he
thinks of her by showing her walking away from the camera in a tight,
wet silver-gray bathing suit that's squeezing her: she's Venus with rear
cleavage.
The fatuous Marion does her burning with Henri (Feodor Atkine),

37
 —

a tall, suave, fortyish stud who's like a slinkier Trintignant with the
high-cheekboned sexual arrogance of a Yul Brynner. He's amused when
she lands in his bed on their first date. (The next day, she once again
—
walks away from the camera this time her bottom is center screen.)
Henri is impressed by her beauty but sees through her pretensions
she's of purely transient interest to him. Pierre (Pascal Greggory), a
handsome blond wind-surfer, has known Marion for years; he thinks that
he has earned her love by his devotion, and he can't understand why he
has never got very far with her. He hangs around her like a puppy
playing guard dog. She urges him to date Pauline (Amanda Langlet), her
dark-eyed, fifteen-year-old cousin, who has been put in her charge for a
few weeks, and she advises Pauline to gain some sexual experience by
going out with him, but Pauline finds a boyfriend on her own —Sylvain
(Simon de la Brosse), who is about her age —and without any ado they
become lovers.
The incident that creates the bedroom-farce misunderstandings is a
casual sexual matinee. While Henri is in his bedroom with a sexy work-
—
ing-class girl a candy seller from the beach (played by an actress
—
known simply as Rosette) Sylvain dashes upstairs to warn him that
Marion is on her way. Trying to spare Marion any humiliation, and
hoping to avoid a bad scene, Henri pushes the candy girl and Sylvain into
the bathroom. When Marion sees them, she assumes that the matinee
has been theirs, and eventually, through Pierre's self-righteous snitch-
ing, Pauline hears of it and is wounded.
—
We know what Rohmer thinks of Pauline her bathing suit fits her
nymphet behind snugly, with nary a wrinkle or a crease. Pauline is
natural and truthful; she hasn't learned adult subterfuges. The film
begins with a French proverb translated as "A wagging tongue bites
itself," and Pauline, who is the moral center of the movie, doesn't carry

tales. She listens to Marion deceiving herself and switching from one
attitude to another as she tries to manipulate Henri. Pauline takes in
what people say and what they do; she doesn't add to the talk with what
she has heard. Rohmer treats the lovemaking of Pauline and Sylvain as
pure and uncorrupted. And now the selfish adults, with their stupid
games, have spoiled this playful, perfect first love.
Rohmer serves it all up with exquisite control — all the low-key con-
versations and the soft sounds of the wind and of steps on gravel. The
nuances seem exactly right: there's a thin veneer of chic over everybody,
and nothing looks forced, though I wish that Henri didn't have to spell
out the limitations of Marion's physical attraction and explain that he
found the fuddlebrained candy girl sexier. But does anybody who isn't

38
 —

a senile sentimentalist really believe in these "natural" adolescents who

go to bed together without a stab of fear or self-consciousness without —
even any coaxing or promises or pimples? Rohmer's adults delude them-
selves; his children see clearly. Their love is a state of grace from which
adults fall away. Pauline at the Beach is frivolous, yet it has this phony
moral built into it. And people in the crowded theatre chuckle their
approval of Rohmer's wisdom. They seem to accept his judgment of the
characters. I don't think I've ever before seen a director score points
with an audience by treating a mature beauty's curvy behind as vulgar
and a pubescent, undeveloped girl's behind as the ideal. The movie is a
daisy chain woven by a prig. The little girl is our moral instructor.

R
off-beat quality.
or about the first fifteen minutes, Risky Business has a
At seventeen, Joel Goodsen (Tom Cruise), a virginal
lively,

and
not too smart high-school senior, is equally worried about what college
he'll get into and when and how he'll make out with a girl. His parents
go on a week's vacation, and he's left alone in their expensive ersatz-
off
Colonial house on the North Shore of Chicago. Goaded by a schoolmate,
he phones for the services of a call girl named Lana (Rebecca De Mor-
nay). Up until her arrival, Joel is desperate, horny, and ingratiating
especially when he dances by himself to a Bob Seger record. Imagining
himself a rock star dancing, he's a charmingly clunky dynamo. (At times,
he's like a shorter Christopher Reeve, and the seems to be raising
film
the question "Can nice boys be sexy?") But once Lana glides in, murmur-
ing, "Are you ready for me?," the movie shifts into an enamelled dream-
time in which this flowerlike young call girl gives the kid sinfully sweet
erotic satisfaction and helps him make a pile of money besides. The
picture becomes visually glib and so smooth that at first I assumed it
—
would all turn out to be a joke I waited for Joel to wake up. After a
while, I waited for the writer-director, Paul Brickman, to wake up. But
this languorous, glossy professionalism —
mated to jangling electronic
—
mood music by Tangerine Dream was apparently what he was after.
From Lana's entrance to the end, the film keeps its creamy-dreamy
soft-core porno look, and everything is dark and slightly unreal.
Risky Business aims to be hypnotically sexy, but it's overdeliberate
and vacuous. Directing his first feature, Brickman (who wrote Citizens
Band and the forthcoming Deal of the Century) is a control freak. He

39
 a

makes Lana's scenes with Joel as much of a turn-on as he can without

actually showing anything anatomical (he might have set out to top
Body Heat in this), but there are no incidental pleasures in Risky Busi-
—
ness there's nothing but the one thin situation. It's all Joel's rite of
passage into hipness; he grows up sexually, and financially, too, when
Lana turns him into a pimp and his home into a bordello for one big,
lucrative night. He has been attending a seminar workshop on free
enterprise; Lana makes an entrepreneur out of him. The film's point of
view is that Lana's whoring is a hot girl's practical and honest approach
to business, that her street-smart materialism is cleaner than the snob-
bish, hypocritical materialism of Joel's parents: the father with his punc-
tiliousness about his platinum Porsche, the mother with her panicky
fears about her dumb bric-a-brac, and both with their anxiety about their
son's getting into the ''right" (i.e., Ivy League) school, so he'll be on the
path to success.
There's a stale cuteness in the idea; it's like a George Bernard Shaw
play rewritten for a cast of ducks and geese. Joel gets to fulfill his

daydreams about having sex and making money, and Paul Brickman
gets to fulfill his daydream about making what he probably regards as
a serious satirical comment on American affluence. Joel becomes an
Example, and he loses whatever likability he had as a goofball kid;
Cruise isn't allowed enough emotions to sustain the performance. Joel's
schoolmates are similarly drained of personality (when they play cards
they're just junior versions of their fathers, and that seems funny until
you realize that the film means to indict them for it), and his parents
never had any. The Goodsens are an upper-middle-class Jewish family
who are like Wasps, only more so. The exteriors were shot at a Highland
Park house just around the block from the one used in Ordinary People.
The only person in the movie who is left with any trace of individual-
ity is Rebecca De Mornay's purringly seductive Lana —
a vision created
out of men's desires, yet distinctive, too. She's mysterious, supple —
golden blonde with an inward-directed smile, like Veronica Lake, but
taller and with a greater range of expressiveness. This young actress
has an original way of playing a prostitute. Her face never opens up to
Joel or to us. She's calculating; she has something going on in her head
—
beyond what she's saying she might be thinking of the move after the
—
next move. Somehow, Rebecca De Mornay this is her first major screen
role— makes the coolheadedness that Brickman has written into the
character seem bewitching. But, of course, Brickman never takes Lana
out of fantasyland; she isn't permitted to emerge as a character —she
has no motives or feelings beyond what serves his purpose. Lana has to

40
be a sensuous creature who enjoys her work, and prostitution here isn't
a sad, rotten business — it's just a shade "risky." The picture is centered
on this tiresome He, which appears to satisfy some deep vanity in men.
It's one of the invincible Hes that keep going so long they gather moss
and turn into fables.

0,
'uring the past few weeks, the book The Rosenberg File, by
Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, has been widely reviewed by people
who expressed surprise that the authors came to the conclusion that
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were indeed guilty of conspiring to give
atomic-bomb information to the Soviet Union but that their execution, on
June 19, 1953, was a terrible injustice. This conclusion is now being
discussed in the press as if it were something totally new as if people —
in the fifties, governed by their political prejudices, believed the Rosen-

bergs to be either spies who deserved I went

to die or innocent martyrs.
to my bookcase, and within ten minutes had found essays on the
I

—
Rosenbergs by three writers Harold Rosenberg, in The Tradition of
the New, Robert Warshow, in The Immediate Experience, and Leslie
Fiedler, in An End to Innocence —
all dating from the early fifties and

all saying substantially the same thing as the Radosh and Milton book.

Harold Rosenberg wrote, "What shocked fair-minded people was the

objective factor of the disproportion between the crime as charged, and
for which the defendants were convicted, and the death penalty. . . .

Granted that the Rosenbergs were justly convicted, and I don't question
that, they did not seem to deserve the electric chair." And these writers
showed an understanding of the manipulative possibilities in the case.
These are Warshow's calm opening words, written in 1953: "Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg were not put to death for their opinions, but from their
side, clearly, they died for their opinions nevertheless. And not only did
they choose to give up their lives: each sacrificed the other, and both
together sacrificed their two young children." And Leslie Fiedler wrote
of the contrast between the Rosenberg case that came to trial early in
1951 and the symbolic, propagandistic Rosenberg case that got its start
in the Communist press later that year, in which the couple were de-
picted as the victims of a frameup because they were "progressives" and
Jews. Soon they were discussed all over the world as political prisoners
and compared to Dreyfus, Sacco and Vanzetti, and the Scottsboro Boys.

41
 The new movie Daniel, directed by Sidney Lumet, from E. L. Docto-
row's script based on his 1971 novel The Book of Daniel, is about that
symbolic Rosenberg case. It was clear from the quasi-modernist novel
that Doctorow wasn't naive about the Rosenbergs but that he was let-

ting himself go emotionally —that he loved the energy and anguish that
Jewish persecution stirred in him. And he went right for the torn, bleed-
ing heart of the matter: the novel centers on the emotions of the two
young children orphaned by the electric chair and (less powerfully) their
struggles as adults to come to terms with their political legacy. The book
is an upsettingly personal fantasy that plugs right into the persecution
fears and victimization fantasies that the case excited —particularly
among American Jews but also among much of the gentile left. Docto-
row's book is so charged with painful feelings that it's sadistic to the
reader. He uses the Rosenbergs' deaths to fire his furnace. It's a mussy,
mixed-up, passionate book —demagogic and harrowing.
The movie is all those things, too, except it's not passionate, and so
it doesn't carry you along. Whenever Sidney Lumet gets into one of his
chronicles of agonized morality —such as Prince of the City (1981) or
—
The Verdict (1982) it seems as if his normally high energy level sinks,
and the melodramatic materials he's working with thicken and become
clotted. The Verdict at least followed a relatively straight line, but
Daniel jumps back and forth among four decades shot in slightly differ-
ent color ranges, and nothing takes hold now or then or in between. It's
one of the most emotionally fragmented films I've ever seen. Or didn't
quite see. For Lumet, chiaroscuro appears to be a sign of seriousness;
everyone lives in the dark. Lumet is once again working with the Polish
cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak. The two of them received consid-
erable praise for the "Caravaggio" lighting of The Verdict but why —
should anyone want to do a modern courtroom drama in Caravaggio
tones? The Verdict was dim and looked posed. This picture often looks
plain ugly, as if there were barnacles on the lens; even when the action
is outdoors, it has the gummy drabness of institutional life.

—
Daniel in which Timothy Hutton plays the title character, the son
of the "Isaacsons," and Amanda Plummer plays his driven-mad younger
sister, Susan — is meant to take its form from Daniel's quest for the

meaning of his dead parents' lives. He has jeered at his sister's political
—
activism and has become a rigid, tight academic a graduate student at
Columbia who even gives his young wife a bad time. Disliking himself,
he goes back over the events of his childhood, hunting down people who
were involved in the Isaacson case, and asking questions. But this doesn't
provide any impetus to the scenes, because it isn't clear what he hopes
to find out. He never asks the straightforward question "Were my par-
ents spies or weren't they?" And so he never gets to the question "If
they were spies, how was it that they were fooled into thinking that what
they were doing was for the good of mankind?" The movie doesn't move
— it agglomerates. The hollow quest is carefully rigged with digressions

and overcomplicated by narrative devices. As if the material weren't

agonizing enough, from time to time we get Daniel in closeup some- —
times just his eyes and nose and nose hair filling the screen as he —
narrates gory particulars of the different means of execution that have
been used in various countries throughout history. (You can bet that
drawing and quartering gets its full share of attention.) We also see
perhaps half a dozen sequences with the actors in dumb show, their arms
waving like semaphores, while Paul Robeson's voice rolls across the
soundtrack in songs that have been selected for their special relevance
to what Daniel sees or remembers as he crisscrosses the country. It is
a secret rarely let out: rich as Paul Robeson's voice was, he was a very
monotonous singer. These songs all sound the same. (And boy, could this
movie use something jazzy to pace it.)
As the sister, Amanda Plummer is photographed cruelly. She seems
sallow and shrivelled and rodentlike in her initial scene; I could hardly
look at her, and I barely registered what she was saying. But her words
were repeated in a voice-over a little later, and I was struck by how eerily
delicate her vocal rhythms were. In her second scene, I was prepared for
the way she was photographed, and she seemed to transcend it she —
brings a lyrical, otherworldly intensity to Susan's madness. The other
performances range from Lindsay Grouse's fine, strong Mrs. Isaacson
to Mandy Patinkin's grotesquely hyper Isaacson. I don't know what
—
Lindsay Grouse is playing Doctorow doesn't create characters; he has
his own patented cutouts —
but she plays well. She's a flesh-and-blood
presence, and she's convincing as a politically involved woman of her
time. Even her accent seems right. Patinkin, though, is like a crazily
overenthusiastic football coach; a lot of the time, the camera seems much
too close for what he's doing, and at other times we simply have no
preparation for his manic cavorting. Button, meanwhile, grows ever
hairier. He's swathed in so much beard that the only feature he has left
to act with is his pretty blue eyes, and they become a little disconcerting,
because they don't quite match up with the eyes of the various little kids
who play Daniel in the earlier decades. (As an infant, Daniel looks as if
he'd grow up to be Gharles Laughton.) It's terrible to pick at details like
this, but the movie is so unwieldy and so many platforms are mounted

that details may be all you actually take in.

43
 There are large quantities of performers in this movie. Ellen Barkin,
for example, turns up as Daniel's wife and makes a striking impression
in her few minutes of screen time. She fares better than most of the

other women playing Jewish roles; the middle-class characters, in partic-

ular (such as Carmen Matthews, as the defense attorney's wife, and
Maria Tucci, as Daniel and Susan's foster mother), are subjected to
brutal long takes in which they expose their cold, ungenerous natures
— they're like spiders presiding over their dark apartments. Mostly, we
get a flash of the actors, perhaps in a closeup; then they'll turn up in a
scene or two, and disappear. And it's impossible to know why they're in
the movie. The only time we know for sure is when they're black, be-
cause then they're there to display their nobility and the Isaacsons' love
—
of them as when Mrs. Isaacson embraces a black prison matron before
sitting down in the big chair. Her last act on earth is thus a demonstra-
tion of solidarity. What will people who don't know anything about the
Rosenberg case and haven't read the novel make of the movie? If they
get anything at all, it will probably be the idea that the Rosenbergs were
killed because they were Jewish and because they believed in social
justice. Social justice is what their spiritually reborn son commits him-
self to at the end, when he and his wife and baby boy take part in a peace
rally. This is his parents' legacy to him. It's almost a sick joke, consider-
ing that it was the Rosenbergs' fervid dedication to principle that made
them susceptible to Soviet manipulation. (There's another — even sicker
— ^joke here: the rally footage is from the June 12, 1982, disarmament
gathering. The parents gave the bomb to the Russians, and the son
protests its use.)

The movie comes to us with all sorts of disclaimers in the press:

Lumet says that about the Rosenbergs, that it's the story of the
it isn't

"thawing" of Daniel, who "buried himself with his parents froze emo- —
tionally, intellectually." And this, I think, is supposed to exempt Daniel
— which, of course, is about the Rosenbergs, and uses them to trigger
viewer responses —from the obligation to make sense of the material. It

was always possible to be sane about the case —as the Radosh and
Milton book and as the writers I cited and many other people were
is,

—
at the time but not if you saw the Rosenbergs as innocent martyrs to
the cause of social justice. That is, however, the easiest way to get a
response. Daniel isn't interested in sorting things out. Its confusion
feeds a strain of public hysteria and a fear of anti-Semitism. Poor Mandy
Patinkin —one moment he's lifting his arms in a dance, as if he were
getting ready to play Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, and not long after-
ward he's being strapped in the chair, and the juice comes on and his

44
body is Then Lindsay Grouse goes through her strapping in and
rattling.
ratthng, but she's got more Hfe in her than he does, and she needs more
juice. She has got to rattle again. Is there any purpose in this except to
make Jewish audiences quake and weep and feel helpless?
September 5, 1983

A BAD DREAM/A MASTERPIECE

doming right after Jean-Jacques Beineix's directing-debut film

Diva, The Moon in the Gutter may be a shock, but it's the kind of
excruciatingly silly movie that only a talented director can make. (Hacks
don't leave common sense this far behind.) The trashy chic of Delacorta's
novel Diva (which was written like a script) gave Beineix something to
play with. This time, he takes the 1953 American novel The Moon in the
Gutter, by David Goodis, as the basis for a romanticized tragic vision.
With Gerard Depardieu in the frayed T-shirt of a poor, honest working-
man and Nastassia Kinski in spangles "created by Marc Bohan for
Christian Dior," and the two of them gazing soulfully at each other
across a chasm of class distinctions, the picture cries out for giggles and
hoots. Yet Beineix's damn talent gets in the way, so you can't even have
a good time razzing it.

The opening words of the narrator are enough to give you a

premonitory pang: "In a port nowhere in particular, in a dead end in the
dockside area, a man came nightly to escape his memories." This man
— he's a stevedore — is called Gerard, and that's the only simplifying step
Beineix permits himself. Gradually, we pick up the idea that Gerard is
obsessed with the death of his who killed herself after she was
sister,

raped. It takes a long time to get the reason for his moping straight,
because the images of his sister traipsing along at night in the water-
front area in spiky high heels and a starlet's shimmery wisp of a gown

45
certainly don't suggest the pure, virginal girl he talks about, the one who
took herown life because she felt defiled. (Beineix doesn't seem to have
much interest in representational details.) For most of the movie, Gerard
lunges from table to table in a waterfront dive that features two haglike
painted whores out of the Expressionist past dancing together, and he
stares meaningfully into the faces of drunken men who he imagines
might be the rapist. Two of the prime suspects appear to be his father
and his brother, so naturally we begin to think that there's some
Freudian hanky-panky going on: Was Gerard himself in love with his
sister? Is he himself the criminal he seeks? The way Beineix works here,
it's not for him to show us what's going on —
it's for us to wonder. In an

interview in Film Comment, Beineix explains Gerard's swinish, slobby

brother (played by Dominique Pinon, the small blond killer in Diva who
looks like a mutant) and Gerard's besotted father (Gabriel Monnet) in
these terms: "The character of the brother stands for the idea of a
brother, and that of the father for Father, rather than his own parent."
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Gerard also has a standard-issue fiery, tempestuous, but loving
girlfriend, Bella (Victoria Abril), who, through a quirk of casting, has a
black mother (Bertice Reading). The role of Bella was initially scheduled
to be played by the black American actress Diahnne Abbott, and that
probably accounts for the black mother; presumably, when Beineix re-
cast the role he was carried away by his idea of an indefinite, universal

place inhabited by people of unspecified backgrounds and didn't think

mother and daughter needed to match up. It may also come as a surprise
to the audience that a stevedore who goes to work on the docks every
day is so poor and deprived that he lives in a decorator shanty — it's

rag-strewn, with what might be burlap sacks dangling from the walls.
Gerard and Bella and their relatives are the lower-depths poor, doomed
to live in crumbling hovels. The rich moon-goddess Kinski, who has the
bewildering Anglo-Saxon name Loretta Channing, lives "uptown," in a
sumptuous mansion, with her dissolute-dude brother, Newton Channing
(Vittorio Mezzogiorno). Loretta has glazed,zombie eyes, and she may be
Gerard's wish She
fulfillment.doesn't talk like a person she talks like —
the essence of femme fatale. She seems to come from the world of the
movies, by way of Coppola's One from the Heart, and this has to be
deliberate.
Beineix takes movie conventions and cliches of the past as iconogra-
phy and creates a fake-poetic world for himself. If we supply the name
Marseilles for his stylized nameless port, it's because it's based on the
Marseilles of the French films of the thirties, just as the decent, trapped

46
Gerard is based, primarily, on the decent, trapped Jean Gabin of those
Gerard is an ordinary "little" man reaching (hopelessly) for the
films.

moon. He and the other characters come from movies processed by

Beineix's memories and imagination. They're movie myths masquerad-
ing as mysterious characters. And so they don't talk; they make utter-
ances — gnomic Freudian utterances such as "There's no such thing as
chance."
Like Scorsese when he called our attention to the fake grove of trees
in New York, New York as if to shout, "Look, I'm shooting on a studio
set, just the way the directors in the forties did!," Beineix shows off the
studio-made look of his alley, his warehouses, his wharf. The movies
made in the old Hollywood studios used their sets and their lighting to
create an atmosphere that would intensify the power of the story. Bei-
neix — like Scorsese before him, and like Coppola in One from the Heart
and The Outsiders —makes the audience conscious of his style. He's
celebrating the poetry of the movies, which for him is the poetry of
artificiality. So Nastassia Kinski is posed like Hedy Lamarr in Algiers;

she's the unattainable —the moon that shines on poor Gerard down there
in his Brando T-shirt film noir gutter. Of course, when you're
in the
playing the moon there's not much you can bring to your role; Kinski is
—
used like a wax figure she's tilted this way and that, her lips parting,
her neck flung back. And Victoria Abril's Bella, who tosses her curls and
gives off heat, is like a parody of generations of sensual, jealous spitfires
— Rita Moreno redux. The music is an exaggeration of Hollywood's old
soaring and slurping scores — the kind that make you wince during re-
vival showings. The whole movie
is layered; you can see the detritus of

dark-shadowed French tragedies of the thirties and American films of

several decades, and it's made in thick, nocturnal color the color of a —
bad dream.
Beineix is fond of saying thingsfilm, the filmmaker
like "In my
reflects on his own art" and "The entire
an attempt to stop film is
time. . . . —
This is what an artist does freezes a moment in time and
explores it." At Cannes, in May, where The Moon in the Gutter was first
shown, he informed the press that his film was "a symphony of images."
In the Film Comment interview, he said, "It's a film that talks about
institutions, about the rich and the poor, without being interested in
either wealth or poverty. It shows the existential suffering of two human
beings (Depardieu and Kinski) which comes out of the gap between them
—he, who and she, who comes from fantasy-land."
lives in the gutter,
Temporarily, at least, Beineix is a master of foolishness. I think he

means all the hundreds of ready-made phrases that pop out of his mouth,

47
such as "There is no story. It's symbohsm." He's right about that, alas.
How else can you explain Gerard's giving his father (or Father) a violin
for a birthday present, when the shaky old boozer not only doesn't play
the violin but can barely stand up?
What it comes down to is that Beineix doesn't have the impulse
simply to represent; his impulse is to represent representations. Andre
Techine, who made French Provincial in 1974 and Barocco in 1976, also

worked in a layered style and with movie-derived characters, but his

films were lighter, more illusionist in manner. Beineix is suffocatingly
passionate about what he's doing, and this is what trips him up: his
material is so far removed from actual experience (and is so familiar)
that it can't support the weight of his emotions. The film becomes both
oppressive and stupid.
—
In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop Art
—
and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of
recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those
movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled
belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use —
them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars. Beineix and Scorsese and
Coppola become worshippers of film, and their filmmaking religion leads
them to re-representation. Like the humbug Wizard of Oz, they rig up
overblown, monumental effects to impress us or scare us; the effects
—
ultimately point to the little guy pulling the levers the little guy behind
the curtain who is trying to put on a big show. These directors are so
—
proud of their manipulation of images they're so caught up in the
filmmaking process, and have so much emotion invested in it that they —
expect their re-representations to wow people. They can't understand
why audiences are cold. But audiences are cold for the best of reasons:
thenew ''mythic" films are made up of images without substance. The
directors' "larger-than-life" stylization is empty.
In The Moon in the Gutter, the actors are not supposed to be
anyone in particular. They're supposed to evoke, and what Beineix
wants them to evoke is all those classy bad ideas he cherishes. Gerard,
according to Beineix, is supposed to be "seeking to reconcile himself
with his other half, his better half." How on earth does an actor show
you that? He can't; all he can do is what Depardieu does wander —
about somnambulistically. The actors in The Moon are helpless, be-
cause the movie isn't about their characters' emotions it's about Bein- —
eix's swooning response to the earlier movie stars that they are
standing in for. Although Depardieu is in the Jean Gabin role, he
doesn't actually suggest Gabin; he's been in too many Depardieu roles

48
 And he has a special problem: something in him has been sucked
for that.
out by so much exposure to the camera. The volatility that made him
seem raw and funny in Going Places has been lost. He hasn't turned
into abad actor, but he has become a pro, and "sensitive" in a dull,
way. His edges are smooth, and though he gives conscientious
pictorial
performances, they all seem to be in just about the same range. (The
only surprise in The Moon is the crude, loud sound of the black
— —
mama's or Mama's speeches; the actress is made to sound like
someone bellowing in a TV commercial.)
Having cancelled out the actors, Beineix is left alone with his
effects. Against all odds, he can sometimes engage us by imagery that

isn't about anything in particular. This is especially true of the se-

quence with Gerard and the other dockhands at work loading and un-
loading cargo. The men and the equipment are stylized silhouettes, ab-
stractions of men at work. Maybe we watch these compositions so
intently because we've never seen anything quite like them and be- —
cause for a moment we're spared the warmed-over romanticism. From
time to time, there are dazzling flourishes, such as the exterior view of
the cathedral where Gerard and Loretta go for some sort of dream
marriage ceremony: it's perched on top of a cliff, and its improbability

gives the scene an awesome craziness. (Beineix's victories here are the
equivalent of an actor's magnetizing us by his reading of a menu.)
Beineix is a real technician, and he knows how to make images flow
into each other, even though he's working with a palette that suggests
manufactured rot. The Moon is primarily a nighttime movie, yet the
highlight color is green —a thick green shellac with hallucinogenic
overtones. (Asked by an interviewer to explain his color scheme, Bein-
eix replied, "Color is a vibration that stems from our unconscious." Talk
about humbug wizards!) The rapist wears red shoes, and the red of the
raped girl's blood is as lacquered as Loretta's lipstick and her sleek red
roadster. The picture is color-controlled to look poisonous, yet it undenia-
bly has its own poisonous look.
In the street outside Gerard's family hovel, there is a brightly col-

ored advertising billboard with the slogan "Try Another World." Beineix
puts it in scene after scene; it's his big irony —that honest workers like

Gerard can't win in this one. But a viewer can get fed up with the bad
news. After a while, I thought the poster should have said "Try Another
Movie."

49
 1. It's deeply satisfying to see, finally, Luchino Visconti's mag-
nificent 1963 film The Leopard in Italian, with subtitles, and at its full

length —three hours and five minutes. It had been cut to two hours and
forty-one minutes when it opened in this country, in a dubbed-into-
English version that didn't always seem and with the color
in sync,

brightened in highly variable and disorienting ways. Now the movie has
its full shape, and it couldn't have arrived at a better time. The new

— —
movies especially the new American movies have reached a low, low
point. And here is a work of a type we rarely see anymore a sweeping —
popular epic, with obvious similarities to Gone with the Wind. Set in
Sicily, beginning in 1860, it's Gone with theWind with sensibility an —
almost Chekhovian sensibility. It doesn't have the active central charac-
ters that the American epic has; there's no Scarlett or Rhett. But it has
—
a hero on a grand scale Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, played superla-
tively well by Burt Lancaster. And it's so much better at doing the kind
—
of things that Gone with the Wind did showing you how historical
—
events affect the lives of the privileged classes that it can make you
feel a little embarrassed for Hollywood. Gone with the Wind is, of
course, a terrific piece of entertainment; The Leopard is so beautifully
felt that it calls up a whole culture. It casts an intelligent spell intelli- —
gent and rapturous.
The Visconti epic is based on the posthumously published, best-
selling novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa —
an impoverished Sicil-
ian prince, like his hero. (The Lampedusa coat of arms bore a leopard.)
The movie isn't what we normally call "novelistic," though; everything
comes to us physically. Visconti suggests Don Fabrizio's thoughts and
feelings by the sweep and texture of his life. The fabrics, the medal-
laden military uniforms, the dark, heavy furniture, the huge palaces,
with their terraces and broad marble staircases, and the arid, harsh
—
landscapes they're set in are all sensualized made tactile. Burt Lancas-
ter has always been a distinctively physical actor, and this is a supremely
physical role. We know the Prince by his noble bearing and the assur-
ance of his gestures —they're never wasteful. He's at ease with author-
ity;you can believe that he's the result of centuries of aristocratic breed-
ing. There's grandeur in the performance, which Lancaster has
acknowledged he modelled on Visconti himself (who, though not a Sicil-
ian, was a count whose family titles were among the oldest and most

noble in Europe). It is not merely that the Prince is in tune with his
surroundings. They have formed each other: he and the Salina country
palazzo basking in the yellow light outside Palermo are one.

50
 — —

The Prince's estates have dwindled, money is running low, but he

—
keeps up the family traditions. He's not a romantic he's a realist. He'll
protect aristocratic values for as long as he can, and he'll do his best to
—
protect the future of the Salina family his wife and seven children, his
—
nephew and the household priest and all the other attendants. He
bends to the times only as much as he needs to. In 1860, Italy was in the
middle of a revolution. Garibaldi and his followers the Redshirts —
were trying to unify Italy and free the south and Sicily from Bourbon
rule. The Prince's favorite nephew, the spirited, gallant Tancredi (Alain
Delon), goes off to join Garibaldi; he goes with the Prince's blessing and
a small bag of his gold —the Prince understands that the Bourbons will
fall. He's a man with few illusions, a man of sense who suffers fools all
the time and tries to cushion his impatience. When Garibaldi lands on
Sicily with an army of about a thousand men, and there are skirmishes
in the streets of Palermo, the Prince's neurasthenic wife (Rina Morelli)
becomes hysterically frightened — she's a whimperer—and he, recogniz-
ing that they may be in danger, takes her and their brood to safety at
the family holdings across the island in Donnafugata. Along the way, the
servants lay out a picnic —
they spread a vast white linen cloth, and dish
after dish, while the grooms take care of the horses. (Corot should have
been At Donnafugata, the Prince leads the procession of his
invited.)
people, weary, and covered with dust from the road, into the cathedral.
Seated in the Salina family pews, they're like corpses — petrified, dead-

wood figures.
The movie is about the betrayal of Garibaldi's democratic revolu-

tion, and about the wiliness of opportunists like Tancredi. ("Black and
slim as an adder" was how Lampedusa described him.) Tancredi makes
his reputation as a heroic fighter while he's an officer with Garibaldi's
Redshirts, but as soon as power shifts to the Mafia-dominated, middle-
class landgrabbers, he changes into the uniform of the new king their
king, Victor Emmanuel II, from the House of Savoy. He doesn't so much
as blink when he hears the gunshots that mark the execution of the last
of Garibaldi's loyal troops. The young Delon is perhaps too airy for the
role. With his even features, small teeth, and smooth cheeks, he's a very

pretty art object, perfectly carved. He'd make a fine, spry figure in an
operetta, but he doesn't have the excitement or force to give Tancredi's
actions the weight they might have had. (This Tancredi is as shallow as
that other opportunist —Scarlett.) But the film is essentially about the
Prince himself —the aging Leopard—and how he reacts to the social
changes.
Lancaster provides the film's center of consciousness. We see every-

51
thing that happens through Visconti's eyes, of course, but we feel we're
seeing it through the Prince's eyes. We couldn't be any closer to him if

—
we were inside his skin in a way, we are. We see what he sees, feel what
—
he feels; we know what's in his mind. He's fond of and a little envious
of—Tancredi, with his youth and verve. The Prince—he's only forty-five,
but forty-five was a ripe age the mid-nineteenth century — has per-
in

ceived what the result of the revolution will be: the most ruthless grab-
bers will come out on top. There's a despicable specimen of the breed
close at hand —the and powerful mayor of Donnafugata, Don
rich
Calogero (Paolo Stoppa), who
is eager to climb into society. The Prince

has a daughter who is in love with Tancredi, but the Prince understands
—
that this daughter prim and repressed, like his wife is too over- —
protected and overbred to be the wife Tancredi needs for the important
public career he's going after. And Tancredi, who has nothing but his
princely title and his rakish charm, requires a wife who will bring him
a fortune. And so when Tancredi is smitten by Don Calogero's poised and
strikingly sensual daughter, Angelica (the lush young Claudia Car-
dinale, doing a bit too much lip-licking), the Prince arranges the match.
(All this is presented very convincingly, and it's probably silly to quibble
with a masterpiece, yet I doubt if —and especially
a warmhearted father
one sensually deprived in his relationship with his wife— would be so
free of illusions about his daughter. And it seemed to me that he was
—
more cut off from his children one of the striplings is played by the
very young Pierre Clementi, who has the face of a passionflower than —
a man of his temperament would be, whatever his rank.)
Lighted by the justly celebrated cinematographer Giuseppe
Rotunno, the movie is full of marvellous, fluid set-piece sequences: the
dashing Tancredi's goodbyes to the Salina family when he goes off to join
Garibaldi; the picnic; the church sequence. The original Italian prints
may have had deeper brown tones and more lustrous golds some of the —
—
scenes have a drained-out look but there's always detail to exult in.
Each time the Salina family assembles for Mass or for dinner, it's a big
gathering. Some of the smaller, less opulent sequences are ongoing
political arguments, like the ironic dialogue between the Prince and the

timid worrywart family priest (Romolo Valli), or between the Prince and
a family retainer who is his hunting companion (Serge Reggiani, overact-
ing). This poverty-stricken snob, who's loyal to the Bourbons, is shocked

that the Prince would approve of his nephew's marrying a girl whose
mother is "an illiterate animal." The political issues that the film deals
with are, of course, simplified, but they're presented with considerable
cogency, and they're very enjoyable. Of the smaller sequences, perhaps

52
the most dazzling is the conversation between the Prince and a petite,
intelligent professorial gentleman (Leslie French) who has come with the
official request that he stand for election to the Senate. (Victor Emman-
uel II is a constitutional monarch.) Here, the Leopard —refusing the offer
—shows his full pride. It's the most literary passage in the movie; it's

the rationale of the script: the Prince explains the Sicilian arrogance and
torpor, and how he and the land are intertwined. I doubt if any other
director has got by even halfway with a fancy dialogue of this kind, yet
it's stunningly successful here. Lancaster has held his energy in check

through most of the performance; now he comes out blazing, and he's
completely controlled. He has a wild, tragicomic scene, too, when the
weasel-eyed Don Calogero comes to discuss Tancredi's proposal to his
daughter. The sickened Prince listens to him, and then, in a startling
move, picks up the little weasel, plants a quick, ceremonial kiss on each
cheek to welcome him into the family, and plunks him down. It happens
so fast we barely have time to laugh. Don Calogero's greed shines forth
then in the satisfaction with which he enumerates each item of the dowry
he will bestow upon Tancredi; it's as if he expected the Prince to cry
"Hosanna!" for each acre, each piece of gold.
Probably the movie seems as intense as it does because the action
isn't dispersed among several groups of characters, the way it usually

is in an epic. We stay with the Prince almost all the time. Except for the

fighting in the streets, there's only one major sequence that he isn't in
— an episode in which Tancredi and Angelica wander about in unused
parts of the rambling Salina palace in Donnafugata. The Prince's ab-
sence may not be the reason, but this episode doesn't seem to have any
purpose or focal point, and it's tempo seems
also the only time the film's
off. Whenever the Prince is onscreen —
whether in his study, where the
telescopes indicate his interest in astronomy, or in the town hall, control-
ling his distaste while drinking a glass of cheap wine that Don Calogero
has handed him —we're held, because we're always learning new things
about him. And the concluding hour, at the Ponteleone Ball — certainly
in

the finest hour of film that Visconti ever shot (and the most influential,
as The Godfather and The Deer Hunter testify) — it all comes together.
At this ball, the Salinas introduce Angelica to society —to all the many
Sicilian princesand aristocrats. Visconti' s triumph here is that the ball
serves the same function as the Prince's interior monologue in the novel:
throughout this sequence, in which the Prince relives his life, experi-
ences regret, and accepts the dying of his class and his own death, we
feel we're inside the mind of the Leopard saying farewell to life.
Everything we've seen earlier, we now realize, was leading to this

53
splendid ball, which marks the aristocrats' acceptance of the parvenus
who are taking over their wealth and power. (The poor will stay at the
bottom, and — in the Prince's view, at least — will be worse off than be-
fore; the new bound by the tradition of noblesse
ruling class will not be
oblige.) The Prince, alone wanders from one mammoth ball-
by choice,
room to the next, observing all these people he knows. Tancredi and
Angelica have their first dance, and the Nino Rota score gives way to
a lilting waltz by Verdi, which had been discovered just before the film
was shot; Visconti was giving it its first public performance, and a piece
of music may never have been showcased more lavishly. Visconti (and
perhaps his helpers) certainly knew how to stage dance sequences. (The
movie was edited in a month, yet the rhythmic movement of the whole
film is intoxicatingly smooth.) Soon the crowded rooms are stifling and,

with the women fluttering their fans, look like cages of moths. The
Prince, strolling away from these overheated rooms, sees a bevy of
adolescent girls in their ruffles jumping up and down on a bed while

chattering and screaming in delight — overbred, chalky-faced girls, like

his daughters, all excited. In a room where people are seated at tables
feasting, he glances in revulsion at a colonel covered with medals who
is boasting of his actions against Garibaldi's men. He begins to feel
fatigued —flushed and ill. He goes into the library, pours himself a glass
of water, and stares at a big oil —a copy of a Greuze deathbed scene.
It's there, in front of the painting, that Tancredi and Angelica find
him. She wants the Prince to dance with her, and as she pleads with him
their bodies are very close, and for a few seconds the emotions he has
been feeling change into something close to lust. He envies Tancredi for
marrying for different reasons from his own; he envies Tancredi for
Angelica's full-blown beauty, her heartiness, her coarseness. He escorts
her to the big ballroom, and they waltz together. It's Angelica's moment
of triumph: he is publicly welcoming her into his family. He is straight-
backed and formal while they dance, but his thoughts are chaotic. He
experiences acute regret for the sensual partnership he never had with
his wife, and a nostalgia for the animal vitality of his youth. His intima-
tions of his own mortality are fierce. After returning the shrewd, happy
Angelica to Tancredi, he goes to a special small room to freshen up.
—
Coming out, he sees into an anteroom the floor is covered with chamber
pots that need emptying. Eventually, the ball draws to a close, and
people begin to leave, but a batch of young diehard dancers are still

going strong: they're hopping and whirling about to livelier music now
that the older people have left the floor. The Prince arranges for his
family to be taken home, explaining that he will walk. When he passes

54
down the narrow streets, he's an old man. The compromises he has had
to make have more than sickened him —
they've aged him. His vision of
the jackals and sheep who are replacing the leopards and lions ages him
even more. He is emotionally isolated from his wife and children; he no
longer feels any affection for the sly-faced Tancredi. He's alone.
The Leopard is the only film I can think of that's about the aristoc-
racy from the inside. Visconti, the Marxist count, is both pitiless and
loving. His view from the inside is not very different from that of Max
Ophuls The Earrings of Madame de
in which was made from the
. . . —
outside (though it was based on the short novel by the aristocratic Louise
de Vilmorin). Ophuls' imagination took him where Visconti's lineage (and
imagination) had brought him, and he gave us a portrait of a French
aristocrat by Charles Boyer which had similarities to Lancaster's per-
formance. But we weren't taken inside that French aristocrat's value
system with anything like the robust fullness of our involvement with
Lancaster's Leopard. If it weren't for the Prince's wiry, strong, dark-red
hair and his magisterial physique — his vigor — I doubt if we'd feel the
same melancholy at the death of his class. The film makes us feel that
his grace is part of his position. We're brought to respect values that are
almost totally foreign to our society. That's not a small thing for a movie
to accomplish.
September 19, 1983

ON GOLDEN SWAMP

Woss Creek, an account of a woman's struggle to become a

writer, is given a supernal glow by the director Martin Ritt. The picture
seems to be suffering from earthshine: everything is lighted to look holy,
and whenever the score isn't shimmering and burnishing, nature is twit-
tering. It's all pearly and languid, and more than a little twerpy — it's one

55
 —

long cue for "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'." LooselyJbased on Marjorie

Kinnan Rawlings' semi-autobiographical tales about what she learned
during her years in an orange grove in the Florida swamps, the movie
opens in 1928. We're meant to admire Mrs. Rawlings (Mary Steenbur-
gen), a Northerner, for her courage in leaving her home and husband
and going down to Florida to write. But the script doesn't give even a
hint of why she bought the grove (sight unseen), or why she thinks she'll
find more propitious conditions for writing gothic romances in the sub-
tropical marshland than she had in her bedroom or her study in New
York. The filmmakers view her as a feminist ahead of her time a hero- —
ine who gives up a soft life and goes out on her own to face hardships.
Yet the way they tell the story, she's almost immediately equipped with
everything she has cast aside. When her jalopy gives out before she
arrives at her property, it's said to be in hopeless condition, but the
courtly and handsome hotelkeeper Norton Baskin (Peter Coyote), who
drives her to her tumbledown shack, shows up again a day or two later
bringing the car, which has been repaired so that it looks sparkling and
new. Meanwhile, friendly neighbors have been dropping in, and Mrs.
Rawlings has hired a young black woman, Geechee (Alfre Woodard), to
clean and cook, and field hands to take care of the crops. The house is
already transformed; it's gracious and orderly, and she's at her type-
writer, with a potted gloxinia blooming nearby. She's ladylike, and the
local people do everything for her. So what's so heroic about her
beyond her managerial skills?
The film's central peculiarity is that Mary Steenburgen doesn't

make contact with the audience. Our emotions circulate among the other
characters; they never land on her, and it's because she's so withdrawn.
She has a tight, little-girl voice, and she seems to count to ten before she
speaks; her eyes narrowed, she looks at the person she's going to say
something to, and we have to wait until she says it. I think she wants
us to see that Mrs. Rawlings is a determined woman who doesn't speak
lightly, and that she observes everything around her and takes it in

stores it for her art. But the movie dies many deaths during her ten-beat
considerations. She's playing in "real time," and everyone else is playing
in heightened, theatrical style; the other actors take us out for a ride, and
she keeps putting the brakes on.
Her character isn't appealing in other ways, either. Mary Steenbur-
gen has traded in her softness for a frosty, patrician manner. And with
crisp hatbrims that come down to her eyes, and her expression pinched
and vinegary, Mrs. Rawlings is a Mary Poppins even when she's belting
down a shot of corn liquor. She treats that tall, charming Norton Baskin

56
abominably. But he must see in her what the filmmakers see (and what
they fail to show us), because he keeps coming back. And he's certainly
a resourceful fellow. He doesn't just get cars repaired; he flushes Max-
well Perkins out of the swamps. Perkins (Malcolm McDowell) explains
that he has been visiting "Ernest in Key West," and before dinner he sits
down to read Marjorie's latest effort, her breakthrough story, "Jacob's
Ladder," which, of course, isn't a gothic— it's about the lives of back-
—
woods people and Perkins tells her he'll publish it.
Ritt and his collaborators seem to have adopted a child' s-storybook
women's-liberation approach. Actually, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and
her husband, Charles, bought the Florida grove together and lived
there for about five years before they separated. And all these "giv-
ing" people! In the movie, Geechee follows her mistress's example: she
learns to be independent. Luckily for Mrs. Rawlings, she goes right on
cleaning and cooking. (Independence seems to make her a perfect, lov-
ing servant.) In the book Cross Creek, Geechee is a hopeless, tor-
mented drunk who wanders off, and she and the other characters don't
do much without expecting something in return. It's a readable, tough-
minded book, filled with people who, according to the author, are "a
blend of the true and the imagined." One of its weaknesses is the
homey sententiousness about "the land" which mars a few paragraphs
of the opening and closing chapters; this high-toned guff is just what
Mary Steenburgen is given to recite in voice-over. Most of the movie is

sun-coated and sugar-cured. It's the development of a writer according

to the Waltons.
Something about centering a picture on a heroine seems to lead Ritt
to Disneyfy his men. In his Norma Rae, both Beau Bridges and Ron
Leibman were emasculated; here Norton Baskin, the character based on
Mrs. Rawlings' second husband and widower, has no apparent interest
in life except to be supportive of this wonderful woman, who keeps

rejecting him. Peter Coyote (he was Keys in E.T.) has a Jiminy Cricket
charm, and he manages to suggest an amiable, gentlemanly insolence;
he's a spiffy fellow for a woman to turn up in the swamps (or any other
place). But he has been sprinkled with pixie dust. The only man in the
movie who has any strength as a character is Rip Torn as Marsh Turner
— a Cracker on a grand scale and too powerful for sweetening. Rip Tom
is off and running before Mary Steenburgen finishes her ten-point count.

Cobbled together out of several people in the book (and probably in-
tended to represent the spirit of the place itself), Marsh Turner figures
in a subplot, which is basically a revamped version of Mrs. Rawlings'

book The Yearling. He's a father who loves his daughter (Dana Hill) so

57
 —

much that he lets her make a pet of a fawn, even though he realizes that
the grown deer will endanger the family's food supply.
Ritt shows his flair for melodrama in his handling of the hyper-
emotional entanglement between father and daughter. The scriptwriter,
Dalene Young, piles most of the film's dramatic action into these scenes,
and Rip Torn and Dana Hill work together with what looks like spontane-
—
ous frenzy you believe in his passion for her, and she's almost as far
into her character as she was in Shoot the Moon. (She was so very bad
in her starring role in the TV production of The Member of the Wedding
that her performance here is a return to grace.) In the past, Torn's
emotions have generally been twisted, and he has often had a mean,
meanness was fun; it was tonic. But his being on was
hipster's glint. His
sometimes the essence of his acting and of his characters. They fed off
—
being on that's what made them seem sadistic, sharklike. Self-hate was
Rip Torn's specialty. Here, he's essentially decent; he's untwisted, and
you see more sides to him than in his usual roles. There's a warm,
free-flowing stream of emotion in his performance; both the character
and Torn himself seem capable of sorrow (and of generosity). As Marsh
Turner, he wears a feather in his hat. He's a gallant, responsible hus-
band and father who's also a grandstanding rowdy. Then, within a few
minutes of screen time, he turns into a weeping, broken man; drunk and
in despair, he throws an empty liquor keg through a shopwindow in
town; returning home, he bangs things in misery, breaking up furniture.
Marsh Turner's emotions rear up very large, and he simply discharges
—
them when he's bashing chairs or tables, it's like brushing a tear away.
It's a rampaging role, but Torn doesn't seem to be afraid of anything,

and he gives his character a pleasure in performance something that —

American actors rarely do. He endows this backwoods man with his own
love of whooping it up in front of people, and with an awareness of the
impressions he makes. It's a demonstration of a wild-man actor's art
he lets us see how rage and tears verge on each other. It's crazy, great
acting, and the picture would be stone cold without it.
You can't really dislike Cross Creek. It's lulling, in a semi-stupefy-
ing way. You sit there staring at this prestige item that might have been
planned to open at Radio City Music Hall for Easter Week circa 1935.
Alfre Woodard brings some speed and urgency to Geechee's first conver-
sation with Mrs. Rawlings, when she insists that she be hired. And Ritt
handles the low-key scenes involving a white handyman, Tim (John Ham-
mond), and his bedraggled wife (Toni Hudson) with a sure — if slightly
mechanical —touch. (The Tim episode is like a classic yet shopworn short
story.) Yet even what is well done feels out of whack. I think what keeps

58
it that way is the misconception of the central figure — envisioning her
as a muted, passive artist who soaks up the local color, and leaving us
to watch her soak. It may be an impossible-to-play role; the heroine never
deepens or takes hold. At the end, she says that she has become a part
of Cross Creek, but to us she's still an outsider. Mrs. Rawlings that's —
—
what the people in the movie call her comes across as a lyrical stiff.
The remarkably ugly ads seem to be trying to suggest radiant
respectability: they show the heroine peering out from a background of
blotches and lily pads, and they describe the picture as "The true and
compelling story of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Pulitzer Prize winning
authoress of The Yearling. " That sad, misbegotten word ''authoress"
is emblematic of everything that went wrong with the movie.

comedy Lonely Hearts, the

ibout halfway into the Australian
shy Patricia (Wendy Hughes) is room with the eager,
sitting in a tea
eccentric Peter (Norman Kaye), and she looks out the window and says
that she loves Melbourne in the winter. And her comment may bring you
up short, because it makes you realize that you haven't registered where
or when the film is taking place. Lonely Hearts is burdened by that title
and, much worse, by its nondescript look and dreary, crabbed cinematog-
raphy. The exteriors are as cheerless as the orange-brown interiors. This
is a movie in which you have to settle for the acting and the odd flyspecks
of humor. Wendy Hughes, who looks a bit like Joan Hackett here, starts
out with her straight dark hair solemnly parted in the middle and tucked
behind her ears. She is perfectly in control of her performance: she's a
beautiful woman acting plain, and she is skillful enough to put across
every nuance of Patricia's sexual repression. Patricia is a bank clerk in
her thirties who wilted before she bloomed. Now she has moved away
from the parents who intimidated her, taken an apartment of her own,
and got herself a therapist. She's still wearing proper-schoolgirl clothes
(jumpers and shirtwaist dresses), and she moves with an agony of self-
consciousness, but she has signed up with a dating service.
That's how she meets Peter, a forty-nine-year-old piano tuner who
has just been liberated by the death of the invalid mother he has been
caring for. Norman Kaye, a stage and TV performer making his film
debut here, doesn't always ring as true as Wendy Hughes does, but then
he doesn't hit as many familiar notes as she does, either. (She gives the

59
standard fine-actress-playing-dowdy-aging-virgin performance.) Nor-
man Kaye is playing an individual whose traits don't add up the way
character traits in movies usually do. Peter has a furtive, childlike prank-
ishness in him, and that's what keeps the movie alive. Norman Kaye is
an unpredictable actor, who takes a lot of quirky, vagrant chances. He
plays Peter with a ruddy, mottled complexion, and his face is an un-
charted maze of tics and wrinkles, topped by a hairpiece that's like
Pagliacci's hat. The total effectis surprisingly genial and attractive.
Peter most likable, I think, in the scene at a rehearsal of the amateur
is

theatrical group he has brought Patricia into; sitting behind his friend
the director (Jon Finlayson) and watching the atrocious acting of his
amiable, innocent brother-in-law (Jonathan Hardy), he leans forward to
make a comment, pressing his head down on his friend's shoulder to hide
his giggles.
The budding romance between the timorous Patricia and the whimsi-
cal bachelor doesn't put too much of an emotional squeeze on us, because
although the core material is moist the film's humor is dry and sometimes
darting and sneaky. The movie is very casually strung together. It's an
Australian variant of the comfy-cozy Ealing comedies of the fifties, but it
doesn't have their precise construction or their sharply pointed wit. It
moves from one small slapstick diversion to the next. The director, Paul
Cox, who wrote the picture with John Clarke, falls back on such standbys
as that little-theatre group, which helps to fill the big void in the script.
There's not much story. Peter's work as a piano tuner allows the director
to follow him into homes and institutions, and every place has some potty
people or is good for a gag or two. So are the places that Peter and Patricia
go to on their dates. (The director may feel virtuous about the film's
dun-colored drabness; may tie in with his conception of realism and how
it

ordinary people see things.) At times, Cox may appear to be staging a

"Candid Camera" show, but he whisks the principal actors in and out, and
keeps the bit players busy. Peter always has another piano to tune or the
theatre group has a crisis, and the film keeps bopping along. It's mildly
satirical, mildly romantic, and mildly engaging.
If I'm stingy in my praise, it's because the people in the movie have
been constricted so that we can like them. Patricia and Peter accept their
ordinariness and aspire only to the happiness of simple, unassuming
people. Their modest, desperate hopes are for what is clearly within their
reach, and so we can smile complacently at their efforts. Their aspira-
tions are scaled to flatter the audience: our smiles are like giving them
a pat on the head.
October 3, 1983

60
THE SEVENS

1
director Philip
\he Right Stuff gives off a pleasurable hum: it's the writer-
Kaufman's enjoyment of the subject, the actors, and
moviemaking itself. He's working on a broad canvas, and it excites him
— it tickles him. Based on Tom Wolfe's 1979 book, the movie is an epic
ramble —a reenactment of the early years of the space program, from
breaking the sound barrier up to the end of the solo flights. It covers the
years 1947 to 1963, especially the period after 1957, when government
leaders, who
felt they'd been put to shame by the Soviet Union's sorties

into space, rushed to catch up; they initiated Project Mercury, assembled
— —
a team of official heroes all white, married males and began to exploit
them in the mass media. Henry Luce, the founder of Life, which had
perfected the iconography of a clean-living America during the Second
World War, bought exclusive rights to all NASA coverage of the space
program and put the newly selected astronauts under contract; Life
then presented them and their wives as super-bland versions of the boys
and girls next door. The movie contrasts the test pilots who risk their
lives in secrecy with these seven publicly acclaimed figures who replace
the chimps that were sent up in the first American space capsules.
They're synthetic heroes, men revved up to act like boys. Walking in

formation in their shiny silver uniforms, the astronauts, whose crewcuts

givethem a bullet-headed look, are like a football team in a sci-fi fantasy.
But they're not quite the square-jawed manikins they pretend to be;
creatures of publicity, they learn how to manipulate the forces that are
manipulating them. They have to, in order to preserve their dignity.
They're phony only on the outside. Their heroism, it turns out, is the real
thing (which rather confuses the issue).
As Sam Shepard embodies him. Chuck Yeager, the "ace
the lanky
of aces" who broke the sound barrier in 1947, evokes the young, breath-
takingly handsome Gary Cooper. And Yeager and the other test pilots
have a hangout near the home base of the U.S. flight-test program: a

6i
cantina in the Mojave Desert, with a wall of photographs behind the bar
—snapshots of the flyers' fallen comrades. Presided over by a woman
known as Pancho (Kim Stanley), the place recalls the flyers' hangout in
the Howard Hawks picture Only Angels Have Wings and the saloons
in Westerns. Shepard's Yeager is the strong, silent hero of old movies
— especially John Ford movies. On horseback in the desert, he looks at
the flame-spewing rocket plane that he's going to fly the next morning,
and it's like Kaufman uses Sam Shepard's
a bronco that he's got to bust.
cowboy Yeager as the gallant, gum-chewing individualist. He has some
broken ribs and a useless injured arm when he goes up in that fiery
rocket, and he doesn't let on to his superiors; he just goes up and breaks
the sound barrier and then celebrates with his wife (Barbara Hershey)
over a steak and drinks at Pancho's. He expresses his elation by howling
like a wolf.
Even if the actual, sixtyish Chuck Yeager, now a retired Air Force
brigadier general, weren't familiar to us from his recent appearances in
TV commercials, where he radiates energy and affable good-fellowship,
we can see him in the movie (he plays the bit part of the bartender at
the cantina), and he isn't a lean, angular, solitary type —he's chunky and
convivial. Sam Shepard is playing a legend that appeals to the director.
He's Honest Abe Lincoln and Lucky Lindy, a passionate lover, and a man
who speaks only the truth, if that. This legendary Yeager has too much
symbolism piled on him, and he's posed too artfully; he looms in the
desert, watching over what happens to the astronauts in the following
years as if he were the Spirit of the American Past. Sam Shepard's
Yeager appears in scenes that have no reason to be in the movie except,
maybe, that Phil Kaufman has wanted for a long time to shoot them.
(The worst idea is the black-clad death figure, played by Royal Dano,
who, when he isn't bringing the flyers' widows the bad news or singing
at the burial sites, sits at a table in Pancho's, waiting.) Kaufman must
assume that the images of Yeager resonance
will provide a contrasting
throughout the astronauts' sequences. But Sam Shepard isn't merely
—
willing to be used as an icon he uses himself as an icon, as if he saw
—
no need to act. And he can't resonate he isn't alive. The movie is more
than a little skewed: it's Kaufman's —and Tom Wolfe's— dreamy view
of the nonchalant Yeager set against their satirical view of Henry Luce's
walking apple pies. This epic has no coherence, no theme to hold it

together, except the tacky idea that Americans can't be true, modest
heroes anymore —that they're plasticized by the media.
Like Tom Wolfe, Phil Kaufman wants you to find everything he puts
in beguilingly wonderful and ironic. That's the Tom Wolfe tone, and to

62
a surprising degree Kaufman catches it and blends it with his own. The
film's structural peculiarities and its wise-guy adolescent's caricature of
space research seem to go together to form a zany texture. It's a
all

stirring, enjoyable mess of a movie. Kaufman plays Mad -magazine

games, in which the woman nurse (Jane Dornaker) testing the as-
tronauts is a comic ogre with a mustache and the space scientists are
variants of Dr. Strangelove — clowns with thick German accents. (Scott
Beach, who plays the Wernher von Braun figure,wears a wig that sits
on his head like a furry creature that took sick and died there.) Counter-
culture gags are used for a sort of reverse jingoism. When the scientists
get together to celebrate their victories, they sing in German. When
Lyndon Johnson (Donald Moffat) can't understand what von Braun is
saying, he's a Lyndon Johnson cartoon, and the dialogue has the rhythm
of a routine by two old radio comics. Most of the low comedy doesn't
make it up to that level; Kaufman has a healthy appetite for foolishness,
—
but his comic touch is woozy some scenes are very broad and very limp.
(Even Jeff Goldblum, as a NASA recruiter, can't redeem all the ones he's
in.) And there are coarse, obvious jokes: the astronauts come on to the

press like a vaudeville act —playing dumb and giving the reporters just
—
what they want while the Hallelujah Chorus rises on the soundtrack.
The action zigzags from old-movie romance to cockeyed buffoonery to
the courage (and exaltation) of men alone in tiny capsules orbiting the
earth at eighteen thousand miles an hour. Kaufman relies on the con-
trasts and rhythms of the incidents to produce a cumulative vision, and
it The picture is glued together only by Bill Conti's
doesn't happen.
hodgepodge But a puppyish enthusiasm carries it forward, semi-
score.
triumphantly. And the nuthouse- America games do something for it that
perhaps nothing else could have done: they knock out any danger of its
having a worthy, official quality, and they make it O.K. for the flights
themselves to be voluptuously peaceful.
The flights —a mixture of NASA footage and material, with
fictional
marvellous sound effects —are inescapably romantic. Working with the
cinematographer Caleb Deschanel {The Black Stallion) and with the
San Francisco avant-garde filmmaker Jordan Belson, who does special
visual effects, Kaufman provides unusually simple and lyrical heavenly
scenes. As a may try to come in on a wing and a prayer,
scriptwriter, he
and as a director he may have too easygoing a style for the one-two-bang
timing needed for low comedy, but he's a tremendous moviemaker, as
he demonstrated in The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid (1972), The
White Dawn (1974), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and The
Wanderers (1979). He has a puckish side; it comes out here in a rather

63
unshaped deadpan joke using Australian aborigines to account for the
mysterious "celestial fireflies" that Ed Harris's John Glenn reports see-
ing. Kaufman's re-creation of the middle and late fifties is realistic and
affectionate without any great show of expense. (He was able to fake
most of the locations in the San Francisco area, which doubles here for
Florida, Texas, Washington, D.C., and New York, and Australia, too.)
And he doesn't take the bloom off space by knocking us silly with the
grandeur of it all. The Right Stuff has just enough of Jordan Belson's
tantalizing patterns and rainbow fragments to suggest the bliss that
Chuck Yeager felt high above the desert and that the astronauts experi-
ence while they're inside their spinning capsules. Strapped in and almost
immobile, John Glenn is also the beneficiary of a magical effect that he
himself can't see. The lights from the equipment that are reflected in the
windows of all the astronauts' helmets hit him just right; we see two tiny
lines of jewelled lights streaking down his face, one from each eye.
"Astro tears" the movie crew called them. (They suggest Jesus in space.)
Phil Kaufman makes it some of his characters to show
possible for
so many sides that they keep taking us —
by surprise especially Ed Har-
ris's John Glenn, the strict Presbyterian, who probably comes the closest

to fitting Life's image of an American hero. This Glenn, who reprimands

his teammates for their willingness to oblige astronaut groupies, and is
grimly humming "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" to keep himself
together as he sits trussed up in his capsule, hurtling back into the
earth's atmosphere, is perfectly capable of using patriotism as a put-on:
at the Mercury team's first big press conference, in Washington, he
assumes the role of spokesman, flashes his quick, big smile, and is real
pleased with himself. Blond and blue-eyed, and, at thirty-two, considera-
bly younger than John Glenn was at the time, Ed Harris has some of the
bleached pallor of Robert Duvall, and when he's sitting out in space,
loving it, his pale-eyed, staring intensity may remind you of Keir Dul-
lea's starchild face in 2001. But Harris has a scary, unstable quality
that's pretty much his own. He holds his head stiff on his neck, and he's
the kind of very still actor who can give you the willies: he often has the
look of someone who's about to cry, and a flicker of a smile can make
you think the character he's playing is a total psycho.
Your feelings about Harris's Glenn are likely to be unresolved,
except in Glenn's scenes with his wife, Annie (played with delicate,
grinning charm and mischief by Mary Jo Deschanel, the actress wife of
the cinematographer). In an early scene, Kaufman establishes that they
have an understanding of each other that goes beyond words. It has to,
because the enchanting Annie is a stutterer who can't get a sentence out.

64
Her husband knows how to read every blocked syllable; the two of them
are so close they communicate almost by osmosis, and even when she's
making fun of his gung-ho wholesomeness he giggles happily, secure in
the intimacy they share. Then, on the day of his scheduled flight, the
NASA people ask him to talk to his wife on the phone and persuade her
to "play ball" with the television newscasters who are outside the
Glenns' house waiting to come in and interview her. Vice-President John-
son is also out there, in his limousine; he wants to come in to reassure
her on TV. On the phone, she's distraught —she can barely speak her
husband's name. But he intuits what she's trying to say; it's as if he
could read her breathing. She faces terrible humiliation —she wants to
know if she has to let them
Glenn has the single most winning
all in.

speech of the whole three-hour-and-twelve-minute movie when he tells

her that no, she doesn't have to let anybody in. And, good Presbyterian
that he is, he manages to express his rage at the networks and the
politicians without ever using a cussword (which is a feat comparable to
—
her non-verbal communication they're both handicapped). The scene is
perhaps the wittiest and most deeply romantic confirmation of a mar-
riage ever filmed. When Glenn is back on earth and the two of them are
riding in a ticker-tape parade in his honor, they're a pair of secret,
victorious rebels.
The movie probably has the best cast ever assembled for what is
essentially a —
docudrama although a twenty-seven-million-dollar docu-
drama, and one with an individual temperament, isn't like anything
we've seen on TV. Scott Wilson appears as the test pilot Crossfield, and
Levon Helm is Ridley, Yeager's mechanic. Pamela Reed brightens up the
scenes she's in; she's all eyes as Trudy, the secretly estranged wife of
the astronaut Gordon Cooper. And I felt my face twitching, as if I were
about to laugh, whenever Dennis Quaid's Gordo was on the screen,
because he has a devilish kid's smile, with his upper lip a straight line
across his face. Quaid plays Gordo as a self-reliant, tough kid —a wised-
up Disney boy, the savviest Huck Finn there ever was. When he gets his
—
turn in the heavens Cooper makes the last solo flight into space his —
split-faced grin is perhaps the standout image of the fllm. He's cynical
—
and cocky a materialist in every thought and feeling and so when his —
face tells us that he's awed by what he sees, we're awed by what we see
in his face. It may seem ungrateful to point out the results of realism,
but most of the actors playing astronauts are martyred by their haircuts;
their features look naked, their noses as big as a bald eagle's beak. Scott
Glenn, who plays Alan Shepard, has gone even further than the others.
He looks a little like Hoagy Carmichael, but he seems to be deforming

65
himself; if this is meant to be an aspect of the astronaut's character, it

isn't delved into. Scott Glenn has got so wiry, gaunt, and muscular that
his skin appears to be pulled taut against his bones, and when he laughs
his whole face crinkles, like a hyena's.
If we're often preoccupied by the men as physical specimens, this
has a good deal to do with the subject, but it may also be because we're
not sure how to interpret their meaningful glances at each other. Are we
intended to see comradeship there, and mutual respect, or do the expres-
sions mean "They're buying it!" or "This is the life!" or "My head is
numb"? We in the audience are put in the position of being hip to what's
going on even when we don't really get it. What, for example, are the
astronauts thinking as they watch old Sally Rand do her feather-fan
dance in their honor in Houston in 1962? (The dancer who impersonates
her is, blessedly, younger and more gifted.) The jazzy hipness in the
film's tone comes down to us from Tom Wolfe —
it's an unearned feeling

that we're on to things. Probably Kaufman thinks that he's conveying

a great deal more to us than he is. Certainly he's trying to "say some-
thing" when he cuts Sally's fan dance and the expressions of the as-
tronauts watching her right into footage of Sam Shepard's Chuck Yea-
ger being brave again (and still unsung). But he's making points on an
epic scale rather than telling an epic story. He hasn't dramatized what
he wants to get at; he has attitudinized instead —
setting the modern,
hype-bound world against a vision of the past that never was. Though
it's a docudrama and some incidents are included simply for the record,

The Right Stuff is drawn not from life but from Tom Wolfe's book and
Kaufman's nostalgia for old-movie values.
The mishap that the astronaut Gus Grissom (that terrific actor Fred
Ward) is involved in gives us, briefly, something solid that makes us feel
very uncomfortable. As the film presents it, the gloomy-souled Grissom
panics during the splashdown of his capsule and is desperate to get out.
The helicopter that is to pick up the capsule is hovering overhead, ma-
neuvering into position. Though the film doesn't make it absolutely clear,
when the hatch blows open and Grissom climbs out (and the capsule
sinks) the implication is that he opened it. He claims that it simply
malfunctioned and opened by itself, but clearly the NASA people don't
accept his account, because he receives considerably less than a hero's
welcome, and his wife, Betty (Veronica Cartwright), feels horribly let

down by the second-rateness of the ceremonies in his honor. I wish that

Kaufman had followed through on the disturbing, awkward quality of
this incident, which grips us at a different emotional level from the other
scenes. I realize I'm asking for a different kind of movie, but if he'd taken

66
a different approach to the Gus and Betty Grissom episode he might have
opened up some of the impHcations of the phrase "the right stuff" that
have bothered me ever since Tom Wolfe's book came out.
Yeager is, of course, the movie's archetype of "the right stuff" the —
model of courage, determination, and style. The astronauts don't have
an acceptable style, but the movie half forgives them, because, as it
—
indicates, this isn't their fault the times are to blame. The men them-
selves have the guts and the drive, and they win Kaufman's admiration.
But then there's Fred Ward's Gus Grissom, who may at a crucial mo-
ment have failed to demonstrate "the right stuff." Isn't this all painfully
familiar? Doesn't it take us back to the Victorian values of The Four
Feathers and all those other cultural artifacts which poisoned the lives
of little boys (and some girls, too), filling them with terror that they
might show a "yellow streak"?
Being far more of an anti-establishmentarian than Tom Wolfe,
Kaufman probably felt that he had transformed the material, but he is
still stuck with its reactionary cornerstone: the notion that a man's value

is determined by his physical courage. You'd think that Kaufman would

have got past this romantic (and perhaps monomaniacal) conception of

bravery. (With this standard, whatever you fear becomes what you
compulsively measure yourself by.) I assume that people who are jel-
lyfish about some things may be very brave about others. And certainly
during the counterculture period there was a widespread rejection of the
idea of bravery that this film represents. According to Wolfe, "the right
stuff" is "the uncritical willingness to face danger." Yet the film's com-
edy scenes are conceived in counterculture terms.
The movie has the happy, excited spirit of a fanfare, and it's aston-
ishingly entertaining, considering what a screw-up it is. It satirizes the
astronauts as mock pilots, and it never indicates that there's any reason
for them to be rocketing into space besides the public-relations benefit
to the government; then it celebrates them as heroes. As a viewer, you
want the lift of watching them be heroic, but they're not in a heroic
situation. More than anything else, they seem to be selected for their
ability to take physical punishment and accept confinement in a tight
cylinder. And about the only way they can show their mettle is by not
panicking when they finally get into their passive, chimp positions. (If
they discover that they're sick with terror, they can't do much more
about it than the chimps could, anyway.) It's Yeager who pronounces the
benediction on the astronauts, who tells us that yes, they are heroes,
because they know (what the chimps didn't) that they're sitting on top
of a rocket. (I imagine that the chimps had a pretty fair suspicion that

67
they weren't frolicking high in a banana tree.) If having "the right stuff"
is up as the society's highest standard, and if a person proves that
set
he has it by his eagerness to be locked in a can and shot into space, the

only thing that distinguishes human heroes from chimps is that the
heroes volunteer for the job. And if they volunteer, as they do in this
film, out of personal ambition and for profit, are they different from the
chimp who might jump into the can eagerly, too, if he saw a really big
banana there?

inyone who believes himself to have been a revolutionary or

a deeply committed radical during his student-demonstration days in the
late sixties is likely to find which opened the recent New
The Big Chill,
York Film Festival, despicable. And if the advance publicity for the film
has led you to expect a serious, ''personal" movie about how the late-
sixties campus activists have adjusted to becoming the kind of people
they used to insult, you may find it pretty offensive. It's no more than
an amiable, slick comedy with some very well-directed repartee and
skillful performances. It's overcontrolled, it's shallow, it's a series of
contrivances. But there are pleasures to be had from this kind of wise-
cracking contemporary movie that you can't get from anything else.
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the script with Barbara
Benedek, it's set in South Carolina, where a group of seven former
friends from the University of Michigan gather for the funeral of Alex,
the campus radical who brought them together, and who has now, after
years of flailing about disconsolately, slit his wrists. The movie is,
nonetheless, lighthearted from the start. It may pretend to be about
"life," but it's really about being clever (even the title tells you that), and

about the fun of ensemble acting. It begins with a little game-playing:

—
glimpses of two pairs of hands one pair with sexy long red fingernails
— as they adjust a man's very spiffy clothes. The man turns out to be the
corpse being dressed. This amusingly callous, slightly tawdry gag,
planned so immaculately that it suggests a parody of American Gigolo,

sets the film's tone. (It's a shame that Alex's old friends don't get to
admire his fancy duds, but it appears that he was accoutred for us, not
for them — it's a closed-coffin ceremony.) After the funeral, the friends
— all in their mid-thirties —feel the need to be with each other again.
They bury the sixties (which Alex symbolizes) and then dredge them up

68
 The out-of-towners stick around for the weekend, at the
to talk about.
spacious home of the only two of the old group who married within it;
the husband, who has done well in the running-shoes business, is played
by Kevin Kline, and his wife, a doctor, by Glenn Close. These two are
also the happiest of the seven surviving friends. Kline (who, for the first
time, relaxes in front of the camera and comes across as a character
rather than an actor) is a man of substance here, a quick-witted fellow
who adores his kids and feels no guilt about making money. He doesn't
look back, except musically; the sixties for him are the rock 'n' roll

records he loves, which we hear throughout the movie "Joy to the —

World," Aretha Franklin's "A Natural Woman," the Stones, the Band,
and so on. His wife had a long emotional attachment to Alex and a brief
sexual one, and she's torn up by his death, but she's a warm, nurturing
woman, and will be fine.
As soon as you see how warm she is, you begin to see the film's
flabby side —the seven characters are like a psych major's sexually inte-

grated version of a forties bomber crew. The pleasures of The Big Chill
are the pleasures of the synthetic; it's all tricks, but craftsmanlike,
exemplary tricks. Glenn Close's opposite number is JoBeth Williams, the
dissatisfied wife of an advertising executive, a tough bitch who means
to leave him and nail the most famous of the group —Tom Berenger, a
TV star, who is dissatisfied in his own way (he seems to be in a state of
suspended animation) but is not about to be nailed. She's furious when,
ever so gently, he turns her down. The likable Mary Kay Place has
perhaps the worst role: she's a lawyer who gave up on her idealistically
motivated legal-aid job and went into corporate law. Unmarried, disap-
pointed with everything she has been involved in since her college days,
she wants a child and hopes to conceive one this weekend by one of the
old friends she loves and trusts. Mary Kay Place brings a soft, self-
deprecating wryness to the part, but it still reeks of cheap poignancy,
which is compounded when the man who is her first choice William —
—
Hurt turns out to have been made impotent by the wounds he suffered
in Vietnam. This device should probably be marked "Property of Hem-

ingway" and retired, but, still, working with it. Hurt gives the best
performance of his young movie career. As a man who lives by dealing
drugs and is his own chief customer, he looks doughy and unhealthy, as
if he'd lost touch with his own life. He's quiet, and maybe because he
isn't acting all over the landscape and commandeering our attention, he's
very appealing. The seventh, Jeff Goldblum, a writer for People and a
man of stunning superficiality, takes himself very seriously. His tall,

gangling body, his pointed head, and his scowling face and hobbling

69
 —

Adam's apple are all involved in whatever he's saying; he's a living
cartoon —a man who wrinkles his forehead to think. This is probably the
best-written role that Goldblum has had since the 1978 Invasion of the
Body Snatchers, and he gives his fatuous remarks a huffy delivery that
makes him the butt of his own lines; his huge eyes, behind specs, never
let on that he knows he's funny. He's got a real comic creation here: a

worrywart, a young old geezer.

There are nifty details in this movie, such as the name of the chain
of running-shoe stores that Kevin Kline has built up (Running Dogs
remember the revisionists of the Chinese Revolution?), and Kline's little

son's knowing the lyrics of the sixties songs. Sometimes details are
punched up too mechanically: cuts to Hurt's single earring or to Mary
Kay Place's young-professional outfit, for example. At times you may
feel as if the cutting followed the script exactly —as ifyou were seeing
a blueprint. And there's an early montage of the characters reacting to
the news and packing their suitcases; it's a guerrilla tactic
(the big chill)
— to expose these people before we even meet them. A little later we get
a montage of them unpacking, and even glimpses of what's on their
night tables. And it's too cute, with items like an anthology of Kafka.
The movie might have been inspired by a screenwriting manual that tells
its purchasers to make lists for each character: What's he reading? What

kind of clothes does he wear? What would he pack for a trip? Yet the
film's details help you past the obviousness of most of the roles the —
women's especially, and also Berenger's. He's not bad at all; his apolo-
—
getic narcissism is rather touching with his bushy blow-dried hair and
thick mustache, he's a sheepish ringer for Tom Selleck. But he really has
only one terrific scene: when the whole group rushes to the TV set to
watch the opening credits of his hit series "J. T. Lancer" which show —
him as the daredevil hero, leaping from one hazard to the next and he's —
compelled to look. The film is often weak when two people go off and bare
their souls, but the group scenes have snap and proficiency, and they
show Kasdan's flair as a director.
Most directors are at a loss when they try to shoot ensemble scenes,
and John Sayles, when he made the 1980 Return of the Secaucus 7 —
a sixties-reunion film with a similar houseparty structure but an unslick
tone — didn't seem to have any idea of how to use the camera as an active
participant, pinpointing what was going on. Kasdan keeps the camera
jumping for the gag (the way Sydney Pollack did in Tootsie), and in the
ensemble scenes you can almost hear the crackle as he hits the effects
— —
he wants. There's also an eighth person an observer in the house with
the group: Meg Tilly plays the young girl with whom Alex was living at

70
 —

the time of his suicide. She's ten to fifteen years younger than the others,
and, with her small, delicate features and wide-apart almond eyes, she
seems to stand for a generation born shell-shocked and wise — or is it

stoned and empty of anything but matter-of-fact considerations? Her

role is perhaps too conceptual, and there probably should be a little more
going on in the character, but she's an extraordinarily lovely presence.
Secaucus 7 had an outsider in some scenes, too: the local fellow, Howie
(played by Sayles himself), who hadn't gone off to college who'd mar- —
ried and was raising a family, Howie had what the others, with their
hipness, had lost, and he made us aware that the Secaucus 7 were all
childless and unrooted. Here, Meg Tilly makes us conscious of how
articulate the whole bunch is. It's easy to see why Alex turned to this
restful girl — —
she's a refuge from ideas and it's very pleasing when she
and William Hurt find a rapport.
The remarkable thing about this movie is that the actors don't
destroy themselves even in their maudlin moments. Glenn Close has an
—
icky "generous" scene toward the end she makes it work by the sheer
silliness of her expression. Whenever Kasdan tries for depth, the movie

is phony, but a lot of the time it manages to turn phoniness into fun
which is in a long if not so great Hollywood tradition.
October 17, 1983

IMAGE MAKERS

I, In the opening scenes of Under Fire, rebel soldiers in Chad are

trying to move a caravan of elephants carrying crates of weapons across

a patch of open and Nick Nolte, as Russell Price, a photojournalist,
field,

trots alongside, snapping pictures of theponderous beasts and the driv-

ers sitting way on top of them and their freight. Suddenly, a helicopter
gunship appears, blasting, and the scene turns into a horrifying sham-

71
bles of elephants running and men shot down as they scurry for the
bush. Wherever he is, the big, blond Russell Price goes on taking pic-
tures. Hecovered with cameras; they're his only luggage, and they
is

swing as he moves. He switches from one to the other, and with each
small click of the shutter we —
see in a freeze-f rame that is held for just
an instant —what he has shot. The director, Roger Spottiswoode, a
Canadian-born Englishman who's thirty-eight now, began working in
London studios at nineteen and already had several years of experience,
including work as an editor on Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, when he
came to live in this country, in 1971. He edited two more Peckinpah films
and Walter Hill's Hard Times, worked with Karel Reisz, first as editor,
then as second-unit director and associate producer, and also wrote the
firstdraft of 48 Hrs. before he got a chance to direct (with Terror Train
and The Pursuit of D. B. Cooper). He was ready maybe more than —
—
ready for Under Fire. It has been made with breathtaking skill.
Price's photographs —
those freeze-frames, most of them in black-and-
white, some in color, and each with its small, staccato click — fix the
faces, the actions, the calamities in our memories, and the film is so
cleanly constructed that they have a percussive effect. They're what
Under Fire is about.
When Price hitches a ride on a truck carrying rebel troops out of the
area, he's not the only American (or the only blond) among the black
men. Gates (Ed Harris), a mercenary with the grin of a happy psycho-
path, sits among the rebels thinking he's among the soldiers of the
government that's paying him. Price sets him straight, and he chuckles;
he doesn't care who he kills anyway — it's his sport. When Price gets
back to his hotel, the foreign press corps —which includes Claire (Joanna
Cassidy), a radio reporter who is just breaking up with her lover, Alex
(Gene Hackman), and Alex himself, a celebrated war correspondent and
—
Price's closest friend is preparing to move on to the next big trouble
spot, Nicaragua. And we realize that what we have seen is, essentially,
the prologue. But we have already grasped the most important thing
about Price, who risks his carcass as a matter of course: he's an image
man. And, seeing through his eyes as he clicks the shutter, we intuitively
recognize how good he is at what he does. There's a purity about his total
absorption images. Price doesn't even have to do the kind of interpre-
in

tation that the reporters do; he doesn't have to try to make sense of
things. Nolte's loping, athletic grace as he moves alongside fighting men
adds to the feeling we get that Price is an artist and an automaton, too.
His whole body is tuned up for those clicks. He couldn't explain why he
shoots when he does; he simply knows. And Nolte has what is perhaps

72
an accidental asset for the role: his eyes are narrowed, as if by a lifetime
of squinting through cameras, and his eyelids look callused.
It doesn't take long to grasp that Price and Claire and Alex regard

their lack of involvement in what they cover as part of being profession-

als.They are observers, not participants, and they're proud of it. It's the
essence of their personal dash and style —
the international form of the
swaggering cynicism of The Front Page. They all risk their lives with
a becoming carelessness. But that's almost the only thing they have in
common with the heroes and heroines of old Hollywood movies. One
conspicuous difference is that they're grownup people in their forties;
Alex may even be fifty.

The movie is set in 1979, during the last days of the rule of General
Anastasio Somoza, the dictator-president whose family was put in power

and kept there by the United States. And in a sense the Sandinist revolu-
tion — —
the imagery of it is the star. This is trompe-l'oeil moviemaking,
with Mexican locations in Oaxaca and Chiapas dressed up in the shanty-
town building material of Nicaragua (uncut beer-can sheets), and the
political graffiti and the pulsing, hot colors —
turquoise and flaming pink.
The young Sandinistas who dart through the streets in striped T-shirts,
with bright handkerchiefs masking their faces, have the street-theatre
look that is so startling in the book Nicaragua, Susan Meiselas's 1981
collection of photographs of the insurrection. Spottiswoode knows not to
make realism drab; there's dust and anger everywhere, but the country
is airy and alive with color. Produced at a cost of eight and a half million

dollars (Nolte and Hackman worked for much less than their usual fees)
and with only fifty-seven shooting days, the film is a beautiful piece of
new-style classical moviemaking; everything is thought out and pre-
pared, but it isn't explicit, it isn't labored, and it certainly isn't overcom-
posed. No doubt the cinematographer John Alcott, whose speed is turn-
—
ing him into a legend he's the man who doesn't bother with light
—
meters, he just looks at the back of his hand gave it its tingling visual
quality. The dialogue is exciting, too. The script, by Ron Shelton, work-
ing from a first draft by Clayton Frohman, is often edgy and maliciously
smart. Terry Southern at his peak did no better than the lines Shelton
has written for Richard Masur as Somoza's American publicity expert
— —
the man trying to improve Somoza's "image" as he offers condo-
lences to the lover of a correspondent murdered by Somoza's troops:
"Jesus Christ, a human tragedy. What can I say?" (Shelton was a profes-
sional baseball player for some time; he has been writing scripts for
three or four years, but except for some rewrite work he did on D. B.
Cooper, this is the first to be filmed.) What gives the movie its distinction

73
 — —

is that the articulate, sophisticated characters don't altogether dominate

the imagery. The Nicaraguans (some of them played by Mexicans, oth-
ers by Nicaraguan refugees in Mexico) aren't there just to supply back-
grounds for the stars.
With its concentration on the journalists —the outsiders Under
Fire is a little like Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously, but
visually and in its romantic revolutionary spirit it's more like the Cuban
scenes The Godfather, Part II and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of
in

Algiers and Burn! Spottiswoode isn't inflammatory in the way that

Pontecorvo is, but in his more subdued impassioned manner he presents
—
the case for the 1979 revolution the one that the United States govern-
ment has been trying to undo by backing the insurgents known as
contras or anti-Sandinistas. (I assume that the title of the film comes
from the words of Augusto Cesar Sandino, the leader of a peasant army,
who was murdered in 1934: "It is better to die as rebels under fire than
to live as slaves.")
The revolutionaries, with their poetic peasant faces, are presented
in a grand, naive, idealized movie tradition. Anger doesn't make the
Sandinistas mean or violent, and there's no dissension among them. (It's

how we want to think revolutionaries are.) They don't have any visible
connections to the Communist powers, either.Even so, this is one of the
most intelligently constructed political movies I've ever seen. Its
fictional inventions serve a clear purpose. Although the Sandinistas have
always been led by a group, the story posits a single leader —Rafael
who gives the people hope. Rafael is featured in the graffiti his face is —
—
the emblem of the revolution but he has never been photographed, and
the story involves the attempt of Price and Claire to find him, and the
various forces that manipulate them before and after their search. One
of these forces is a wily Frenchman, Jazy, who works for the C.I.A., and,
as played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, he's a suave, lecherous imp. You
know he's a dangerous little sleazo (he says he works for everybody, and
he probably does), but he's also knowledgeable and witty. And when
Somoza's men throw Price in the clink "for taking too many pictures"
—
and kick him around, it's Jazy a pal of Somoza's who gets him —
released. Jazy is who amuses himself with
the kind of pal of Somoza's
Somoza's leggy young mistress. Miss Panama (Jenny Gago). The Gen-
eral himself is played by Rene Enriquez (of "Hill Street Blues"), who in
fact is a Nicaraguan and was acquainted with Somoza. His performance
is a finely nuanced caricature: this Teddy-bear Somoza deludes himself
that he's an aristocrat with thousands of years of tradition behind him.
He has perfected a form of infantilism —he sees only what he wants to

74
 a

see and hears only what he wants to hear. He's so locked in himself he's
like a product of inbreeding — a genetic idiot who thinks he's a grandee.
The corrupt environment creates tensions in the gentle, affable

Price: anger at the way Somoza's bullies treated him, and deeper anger
at the way they brutalized the priest he shared a cell with. And some-
thing happens that upsets him so much that, photogenic as it is, he
momentarily forgets to take a picture. When he and Claire are on one
of their trips trying to find Rafael and are being escorted by Sandinistas,
he sees the mercenary Gates hiding. Gates is out of his skull; he's an
obscenity. (He stands in for all the mercenaries running loose in Third
World countries.) But Price, being a journalist and regarding himself as
"neutral," doesn't reveal Gates' presence. Then, as he and Claire are
walking along and talking to their young Sandinista guide —who wears
a Baltimore Grioles cap, because the Nicaraguan Dennis Martinez is on
the —
team Gates kills the kid. It's a spiteful, showojffy murder, and Price
knows he could have prevented it. He's sickened; he's full of grief and
disgust. It's Claire (whom he loves) who points out to him that he didn't
take a picture; the artist-automaton broke down and behaved humanly,
and that night is their first together.
When Price and Claire reach Rafael's hiding place and Price is asked
to perform a crucial service for the rebels, he is emotionally prepared.
He is asked to fake a photograph for them, and he does it, though this

is a betrayal of his art and, if it becomes known, will almost inevitably

wreck his reputation. Events then move very quickly. Shortly afterward.
Price discovers that a whole series of photographs he took (just for
himself) of the unmasked Sandinistas at Rafael's headquarters have
been stolen and are being used by the demented mercenary Gates —
—
one-man hit squad to identify the rebel leaders. Even Price's pure
images are being polluted; they're being used every which way. They're
marking his subjects for extinction.
Before Price came to Nicaragua, he was an overgrown small boy
playing with what he loved to do: take pictures. (And this is why Nolte
is a perfect choice for the role. He can be dumb, unthinking, oxlike, yet
with a controlling intelligence and a central sweetness and decency.) In
Nicaragua, where somebody's using you all the time, Price is in a new
situation.Detachment can have hideous results, as he saw when the
Grioles loverwas killed. Whatever Price's misgivings as a professional
photojournalist with a reputation for integrity, and whatever the effects
of the action on his future, when he fakes the picture to help the San-
dinistas he isn't destroyed by doing —he's humanized.
it He is letting
himself be governed by his own core of generosity. These are the terms

75
 —

of the movie, in which Price the photojournalist is a metaphor for movie

director. Making movies, this picture says, isn't about purity. It's about
trying to suggest the living texture in which people make choices that
may —from an academic point of view—appear unethical, crazy, wrong.
The movie fills our heads with images of people under fire. There are
terrified peasants and Somoza's equally terrified national guardsmen
probably peasant boys who signed up because they were hungry. At one
point, Price and Claire are in a car in a provincial town, and the driver
panics when guardsmen direct him to stop; he backs up, and, with
guardsmen firing at them. Price and Claire jump out into the street and
try to hide. There's not much sense to anything that happens during the
insurrection. Peasants in dirt streets stare at a shiny big automobile in
flames. Refugees in the provincial city of Leon mill in the streets trying

to escape the national guardsmen who are shooting at them, and they're
simultaneously attacked by planes. In some neighborhoods of Managua,
guardsmen fire into the flimsy beer-can shacks, and shoot everything in
the streets that moves — even squealing pigs. It's in this sequence that
the movie reenacts the 1979 killing of Bill Stewart, the ABC correspond-
ent, at a national-guard checkpoint in Managua. After kneeling and
holding his hands out, to show that he had no weapons, Stewart was told
to lie down, with his arms over his head, and was then —
for no particular
—
reason shot, while his cameraman went on photographing the scene. I
hadn't been aware of how that footage had stayed in the back of my head
for four years, but at the movie, as soon as I saw the guardsmen stand-
ing there in the street, and saw one of the characters mosey up to them
to ask directions, I knew what was coming; Stewart's death was still so
vivid that this reenactment almost seemed to be in slow motion, and, with
Price's shutter-click frozen frames, in a sense it was. The killing has an
eerie inevitability about it. Under Fire isn't just reproducing a famous
incident here, it's making us conscious of the images we've got stored
up. It brings the Nicaragua of countless news stories right to the center
of our consciousness. We knew more about the place than we thought
we did. And Jerry Goldsmith's spare, melodic score (one of the best
movie scores I've ever heard) features a bamboo flute from the Andes
with a barely perceptible electronic shadow effect —a melancholy sound
that takes you back. It tugs at your memories.
There's a good reason, I think, for the use of grownup people as the
These grownups aren't surprised or scandalized by
principal characters.
what they see, and their lack of surprise is part of the unusual quality
of Under Fire. There's no gee-whizz acting. After Hackman's Alex
who has been "hanging in there" with Claire, hoping she'll change her

76
mind about wanting her freedom —decides to head back to the States and
take the anchorman's job he has been offered, Claire says goodbye to him
and watches as he goes off in the taxi that's taking him to the airport.
Partway down the street, Alex sees Price walking up; he jumps out, and
they hug each other. As he goes off again in the cab, Claire and Price
both stand watching as it becomes smaller down the street and heads
toward the hill in the distance. It's a beautiful shot, and expressive, too,
because nobody (the audience least of all) wants Hackman to go. He's
totally believable as a network's choice for —
anchorman it's the quality
in him that makes him so valuable to the movie (and picks up its energy
level when he returns). Hackman seems leaner here than in his last films,
—
and he's faster he's on the balls of his feet. As the famous Alex, he
—
maintains a surface jauntiness he's professionally likable. But Alex
has ideas ricocheting in his head, and whether he's sitting down at the
piano in a Managua night club and singing or just basking in his celebrity
he's never unaware of what's going on around him. He's always sizing
—
things up taking mental notes. He has an expansiveness about him;
he's full of life (the way Jack Warden was in Shampoo). The three major
characters have to be people who have been around, because outrage is
not the motivating emotion of Under Fire, as it was in, say, Costa-
Gavras's Missing. Spottiswoode and Shelton may be appalled, but
they're not shocked. And they're not interested in presenting characters
going through the usual virgin indignation. The United States has been
setting up or knocking down Nicaraguan governments since 1909; the
movie can hardly pretend to be showing us things we don't at some —
level— already know. Under Fire is about how you live with what you
know.
Joanna Cassidy, who has the pivotal role, is a stunning woman with
—
a real face, and as Claire she has a direct look the kind of look that
Claire Bloom's characters have sometimes turned on people, and that
Jane Fonda has had in her best roles. Joanna Cassidy is tall (Trintignant
looks really petite when he's next to her), and as Claire she has the
strength of a woman who's had to set her jaw and keep her smile for long
stretches. Claire has had to be tough, and toughness deeply offends her.
She has been struggling to keep some softness. The film catches her at
a key time in her physical development. Running through the streets,
she moves with extraordinary grace, and you certainly know why Price
takes pictures of her sleeping nude. But her job has yielded her every-
thing that it's going to. She has an almost grownup daughter, whom she
talks to on the phone and on tapes —she would like to be with her. This
is a time in her life when doubts have settled in. The foreign press corps,

77
 —

like the mercenaries, jump from one chaos to the next; they go where
the armaments shipments are going. They keep the people at home
"informed," but to the people they descend on they must seem like
powerful celebrities who could change things if they would just tell "the
truth." Claire is doing her job almost automatically now, and her mind
has a roving eye. When Price's automatic-response system fails him
when he doesn't take a picture of the dead kid right next to him it's a —
change in him she can respond to. None of this is spelled out for us; it's
all there in Joanna Cassidy's performance and in Nolte's response to her

physical presence. As Price, he doesn't use the low, growling voice that
he had in J^S Hrs., and his beefiness is all sensitivity. Nolte never lets you
see how he gets his effects. His big, rawboned body suggests an Ameri-
can workingman jock, but he uses his solid flesh the way Jean Gabin did:
he inhabits his characters. He's such a damned good actor that he hides
inside them. That's his sport.
I have been wondering why some members of the press show so
little enthusiasm for this picture. (It certainly couldn't be more timely.)
Possibly the movie ladles too much guilt on journalists. (The mercenary
who has been poisoning Price's life bids him a cheery farewell "See you —
in Thailand.") But I can think of only a few scenes that aren't brought

off and only one that's clumsily staged: the last appearance of Trintig-

nant's fascinatingly crisscrossed Jazy. Three frightened young Sandinis-

tas who have come to his house to kill him wait around while he explains
his political rationale to Price — his fear of the future Communist take-
over. I think there's something in Under Fire
bugging the press
that's
the way it was bugged a couple of years ago by Absence of Malice.
Price's faking the photograph and accepting the penalties that will fol-
low may be bewildering to the run of journalists who make decisions
about what to report on the basis of their own convenience and advan-
tage all the time. Since they do it unconsciously, they can easily be
aroused to indignation at Price's conscious act. Maybe they know that
they wouldn't do what he does, and they think that that means he's
morally inferior to them. And maybe, like other professional groups,
they don't like movies about them that don't glorify them.
Spottiswoode could be a trace too sane; the actors go as far as they
can with what they've got to work with, but possibly he doesn't go quite
far enough (and neither, possibly, does the script). Spottiswoode doesn't
have the wild, low cunning that the great scenes in Peckinpah's films
—
have he doesn't spook us. But he does everything short of that. In its
sheer intelligence and craft this is a brilliant movie.
October 31, 1983

78
 —

HAIR

1 leart Like
racer Shirley
a Wheel is a biographical movie about the drag
Muldowney, who has won the National Hot Rod Associa-
tion World Championship three times. The director, Jonathan Kaplan,
and the writer, Ken Friedman (associates from their days at New York
—
University), don't glamorize their heroine played by Bonnie Bedelia
or try to turn her into a feisty, female Rocky. The film is an open-eyed
look at what it cost Shirley Muldowney to win out over men in what was
previously considered the domain of macho daredevils. And the feeling
of authenticity that it gives you is likably modest and sensible. Kaplan
gets his details right; the blue-collar people on the screen appear to be
accurately observed, without interpretation. Heart Like a Wheel is the
type of B picture in which the characters say flat, emotionally neutral
things in situations that seem to call for hyperventilating excitement.
This kind of affectlessness is sometimes praised as realism and as art.
But there's also a cost that Kaplan and Friedman pay: the film's "objec-
tive" surfaces don't yield much to us beyond the facts of the characters'
lives. Heart Like a Wheel has a B-picture sensibility. That's what's good

about it, and that's what makes it not good enough. What's on the screen
is like the raw material for a terrific movie, but if you try to assemble

it in your head you may discover that there's an awful lot missing.

— —
At the opening, the child Shirley perhaps four or five is in a car
with her father, the honky-tonk singer Tex Roque (Hoyt Axton), who is
casually speeding on back roads. She feels carsick, and he knows how
to cure her. He puts her on his lap, and, with his big, burly arms around
her, she takes the wheel; when she gets the sense of controlling the
—
movement, she feels better she loves it. When the car hits a bump in

the road, it seems to fly through the air; and he's

she's exhilarated
gleeful as they ride together over the dark asphalt. The film jumps ahead
about twelve years, to 1956. Bonnie Bedelia is Shirley as a sixteen-year-
old Schenectady high-school girl marrying a gas-station attendant. Jack

79
Muldowney (Leo Rossi), a tall, well-built hot-rodder who's a whizbang
mechanic and dreams of having his own garage. Shirley is at the wheel
when they speed away from the church, and soon afterward the slender,
delicate-looking bride picks up a drag-racing challenge that the groom
doesn't think he can handle, and, driving his car, she wins.
The movie is about Shirley Muldowney's involvement with cars and
men. And since it's a rare sport in which a woman competes directly with
men, the picture has unusual overtones. In the years of her marriage,
Shirley works as a waitress, and Jack, who works in a filling station,
tools up the cars she races. They have a son, who goes along with them
to the small-town competitions. It's a close family, with Jack apparently
—
proud of his wife's driving ability until she wants to move into the
world of big-time professional racing. He thinks she's making a fool of
herself,and accuses her of neglecting him and the boy, and then, fed up
(and drunk), he smashes her dragster. That's the end of the marriage:
they grapple and hit each other, and, with the child watching from an
upstairs window, she clonks him on the head with a hefty flashlight and
takes off.

The movie sticks to a biographical format, observing her progress

year by year as she joins up with a champ, Connie Kalitta (Beau Bridges),
wears hot pants as her trademark, and becomes a racing star, known as
Shirley "Cha Cha" Muldowney. Her adolescent son (Anthony Edwards)
works as part of her crew, and when she breaks with Connie she goes on
alone (with the son, now full grown). The biographical material could have
used more shaping, but the film is engrossing all the way through. Kaplan
doesn't appear to have the sureness in domestic scenes that he has in the
outdoors. The Oedipal mysteries that are hinted at seem a bit too symmet-
rical: when Shirley's son breaks in on a fight she's having with Connie, the
three bodies become entangled, and the son (perhaps unconsciously try-

ing to keep his mother from leaving him again) hits Connie with a wrench.
Kaplan, a graduate of Roger Corman's action school, who directed seven
earlier pictures and four for TV, is much more confident in the race-track
scenes, especially after Connie and Shirley, having broken up, compete
against each other (and our emotions are divided). While the movie was
going on, I kept mulling over Shirley Muldowney's life, thinking that with
just a twist here and there she would come across as a mean bitch who
sacrifices the men who love her just for the satisfaction of winning races.
And I respected the fact that Kaplan and Friedman were making what
appeared to be (and often felt like) a feminist movie about a working-class
woman who was fighting men on their own turf. Yet the picture left me
feeling a little blank.

80
 Bonnie Bedelia's role spans Shirley's life from sixteen to forty, and
she's a highly competent actress, but I didn't know anything about
Shirley Muldowney when the picture was over. I felt that I knew Beau
Bridges' Connie Kalitta. Bridges brings dazzling radiance to characters
like this rowdy, all too lovable philanderer; he shows you the fellow's
insides in the flash of a nervous smile. His Connie is a stocky, blobby guy
who's totally impulsive; he makes sense as a drag racer. Shirley doesn't.
—
Why would a wary, suspicious person a planner and pusher who thinks
everything out —become addicted to a suicidal sport that takes place in

five-to-six-second bursts of activity? Connie liveson his instincts. After

an accident which Shirley has been badly injured, she comes to the
in

track, and a man grabs her by the arm —

the arm that has been burned.
Connie goes completely ape. He lunges at the man, hitting him hysteri-
cally; you can feel his wanting to kill the guy for inadvertently giving

her more pain. It's perfectly apparent that Connie loves Shirley and
admires her; you can also see that he's a skirt-chaser who humiliates her
without meaning to. She feels let down by him; he violates her monoga-
mous standards. Yet his roving eye is part of his radiance; he's always
true to himself —to his impulses. And he means to give pleasure. Sitting
there, I couldn't fault him for being duplicitous, but I didn't have to live

with him. (He's that real, that close.)

There was someone else in the movie I knew Hoyt Axton's Tex —
Roque, who's earthy and congenial and doesn't want his daughter Shir-
ley to be any man's victim. Axton is a marvellous, unforced actor. As Tex
Roque, he has gusto in his canny eyes and grinning face; he loves the
life he's living. That's part of what's missing from Bedelia's perform-

ance: her acting is so tightly controlled that she has no zest. (Her body
never moves without her conscious consent.) Bonnie Bedelia's high,
rounded forehead and her childlike features made her seem forlornly
pretty when she played Bruce Bern's poor, pregnant young wife in the
1969 They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Since hers was the only soft face
in that picture, she was able to get by with a little-match-girl display of
hopefulness and courage; she sang "The Best Things in Life Are Free"
in a sweet, clear voice, and hearts melted all over theatre floors. She was
when she played the bride in Lovers
soft again and even prettier in 1970,
and Other Strangers. Now, in her first starring role, she seems deter-
mined to show her strength. But actors show their strength when they
let go; Bedelia keeps herself on a short leash with a choke collar. We
don't see any of the child's exhilaration in the woman. Drag racing is a
fulfillment of nothing we can detect in her character; it appears to be a
career she has chosen and pursued methodically. (Running an orphanage
 —

in a Dickens novel might be more in her line.) What Bedelia gives Shirley
is a dry and precise irony —which shines in a Christmas sequence, when
she talks to her ex-husband on the phone, and then does a radio inter-
view, also on the phone, with an interviewer who doesn't know the first

thing about her. Bedelia has a smiling glitter as she talks to this fool on
the radio. Shirley the champ is intensely aware of not getting the recog-
nition that she thinks her accomplishments entitle her to, particularly at
a time when women in more genteel sports are being celebrated. She
resents the Cha Cha image, which she can't shake off. She's so hard and
bitterly amused that the price she pays for being a champion seems like
another form of victimization.
The moviemakers avoid sentimentality by not bringing their heroine
to life. At times, what Bedelia's Shirley does has no meaning for us
it just seems as if she's doing it because that's what the real Shirley

Muldowney did. And there's a detail that struck me as a beautiful

(passed-up) opportunity to reveal something about her. Throughout the
picture, Shirley wears a succession of elaborate, fake-looking black hair-
dos. They're as bizarrely stiff and ornamental as the ones on the women
singers at the Grand Ole Opry, and they make her look like a dragon lady
in a comic strip. (Her forehead is generally concealed.) I assume that this
is an imitation of the real Shirley, and, to do the moviemakers justice,

they may have felt that certain things are better left unexplained, be-

cause they're just too paradoxical to account for. But it isn't that kind
of explanation that's needed — it's simply some illumination of the con-
flicting impulses in thiswoman. These heaping hairdos keep appearing
on her, like a blight, and since we never go into her dressing room or see
her primping or instructing the women at the beauty parlor, we have no
way what weird notions of femininity they serve. Is it that
of knowing
the men she meets are more comfortable around women who look a
certain —
way that the men relate to what's unnatural, and that the thick,
stiff make it possible for Shirley to feel accepted? Wouldn't it give
curls
the film's Shirley Muldowney more dimensions if we could see that
unlike college-educated professional women who ask to be accepted for
what they are, Shirley the hot-rod champ is still trying to pass as a classy
belle? And does she pass? Does she get any pleasure from it? Or does
itadd to her feeling of loneliness and isolation?
In its own, limited terms, there's not much wrong with this movie.
Kaplan stages plenty of action sequences (of the kind that action-film
enthusiasts call "existential" and "cinematic"); he avoids dramatic cli-
maxes (of the kind that these enthusiasts disparage as "theatrical"). And
this can make a movie seem honest and authentically American —none

82
of your highbrow stuff. Shirley's hardness can be seen simply as what
happens to a woman who bucks a sexist society. Sometimes, the less
insight a movie offers, the less it offends people. Heart Like a Wheel is

probably being praised more for what it isn't than for what it is.

The film has one truly striking image that goes way beyond the
verisimilitude that Kaplan and Friedman are after most of the time.
Bonnie Bedelia's performance has been concentrated in her eyes; Shir-
ley's intelligence shows in the way she takes in everything going on
around her. Then she staggers out of her big crash in flames, and her
son runs out to her. He looks into the charred helmet, and only one eye
is visible —
one terrified eye in a scorched patch of face, with even the
eyelashes gone —and he stares into that trapped eye, trying to make
contact with her, trying to assure her that she'll be all right. It's a great
scene. It may even speak to the issue that is buried in the movie. There
is a reason Shirley Muldowneybecome more famous for breaking
hasn't
the sex barrier in hot-rod competition. For the best of motives, women
(especially young mothers) have not been eager to compete in thrill
sports like drag racing. When Shirley's son —who will soon be the only
man left in her life —stares smoking helmet, the scene exposes
into that
the superficiality of most of the film's treatment of Shirley Muldowney's
determination to be the fastest hot-rodder of them all.

fi
i^^ducating Rita is no more than a two-character play a duet —
—"opened up" a bit for the screen, but the lines have surprise and wit,
and Michael Caine, who is one of its two stars, has become something
of a phenomenon. He gives each new role everything that he can if —
necessary, he's a show all by himself. Luckily, he gets some help here.
He plays a dispirited college professor —a once promising poet who now
poses as a boozehound and a burned-out slob. He tries to conceal his
mediocrity by carrying on as if he were Dylan Thomas. Rita, played by

Julie Walters (for and partly about whom the role was written), is a
street-smart young hairdresser in Liverpool who signs up for literature
tutorials in the Open University and is assigned to him. She wants the
education that he, with his doctorate and his fancy turns of speech, has
decided is worthless. He enjoys her quick mind, her slang, and the yowl
in her voice. He thinks she has a more honest perception of things than
his book-fed, upper-class students do; she's funny and eager to learn.

83
and he delights in her alertness and her tattiness a miniskirt and a —
maxi-coiffure and high heels that rattle on the university's old cobble-
stones.
Julie Walters' performance may be too "set" for the camera (she
played the role on the London stage for about seven months), but her
inflections are funny in unexpected ways. Rita is Julie Walters' role in
the way that Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday was Judy Holliday's role;
you enjoy these performances, knowing how worked-up they are. At
first, Julie Walters seems tiny, with a pinched, doll's mouth, and she

reminded me of Barbara Harris; then her brassy-waif quality suggested

Shirley MacLaine, and before long she recalled a whole collection of
funnygirls. (She has good fast timing.) Willy Russell adapted his own
play, and some of the opening-out scenes he has provided actually work
(this almost never happens); the director, Lewis Gilbert, has an affection-

—
ate touch here. The material isn't sustained Rita, like Billie Dawn, is
inevitably less entertaining after she's transformed. And there are
scenes that sort of wobble around, such as the one which Rita gives
in

an educated, false response to the professor's poetry, and he sees right

through what she says. And there are foibles, such as the professor's
giving Rita a dress that we don't see him buy and never see her wear
— what's it doing in the movie? But none of this matters much, because
of Caine. About half an hour into the film, the professor is in a rage, and
Rita says something hilarious out of the blue, and he breaks up he can't —
help himself. The way Caine plays the scene, you'd swear she took him
totally by surprise. Later, after Rita has been devouring the learning she
is have much more to give her,
offered, the professor realizes he doesn't
and he becomes anxious, and jealous of the students she spends time
—
with. His last trump card is Blake he looks forward to teaching her
Blake in the fall. When she comes back from summer school in the
country and he realizes she has already "done" Blake, he is devastated,
—
crushed. The news is tragic to him he can barely comprehend it. He
seems to turn red all over; he has been cheated out of giving her the last
gift he had to offer. Their teacher-student relationship is finished prema-
turely —he isn't ready to accept it.

Michael Caine is the least pyrotechnical, the least showoffy of ac-

tors. He has prodigious ease on the screen; it's only afterward that you
realize how difficult what he was doing is. His role here is a masochistic
one, but Caine transcends that aspect of it. The professor's anguish at
having nothing left to give Rita is also his recognition that he has lost
his last vestige of superiority. For years, he hasn't been able to give form
to his thoughts —they've been eating away at him, bloating him. We can

84
 —

see his impotence in his pink-rimmed, blurry eyes. He's crumbling from
within. Somehow, Rita is the one person who reaches him, and after he
—
accepts her token gift to him she trims his beard and cuts his hair
he looks bewildered but years younger. His smirking terror is gone. This
is a master film actor's performance. The goal of Caine's technique

seems to be to dissolve all vestiges of "technique." He lets nothing get

between you and the character he plays. You don't observe his acting;
you just experience the character's emotions. He may be in acting terms
something like what Jean Renoir was in directing terms.
November U, 1983

THE PERFECTIONIST

^^arbra Streisand's Yentl is rhapsodic yet informal; it's like a

gently surprising turn of phrase. Set in the thriving Polish-Jewish com-
munities of an imaginary, glowing past, the movie has its own swift
rhythms. and unity are somewhat reminiscent of Jacques
Its simplicity

Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964); perhaps that's because the

composer Michel Legrand wrote the scores for both, and the songs carry
both films' emotional currents (though in totally different ways).

Adapted from the Isaac Bashevis Singer story "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,"
young woman who grows up in a tradition-
the Streisand film tells of a
—
bound community in which bright boys yeshiva boys live to study —
Torah. Coddled and prized, they sit at their books all day long, memoriz-
ing and reciting, debating moral issues, and attempting to fathom the
unfathomable. Women are excluded from scholarship, but Yentl has a
passion for religious study —she thinks it's the only way of life that's

worthwhile. And so when her widower father (who has secretly taught
her) dies, she dresses as a boy, sneaks away at night and goes off to
enroll in a yeshiva in a distant town.

85
 The beginning of Yentl is shaky. Streisand wants to make sure we
get the idea that women are kept in ignorance, and she's a trace insis-
tent. And the end is, I think, a flat-out mistake. But most of Yentl is, of
course, its middle, which is glorious; it's like that of the story, though
with different shades of humor. Yentl, a woman crowding thirty, passes
as an adolescent student and feels like one. She's carefree and goofy; she
has found herself —as a boy. (Yentl in disguise is definitely a boy, not a
man. That's how the masquerade was conceived by Singer, and it works
for Streisand the way it did for Katharine Hepburn when she passed as
a boy in Sylvia Scarlett. ) You can believe that the people in the Jewish
quarter accept this smart, smooth-faced student, who has taken the
name of Anshel, as male, because she isn't so very different from a lot
of precocious, little-shrimp kids who seem to grow only in the head.
Anshel is a sprite: as the yeshiva student, Streisand doesn't have an
image of Barbra Streisand to play, and she lets herself be this slender
and defenseless kid showing off his knowledge. When Streisand is play-
—
ing a character, it releases something in her a self-doubt, a tentative-
ness, a delicacy. She seems physically lighter; her scale is human, and
you can share something with her that you can't when she's planted
there as Streisand (and seems domineering). The basic concept of this
movie lets her release herself, and as the yeshiva boy she's giddy and
winsome.
Her singing voice takes you farther into the character; the songs
—
express Yentl's feelings what she wants to say but has to hold back.
Her singing is more than an interior monologue. When she starts a
song, her hushed intensity makes you want to hear her every breath,
and there's high drama in her transitions from verse to chorus. Her
phrasing and inflections are so completely her own that the songs
make the movie seem very personal. Her singing has an ardent, be-
—
seeching quality an intimacy. And her vocal fervor lifts the movie to
the level of fantasy.
Streisand sings with such passionate conviction that she partly com-
pensates for the sameness of Legrand's tunes. A few of them are excit-
ing in context, but 'This Is One of Those Moments" and "Tomorrow
Night" are so dull they seem to be all recitative, and Legrand's music
simply doesn't have the variety, the amplitude, to do justice to Yentl's
full emotional range. The Alan and Marilyn Bergman lyrics don't rise to

the poetic richness of the occasion, either; songs such as "No Matter
What Happens" and "A Piece of Sky" are tainted with feminist psy-
chobabble and Broadway uplift. Streisand's eerily way-out-there-by-
itself voice soars, striving to achieve new emotional heights, and the
music is on a treadmill. But as the director Streisand does graceful tricks

with the songs. She uses them to take the audience through time and
space. Yentl begins a song, and it continues in voice-over as the action
races ahead. The songs are montages and comedy routines, too, with
images of what Yentl is singing about edited to the rhythm of the music.
During the song "No Wonder," a dialogue scene takes place while Yentl/
Anshel sings a wry, funny commentary on it, and it's all brought off
rather softly, without fuss. As a musical, Yentl conveys the illusion that
—
the songs simply grow out of the situations which isn't altogether an
illusion.

The movie loses its sureness of touch now and then, but it's unas-
suming. It's a homey, brightly lighted fantasy. Yentl's teacher papa
(Nehemiah Persoff) has the apple cheeks and jolly gray beard of a Yid-
dish Kris Kringle. And when he dies and she leaves home, a big bird who
represents his spirit hovers overhead, accompanying her on her travels.
The place Yentl grew up in, the inn where she breaks her journey, the
town where she passes the examination and is accepted as a yeshiva
—
student they all have the familiarity and the pastness of places we
know from folktales. Only the big, clanging gates of the Jewish quarter,
which are closed at night, seem unusual, and it may take a second or two
to register what they are, because the movie doesn't emphasize the
specific nature of its folklore. It takes it for granted. (In a scene in which
Yentl, dressed as a boy, pays for a ride on a farmer's wagon and then
isn't allowed to climb on board, the point that the people on the wagon

are gentiles who are pulling a trick on her isn't fully shaped for the
audience, and some moviegoers may be mystified.) But Yentl isn't a
sweet, tame musical. Coming out of that ornery, mischievous Singer
story, it couldn't be. There's a running theme in Singer: human beings
keep trying to flirt with God, hoping that someday a line of communica-
tion can be established, but sex always gets in the way. Their wonderful
good intentions are thwarted by the tingle of the groin.
Dressed as a boy, Yentl is no longer resentful of male privileges,
and for the first time she feels attracted to a man. At the inn, just after
she has left home, she meets the virile, bearded Avigdor, played by
Mandy Patinkin (who makes the impact here that he failed to make in
Ragtime and Daniel). Avigdor is friendly and warm. He's also
charged up sexually. After years of the repressed life of a yeshiva
student, he can hardly wait to be married to the luscious ripe peach
who is pledged to him. Yentl, who is aroused by his sensual fever,
accepts his suggestion that she come to his yeshiva, and when, as
Anshel, she is accepted there and is considered a prodigy, Avigdor's
eyes sparkle with pride. He plays big brother to her, and she becomes
his study partner.
Maybe the magic of this Singer story (and of many of his other tales)
is that the folkloric characters have been imbued with a drop of D. H.
Lawrence's blood, yet theylive in a time when confusing sexual urges

are explained as the work of demons. "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" is a

folktale told by a sly trickster: its elements don't stay within the conven-
if the story were a river, and fish were trying
tions of folklore. (It's as
tojump out of it.) Things take a turn toward the disturbing in "Yentl the
Yeshiva Boy"; they become quite turbulent. There's darkness on the one
—
hand and ribald comedy even sex farce and burlesque on the other, —
but the storyteller remains imperturbable.
In the movie, when Avigdor's fiancee, Hadass (Amy Irving), a
beauty out of the erotic pages of the Old Testament, enters the pic-
ture, it becomes a series of dilemmas and metaphors. The three princi-
pal characters look at each other with longing, and sometimes with
fear and bewilderment. They can't sort their emotions out. Avigdor,
not knowing that Anshel is a woman, feels a closer companionship with
her than he has ever known with anybody else of either sex. When
Hadass's father cancels the wedding and Avigdor is distraught,
Anshel, his confidant, shares in his pain. And the brooding, pitiful
Avigdor, having lost Hadass, and loving his friend Anshel, wants
Anshel to marry her; that way, Avigdor won't feel he has totally lost
her. He threatens to go away
Anshel doesn't agree to the plan.
if

Meanwhile, Hadass, whose love for the burly, strong Avigdor is a mix-
ture of attraction and terror, begins to love Anshel for his gentleness
— Hadass has found a "man" she doesn't feel afraid of. The baffled
Yentl, who sees in Hadass everything that she herself didn't want to
be and couldn't have been —who sees that Hadass is like a slave girl

when she's around men— jealous of her and at

is the same time
touched by her. Hadass's submissiveness is mysteriously sultry. And
Yentl/Anshel —as if in a trance, thinking to hold on to Avigdor and
also captivated by Hadass —asks for her hand in marriage.
One moment, Yentl is a yeshiva boy, taking pleasure in being the
smartest kid in the class; the next moment, she's got herself in a fix.

There's only one end to this story, and it's the one that Singer gave it:

Yentl must go down the road in search of another yeshiva. She is con-
demned to the life of study that she has chosen (and a Chassidic scholar
can never learn enough). It isn't difficult to figure out the thinking behind
the film's ending, in which Yentl, restored to women's clothes, goes off
to America, where, presumably, freed from the binding traditions of the

88
 —

Old World, she can live as a woman and still continue her studies. The
thinking is that you have to give the movie audience hope. (And there's
even an attempt to show that Hadass will be changed by her encounter
with Yentl/Anshel—that, Lord help us, she has had her consciousness
raised.) Streisand tries to turn a story about repressed, entangled char-
acters into a sisterhood fable about learning to be a free woman. She
tries to transform a quirky folktale into a fairy tale. And it feels almost

like a marketing choice.

But by no means a playing-it-safe movie. It's a movie about
this is
restrictive social conventionsand about internal conflicts about emo- —
tions and how they snarl you up. There are no chases, no fistfights or
fights of any other kind. The picture is closer to the sensibility of the
Ernst Lubitsch musical comedies than it is to films such as The Turning
Point and Rich and Famous. And even when the characters' sex roles
are blurred —when they're lost in a multitude of roles —Streisand as
director keeps them all clear. Her vision is sustained —until the end. The
closing shipboard sequence seems a blatant lift from the "Don't Rain on
My Parade" tugboat scene in Funny Girl; it feels like a production
number, and it whole musical scheme of the movie. It also
violates the
has Streisand wearing immigrant chic and playing the Streisand image.
This misstep must have come from an excess of virtue. Streisand wants
to give the audience an educational and spiritual message. She wants

— —
Yentl to be gulp a role model. Where Streisand's instinct as an artist
fails her is in her not recognizing that Yentl exists on a magical plane,

and that the attempt to make her a relevant, contemporary heroine

yanks her off it. The script, by the English playwright and television
writer Jack Rosenthal and Streisand, prepares for this ending by placing
the action in 1904, but the Chassidic life that the movie shows belongs
to an earlier, make-believe past. At the start of the film, a book peddler
calls out "Storybooks for women! Sacred books for men!" By 1904, the

novels War and Peace, perhaps, or Anna Karenina or The Brothers

Karamazov or Middlemarch or volumes of Dickens or Balzac might —
have had more to tell Yentl than she could get out of the sacred texts.
(A girl who couldn't study Torah may not have known how lucky she
was. When Yentl sings defiantly "Where is it writtenwhat it is I'm
meant to be?" the answer is: In those sacred books that she's so high
on.) This musical creates its own frame of reference; its spirit is violated
by earnest intentions. Streisand wants to create a woman hero, but when
—
you read Singer, Yentl isn't the hero the story is. And at its best the
movie is the hero, too.
Streisand's long obsession with the material is well known; she
began thinking about the story as a possible film in the late sixties, and
bought the screen rights in 1974. Whatever the box-office results, her
instinct was sound. It is the right material for her. And now that she has
made her formal debut as a director, her work explains why she, notori-
ously, asks so many questions of writers and directors and everyone
else: that's And it also explains why she has
her method of learning.
sometimes been unhappy with her directors: she really did know better.
Yentl is never static or stagy; the images move lyrically. The same
intuitions that have guided Streisand in producing her records and her
—
TV specials have guided her here and taken her into some of the same
traps. But, even if you object (as I do) to the choice of songs on her
records and the manner of those specials, they're highly professional.
Within her own tastes, she aims for perfection. Shooting on Czech loca-
tions and in English studios, and with the cinematographer David Wat-
kin, Streisand has made a technically admirable movie, with lovely
and silky-smooth editing. And she brings out the
diffuse, poetic lighting
other performers' most appealing qualities. It's a movie full of likable
people. Steven Hill, who plays Hadass's father, gives marvellous line
readings, and he has something of the same gnomish charm as Nehe-
miah Persoff's Papa; they're the elders as a child sees them. And Amy
Irving's Hadass has a comically human dimension. The half-closed eyes
of this slave princess as she serves dinner make her look as if she were
deep in an erotic dream, but they are actually the result of her having
had to be up at dawn to buy the fish. Her sleepy, plaintive beauty is the
perfect foil for Yentl' s skinny, anxious face. When Amy Irving just
stands there, with her mass of thick, curly dark-red hair and with orna-
ments dripping from her head and body, she seems to be overcome by
her own heavy perfume. She's dopey and she's sumptuous she's the —
image of what women have wanted to be freed from, yet can't help
wanting to be.
Streisand and Amy Irving play off each other with a kind of rapport
that you don't see in movies directed by men. They have a scene in which
Hadass, now in love with Anshel, tries to help him conquer his physical
— —
timidity tries to seduce him and Yentl is in pain as she backs away.
It's a deeply ambiguous scene; thought went into it, as well as care. And

toward the end of the film Streisand and Patinkin play a bedroom scene
in which Avigdor, who has been sexually attracted to Anshel in the

vagrant moments when he wasn't sick with love for Hadass, shows the
limits of his understanding of a woman's needs. The scene is simply
different from scenes conceived and directed by men; it has a different
flavor. Avigdor is revealed as essentially a big, sweet Jewish hunk who

90
could never accept a woman as an equal, and when he and Yentl part,

the tapering, feminine hand she holds up in farewell puts a seal on his
blindness. The whole movie has a modulated emotionality that seems
distinctively feminine. That's part of why the independent-woman-on-
her-way-to-the-new-land ending is so silly. There is something genuinely
heroic in the mixture of delicacy and strength that gives this movie its

suppleness. Within the forty-one-year-old star-director are the perfectly

preserved feelings of a shy, frightened girl of twelve. She's also shock-
ingly potent. So was Colette —and there's a suggestion of her in the
Yentl who runs her fingers over books as if they were magic objects.

APob Fosse's Star 80 is about the degradation of everything

and everybody. Fosse shows us skin and sleaze from fancy camera
angles. The movie is based on Teresa Carpenter's "Death of a Play-
mate," in the Village Voice, and other accounts of the murder of the
Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten by her estranged bodybuilder hus-
band, Paul Snider, a pimp and a two-bit promoter, who, after killing
her, sodomized the corpse and then shot himself. Fosse, who wrote the
script and directed, uses the case as evidence that murder is inherent
in pornography and that the whole world is scummy. The central char-

acter, Snider (Eric Roberts), is a loser and a slime; he has False Values,
and he's wacko besides. Roberts, who gave a tender, thoughtful per-
formance opposite Sissy Spacek in Jack Fisk's Raggedy Man, uses a
wet, mushy voice here, and he makes you feel the man's squirminess
and rage. He gets the film's central idea across: that Paul Snider repre-
sents a mutation of the Playboy "philosophy," and that it's his frustra-
tion at not becoming a success like his idol, Hugh Hefner, that's driv-
ing him crazy. But Fosse, apparently deliberately, makes him loud and
—
monotonous. He starts too high shouting, and twisting his face and —
as the movie goes on he sweats more and more, and the vein in his
forehead does bumps and grinds. Dorothy, played by Mariel Heming-
way, is so malleable she's a nothing, a big dummy. As Fosse has writ-
ten the role, she's insultingly stupid. That seems to be a prerequisite
for the small amount of sympathy allotted her. Mariel Hemingway
tries hard and has a touching quality, but she's all wrong for the part
—she's simply not a Bunny type.
There's no suspense: we know what's coming. But Fosse uses his

91
whole pack of tricks —flashbacks, interviews, shock cuts, the works —to
keep us in a state of fixated dread. Each time there's a cut to Paul
spattered and smeared with Dorothy's blood —which
happens at fre-
quent intervals —the music screeches "Look!" Thereeven an early isn't

good-times period when Dorothy and Paul have something going be-
tween them; everything is ugly from the start. (Dorothy's mother, as
played by Carroll Baker, is the only character who isn't on strings; she
has some substance.) There's an incredible arrogance about this movie:
Fosse must believe that he can make art out of anything that he —
doesn't need a writer to create characters, that he can just take the
idea of a pimp murdering a pinup and give it such razzle-dazzle that it

will shake us to the marrow. But his razzle-dazzle is like Paul Snider's
loud, flashy clothes and the grease in his hair. And Fosse's ideas aren't
much better than Paul's, either. Every time Dorothy's picture is taken,
the sound of the camera is like the sound of a gun being cocked —the
photographers are killing her by inches. Other samples of Fosse's con-
ceptualizing: When Dorothy acts in a cheapo movie, she bites a blood
pellet at the wrong time and gets her face messy; when Paul kills her,

he blasts her in the face with a shotgun. When Dorothy has her picture
taken by a professional photographer for the first time, she's posed
against a wall decorated with graffiti; when Paul uses his shotgun on
her, her blood drips from a huge blowup of her face on the wall, recall-
ing the graffiti.

In All That Jazz, Fosse forced you to look into his cut-open chest;
now he's got more bloody innards to show you. The way he presents the
movie, there's nothing at stake: Mariel Hemingway's Dorothy doesn't
seem to have any depth and isn't meant to have any talent. And Paul is

a pathetic, failed flesh-peddler. There's nothing else visible —^just other

forms of flesh-peddling at the Playboy mansion and the movie studios.
That seems to be the film's meaning: that there's nothing at stake in the
entire world, and nothing to do but be bloodied by it. Star 80 is like a
pointlessly gruesome update of John Schlesinger's Darling, with the
very latest in smug self-hatred. Fosse has gone so far that the question
arises: Can a movie get by with total disgust for its subject? Fosse piles
up such an accumulation of sordid scenes that the movie is nauseated by
itself.

November 28, 1983

92
RETRO RETRO

itting in the theatrewhere Terms of Endearment was being

previewed, and Hstening to the sniffles and sobs of the audience that only
a few minutes before had been laughing, I flashed back to Penny Sere-
nade in 1941, the picture in which Irene Dunne and Gary Grant as a
young married couple stood by helplessly as their little adopted daugh-
ter died. And I watched as, once again, the survivors overcame their
pettiness and selfishness and showed the strength they had in them; they
demonstrated their American middle-class (white) moral fiber. This is a
real-life-tragedy movie that leaves you no choice but to find it irresistible.
It's exactly the kind of bogus picture that will have people saying, "I saw

myself in those characters." Of course they'll see themselves in Terms

of Endearment. James L. Brooks, who directed it, guides the actors
with both eyes on the audience.
He works this way in perfect sincerity. Brooks was one of the two
collaborators who thought up "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," and he
and three other fellows put "Taxi" together; as a writer-producer on
those series (and others), he developed a sixth sense for what makes
TV-watchers laugh. An enthusiastic reviewer said of the characters in
Terms of Endearment, "You would be happy to spend several more
hours in theircompany." That's exactly how you feel about the best
half-hour series shows. They're entertaining in a random, eccentric way;
you have no idea what will happen next. The acting has a comic-strip
frame around it; it's stylized and comfy. The actors are out to please you
and keep you coming back for more. And you want to like them. The
characters they play represent our own notions of who or what we would
be if (if we were snobs or buffoons, or whatever). Sometimes watching
a character is like watching our alter ego going at a problem. Often the
cleverest characters set themselves up for the line that demolishes them.
(Of course, they're not really demolished: they continue to have lives
after the commercial.)

93
 InTerms of Endearment, which Brooks adapted from the 1975
Larry McMurtry novel, he keeps the audience giggling over the same
kind of ramshackle comedy. Shirley MacLaine is all tics as Aurora

Greenway, a snappish, compulsively neat widow tending her house and

garden in the prosperous River Oaks section of Houston a Southwest- —
ern Scarsdale. Aurora is a little dotty: in our first view of her, she's
climbing into her sleeping infant's crib to make sure the baby hasn't
died. Everything about her —
her pert little expressions, her pinched-
tight mouth and narrowed eyes, her standoffishness, and even the pair
—
of devoted suitors who hang around for years is quaint. This isn't
meant as a putdown of Shirley MacLaine' s performance; I don't know
how else the role could be played. Aurora doesn't exist except as a pixie
horror to string gags on. She's a cartoon: a rich skinflint with a blond
dye job and pastel frills. Surely she's not meant to be believable? She's
a TV-museum piece, like the characters in "Mary Hartman, Mary Hart-
man" or "Soap"; she's warped. And so is the pie-eyed lecher who's her
—
next-door neighbor a former astronaut named Garrett Breedlove,
played by Jack Nicholson. (It's only in the world of TV comedy that
characters have next-door neighbors.) Spanning thirty years in the lives
of the cantankerous Aurora and her straightforward daughter, Emma
—played from adolescence on by Debra Winger—the movie is one droll

payoff after another, with Nicholson kept on the sidelines until Emma,
married and with a child (and another on the way), moves to Iowa with
her husband, and, after a time, Aurora and Garrett Breedlove have an
affair.

It's a screwball, sitcom affair, but Brooks pulls some sleight of hand
and "real feelings" come out of it. Aurora falls in love with Garrett the
—
guzzler, but in the psychiatric hand-me-down vernacular he isn't —
ready to make a commitment. Aurora is, though, and the emotion she
feels for him helps her become human; when tragic illness strikes her
family, she shows her mettle. I think I hated Terms of Endearment the
most when the grief-stricken Aurora embraces her longtime servant,
Rosie (Betty R. King), who shares her misery. Greer Garson in her Mrs.
Miniver drag was only a shade more noble. When Aurora and Rosie hug
— —
each other sisters under the skin the audience is alerted that Aurora
is really a good person, and from then on she becomes useful and consid-

erate. As the Second World War movies taught us, the function of
adversity is to build character.
on the cartoon underpinnings of TV
All this retro-forties virtue piled
comedy shows might seem utterly nuts if it weren't for Debra Winger.
The movie is a Freudian story of role reversals between mother and

94
daughter, told in a slaphappy style. Most of the time, Aurora is a vaude-
ville joke —she's the mother who's always phoning her daughter at the
wrong moment. She refuses to attend her daughter's wedding, but
phones her bright and very early the next morning. I didn't feel much
love or any other connection between MacLaine's brittle Aurora and
Winger's fluid Emma. They don't have the uncanny similarities —the
vocal tricks, the syntax, the fleeting expressions — of real mothers and
daughters. I'm not sure what Brooks meant to show us, but what comes
across is Aurora as a parody of an anti-life monster and Emma as a
natural woman— a life force. The two actresses might be playing in two

different movies. —
Debra Winger as she did in Urban Cowboy and An
Officer —
and a Gentleman gives you the feeling that she's completely
realized on the screen. There's a capacity for delight that is always near
the surface of her characters (and she never loses track of what turns
them The adolescent Emma (in braces) has a husky, raucous voice
on).

and a lowdown snorting laugh; this is not a standard ingenue. Winger

heats up her traditional-woman role and makes it modern by her aban-
don. She floods the character. When Emma's two little sons give her a
bad time and she fights with them, she's direct and all-out; she's totally
involved in this power struggle with her kids, and they know it. While
Aurora overgrooms even her back-yard garden, and the flowering
bushes look cramped and forced (they're as contorted as the little statues
stuck among them), Emma lives in the disorder of three children, dilapi-
dated houses, not enough money, and a college-English-teacher husband
(Jeff Daniels) who's having an affair with a graduate student. The predic-
tions that Aurora makes when she tries to talk Emma out of marrying
the —
handsome lunkhead he's like a big, floppy stuffed animal turn out —
to be accurate, but what Aurora doesn't foresee is that Emma will be
fulfilled in the marriage and the kids. Emma thrives on the semi-con-

trolled chaos of family life; she accepts messes —

life is messes. All this

is in Debra Winger's performance; she's incredibly vivid, and she has

fresh details in her scenes — details like spotting a zit on her husband's
shoulder while she's lying in bed next to him, talking to her mother on
the phone. But Emma has been made too heartbreakingly wonderful.
She's an earth mother, of course, with some sort of supernal understand-
ing of Aurora, and when she has her third child she gives birth to her
mother —her little girl is a tiny ringer for Aurora. The way that Emma
is presented she's a glorified ordinary woman— a slob angel.
Brooks does some cramping and forcing of his own when he cross-
cuts between Aurora's first date with the astronaut and Emma's

95
extramarital romance with a timid bank officer (John Lithgow, as a
jumbo-size shrinking violet). The two relationships may be vaguely par-
allel, but they take place in different time frames, and the film cuts back
and forth between actions that are a few minutes apart and actions that
are days or weeks apart. This is the clumsiest patch of the movie, al-
—
though there are other sequences that don't come oif such as a trip to
New York that Emma takes. And there are characters who don't come
off— such as those perennial suitors, who seem to follow Aurora around
just so she can be bossy with them, and Patsy, Emma's friend from her
school days, who suggests the New York trip. (Patsy seems to be wait-
ing around for her running gag to be given to her, and she never gets
it.) But most of the time Brooks' TV-trained intuitions are more than

—
adequate to what he's doing here extending half-hour gag comedy to
feature length by the use of superlative actors who can entertain us even
when the material is arch and hopped-up.
The movie gains its only suspense from keeping Jack Nicholson
waiting in the wings for almost half its running time. After eleven years
of living next door, Garrett asks Aurora out to lunch; four more years
pass before she accepts. By that time, you're so primed that his every
kidding leer rocks the theatre. When he comes on to her in the Nicholson
lewd, seductive manner and tells her that she brings out the devil in him,
it may sound like the wittiest, most obscene thing you've ever heard. The

years have given Nicholson an impressive, broader face, and his comedy
has never been more alert, more polished. He isn't getting laughs be-
cause of his lines; he's getting them because of his insinuating delivery.
He has one inspired nuance: when Aurora accepts his invitation to lunch,
this flabby old astronaut glances up at the heavens as if to ask, "Why
—
did you make me so sexy?" Whatever Nicholson does lick his lips, roll
—
back his eyes, stoop slightly, or just turn his head he keeps the audi-
ence up. There's a charge of fun in his acting; he lets you see the bad
boy inside him. When Garrett stands, stripped to his trunks, in Aurora's
bedroom, it isn't just the flab hanging out that makes him funny it's —
that he stands like a dirty-minded little kid who hasn't yet learned to suck
in his gut, and an old sex warrior who can't be bothered.
There's nothing visually engaging in the movie except the actors. I
liked the way Shirley MacLaine flung herself about in a hospital scene:
Aurora has a tantrum because the nurses have failed to bring a suffering
patient a scheduled painkiller, and you feel the emotions that Aurora has
had to suppress suddenly exploding at the only target she can find. (This
tour-de-force scene was the one time Aurora's rambunctiousness
seemed to have any subtext.) I liked the desolate look on Lithgow's

96
 —

yearning face when Emma says goodbye to him. There are enjoyable bits
all through this movie; a staggering amount of contrivance has gone into
it,and when all else fails, Nicholson's sparse hair sticks out at the sides
of his head, or something else is surprising and screwy. Brooks does
perhaps his best directing with the two small boys (Troy Bishop and
—
Huckleberry Fox) who play Emma's sons Tommy, at about ten, and
Teddy, at about six. The boys don't like a lot of what goes on between
their parents, and they show it. On the other hand. Brooks is shameless
about exploiting the children's emotions to jerk tears from the audience.
The picture isn't boring; it's just fraudulent.
In this debut film. Brooks appears to be a genuinely clever fellow
with an inspirational psychology. Aurora, who has tried to keep life out,
finally welcomes it. And, of course, Garrett Breedlove, the potbellied
satyr, has to become a responsible guy. Brooks was probably attracted
to the McMurtry novel because McMurtry's people are eccentric in a way
that's supposed to make them lovable and forgivable, and Brooks, who
added the character of Garrett, has made him in the same mold. Gar-
rett is like those wastrel British aristocrats in the pukka-sahib pictures:
when the crisis comes, his fundamental decency rises to the surface;
he straightens up and does the right thing. He and Aurora are good
Americans.
Terms of Endearment is being compared to two high-prestige,
award-winning pictures Ordinary People and Kramer vs. Kramer —
and though Terms is both tackier and livelier than they are, the compari-
son is apt: it, too, is pious. And the piousness is integral to the whole
conception. If Terms had stayed a comedy, it might have been innocu-
ous, but had to be ratified by importance, and it uses cancer like a seal
it

of approval. Cancer gives the movie its message: ''Don't take people for
granted; you never know when you're going to lose them." At the end,
—
the picture says, "You can go home now you've laughed, you've cried."
What's infuriating about it is its calculated humanity.

^arroll Ballard's landscapes are peerless; they achieve a kind

of superreality. His great scenes have a sensuous, trancelike quality; the
atmosphere seems outside time. And in his first feature, the 1979 The
Black Stallion, this distilled atmosphere made it possible for a simple
boy-and-animal story to be transformed into something mythological.

97
 —

—
The boy's sense of wonder his way of finding the mysterious in the
—
ordinary recalled Father Panchali, but there were also elements of
Arabian Nights fantasy that suggested the 1940 Korda production of
The Thief of Bagdad, without the theatricality. The Black Stallion is
a magical fusion; a friend of mine said that when he saw the picture he
felt that he was rediscovering the emotional sources of mystery and
enchantment.
have been following the course of Carroll Ballard's filmmaking
I

since the early sixties, when I saw a short he made as a student at the
U.C.L.A. film school; that little movie and some of his work later in the
sixties already showed traces of his ecstatic eye.The documentaries that
he did for the United States Information Agency Beyond This Win-
ter's Wheat and Harvest — were breathtaking, with layered images that
suggested one horizon above another, as in a Morris Louis painting. And
he did the rollicking Pigs in 1967, and in 1969, for the Pasadena Humane
Society, The Perils ofPriscilla, about a lost cat, seen from the point of
view of the terrified animal trying to find its way home. Then, in 1970,

he made the celebrated Rodeo. The visual imagination Ballard brings to

the natural landscape is so intense that his imagery makes you feel like

a pagan —as
you were touching when you're only looking.
if

Ballard's gifts are awesome; so are the risks of filtering an ecologi-

cal story through his sensibility. His second feature. Never Cry Wolf
from Farley Mowat's autobiographical book, is a failed classic un- —
speakably beautiful but unsatisfying. It's about Tyler (Charles Martin
Smith), a young biologist working for the Canadian government, who is
sent to spend a year in what Mowat calls "the desolate wastes of the

subarctic Barren Lands." Tyler's mission is to find a way to get rid of

the wolves that have supposedly been devastating the caribou herds; this
is of some urgency to the government, because the hunters are com-
plaining that they're not getting their share. The facts that Tyler collects
indicate that these hunters, rather than the wolves, are slaughtering the
herds, but the proof is so difficult to photograph that the viewer is

dependent in large part on Tyler's explanatory narration.

The movie fails as an adventure story: it simply doesn't have a
dramatic core. It needs a more stirring script; the first hint of trouble

comes when the pilot (Brian Dennehy) who flies Tyler to his icy destina-
—
tion engages in fancy philosophical talk you feel you're in the hands of
amateurs. The picture also needs a central actor with a greater range
(and some depth). Charles Martin Smith was the Toad in American
Graffiti, and he was very likable as one of the three Crickets in The
Buddy Holly Story. He has a boyish quality, and Ballard must have felt

98
that audiences would identify with him, especially since Tyler starts out
as what in Westerns used to be called a tenderfoot. But the boyishness
that comes through here is not the kind that people are eager to identify
with— Smith's Tyler is crabbed, plodding, and, at the start, ineffectual.
The performance feels thought out in advance. In the beginning. Smith
is deliberately dopey; then he drops the dopiness and Tyler is just a —
dull, well-meaning fellow. He's dull even when he behaves heroically.

— —
And what's crucial here there's nothing natural about the perform-
ance, and no sense of discovery in it.
The cruel fact is that more wolves would have helped; wolves that
were more accommodating would have helped, too. The animals on the
screen just don't seem eager to act out their roles, and they're not strong
in the grandeur department —
they look sort of scroungy. Children who
went to see The Black Stallion could believe in that mythological horse
because Ballard had fully created him; the wolves here are never charac-
ters. Despite the names that Tyler gives them, they have no discernible
personalities, and nothing really happens between Tyler and the wolves.
These long-legged creatures with tiny, sharp eyes are playing out a
script of their own devising.
Ballard's theme is the magic to be found in nature. From the way
the movie turned out, it appears that when he couldn't get magic out of
Smith or out of the wolves he fell back on the snowscapes. In Stallion,
you knew whose imagination was being —the
fired child's. Here there's
a lot of free-floating transcendence. It doesn't serve the prosaic story,
but it you even though you may forget what
certainly holds you. It holds
the movie is trying to be about. Everything that Ballard (working with
Hiro Narita as the cinematographer) shoots seems new, and it has a
distinctive, shimmering purity. The only disadvantage of this is that
since the essence of what Tyler learns is that wolves actually serve the
ecology of the area, the movie's luminous vistas can give you the uncom-
fortable feeling that you're being handed a high-minded flower child's
view of nature. Tyler tells us that the wolves actually keep the caribou
—
herds strong that they cull out only the weak and the diseased. If he
had explained that the wolves aren't fast enough to run down the
healthy caribou and so usually kill only the sick, we might not have had
any trouble believing it. But the way the film's rationale is presented, it's
as if the wolves were good Darwinians, mindful of the health of the
caribou herds.
Visually (and aurally, too), the film is magnificent. Tyler is set down
alone with his food and equipment in a flat expanse so icy, bare, and vast
that it makes you laugh. He's a speck on a lunar landscape —a gigantic

99
stage for a Beckett play, with infinity right there around him. And every
crunching footstep is magnified in this cold vastness. The noises, re-
corded by the sound editor Alan Splet (who worked with David Lynch
on Eraserhead and The Elephant Man), aren't familiar; they belong to
this plain of ice,and they seem to come at you from a distance, grow
louder, crash, and then echo in waves. They're funny and terrifying, and
the wolf calls have the wonderful eeriness you want them to have.
Ballard knows how to use space and sound for a deranged, comic effect.

In the film's climactic sequence, when Tyler wakes up to discover that

the caribou herds are running past and this is his chance to see what the
wolves will do, Ballard has him dash in naked among the animals. He's
like a tiny boy in the midst of the rushing crowd of beasties. There's an
idea here, all right —a realistic hero. What there isn't is an exciting hero.
Tyler is always a speck in this big movie; when he talks about his
insignificance, we believe it.

December 12, 1983

A DE PALMA MOVIE
FOR PEOPLE WHO
DON'T LIKE DE PALMA MOVIES

il Tony Montana is small and mean. The slash of a

Pacino's
scar that runs through one eyebrow and down across the cheekbone
seems to go right to his soul; there's something dead in his face as if —
ordinary human emotions had rotted away, leaving nothing but greed
and a scummy shrewdness. As the central character in the new Scar-
face, directed by Brian De Palma from a script by Oliver Stone, he
scrambles up the rungs of the Miami drug world the way that Paul Muni,
as an Italian immigrant, climbed to the top of the Chicago bootlegging

100
 —

business in the 1932 Scarface. Modelled on the career of Al Capone, the

1932 film, like the other prototypical gangster pictures Caesar Little
and The Public Enemy, —
was set during Prohibition. The
both of 1931
basic story fits right into the early eighties: the new Scarface is a Cuban,
one of an estimated ten thousand inmates of jails and mental institutions
whom Castro, having his little joke, deported to the United States in
1980, when President Carter (briefly) opened the doors to Cuban ref-
ugees. Tony Montana boils with resentment because other people have
a soft life, and more money than he has. "Me, I want what's coming to
me," he says
— "the world and everything
in it." He's an angry, vindic-

and he sees America as the land of opportunity.

tive killer,
For the first three-quarters of an hour, the film is garish and intense.
With Giorgio Moroder's synthesizer music pulsating and with shots of
the arrival of the "Marielitos" (the Cubans who set out from Mariel
Harbor), it feels like the beginning of a new-style, post-Godfather gang-
—
ster epic hot and raw, like a spaghetti Western. The swaying move-
ments of music and image suggest a developing delirium. In these lushly
ominous early sequences, the -American immigration officers spot Tony
for what he is, and they put him and his pal Manolo (Steven Bauer) in
a detention camp. We see the sadistic murder that the two of them carry
out in order to buy their freedom, and then the first drug deal that Tony
handles, which turns into a bloody massacre. These two sequences are
planned and edited with staccato, brutal efficiency; De Palma seems to
be adapting his techniques to naked melodrama, chain saw and all. (The
—
massacre is awesome a slapstick comedy of horrors which just goes
streaking by.) And our first encounters with the other characters raise
our expectations. Frank Lopez, the Hispanic-Jewish kingpin of the
Miami drug trade, who any number of
takes a fancy to Tony, is like

movie producers: as played by Robert Loggia, he's a big, beefy windbag

who enjoys being expansive and handing out paternal advice. Frank's
bored girlfriend, Elvira, a Wasp junkie with silken blond hair and a
mannequin's cool, is played by Michelle Pfeiffer, a funny, sexy beauty
who slinks across the screen —she's the Platonic ideal of classy hooker.
And Frank's henchman, Omar, an anxious pockmarked creep who has
a big laugh for his boss's jokes, is played by the whirlwind F. Murray
Abraham; he manages to look like a shark here, and every time he
appears in a scene, its energy level jumps.
The film is fine until it gets into the 1932 story. The original Scarface
unfolded rapidly; the scenes went bambam fast. In this 1983 Scarface,
the same scenes are played languorously, in stately, pseudo-Godfather
style, as if something were going on in the characters —
as if they had

lOI
an interior life and were going to grow or change. Just when De Palma
needs every trick he can come up with, he gives up on "style" and goes
straight. The original had a core of wit, but Oliver Stone's script just
seems to touch the old bases, and after those showy early sequences De
Palma tromps through the stock situations; nothing else he does has the
rash brilliance of that Mack Sennett chain-saw sequence. His handling
of the minor actors may be better than ever (Arnaldo Santana has a
scene as Ernie —a flunky who expects to be killed and then isn't—that
any actor could be proud of), and he works in a lot of little zaps, and
always provides you with something to look at. It's the stuff up front
that's sluggish. When Howard Hawks, who directed the 1932 film, and
Ben Hecht, who wrote the script, decided to give their Al Capone and his
sister the incestuous passions of the Borgias, they were having a nose-
thumbing good time. This new film lingers over Tony's possessiveness
about his sister, and is so obvious about it that the picture manages to
make incest seem dated. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who plays the
fiery sister, has a great camera face and is clearly raring to give a
performance, but she's stuck with scenes that refer back to the mores
—
of 1932. When Tony's mother (Miriam Colon) a bone thrown to the
—
moralists goes through the standard poor-but-proud speech, telling
him how worthless he is, the episode has an echo-chamber eifect. If the
actress faltered in her lines, the audience could prompt her.
De Palma may have felt that he could stretch himself by using a
—
straightforward approach something he has never been very good at.
But what happens is simply that he's stripped of his gifts. His originality
doesn't function on this crude, ritualized melodrama; he's working
against his own talent. In desperation, he seems to be trying to blast
through the pulpy material to something primal, and it isn't there. He
keeps attempting to whip up big animalistic scenes, and then plods
through them. And as the action rolls on, F. Murray Abraham is bumped
off, and then Loggia (along with Harris Yulin, who turns up as a self-

satisfied crooked narc and does perhaps the best work he's ever done on
—
the screen). And the piquant Michelle Pfeiffer she hunches her beauti-
ful skinny shoulder blades when she's inhaling coke — doesn't have
enough disdainful, comic opportunities.
After a while, Pacino is a lump at the center of the movie. His Tony
Montana has no bloom to lose, and he doesn't suggest much in the way
of potential: heights aren't built into him. Nothing develops in Pacino's
performance. This is a two-hour-and-forty-nine-minute picture with a
starwhose imagination seems impaired. He wants to show us what an
ignoramus this big-shot gangster is, and the role becomes an exercise

102
in loathsomeness (on the order of De Niro's performance in Raging
Bull), without internal contradictions or shading. Pacino isn't a lazy
actor,and sometimes he comes up with invention that's really inspired
— the way Tony, who's all eyes for Elvira, bobs around her on the
like

dance floor. It's the only time he seems youthful: Elvira wriggles by
herself, grinding her pelvis ever so slightly —this is her notion of sophis-
ticated dancing —and he bounces about like a horny country bumpkin.
(Pacino was also inspired in the contorted, ugly dancing he did in Cruis-
ing.) But most of the time here he goes through the motions of imper-
sonating a dynamo while looking as drained as he did at the end of The
—
Godfather, Part II. He has no tension his "dynamic" movements don't
connect to anything inside him. Then he gives up the fake energy, and
this is supposed to stand for Tony's disintegration. He's doing the kind
of Method acting in which the performer wants you to see that he's living
the part and expects you to be knocked out by his courage in running
the gauntlet. Pacino is certainly willing to go all the way with Tony's
drunken and drugged-out loutishness. But he may be too comfortable
with it; he's sodden.
There was a major difference between Paul Muni's Tony in Scarface
and both Edward G. Robinson's Rico in Little Caesar and James Cag-
ney's Tommy Powers in The Public Enemy: Tony wasn't likable. It was
his jabbing, phallic drive —
the sheer "I want" force of the man that —
made him exciting to watch. Stone and De Palma have retained this idea;
likability is left to Steven Bauer, as Tony's loyal friend Manolo (the role
played by George Raft in the 1932 version). Bauer, a bilingual Cuban-
American in his mid-twenties who appeared in the eighteen-episode pub-
lic-television series "Que Pasa, U.S.A.?" under the name Rocky
Echevarria, brings the picture a nifty mixture of businesslike murder-
ousness and lover-boy sweetness. You can hook in to his character, and
you may experience a pang when Manolo is killed. But Pacino is not the
darting, energetic gangster hero who scores and scores. He's hollow
—
from the start he seems to have to act to look alive. And you don't feel
a thing when Tony is finished.
This Scarface has the length of an epic but not the texture of an
epic, and its dramatic arc is faulty: Tony is just starting to learn the
ropes, and then, sated with wealth and dope, he's moldy. He seems to
get to the top by one quick coup. We need to see more of his rise and
—
how he managed it how he built his organization and won the loyalty
of his men. And we need to see his triumph. We miss out on the frighten-
ing exhilaration of Tony's winning his crown; there's no satisfaction for
Tony or for the audience. We don't even get any of the gangster con-

103
spiracies that we might enjoy. The middle of the movie is missing. We
get the aftermaths but not the capers. And Pacino seems to shrink with
power; he looks as if he's about to disappear in a puff of coke.
Pacino has several scenes which he's practically buried in money
in

— we are given to understand that it's coming in so fast that it's a joke.
And he also has scenes in which he's covered in cocaine: Tony dunks his
face in it, or just shoves his snout in it. This, too, is a joke the whole —
movie is a joke about consumerism (and capitalism). Tony gets every-
—
thing he wanted an estate with a tiger on the grounds, an enormous
sunken tub for his bubble baths. The grandiose visual effects include a
blimp with the words "The World Is Yours" spelled out in lights; it
appears in the sky on the night that Tony disposes of Frank Lopez and
lays claim to Elvira. —
The same words they were the motif of the 1932
film, also —
appear on the lamp (a globe of the world) that lights the
Pompeian entranceway of the mansion that Tony and Elvira live in after
they're married. The joke is how shallow he is, how degraded. He's a pig
rooting around in money and cocaine, and, as things go wrong, he snorts
more and more. (This could be a summary of how some movies are made
now.)
Probably all this excess is intended to be satirical —snorting coke
turns into a running gag. But the scenes are so shapeless that we don't
know at what point we're meant to laugh. The ludicrousness that the
moviemakers are showing us can't be sorted out from the ludicrousness
of the movie itself. When the quick-tempered Elvira, who has regarded
Tony as filth since the first time she saw him, suddenly throws a drink
at him, and says accusingly, "Can't you see what we've become!," her
line is a howler. And when Elvira complains of the boringness of Tony's
constant use of a seven-letter obscenity it's like a criticism of the picture.
The obscenities here are boring; they're used in the enervated way they
—
were in Rumble Fish the lines sound as if the actors were making
them up. And in a picture with Ferdinando Scarfiotti as the visual consul-
tant and such extravagant theatrical effects as rooms and terraces that
are pastel abstractions, a painted mural of a tropical paradise on Frank
Lopez's office wall, and home furnishings that suggest Roman Empire
Art Deco, the flat, stunted language seems almost campy, like the lan-
guage in the Maria Montez-Jon Hall-Turhan Bey epics. What is a
moviegoer supposed to be thinking about while listening to Elvira's
impassioned "We're losers, not winners" or hearing Tony say of Elvira,
"Her womb is polluted"? (He also comes up with some variant of "You
touch my seester, I keel you.")
The movie turns funny through a curdled, unfunny blowsiness.

104
 " —

Tony doesn't even spit out his expletives anymore; he slurs them. Elvira
accuses him of not being much of a lover, and he sprawls in his bubbles
in his big tub watching TV and muttering, "I don't need nobody." This
isn't the usual La Dolce Vita, you're-never-happy-when-you-get-what-
you-want movie. Tony is progressively immobilized. He lolls in the circu-
lar tub, —
and the camera rises high above him he's a cigar butt in a
bird's-eye view of an ashtray. The camera has to move because he isn't
going to move. The dialogue doesn't move the scenes forward, either,
and the action slows to next to nothing.
Tony is such a coked-up dullard that many of us in the audience
especially women —may lose all interest in him. His lassitude is our
lassitude. But the moviemakers expect us to care about him because of
their conception of his force. Near the start, Tony tells Frank Lopez that
"the only thing that gives orders in this world is balls." And Tony, as
he keeps demonstrating by his brutality, has "steel in his balls." That's
what separates him from the other gangsters: he's fearless. This fear-
lessness —the cojones of a hit man — is the only explanation that the
movie offers for Tony's rise in the world. And because he isn't afraid of
anybody he dares to speak his mind. In a restaurant full of white-haired
fat cats —a Wasp millionaires' stronghold—he yells, "You don't have the
guts to be what you wanna be! You need people like me. You need people
like me so you can point your fucking fingers and say, That's the bad
guy.'
Tony may sound almost passive; he may dribble saliva. But this is
the film's message (or rationalization): that Tony is an honestly brutal
—
businessman he isn't a hypocrite like the Wasps. There's even the
suggestion that he's better than they are because he isn't afraid to do
his own killing. (The film's message is like a sociopathic moron's interpre-
tation of Robert Warshow's thesis in his famous essay The Gangster as

Tragic Hero. The restaurant sequence is especially tinny, because the

)

Establishment millionaires and their ladies are the usual Hollywood

dress extras, and their polite, aghast expressions (and anonymous, help-
ful buzz) give them a stiff, Pop Art stuffed-dummy look. They're in a time
warp. This isn't just a sloppy piece of filmmaking, though it's the only —
piece of rabble-rousing that I've ever seen in a De Palma movie. When
Tony, the drunken, corrupted peasant, tells off the old rich, he appears
to bespeaking for the writer and the director. And from the film's point
of view he knows the truth about power and how it works. (It may be
that Stone and De Palma got into these cheap distortions by using the
movie business as their model for the world.)
The picture is peddling macho primitivism and at the same time

105
 —

making it absurd. Tony's sister does a creeping-hellcat seduction number

on him, and he doesn't respond. She empties a gun at him, and her bullets
can't kill him (or don't, anyway); he gets more vital as he's pumped full
of lead. It takes men to shoot him down — in a rampaging. White Heat
finale that involves an army of assassins and fills the screen with
corpses, without generating much excitement.
At the beginning, we're led to expect that something terrible will
happen, and what happens is that the director's concentration seems to
fall apart, and his energies are dispersed. Maybe in giving up his artistry

De Palma was trying to identify with Pacino's performance, and trying

to persuade himself that the methods he was using here were more
honest, more truthful than the way he'd worked on his other pictures.
But Pacino's Tony has nothing to reveal. Scarface is a long, druggy
—
spectacle manic yet exhausted, with De Palma entering into the de-
rangement and trying to make something heroic out of Tony's emptiness
and debauchery. The director is doggedly persistent compellingly so —
but the whole feeling of the movie is limp. This may be the only action
picture that turns into an allegory of impotence.
December 26, 1983

BUSYBODY

m eryl Streep gives a very fine

considering that she's the wrong kind
has reached great heights of prestige, and
performance as Karen Silkwood,
of actress for the role. Since she
many projects are offered to
her, she's the one who's making the wrong choices —she is miscasting
herself. There's a scene inSilkwood in which Karen and the other
employees of the Kerr-McGee plutonium and uranium fuel plant near
Crescent, Oklahoma, are having lunch, and Karen, who likes to titillate
her co-workers by showing them how freewheeling she is, nuzzles close

io6
to one of them— Drew (Kurt Russell), her lover —rubs his bare upper
arm with her fingers, and then, swinging her hips and moving from table
to table, starts to take a bite out of somebody else's sandwich. Meryl
—
Streep imitates raunchiness meticulously exquisitely. She does a
whole lot of little things with her hands and her body; she's certainly out
to prove that she's physical, and she seems more free here than in her
other starring roles. But she hasn't got the craving to take that bite. If
the young Barbara Stanwyck had grabbed the sandwich, we'd have
registered that her appetitemade her break the rules; if Debra Winger
had chomped on it, we'd have felt her sensual greed. With Streep, we just
observe how accomplished she is. She chews gum and talks with a
twang; she tousles her shag-cut brown hair; she hugs herself; she eyes
a man, her head at an angle. She has the external details of "Okie bad
girl" down pat, but something is not quite right. She has no natural
vitality; she's like —
a replicant all shtick.

Karen Silkwood, who worked at the plant for two years, was con-
—
taminated by radiation she had plutonium in her lungs and might —
have died of cancer if she hadn't been killed in 1974, at the age of
twenty-eight, in a car crash. She was on her way to a meeting with a
New York Times reporter when her car veered off the road and into the
concrete wall of a culvert. According to the legend that has sprung up,
she was murdered because she was about to "blow the whistle" on
Kerr-McGee and had documents to give the reporter which would have
backed up her allegation that the mineral-resources conglomerate was
not meeting quality standards in the production of plutonium fuel rods
for the government, and was falsifying its records. (She had already
presented thirty-nine claims of health-and-safety irregularities to the
Atomic Energy Commission, which investigated her charges and
confirmed more than half of them.) The most dramatic events in the
various accounts of Karen Silkwood's life are circumscribed, because
they're in contention (probably forever); there's no definitive version of
what happened. As a result, the movie is a series of suggestions and
insinuations and evasions.
What can be dramatized is the character of Karen Silkwood, and
that could be enough, because, unlike storybook heroes and heroines but
like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social
outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and
embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in
the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt
they had too much to lose.) Karen Silkwood drank and popped pills and
liked to play around. She had given her three small children over to their

107
father, and at the time of her contamination she was going with Drew
and sharing an apartment with a lesbian co-worker (called Dolly here,
— —
and played by Cher). She was perhaps obsessively centered on her
duties as a member of the union's negotiating committee and worked
gathering evidence to support her charges. She was a maze of contradic-
tions, and a spirited actress could have made us feel what her warring
impulses came out of. A woman who gives up her children is horrifying
to many of us; we want to understand the sexual needs or the passion
for freedom that drove Karen Silkwood to it, and how these emotions
tied in with her union activism and the courage she showed in going
against the company.
Meryl Streep sensitizes the character and blurs her conflicts. She
—
plays Silkwood in a muted and mournful manner Karen's sad, flirty
eyes show the pain of a woman who doesn't quite understand how she
lost her children, and can never get over it. She's haunted by her loss;
—
she's fine-boned and fragile a doomed, despondent woman with many
an opportunity to smile mistily through incipient tears. And, returning
to the screen after an interval of eight years, Mike Nichols, the director,
soft-pedals everything around her. Kurt Russell is a marvellously
relaxed, easy actor, and his talent comes through, even though he's used
mostly for his bare chest and his dimples. Cher, who showed a likable
toughness and directness in Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean,
Jimmy Dean, is used as a lesbian Mona Lisa, all faraway smiles and
shrugs. She has a lovely, dark-lady presence, but Dolly is a wan, weak
role. In the film, Karen and Drew and Dolly live together in a small,

rickety house, and both Drew and Dolly are in love with Karen; it's hard
to know why, except that Karen is played by the picture's star. (They
love Karen the way everybody in An Unmarried Woman loved Jill
Clayburgh.) "I can't stay away from you," Drew tells her, and he demon-
strates the very latest in gentle, good-animal lovemaking. And Karen
has a scene sitting in a porch swing and holding Dolly and comforting
her, because she can't love Dolly the same way Dolly loves her. By that
time, the movie has refined a potentially great woman character and
turned her into a neurasthenic object of sympathy and adoration.
Unable to take a stand on what happened and provide a set of
villains (or of misunderstandings of accidents), Mike Nichols has made
—
a passive advocacy film it raises suspicions of many kinds of nuclear-
age foul play, and everything is permeated with paranoia, hopelessness,
and death. The movie is so cloudy and unfocussed that its high points
are the moments when Karen's radiation sets off the plant's alarm and
—
she is forced into a high-pressure shower it suggests a concentration

io8
 —

camp —and scrubbed down with an abrasive brush. That's when she's at
her most helpless, and it may be the only time we in the audience identify
with her.
The movie has a sad, depressive sting. It's absorbing because we
know that many companies are in fact criminally careless about em-
ployee safety, and that when employee complaints are publicized, and
accusations start flying back and forth, the plant may quietly close
down. So we understand the fearfulness of the other workers, and their
— —
resentment when Karen literally a busybody sits around making
—
notes. But the movie is gutted it's aesthetically frightened and faded.
Mike Nichols' work is erratic throughout. There are good performances
by Craig T. Nelson, Ron Silver, E. Katherine Kerr, Sudie Bond, Josef
Sommer, Fred Ward, and several others, but almost every one of them
—
has a scene that gets frozen or hokey Fred Ward is turned into a
wooden Indian. The cinematography, by Miroslav Ondf iCek, is discreetly
poetic, with the plains and the petrochemical plants and the people all in
uneasy relationships with each other, but every now and then Nichols
calls for a cloying, calendar-art-sunset lyricism that temporarily de-
stroys the visual texture. There are melodramatic posturings by the
implied "bad guys" which belong to an altogether different style of
storytelling, and when the workers at the plant turn against Karen they
could be posing for illustrations of a pamphlet on how capitalism whips
workers. The dangling implication that Dolly somehow betrayed Karen
to the Kerr-McGee managers is particularly unsettling; a scene in which
Karen questions her and she acts guilty is out of "The Twilight Zone."
It's hard to believe that the script —
by Nora Ephron and Alice Aden
could have had so many loose ends, and no finish. (The end of the film
is chopped short. It must have been a special problem, partly because

The China Syndrome borrowed what is widely believed to have been

Silkwood's murder for its highway-chase sequence.)
Some scenes appear to relate to passages that were edited out. My
favorite glitch comes about two-thirds of the way through the picture:
When the simple, pragmatic Drew is fed up with Karen's spending so
much time on union activities, he quits his job at the plant and wants her
and come away with him. But she's all involved in her fight.
to quit, too,
She claims that he doesn't care if everybody at the plant is poisoned, and
he leaves her, saying, "Don't give me a problem I can't solve." As he
goes out to his car, he is followed by a large, devoted dog whose exis-
tence we hadn't registered before, though we did once see Drew —rather
bewilderingly —
pouring kibble into a dish. (This sequence ends with a
wildly unlikely but very fetching romantic conceit: Drew comes back in,

109
his face melting, and, taking Karen in his arms, he says, "I loved it,

baby," before driving off. Men screenwriters would have been much less
likely to have a man break up an affair in a manner so gratifying to a
woman.)
Soon company officials come to the house that the three have shared;
they find traces of plutonium there and accuse Karen of having deliber-
ately contaminated herself so she could hurt Kerr-McGee. Karen reels
off an elaborate explanation of how she was poisoned, and her words
don't have the weight of thought. The scene is an embarrassment: Are
we meant to think that she's lying, or is it just that Streep lost hold of
the character? It's as if no one on the set were listening. Or watching,
either; Karen's accuser looks at her with a blank stare of the kind that
used to be called And there's an awful scene a little later, after
"pitiless."
the walls have been stripped down and the house evacuated: Drew comes
back and wanders through the empty rooms in some sort of reminiscent
daze, and he takes the front-door key as a souvenir it's like something —
out of Random Harvest (M-G-M, circa 1942). The capper to the director's
uncertainty is the song Karen sings, first onscreen and then in voice-over
at the abortive end. Meryl Streep has a tender, scratchy singing voice,
a little like Buffy Sainte-Marie's; her singing has more emotional lift than
her acting — it's the only suggestive element in her performance. But
''Amazing Grace"! It's the safest, most overworked song in contempo-
rary movies.
There's no vulgar Silkwood except for Diana Scarwid's An-
life in

gela, a cosmetician in a mortuary who has an affair with Dolly and lives
with the three for a while. Scarwid does a vaudeville turn that rouses the
audience from its motion-picture-appreciation blues. Standing ramrod
straight, and with her bottom packed into pastel pants, she gets laughs
out of her tight walk; she gets laughs out of lines that have no laughs.
—
She prolongs syllables and twists meanings she sounds like Jean Har-
low as a Valley Girl. Scarwid seems to be the only person connected with
the movie who isn't worried about not being artistic enough. (When she
and Kurt Russell are bitching at each other, they're a terrific team.) And
it's a lucky thing that Angela the cosmetician is around to ply her

professional skills on this movie, because Silkwood is a stiff.

Meryl Streep has been quoted as saying, "I've always felt that I can
do anything." No doubt that's a wonderful feeling, and I don't think she
should abandon it, but she shouldn't take it too literally, either. It may
be true for her on the stage, but in movies even the greatest stars have
been successes only within a certain range of roles. Katharine Hepburn
didn't play Sadie Thompson or Mildred Pierce, and Ginger Rogers didn't

no
appear in The Swan. Anna Magnani didn't try out for Scarlett O'Hara,
Bette Davis wasn't cast as the second wife in Rebecca, and Garbo didn't
break her heart over not doing Stella Dallas. Part of being a good movie
actress is in knowing what you come across as. My guess is that Meryl
Streep could be a hell-raising romantic comedienne. (A tiny dirty laugh
comes out of her just once in Silkwood, and it's funkier and more
expressive than any of her line readings.) She has the singing voice for
musical comedy, and the agility and crazy daring for knockabout farce.
And maybe she can play certain serious and tragic roles, too she was —
unusually effective in her supporting role in The Deer Hunter. But in
her starring performances she has been giving us artificial creations.
She doesn't seem to know how to draw on herself; she hasn't yet released
an innate personality on the screen.

& lubitsch abandoned his

melodramatic burlesque To Be or Not To Be,
famous light touch when he made
The actors gave
in 1942.
the

noisy, effusive performances, probably because they were so gleeful at

having the chance to make fools of the Nazis. And getting back at Hitler
may have given Lubitsch such a charge that he thought everything the
actors did was sidesplitting. All that the picture has going for it is a sort
of crude, tireless enthusiasm. (It was made at a time when a lot of people
thought that if you showed how ridiculous the Nazis were they would
—magically— lose their power.) The new version, produced by Mel
Brooks, has nothing to take the place of that anti-Nazi rambunctious-
ness, and no new point of view. Set in Poland at the time of the German
invasion, this To Be or Not To Be is still the story of a theatre troupe
that outwits Nazi officialdom. Directed by Alan Johnson, who was the
choreographer on several earlier Brooks films, it's a mild farce benign —
but not really very funny. Johnson doesn't seize his opportunities to
work up a head of steam. You know very early that you're not in the
hands of a filmmaking wizard: during an air raid, you hear the conversa-
tions of the actors as they scurry down to the basement shelter, and
there isn't a single line that makes you laugh or relates to the plot. It's
just filler — dead time.
Comedians such as Jose Ferrer and Jack Riley
appear in script, by Thomas Meehan
supporting roles, but the semi-new
and Ronny Graham, doesn't give them enough gags; the tall, dazed
Christopher Lloyd has a good moment or two, but the only one who

III
keeps his energy up high enough to give the picture a real boost is

Charles Burning —he seems able to tune in to some private madhouse

in his head.
The roles once played by Jack Benny and Carole Lombard the —
husband and wife who run the theatre and are its stars are now filled —
by Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, and the surprise is that she's the
picture's chief asset. With her thick, dark curly hair cut short, pencil-line
thirties eyebrows, a broad, lascivious smile, and her body jiggling in
silver lame, she's spectacularly sexy. Her dialogue is barely adequate,
and at times her smile gets a little glassy and her expression says that
wanted of her, but she sustains
she's floating, waiting to be told what's
the loose, invitationalmanner of a woman who is bored with her little
putz of a husband and is eager for some action. (Her backstage dallyings
— —
with a young Polish bomber pilot Tim Matheson are timed to coincide
with her husband's recitation of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy
onstage.) There's a friendly warmth about Bancroft's vamping; she
seems more at ease in the general silliness than Brooks does. It's not
really his silliness: the Jack Benny role hasn't been fully reconceived for
him, and he has to rush around in one disguise after another, pretending
whole series of Nazis. He loses the particular maniacal sophistica-
to be a
tion of —
Mel Brooks he's like any other actor rushing around to keep a
movie going. Brooks' plight reminded me of how ordinary the Marx
Brothers were when they appeared in roles that hadn't been written for
them, in Broadway farce Room Service. They
the movie version of the
and neither does Brooks.
didn't cut loose,
The high spot of the film comes in its opening number Brooks and —
Bancroft singing "Sweet Georgia Brown" in Polish. But even that num-
ber could have used more raucousness. It's a trace too bland, and it
depends too heavily on Bancroft's dazzling smile and shimmer and
shake. The two other musical numbers are duds. So are many of the
plot-complication scenes, especially the ones featuring James Haake as
Bancroft's dresser —a fey homosexual who wears flowered silk wrap-
pers and matching shorts. When the Nazis come to arrest him, he tries
to hide among the chorus girls onstage. The director doesn't seem to
know whether the scene should be played for laughter or suspense or
pathos. It's a mess. And the picture's be-kind-to-Jews-and-homosexuals
tone is The scenes centering on Jews being hidden in the theatre
icky.
are awkward, because if the Jews are hiding in the basement, what does
that make the actors on the stage? The implication is that Mel Brooks
is a Polish Catholic. That's a first.

January 9, 1984

112
 —

VANITY, VAINGLORY, AND LOWLIFE

1 [here are two high spots in The Dresser, the

Ronald Harwood's play about an old Shakespearean actor-manager
film version of
(Al-
bert Finney) —a knight of the theatre who is touring the provinces with
his dilapidated company during the Second World War and his dresser —
(Tom Courtenay). In the first, the stage assistants and company mem-
bers and Norman the dresser are in the wings banging drums and
shaking clanging metal, trying to create a loud enough storm to satisfy
— —
the old man they call him Sir who is onstage playing Lear. And a cold,
disagreeable member of the troupe (Edward Fox), a limping actor-play-
wright who despises Sir and has refused to help, is disgusted by the lack
of professionalism of these noisemakers; he gets into their midst and
clangs away enthusiastically, showing them how it should be done. In
the second, which takes place in Sir's dressing room during the intermis-
sion, a young stage assistant (Cathryn Harrison) comes on to the aged
warrior, hoping to obtain an acting job; she tells him she feels "the power
and the mystery" in his room, and he lifts her up in his arms, testing her
weight, feeling how much lighter she'd be as Cordelia than his wife
his Lady Wife, he calls her—who is growing a bit portly. Finney brings
a wonderful mock gravity, charged with tumescent lewdness, to the
flirtation. When Sir is excited, you can practically hear his rusty old
machinery grinding and creaking.
There's also a lovely moment or two with Lock wood West as a
heavy-set, elderly actor who must substitute for the (smaller) actor
scheduled to appear as Lear's Fool and is stuffed into the Fool's motley:
bulging out pitifully, he receives his last-minute instructions from Sir
with such trembling eagerness to perform well that your heart goes out
to him. I wish that this movie, directed by Peter Yates from Harwood's
somewhat restructured adaptation of the play, were a comedy about the
glorious, berserk life of the theatre, because in fond, light moments like
this one we feel exactly what we're meant to feel, and more. And Finney

113
 a

is marvellously straight-faced and righteous when, as Sir, he reminds

the company that the spotlight must always be on him. He's polished and
funny in the opening scenes, in which the troupe is completing its en-
gagement in a small city, with Othello; he pounces on his lines, caressing
his vowels. Sir's humble bow to the audience is a masterpiece. So is his
curtain speech, in which he refers to his Lady Wife but doesn't single
her out from the company; nothing is allowed to distract attention from
him. In the train station, his grand manner with his walking stick as he
points the way for the others to follow him could hardly be bettered. And
when he sees that the train that is to carry them all to the next town on
their itinerary is pulling out, he thunders "Stop that train!" in a voice
that resounds in the huge station like the voice of God. (The train stops.)
Finney can gasp for breath so loud that he could be mistaken for a
snorting bull; he has amazing sounds coming out of him —maybe the
most stupendous vocal sounds in movies since Nicol Williamson's Merlin
in Excalibur. And he brings humor to the role in the way he lets Sir's

bombastic, declamatory style onstage carry over into his conversation;

he's onstage all the time. He also has an arresting quiet scene: with the
help of some ingenious lighting, this actor who's only forty-seven man-
ages to look wasted and flabby in Sir's portable bathtub —an old man
physically exhausted. More typically, he's batting his blue eyes dolor-
ously, and honeyed with self-reverence, as he announces,
his voice is
"I'm a spent force. My days are numbered."
Almost everything in The Dresser is good except what relates to
its theme: the symbiotic relationship of the grand old trouper and his

dresser. The play and the script are written mostly from the point of
view of the flyweight dresser, who cajoles and teases and mothers the
old man, and keeps him going. Harwood, as a young actor, served for
a while as a dresser to the touring actor-manager Donald Wolfit (who
is probably best known to American moviegoers for his appearance as

the rumbling-voiced tycoon with bushy eyebrows in iJoom at the Top),

and there's an element of unconvincing fantasy at the core of the
material. It's as if Winston Churchill's valet were to write a book about
how he held his adored master together, pouring energy into him and
enabling him to unite Britain to fight the Nazis, and then a film were
to be made depicting Churchill's life just as the valet described it —
saga of dependency. Finney and Courtenay have to keep showing us
the supposedly deep bonds between them, and pointing up the meta-
phor of Lear and his Fool. Courtenay's Norman is always hopping
about, mincing and fussing, and talking, talking — cheering the old

114
man on by performing for him. And it's a piece of clioreography that
Courtenay patented before he got near the camera. He played the role
in Manchester when The Dresser opened there, in 1980, and again in
London and on Broadway, and his interpretation has lost whatever
connection it may once have had to Norman's emotions; it's external-

ized —
and rhythmic it's all dried up.
Courtenay' s performance is so practiced that the material becomes
confusing. I wasn't sure if Sir, when he gets wildly distraught in the
marketplace of the city where he is to play Lear in the evening, was
going through routine shenanigans or a major crisis. And when that
night he seems unable to summon the will or the strength to make his
first entrance onstage I couldn't tell from Courtenay's flutterings
whether Norman was used to Sir's being this much of a wreck or
whether this was supposed to be the first (and, as it turns out, the last)
breakdown. From Courtenay's responses, he appears to have seen it all
a thousand times before. This is partly the director's fault. Yates (who
has a background in the theatre himself) may have been so charmed by
working with such accomplished actors as Finney and Courtenay that he
failed to "make it new."
The movie is claustrophobic, and not because most of it is set on-
stage or backstage but because the conception seals off the possibili-
ties — Sir's death is all that can happen —and because there's a hot-
house artificiality to the central relationship. I didn't believe in
Norman's pure (though jealous) devotion to his master; it doesn't even
go with Courtenay's tight face and his peevish, asexual tics. (I waited
for the eruption of the poisonous resentment and malice that I as-
sumed were lurking just beneath the fawning manner.) And I didn't
believe in the subplot about the twenty-year unrequited passion that
Madge (Eileen Atkins), the stage manager, is supposed to have for Sir.

Madge is what in this country would be a Jane Alexander role; she's a

construct —she gives you her whole character in the first closeup, and
then gives it to you over and over again. What all this comes down to
is that Harwood's real cleverness —which includes using the wartime
bombing of Britain to give an element of gallantry to Sir's Shakes-
pearean touring, and using the sound of an air raid to spur him on to
give his greatest performance — hits too many hollow notes. And
though Finney is often commanding and almost always witty, we
never get a substantial enough taste of Sir's Lear; without that, Fin-
ney's performance lacks the final zing that it needs. It becomes a little

less than titanic —rather amorphous, in fact.

"5
 But what's off-putting about The Dresser is that it's conceived as
a tribute to Norman. "Shall we make an effort?" he says to Sir, who
collapses againsthim sobbing. In the film's view, great actors are incor-
rigible, demented children; they need these dedicated, smothering serv-

ants. And the picture itself has a lot of Norman's pinched oppressive-
ness. There's a suggestion in the material that an English child needs
—
an English nanny which couldn't be more untrue.

Do
A reasonably accurate test of whether an action movie
the white heroes slaughter people of color in quantity, either affect-
is racist:

lessly or triumphantly? This test isn't foolproof. In Raiders of the Lost

Ark, Arabs are casually dispatched — it's as if the hero were skeet shoot-
ing —but the tone is clearly a parody of old-movie conventions, and I

wouldn't call the picture racist. Thoughtless, maybe, but not racist.
Uncommon Valor, a realistic action fantasy in which a group of Viet-
nam veterans get together for an expedition into northern Laos to bring
out the missing-in-action men from their unit who have been slave labor-
The Communist soldiers are depersonalized;
ers for ten years, is racist.
they're presented in much the same terms as the Japanese in Second
World War films such as Bataan (1943). They're little yellow-peril tar-
gets. The plot mechanism that makes the movie effective is that the
—
ex-Marines who undertake the raid they're like a dirty half-dozen plus
one, their leader, a former Marine colonel (Gene Hackman) have been —
haunted for a decade. They can't forget the men who were left behind.
And, with the United States government spying on them and trying to
stop them, they're misfits, rebels, underdogs.
Directed by Ted Kotcheff, whose last film was the 1982 First Blood,
a piece of primal pulp with Sylvester Stallone as a mistreated Vietnam-
vet Green Beret, Uncommon Valor is very shrewd about the chip on
its shoulder: these tough guys who risk death to save their buddies are
put before us as the kind of men who made our country great and as —
men whom our country no longer has a place for. The colonel's obsession
with the Marines classified as missing in action (his son is one of them)
has resulted in his being forced into an early retirement; most of the
others haven't been able to adjust to civilian life, because of their shame
and their feeling of dishonor. In the film's nightmarish opening se-
quence, set in Vietnam in 1972, we see several of them running and

ii6
 —

climbing aboard the helicopter that going to take them out; the rest
is

of the men in their unit, carrying their wounded, are running toward it,
with North Vietnamese soldiers right behind them, when the order is

given and the aircraft takes off. We see the horror in the faces of the
men being lifted into the air as they look back at the friends they're
abandoning.
The colonel spends years tracking down the whereabouts of those
forsaken men; at he obtains an aerial photograph of the prison
last,

compound in Laos where they've been spotted, and goes to round up his
— —
son's buddies the Marines who got away and persuade them to join
him. It isn't hard: he gets a little initial resistance from a former major
(Harold Sylvester), a black man who's now an executive, but most of
them (Fred Ward, Reb Brown, and Tim Thomerson) are so plagued by
Vietnam that they're rootless and welcome this mission. One of them
the bearded, half-crazed Sailor, played by the heavyweight prizefighter
—
Randall (Tex) Cobb is as ungenteel as you can get; a self-destructive
biker who walks like a gorilla, he can hardly wait to go. With money
supplied by an oil magnate (Robert Stack) who, it turns out, has a son
among the missing, the colonel arranges to have a full-size model of the
camp built in Texas. He and the men go into training there, and rehearse
the raid. It's exciting to watch a group of men plan a life-or-death action,
and then see what happens when they try to carry it out. These men
figure that they'll have just three minutes to pick up the prisoners and
get out.
At first, I was puzzled about why Gene Hackman was playing the
colonel —who could be a gung-ho, wonderful-guy John Wayne hero — in

such a dogged, almost impersonal manner. During the toughening-up

period, there's horseplay among the six men, but the colonel isn't one of
the boys, and there are no jokes about his being fifty. (Hackman, who

as a young man spent five years in the Marines, looks hale enough to
keep up with the others.) The essential difference between Hackman's
performance and what John Wayne might have done in the role is that
a John Wayne hero would have been so patriotically fired up that he
would have enjoyed the killing he had to do to accomplish his mission.
He would have brought a pop grandiloquence to the action sequences.
And though the picture might have been a bigger hit, many of us would
have rejected it as kids' stuff and perhaps laughed at how John Wayne
was redeeming our national honor by winning the Vietnam War for us.
Hackman's colonel treats soldiering in a businesslike way; his no-non-
sense performance may even be a little more colorless than it needs to
be. But he offers a range of held-in, adult emotion that you don't expect

117
to see in an action film. The colonel is a fair-minded, rational, bitter man,
with the hell of waiting etched in his face —the capture of his son has
drained his life of any relaxation. He offers a terse explanation of why
the politicians don't want to get the missing-in-action men out: because
the war was lost. Wayne would have said that with sarcastic disgust.
Hackman's disgust is internalized; he says it harshly, matter-of-factly.
The politicians want to forget all about the war and the men who were
sent to fight it. There's enough recognizable truth in this to soften the
audience. Working from a script by Joe Gay ton, the twenty-seven-year-
old son of an Air Force sergeant, the director plays on the general
cynicism about the government, and the feeling that though there may
be American prisoners of war still alive in Southeast Asia, the politicians
have written them off.

The film doesn't offer any explanation of why a small group of

Americans would be used in Laos as a work detail under heavy guard.
Vietnam is short of food and money, but it has a considerable labor
surplus, and, with recent reports of a Labor Cooperation Treaty between
itand the Soviet Union, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese being
sent to work in Siberia, it seems likely that the Vietnamese government
would want to trade any American prisoners for goods or money rather
than go to the expense of hiding them and guarding them. But whether
or not there's any basis for believing that there are Americans held as
slave laborers, the movie is very canny in how it exploits our cynicism
about the United States government's denials.
In Uncommon Valor, the government isn't seen as an expression
of the will of the people, anymore, but as something completely cut off
from them. The seven men, who have been psychically scarred and
—
ignored these men whose feelings aren't sanctioned by the govern-
—
ment express the people. The men who were lifted out by helicopter at
the start are very appealing in the way they relate to each other; there's
something they don't speak about but share. What they did last time left
them feeling impotent; they're going back, and this time they're going
to do it right. They're all low-key, except for the flamboyant Sailor. And,
in the movie's terms, their defiance of the government —they keep going
even after the C.LA. fingers them to officials in Bangkok and their
—
weapons are confiscated is enough to make their mission honorable
and make them heroes.
The film shows us Communists holding Americans prisoner and
treating them cruelly; what's implicit is that the Communists are doing
it because they're evil. It boils down to this: we know these seven Ameri-

ii8
 —

cans and we're touched by them; we don't know the men they're killing
(or what they may have suffered). And so, during the weird, quick chaos
of the actual raid, the audience has the pleasure of cheering each time
a Vietnamese or Laotian soldier is bumped off. The exultant, patriotic
American music on the soundtrack during these attacks adds to the
audience's good feelings. Here, finally, is a movie about our heroes in
Vietnam. The cheering is racist and childish, yet somehow not deeply
offensive. It's as if the audience were saying, "This is how it should have
been."
Uncommon Valor depends on the vainglorious idea that seven
ex-Marines can take care of almost any number of foreigners. And it sets
up typical action-movie ploys: The raiding group has a young, inex-
perienced member (Patrick Swayze), whose reasons for joining up are
differentfrom those of the others; probably the true reason is that the
picture needs a juvenile lead so that the younger audience will have
someone to identify with. And the film includes three heroic, anti-Com-
munist guides who help the men over the border from Thailand into
Laos. The movie is nowhere more fake than in its handling of these three
man (Kwan Hi Lim)
spirit-of-the-good-Asian-people characters: an old
—
Gunga Din with a gun and his two strong, resourceful daughters (Alice
Lau and Debi Parker). Introduced to "balance" things, sexually as well
as racially, they are supremely courageous, and as inhuman as the evil
Communists who have enslaved our American boys. John Milius was one
of the film's producers, and it has overtones of his pop mythologizing,
but Ted Kotcheff doesn't go in for big flourishes. He makes just one
exception: Tex Cobb's wildman, called Sailor because he used to "take
a lot of red wine and uppers and sail away." Sailor is all flourish; he could
be a sentimental cartoon of the bearded, bearlike Milius. And, maybe
because Hackman's colonel is so locked in his determination, the film
really needs Cobb, whose performance is playful and uninhibited. Alone
on the screen doing free-form tai chi in silhouette during the closing
credits, he's an endearing figure —a big, slobby satyr. (He couldn't be
more unlike the lean, relatively hairless Asians.)
Starting with its easily forgotten title (taken from the words of
Admiral Chester Nimitz inscribed on the Marine Corps War Memorial in
Arlington, Virginia: "Uncommon Valor Was a Common Virtue"), this
movie is peculiarly understated, and maybe that's part of why it's so
effective. It isn't a solid piece of work, like Under Fire or The Dogs of
War, but it moves on a strong emotional current. The cinematography,
by Steven H. Burum (he was the second-unit man on Apocalypse Now

"9
and recently did Rumble Fish) and Ric Waite (The Long Riders, The
Border), and the smooth authority of the editing, by Mark Melnick,
undercut the cheap jingoism. And Ted Kotcheff' s directing has probably
never been so assured. Uncommon Valor takes you by surprise. You
don't expect this unheralded action movie to be as enjoyable as it is. And
maybe the secret is that it isn't too obstreperously rousing. Kotcheff
keeps the grandiosity in check. When the colonel first goes to see the
ex-Marines, he finds that one of them (Fred Ward) has become an artist;

this poor fellow's tortured w^ire meant to reveal the state of

sculpture is

his soul and tell us that he'll join up. Kotcheff makes the point yet glides
right over the gaudiness. And the picture isn't virulent. Hackman's
matter-of-factness tones it down; glimpsed in flashes and in the
his face,
background, gives it beyond sloganeering. Besides, the
levels of feeling
raiders don't all get out alive, the colonel's hopes aren't all fulfilled, and
the picture doesn't milk the homecoming scenes. Uncommon Valor
benefits from being small-scale. It's a middle-of-the-road right-wing fan-
tasy. At its best, it's also an expression of the pain caused by the war
we lost.

'udden Impact, with Clint Eastwood appearing as Dirty

Harry Callahan of the San Francisco Police Department for the fourth
time, might be mistaken for parody if the sledgehammer-slow pacing
didn't tell you that the director (Eastwood) wasn't in on the joke. The
picture was one of the top hits of the holiday season, and maybe that has
some dire meaning, but, once inside the theatre, at least some of the
ticket-buyers were whistling and wisecracking. Sudden Impact fea-
tures integrated scum —mostly black or swarthy, with many of indeci-
pherable origins (Portuguese? Black Irish?), but with a few blonds
salted among them. Once again, Harry —who doesn't have to wait for
crimes to be reported but catches criminals flagrante delicto, and saves
the state the cost of a trial by convicting them on the spot, with bullets
—has been too efficient for the weak-kneed, San Francisco
lily-livered

So he's sent out of town to track down

politicians (liberals, all of them).
leads on a murder case; he drives to the picturesque coastal city of San
Paulo (actually, Santa Cruz), where he's also besieged by robbers, sa-
dists, killers. America has gone to hell —
Harry can't cross a street with-
out interrupting some heinous crime.

120
 The murderer he's on the trail of is played by Sondra Locke, who,
it turns out, is a saintly executioner, much like him; she's taking care
of her quota of scum, and might just as well be called Dirty Harriet.
The script conveniently provides a trauma in Harriet's past; she and
her younger sister were hideously raped — and throughout the movie
we get flashbacks to the leering, sweating faces of the rapists. The
trauma is convenient in that it helps to account for Sondra Locke's
frozen-faced inexpressiveness. But Eastwood, as director, makes the
mistake of giving us a flashback to the pre-rape Harriet, and she's as
blank then as now. Actually, Sondra Locke may be on to something.
What expressions would be appropriate to this movie? By out-deadpan-
ning Clint Eastwood, she comes across as the one and only right
woman for him. But she takes a lot of beating and raping here, as she
has in other Eastwood productions. And Harry is the only character
who is glorified; he keeps coming back after the villains think they've
killed him, and in one resurrection, at night at the amusement park on
the beach, he walks slowly toward the villains, like the cowboy hero of
a Western, with the boardwalk lights forming a halo around him. The
picture is like a slightly psychopathic version of an old Saturday-after-
noon serial, with Harry sneering at the scum and cursing them before

he shoots them with his king-size custom-made "44 Auto Mag." He

takes particular pleasure in kicking and bashing a foul-mouthed les-

bian; we get the idea — worse than her male associ-

in his eyes, she's

ates, because women are supposed to be ladies. Eastwood's disap-

proval of her impropriety sits a little oddly in a movie with
sub-barnyard jokes about a little bulldog's hindquarters and a laugh-
fest centering on a man shot in the genitals and a frankfurter covered
with ketchup. It's the obviousness of everything in Sudden Impact
that may be putting it over. The main sadistic, rotten villain looks at

Harriet and says, "The bitch is mine." When you see a merry-go-round
with a unicorn that has an outsize horn, you wait to see this guy land
on it; naturally when he does, you applaud or hoot. Eastwood's movie-
making might be euphemistically described as basic.
January 23, 1984

121
VULGARIANS AND ASCETICS

I Woody Allen, the first post-Freudian

In the nineteen-seventies,

movie comedian, channelled his own anxieties and obsessions into his
clowning. He was the first to use his awareness of his own sexual
insecurities as the basis for his humor, and when he turned psychodrama
into comedy he seemed to speak —to joke—for all of us. Moviegoers felt
themselves on insiders' terms with the neurotic Woody Allen hero, who
reflected their defenses, their feelings of insignificance, their embarrass-
ing aspirations. But the culture has changed: Woody Allen no longer
tells us what we think of ourselves. A wall has come down between him
and us: in Broadway Danny Rose, which he wrote, directed, and stars
in, he's on the other side, with the rest of the comedy specialists, beating

against it, trying to make us laugh. It's as if he'd been blessed with
perfect pitch for reaching audiences and had then become tone-deaf. No
one has yet replaced him in the national consciousness, although after
My Dinner with Andre came out, there was talk around the colleges
that Wally Shawn would be the Woody Allen of the eighties, and there
have been flurries of audience identification with John Belushi, Richard
Pryor, Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, and even, after Risky
Business, Tom Cruise.
Woody Allen is the spirit of the seventies incarnate, but he's also a
determined guy, and he has developed something that may make him
successful in the eighties: a fair amount of commercial know-how. The
star of Broadway Danny Rose is not the Woody Allen we all felt
ourselves to be (or, at least, to have a close connection with). As Danny
Rose, Woody Allen isn't hip and he isn't dizzy with angst; the picture
doesn't have any specifically modern themes. Danny is a small-time
booking agent, a mild, patient fellow who nurtures his more promising
clients until they're on the brink of stardom, at which point they invari-
ably leave him and sign up with a big-time agent. The movie has close
ties to the pictures that used to be made from Damon Runyon's Broad-

182
 — —

way stories or, sometimes, were simply based on his characters Little
Miss Marker, Pocketful of Miracles, Guys and Dolls, Bloodhounds of
Broadway, A Slight Case of Murder, and perhaps two dozen others.
They were about racketeers and entertainers with hearts of gold who
had unlikely nicknames and spoke in a stylized tough-guy vernacular
Damon Runyonese. These lowlifes seemed to know nothing of the world
beyond Broadway; they were a bit stunted, but were regarded with
great affection, rather like the way Coach is regarded on the TV series
"Cheers." Woody Allen himself isn't full of affection, though; he's spin-
ning a tale without having any particular involvement in it, except,
perhaps, in its King of Comedy underlayer — its condemnation of what
it views as the scurviness of our time. Broadway Danny Rose seems
"worked up," and though it's moderately entertaining and has some
good fast talk and some push (it isn't as attenuated as Allen's 1982 A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy), nothing in it feels easy or natural.
Danny Rose is Mr. Goodness-and-Poignancy. He lacks the devious-
ness and the blow-your-own-horn brashness to prosper; he's an agent
without a conniving bone in his body. Woody Allen's Zelig was nobody
in history; Danny Rose is nobody in show business. He's a little schmo

in loud plaids, but he's also a virtuous man. The new Judas in his life is

Lou Canova (Nick Apollo Forte), a barrel-chested singer in his forties

with a dimply, piggy, Vegas smile and a voice to make musicians shud-
der. A has-been trying for a comeback, he suggests the least talented
aspects of Buddy Hackett and Tony Bennett. In his first movie appear-
ance. Forte is completely convincing as a ruffled-shirt vulgarian sweat-
ing with sentimentality. As the story is told to us, by Sandy Baron sitting
at a table in the Carnegie Delicatessen with an assortment of fellow-
comics (Corbett Monica, Morty Gunty, Jackie Gayle, Will Jordan, and
others), Lou Canova having a hard time balancing the demands of his
is

—
career, his wife, and the woman he's hooked on Tina, the brassy blond
widow of a mafioso. Lou feels he can't live without seeing her. So when
Danny has him booked to appear at a benefit at the Waldorf he insists
thatDanny go to New Jersey to pick her up and bring her to the benefit
as if she were Danny's date. Danny's ordeal as he chases after the
infuriated, balky Tina, trying to persuade her to accompany him —while
hit men chase after the two of them — is the centerpiece of the film.
The audience's first sight of Tina is something of a shock, and her
every subsequent appearance produces a faint ripple of disbelief, be-
cause this ruthless tough dame who chews gum with a vengeance, talks
with a nasal Brooklyn accent, and has a teased-stiff mop of curls that
come down to her big dark glasses is played by a padded-out Mia Farrow.
It's like seeing a Harpo wig and a Hart Schaffner & Marx suit on a statue

by Donatello; she's a work of art in disguise, her face hidden. There's

—
just one shot of Tina looking in a bathroom mirror, with a towel around
—
her head that reveals the finely modelled Mia Farrow. The rest of the
time, Tina is in motion, talking incessantly, and she sounds so much like
Louise Lasser (who was married to Woody Allen and appeared in a
couple of his early films) that the performance throws a curve into the
material. Mia Farrow is certainly diiferent here, but you can hardly see
her, and her playing against type doesn't do anything special for the
movie; it just makes you stare at Tina's mouth and chin you look for —
signs that Mia Farrow is really lurking under the fright wig and shades.
Although the manner of this movie is deliberately raucous, and the
decision to film it in flat, grainy black-and-white suggests that Allen may
have wanted to give it a strangeness (as if it weren't happening now) and
the feel of a takeoff, the material is rather unformed. It's larval, like

Danny. The story's satirical underpinnings are never brought up top,

and there's an element of something like cowardice although it may be —
—
just nice-guyism in the way that Allen shies off whenever there's a
chance for something sharp. If you plotted a graph of the show-biz
character traits that were the diametric opposites of Woody Allen's
traits, you'd probably find that Lou Canova had them all, and the comedi-

ans at the Carnegie Deli, with their grating voices and gargoyle grins,
had plenty of them. But though Woody Allen knows how repulsive Lou
Canova's act is, Danny Rose doesn't. He isn't permitted to have either
taste or consciousness. "God bless ya, darling," he may say nervously
to an old lady who's detaining him when he's in a hurry. When he uses
the phrases that are the stock-in-trade of cheesy entertainers, he wob-
bles somewhere between weaseling and spreading joy. The picture has
a curdled, Diane Arbus bleakness.
Danny, with his chai (a Jewish life-and-luck charm) on a chain
around his neck, going to be sweet and dull forever a kind, consider-
is —
ate person. The story is set, retrospectively, in an indefinite period; it's
told as if Sandy Baron, the narrator, were in 1983 talking about a legend-
ary figure of the past, but from the visual and verbal clues that we pick
up, Sandy Baron seems to be in 1983 talking about 1982. Broadway
Danny Rose may be meant to be a timeless fable; it comes across as a
toothless fable. I wanted to hear Lou Canova's wife say something that
would clue us in on what living with this singing oaf must be like. I
wanted to know why the oaf was so madly in love with the squawk-box
Tina. I wanted Danny's novelty-act clients (the woman who plays tunes
on water glasses, the stuttering ventriloquist, the blind xylophonist) to

124
say something so weird and redemptive that it would dispel the suspicion
that we were supposed to laugh at them, lovingly, for being hopeless,
elfin losers —while dear Danny Rose was adding to his goodness quo-
tient by serving them Thanksgiving dinner. (It's a scene out of Dickens.)
Allen leaves us in the uncomfortable position of waiting for laugh lines
and character developments that aren't there. But he plugs up the holes
with gags that still get laughs; he remembers to pull the old Frank Capra
strings, and he keeps things moving along.
This is the only time a Woody Allen picture has made me feel that

he was writing down —trying for a

crowd pleaser. The 1959 English
musical satire Expresso Bongo, with Laurence Harvey as a scrounging
Soho booking agent, covered some of the same ground, but it had zest.
The agent that Harvey played wasn't Mr. Virtue; he didn't turn the other
cheek. In Broadway Danny Rose, the dimness of the images begins to
merge with Danny's dimness. Woody Allen isn't all there in Danny. He
has left out the hostility that made him famous, and the imagination and
freak lyricism, too. As Danny, he's a Chaplinesque moral presence in a
world of Catskills comics and Mafia hoods. Danny is a little cloying, and
so is the movie. Agents can have a good cry.

he Italian film Basileus Quartet, written and directed by

Fabio Carpi, is about the monastic life of a celebrated group of classical
musicians. ("Basileus" is the Greek for king.) The story begins with the
heart attack, during a concert, of the elderly first violinist, Oscar, played
by FranQois Simon —whose performance, cut short though it is, is the
wittiest stretch of the movie. He does a ripe parody of the sniffs and tics

of a hypersensitive fiddler. Oscar is really into the music —his eyelids are
fluttering, his mouth is sucked in with prissy passion. He isn't just

making music, he's responding to the music, and this is, of course, all tied
up with the fact that a violinist absorbs the vibrations of his instrument
in his cheek and neck. One part of him is listening to the music he's
playing to make sure he's doing it right, and another part is responding
in a way that the audience can't. The result —
a violinist's seeming to
—
swoon with ecstasy gives him a special romantic appeal. (If you ques-
tion this ecstasy, ask yourself why Isaac Stern's face always reflects a
private bliss.) The story that Carpi tells is dependent on the romance
inherent in classical fiddling.

125
 Oscar's quartet has been together for thirty years, and at first the
survivors, —
who are in their fifties Michel Vitold as a repressed homo-
sexual, and Omero Antonutti and Hector Alterio as repressed heterosex-
uals —think that Oscar's death means the end of the group and the
beginning of new lives. They have no money worries; they can do as they
like.But these men, who have been touring for decades and have no
family except the quartet itself, feel lost on their own. And when Edo
(Pierre Malet), a twenty-year-old virtuoso with long ringlets, flaring
nostrils,and the animal sensuality of a young Nureyev, presents himself
as the only man who can replace Oscar, they audition him and their
problems are solved. They don't even have to make the decision to go on
as a group; Edo's turning up makes it for them. Basileus Quartet is, in
a way, like Death in Venice with three Gustav von Aschenbachs, or,
perhaps, three men who represent different aspects of Aschenbach.
The writer-director very carefully builds the irony that the three
aging men grasp: they have led emotionally impoverished lives —they
have given up everything for their musical careers —but Edo denies
himself nothing, and his music does not suffer. The others observe, and
see what they've missed. Edo breathes heavily when he fiddles; women
can't take their eyes off him. He meets and the trysts are
their eyes,
settled. As the quartet travels through Italy, France, Switzerland, and
— —
Austria, Edo the darling, the pet of the three proud papas has his pick
of the beautiful women of Europe. He drinks, gambles, smokes pot, has
an affair with a woman terrorist whom the police are tracking; he loves
excitement. The life in him is, of course, too much of a shock to the other

men, and, with no ill will on his part, he brings them to grief. One goes
mad, another is destroyed, and the third is broken in spirit.
Fabio Carpi is by no means a great or original filmmaker, but the
movie is pleasing. Though it was an inexpensive production (under five
hundred thousand dollars), Basileus Quartet is calm, distanced, deep-
toned; the men live well wherever they are, and the interiors seem as
richly varnished as their instruments. They frequently perform at pri-
—
vate musicales in palazzos and villas. (Alain Cuny surely one of the
—
most absurdly magnetic of all bad actors is the host at a couple of their
concerts, and his big, square head fills the frame.) But at heart this is
a story about three aging monks regretting their wasted lives. (That's
what I found disappointing about it: we may never get to see another
movie about a string quartet, and this one turns out to be less interested
in music and musicians than in demonstrating the perils of asceticism.)
A fourth moper turns up when Hector Alterio bumps into a friend from
his youth —
Gabriele Ferzetti (he was the sell-out architect hero of L 'Av-

126
Ventura), who's weary and bitter. There's even a fifth: when Omero
Antonutti goes to visit the woman he once loved, she's all gall and
wormwood, and scathingly angry about her supposedly ruined face
(though she looks fine-boned and elegant). With all these handsome,
prosperous people complaining about being older than they used to be,
the movie really should be a comedy. I don't mean to suggest that Carpi
has no humor, but he's somewhat too measured and solemn in his ap-
proach.One Aschenbach may be tragic, but three? In The Sea Gull,
when Masha says, "I'm in mourning for my life," it's funny. Here three
men are saying it in unison, like a vaudeville team; the other characters
who are introduced are also saying it. But Carpi doesn't see the joke.

The picture sags when the yearning old homosexual played by Vi-
told deludes himself that Edo is his lover, and chides the young musical
and sexual prodigy about his naughty bad habits or breaks in on Edo
when he's with a woman. Vitold's role is a literary cliche, with no sur-
prises. What gives the film its sustaining interest is the faces of the
actors —two of them in particular. Seeing Antonutti as the brutal father
in Padre Padrone and as the peasant leaderin The Night of the Shoot-

ing Stars, never imagined that he could be at his ease in dapper

I

evening clothes. And Hector Alterio, the Argentine who has starred in
Spanish films such as The Nest and Cria!, is even more resplendent.
These two —both —
with trim, lordly beards bring the film force and
dignity; the rounded domes of their high foreheads and partly bald heads
loom in the wood-panelled rooms. If you're going to give a movie Old
Master lighting, these are certainly the actors to soak up the light.
But the movie is essentially thin; the situation isn't rooted in any-
thing. These aging musicians seem to have no contact with other musi-
cians, no shoptalk, no insane anxieties about their instruments. They
don't argue about the merits of other musicians or listen to the latest
recordings. They don't even bitch about the acoustics of the halls they
play in. All is gloom and empty lives. What's left out is what the men's
music has meant to them. Anyone who has ever played chamber music
knows how deeply refreshing and convivial it can be. If Carpi wants to
demonstrate the damage caused by denial of sensual gratification, he
has certainly picked the wrong vocational group. Playing in a quartet is

like being part of a socially approved orgy. That's why some musicians
consider it the greatest form of music-making: it's all feelings.
February 6, 1984

127
COMEDY, EPIC, SITCOM

I
friend, falls
In The Lonely Guy, Steve Martin, thrown out by his girl-
into a subculture of Lonely Guys, and we accompany him
as he enters this secret society of men who recognize each other. (It's

like the closeted gay subculture of the The fun of the movie
fifties.) is

Martin's stumbling into this world of outcasts and his earnestness in

trying to conceal the signs that he's one of "them." Martin, who can't
quite believe the situation he's in, puts all his energy into finding a new
girlfriend. He's only a temporary Lonely Guy, but on his first day of this

new life he meets Charles Grodin, a listless, permanent Lonely Guy, who
becomes his close companion. These two Manhattanites engage in a
series of partly improvised dialogues that take place in Central Park and
around the city. When they walk together, Martin, the dreamer, has a
spring to his step; Grodin, who has stopped dreaming, drags himself
along. A dumpy fellow who's losing his hair, he looks as if his brain were
fogged in. He's the essence of droopiness. His shoulders are bowed
down, and he seems to have sunk into his floppy pants; he might have
been born holding a weighted shopping bag in each hand. Grodin creates
the character out of practically nothing — out of inflections—and, with
Steve Martin playing straight man to his f ud, they're a manic-depressive
team. They keep coming up with absurdist jokes, Martin by being des-
perately starry-eyed and hopeful, Grodin by his frowns —by being nega-
tive about everything. And Grodin can't be budged.
It's too bad that the secret world of the Lonely Guys isn't more fully
worked out, with more contrasting species and types. Except for the
Steve Martin-Charles Grodin teamwork, almost nothing carries over
from one scene to the next, and most of the people in the cast are
marooned, trying to look animated when they have nothing to do and
nowhere to hide. The film is at its peak when Steve Martin, having found
Iris (Judith Ivey), a girl with a yen for Lonely Guys, and then lost her

phone number, goes up to the roof of his apartment house and despair-

128
ingly howls her name. His call is like a signal; it sets off other Lonely
Guys on the roofs of other tall buildings, who howl the names of their
own lost loves. It's as if Martin had discovered another wrinkle in the

lives of Lonely Guys, and for a minute New York City is like a gothic
village of howling tomcats. There are other scenes that stand out. The
first time Martin goes into a restaurant and asks for a table for one, all

heads turn toward him and a spotlight follows him as the maitre d' seats
him. At a costume party on a cruise ship, Martin, who's dressed as
Charlie Chaplin, with derby and walking stick, loses Iris to a swinger
(Steve Lawrence); he turns his back to the camera and for an instant
recaptures the mood of the silent clowns as he walks out of the film
frame with the Chaplin lonely-little-fellow walk, twirling his stick. At
home in his apartment, Martin waters his plants and talks to them while
Grodin, who's visiting, reads the obits in the newspaper, looking for the
names of Lonely Guys who have killed themselves. ("This one's thirty-
three.") Often, the execution of a gag is crude but you can still laugh
at the idea; there's a sneezing-in-bed routine that could have been a
classic if it had been given more care. The movie is flimsy, though. We
don't find out why Martin's girlfriend throws him out or why Iris has a
soft spot for Lonely Guys, and after Grodin has defined himself as a
perennial reject he acquires a last-minute womanfriend. The Lonely
Guy is generally likable, but it makes you feel as if you were watching
television. At times, you are watching television: celebrities such as
Merv Griffin, Loni Anderson, and Dr. Joyce Brothers drop in, the idea
being that their appearances are automatically good for a laugh.
Adapted from Bruce Jay Friedman's 1978 The Lonely Guy's Book
of Life, the picture was directed by Arthur Hiller, who is the opposite
of a perfectionist. (His last movies were Romantic Comedy, which
started pushing up daisies in its first shots, and the ineffable Making
Love. ) Watching some of the parts of this film that fizzle the scenes —
with Martin at the greeting-card company where he works as a writer,
or the scenes with Steve Lawrence surrounded by hordes of adoring
—
women I had the feeling that Hiller plows through a comedy script,
shooting it diligently, right on schedule, whether the gags work or not.
And then he begins the next picture. The script here it's by Ed Wein- —
berger and Stan Daniels, from an adaptation by Neil Simon calls for —
Lonely People to jump off bridges and buildings, and the way that Hiller
and his cinematographer, Victor J. Kemper, set up the shots, the stunt
men and women risking their necks might as well be sacks of sawdust.
Steve Martin deserves better craftsmanship and a director with some
whoopee in his soul. Martin isn't just breezing through his pictures; his
mind is working, his physical agility keeps your spirits high, and he
comes up with little refinements in the midst of broad slapstick. He has
a way of pronouncing "lonely" so that the first syllable has an aching
sound; you can hear the character's sympathy for the plight of the
lonely. His heart goes out to these guys, and it goes out to himself.

ft
il Norte is about the flight of two oppressed, terrorized young

—
Guatemalans Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutierrez) and her brother Enrique
—
(David Villalpando) who travel from their Mayan village in the high-
lands, which probably hasn't changed much since pre-Columbian times,
to modern Los Angeles, where they pass themselves off as Mexicans and
become part of the Hispanic cheap-labor force. Written by the director,
Gregory Nava, and his wife, Anna Thomas, who was the producer, the
film was made on a shoestring. It's an attempt at an epic, and in certain,
dogged ways it is an epic; it's divided into three parts (set in Guatemala,
Mexico, and Southern California), and it tries to cover all the bases the —
typical difficult, wrenching experiences of Central American refugees.
But it's an epic of the independent and underfinanced film movement,
which means that moviegoers have to be willing to settle for humanistic
aims and considerable amateurishness. The Navas (who met at the
U.C.L.A. film school) couldn't shoot the Guatemalan section in
Guatemala; they faked it in Mexico, and they didn't have the art directors
and craftsmen to fake it magnificently. (They rely a lot on flute sounds
to suggest the isolation of a mountain village.) Their Rosa and Enrique
aren't Guatemalans, either; they're Mexican actors, and Enrique shows
it.But the subject ties together with our own experiences of the Hispan-
icswe see in menial jobs, and it gets to us, no matter how naive or crude
the moviemaking is.
The film's account of the mistreatment of the Indians, who pick
crops under the eyes of an armed overseer, and of the violence that
—
erupts in which Rosa and Enrique's parents are murdered has a rit- —
ual inevitability about it. It's a romanticized, idyllic life of oppression,
with dignity, and the slender, quietly intelligent Rosa is very beautiful
in her striped woven cottons and with a large jug of water on her head.
We know that we're not in the hands of a great writer-director when the
father, on his way to attend the labor-organizing meeting that will result
in his getting killed, pauses to tell his fully grown son the story of how

130
the rich men took their land away from them, and the son, after being
told to go home to his mother, bows and kisses his father's hand, rever-
ently. (In their own, non-Hollywood way, the Navas are shameless.) But
in this folkloric section the stilted moviemaking is somewhat offset by
the suggestion of Garcia Marquez in the slightly hallucinogenic atmo-
sphere: in the lavender light and some magical butterflies and an appari-
tion or two. It's pasteboard Garcia Marquez; it's merely part of the
picturesqueness of the place, but it helps.
In the Mexico section, the Navas put Rosa and Enrique through a
rapid series of ordeals. With the two of them learning how to deal with
the authorities, fighting for their lives with a guide who means to rob
them and them, and then having to crawl through a rat-infested
kill

sewer pipe to get across the border between Mexico and the United
—
States, this is actually the best the most straightforward moviemak- —
ing. It's also the most conventional action-movie material. When El
Norte reaches its richest possibilities — in Los Angeles — it gets bogged
down in too many incidents that illustrate the perils in the lives of illegals
but don't tell us much about these particular ones. Within a matter of
days, Rosa goes from carrying water on her head to trying to operate
an electronic washing machine in a Beverly Hills mansion. And she has
a poignant quality: she seems insecure, smaller, lost. (Now the flutes on
the soundtrack are her inner voice.) But Enrique or Ricky, as he's —
called in the expensive restaurant where he works as a busboy has —
nothing to draw us to him except his gullibility and his eagerness to
please. Since the movie doesn't deal with America's role in the oppres-
sion that is driving Guatemalans to the north, its point must be to
sensitize us to what they and other our midst feel and think,
illegals in

yet the movie doesn't enable viewers to see deeper into Enrique than the
thoughtless Anglos on the screen do. If he's suffering any spiritual
distress from leaping over centuries, we aren't aware of it. He looks
simple to the people in L.A., and he looks simple to us.
Rosa and Enrique are used as representative characters, and it's on
that basis that we can accept their lack of individuality, but then the
didactic script pulls a shift on us. Rosa, who was attacked by rats in the
sewer pipe, comes down with typhus, and here's the clinker in the film:

her sickness prevents Enrique from grabbing his big chance —a job as
a factory foreman in Chicago, and the legal status that will come with
it. The shows us the plane to Chicago
director actually without flying off
him, and when El Norte starts operating on standard dramatic-crisis
tricks the good will we bring to it dwindles. We may no longer feel any
compunction about admitting to ourselves that it's uninspired. The

131
Navas want to be sure we get the great, resonant theme, and so Rosa,
in her fever, with Enrique weeping at her bedside, tells us the lesson of
the movie —that they are homeless at home and not accepted here. (This
must come as a surprise to Ricky, who seems to have been adapting and
making friends.) It is a great, resonant theme, though, and maybe that's
why the film's ineptitude doesn't leave you feeling quite as empty as an
ordinary mediocre movie does.

ft<'lame It on Rio is about father-daughter incest, in a disguised

form. It's about a forty-three-year-old father's guilt and confusion be-

cause of his affair with his best friend's fifteen-year-old daughter, who
is also his own teen-age daughter's best friend. Yet it's also meant to be

a rollicking romantic comedy. The forty-three-year-old father is played

—
by Michael Caine he was born in 1933, and this picture seems to have
aged him another ten years. I think this is the first time that I've seen
Caine onscreen and taken no pleasure in his performance. He manages
to give his flashy, "smart" lines a reading that makes them sound hu-
manly plausible, but the result is counterproductive. His acting comes
across as overemotional; the near-incest keeps him sweating and rushing
about anxiously, and you just want him to get free of this picture which —
is like a splurgy, risque episode of 'The Love Boat" —
and back to sanity.
The scene that the movie never recovers from comes early. Caine
—
and his pal, Joseph Bologna they're British and American coffee execu-
tives who operate out of Sao Paulo —
take their daughters (Demi Moore
and Michelle Johnson, respectively) for a month's holiday in Rio, where
the four of them share a villa. The girls go down to the beach, and when
the men go there, too, ogling the bare-breasted women, they see the
backs of two beauties, who turn, and their bare-breasted daughters
come bobbing over to them, laughing at their discomfort and hugging
them. It's as if a Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedy of the early sixties
had gone topless. The movie mixes travel-folder footage of Rio that's
—
colorful and showy in a rather insulting way it seems designed for an
audience of tired businessmen looking for tropical kicks with these —
messy erotic-parental situations. The way the ripe-to-bursting Michelle
Johnson is made up, she has the lewd expression that little-girl teases
of six or seven sometimes get when they smear their mouths with lip-

stick; the moviemakers are obviously trying to launch her as a sex

132
goddess, and trying too hard. They've got her snaring Caine on the beach
at night after a Brazilian wedding celebration (macumba, and all that);

she commands, "Make love to me," takes out her retainer, and wiggles
invitingly.
Blame It on Rio was directed by Stanley Donen, and its executive
producer was Larry Gelbart, who also wrote the final script, revising
Charlie Peters' earlier version. (Claude Berri's 1977 film One Wild Mo-
ment, which has the same plot, isn't credited on the screen or in the
publicity.) It's understandable that the moviemakers thought they were
on to something, because they are, but it's not something they can
handle in this touristy manner —and it may be that these particular
moviemakers couldn't handle it in any manner. Most of Blame It on Rio
is an attempt to squirm out from under its subject. The film goes on and

on, prolonging Caine's misery. Bologna is enraged because his daughter

tells him she has been having sex with an older man, but won't tell him

who. He's obsessed with finding the man, and insists that his friend
Caine be at his side. By the time Bologna is beating up strangers and
reading his daughter's diary, the picture has degenerated into a smarmy
sitcom. It oozes self-consciousness.
February 20, 1984

THE WOMEN

\ntre Notts moves along in a relaxed and unruffled way as the

French actress-turned-filmmaker Diane Kurys tells the story of two
young married women in the nineteen-fifties who don't recognize how
unfulfilled they have been in their marriages until they meet each other.
In the preliminary scenes, set in 1942, Lena (Isabelle Huppert), a pretty
eighteen-year-old redhead with a soft, curly long bob, has been arrested
and brought to an internment camp for Jews in the Pyrenees. The camp

133
is guarded by members of the French Foreign Legion, and one of them,
Michel (Guy Marchand), writes her a note warning her that she may be
deported to a Nazi camp and offering her marriage as a means of escape.
She accepts. During the marriage ceremony, she discovers that he, too,
is Jewish; she's incensed to learn that she won't have the protection of

a gentile name. But she has no choice, and they hasten to the Italian
border. Michel carries a small black suitcase with their possessions, and
before they make it across the Alps and into Italy he's also carrying his
exhausted bride, on his back. By 1952, the hardworking Michel has got
himself his own garage in Lyons, and Lena, now the mother of two small
daughters, has a fur coat, and a servant to do the cooking and cleaning.
Lena meets Madeleine (Miou-Miou) at a school pageant. Madeleine, who
comes from a moderately wealthy family, was an art student in 1942 and
had married a fellow student, who was killed in a street skirmish be-
tween the students and the collaborationist police. (Miou-Miou lets out
an impressive scream as her husband is torn up by bullets.) A widow at
nineteen, Madeleine drifted into marriage with a sometime actor and
sometime black marketeer, Costa (Jean-Pierre Bacri), and now she has
a son at the school. Much more worldly than Lena, Madeleine seems
somewhat dissociated from her own life; she seems to be walking
through it, and her little boy, treated indifferently by his mother and
made fun of by his father, is shy and scared of everything.
The two women become inseparable; they develop an intimacy that
is based partly on their sitting around complaining about their husbands.

For Lena, the friendship with Madeleine is like one long consciousness-
raising session. She begins to see Michel as uncouth, as gross. Kurys,
who collaborated with Alain Le Henry on the screenplay, presents the
material in short, anecdotal scenes, skipping back and forth between
incidents in thetwo women's lives as they struggle to define themselves.
The two husbands are dark and hairy and grubby; they never look really
clean. But Miou-Miou, a brunette here, with a short bob, is tall and
elegantly slender in the long, full skirts of the early fifties, and she and
Huppert are lighted and posed so that they are two heroic profiles, with
taut neck tendons and beautiful chins. The men, who always seem to
need a shave, are treated as lumps, as part of the common herd. The two
women are romanticized and politicized; they're turned into feminist
precursors.
The film is primarily about Lena's courage in leaving her husband,
and in what has become known as "taking charge of your own Hfe."

After Michel has been driven half crazy by frustration at being closed
out of Lena's new interests, she has the justification she needs to walk

134
out on him, taking the children. At the end of the film, she and Madeleine
(who left her own husband sometime earlier, had trouble holding a job,
and went through a nervous breakdown) are about to open a dress shop
in Paris, which will presumably thrive. There's no doubt that Lena is

meant to be the heroine; the camera feasts on her determined little face.
(Huppert, who's eager and responsive in her initial scenes, goes blank
after a while and just stands stiff for the camera; when Lena is at her
most heroic, Huppert seems totally outside the events of the story, as
if she already knew the ending and were a little bored with it all.) The
audience is cued, as it was at Paul Mazursky's 1978 An Unmarried
Woman, husband and the superiority of the wife.
to see the faults in the
In one scene, Lena, who usually wears blouses with Peter Pan collars
and prim, slightly boxy suits, puts on a clinging black cocktail dress that
Madeleine has given her. Michel, who is supposed to be going out with
her, tells her that she looks like a whore, and that her panty line shows;
she wriggles free of her panties and leaves alone. There were cheers and
applause from the audience I saw the movie with; you could practically
hear the "Right ons" of the seventies. Kurys has shaped the scene like
a cheerleader.
What's left unshaped is how Kurys feels about much of what she
shows us. It's apparent that Michel has supported the family and built
up his business without any help from Lena, who even leaves most of
the child care to the servant. Lena is a proper bourgeoise who keeps her
children in their place; she prizes refinement and respectability, and she
doesn't like it when Michel roughhouses with the two little girls and
makes up stories for them, or, at a picnic, galumphs around imitating an
ape and uses his head to bat a ball. (How could kids not love a father like
this?) Michel, a man with a capacity for enjoyment, has still got Lena on
his back. He's married to an armored, frigid woman who, after she forms
her attachment to Madeleine and discovers class, independence, and the
arts, thinks herself above him. But this movie is not meant to be about

a tight little bitch-princess with aspirations to culture. Kurys lets us see

the two women's self-preoccupation and their unresponsiveness to their
children, but this is all pushed to the side; it isn't given any weight. In
one sequence, Lena and Madeleine take their kids out on an excursion,
and Lena, busy talking to Madeleine, boards a bus, assuming that the
kids are with them; after a while she notices that her older daughter is
with Madeleine's son but her younger daughter is missing. Little Sophie
—
has been left behind somewhere Sophie, the five-year-old, who, we're
told at the end, grows up to be the filmmaker herself. Diane Kurys shows
her father slapping her mother on this one occasion: Michel slaps Lena

135
for not caring enough about Sophie to keep an eye on her. Yet the
incident is presented so as to call attention to Michel's oafishness rather
than to Lena's negligence. She is somehow meant to be charmingly
oblivious.
The psychology of the in one direction; its sexual politics
film goes
take it in another. What we
see and what we're told we're seeing are in
conflict. Michel is the only character that a viewer is likely to have any

feeling for. Guy Marchand plays the role superbly, without any actorish
fuss; Michel's furtive lecherous side and his outbursts are completely
believable, and we can see that he made a tragic mistake when he
proposed marriage to the pretty girl he'd never actually talked to. Lena

willnever love him, and she's so shallow that she may never understand
—
the depth of his love for the children he's completely enchanted when
he's with them. Yet there is no apparent recognition on Kurys' part that
Lena is a pill. Kurys doesn't dramatize what she felt about her mother
then —at the time that she and her sister were taken away from their
father.She has made a very peculiar kind of memory film; she identifies
with her mother in a political, feminist way, yet it's the father who's
loving and playful, and who's the suffering center of the raw, un-
developed material in the movie.
The director's idealization of Lena and Madeleine seems to be based
on a traditional conception of women as being finer-grained and more
sensitive than men, and this is joined to the seventies view of sisterhood.
—
The two women who live as if they were members of the leisure class
—appear to be very casual about being taken care of; a cynical observer
might suggest that their greater sensitivity consists in not doing any-
thing to help the men, yet the director doesn't point this up. The hus-
bands, working to provide for their families, are made out to be clods.
Poor Costa, who's rebuffed or outsmarted in his every shady negotiation,
keeps trying to be a wheeler-dealer. In one sequence, he borrows money
to buy eighteen carloads of men's shirts, and they turn out to have only
one sleeve; he sits at home at a sewing machine in a dark, cramped room,
trying to turn each long sleeve into two short ones. Madeleine, who can
see him from her bright, airy studio, doesn't commiserate with him,
doesn't offer a hand; she isn't really in the marriage. Yet the scene is
played not to show us her detachment but to show us his comic inepti-
tude. (He belongs in his sweatshop.) The film's feminism is so facile that
we don't get any new perception of what women's relationships might
have been like at that time. Is Madeleine's being upper-class gentile part
of what Lena responds to in her? The movie doesn't give us a clue. And
why is Madeleine attracted to the conventional-minded Lena — is Lena

136
meant to have a vitality that Huppert didn't come up with? We don't get
much insight, either, into why the apparently assured Madeleine
couldn't function in a job and broke down. Nothing about her is revealed
to us; she's a stranger until after her crackup, when she loses her
composed look. Then she's pale, her face goes a little vague and glassy
from confusion, and she's more like the Miou-Miou we know from Ber-
trand Blier's Going Places, Bellocchio's Victory March, and Alain Tan-
ner's Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 but without that Miou-
Miou's infectiousness.
Entre Nous Lena and Madeleine at the same time that
trivializes

it romanticizes them. Their friendship seems to be about their great

profiles and an interest in clothes. Nothing is going on in their heads

that's different from what several generations of male movie directors
have indicated. And they don't show signs of any physical, sexual pres-
sure, either. "Why do I feel so at ease with you?" Madeleine asks Lena,
and we never get an answer. Perched on a bed next to Madeleine, Lena
says, "I feel like kissing you," but she doesn't do it. This is a movie about
two women not having a lesbian aifair. Entre Nous keeps teetering on
the verge of a seduction scene that isn't there, yet that teasing possibil-
ity —suggested mostly by Madeleine's cool, knowing glances —
gives
many of the scenes their only tension. At the women's very first encoun-
ter, atthe school, Lena realizes that Madeleine isn't wearing stockings,
and gasps at her audacity; Madeleine runs a finger down her leg over
her suntan lotion and then thrusts the finger under Lena's nose, giving
her a whiff. After the dinner party where Madeleine meets Lena's hus-
band for the first time, she whispers to Lena, "You're not made for each
other"; she's flirting. And when she does a portrait of Lena she seems
to be using traditional male-seducer blandishments. Early in the friend-

ship, Madeleine begins suggesting that Lena leave her husband, and
when the women meet secretly in Paris they dance together at a night
club, while other patrons —their curiosity piqued— scrutinize them.
On the train to Paris, Lena lets a soldier make love to her. Describ-
ing the encounter to Madeleine, she explains that she didn't allow him
to go "all the way" —and she had an orgasm, for the first time. Implicitly,

male-female sex is low-class and unsatisfactory. If Lena had let the

soldier go all the way, she wouldn't have had an orgasm. The film has
a political commitment to women's friendship, and it comes very close
to having a political commitment to lesbian sex —
Lena and the soldier
didn't do anything that the two women couldn't do but Kurys doesn't —
develop that. She just keeps it lurking in the air, though the film's title
in France was Coup de Foudre —love at first sight.

137
 a

Are we perhaps meant to think that Madeleine breaks down because

she couldn't quite have a love affair with Lena? Some of Madeleine's
actions may look predatory, but there's a muteness about her. At several
points, she seems about to "take" Lena, but she doesn't. Is this what
wipes her out — her lack of sexual aggression? Certainly her breakdown
—
wins the audience's sympathy which she probably wouldn't have got
if she had carried out the seduction. Lena's first venture into business,

a boutique in Lyons that is financed by Michel, is called Magdalena —

marriage of the two women's names. Yet when Michel accuses the
women of being dykes the accusation is treated as evidence of his low,
limited mind, his incomprehension of the finer things. The two women
appear to be above sex of any kind; their passivity is part of their
superiority. (Those vulgar husbands are always trying to make out.)
Kurys leads us to expect a sex relationship in order to hold our interest.
(Nothing else seems about to happen.) But apparently we're supposed
to think that whether or not the women are lovers is irrelevant to the
changes in consciousness they bring out in each other. Lena and Made-
leine are what used to be called soul mates; Entre Nous is about
spiritual lesbianism.
Kurys doesn't build scenes dramatically or prepare for changes in
the characters' behavior, and this lackadaisical flabbiness in the con-
struction can be interpreted as lifelike. But we also keep waiting for
moves that have been indicated, and they don't come. Entre Nous isn't
really much of a picture. Kurys directs the sequences involving Michel
and his daughters with all the affection and humor that one could wish
for. She also gives Michel his due in his final scene; for a few seconds

the film is flooded with emotion. But she's remarkably callous in her
treatment of Madeleine's little boy; everybody ridicules him, and we're
supposed to laugh at him, too. (He's made a pathetic clod, like the two
husbands.) And there's something superficial and complacent in the tone
of the movie: in the way it swings with the feminist party line of about
five years ago —with what's taken for granted now, and has no threat
in Entre Nous has no present-tense urgency; it's all the director's
it.

retrospective view. This may, of course, work to its commercial advan-

tage. A battle-scarred audience may take pleasure in a film in which
everything seems resolved. The only thing that's distinctive about Entre
Nous is its veneer of post-feminism. Kurys achieves this restfulness by
making a movie about sexual politics without sex.
The insipidness and the false leads all go back, I think, to a single
cause: there's a deep and shocking violation of privacy in Diane Kurys'
putting her interpretation of her parents' lives and quarrels and betray-

138
als onto the screen. This movie depends on the filmmaker's revelation
that Lena and Michel are her parents: that's how she can get by with her
undramatized sequences. Entre Nous is presented under the guise of
—
'This is how it was it's real, it's life." There's a casual sort of chutzpah
about the method. In presenting fiction minus the protective veils of
fiction,Kurys is attempting to give birth to her parents; she's trying to
re-create them for her own purposes. She takes possession of them, and
then she tries to contort her feelings about the rigid, repressive Lena in
order to make her a modern heroine. Kurys doesn't romanticize her
mother out of love. You don't have to romanticize someone you love (as
Kurys demonstrates in the father's scenes). And she doesn't do it out of
rage. She romanticizes her mother for her own convenience.

ootloose is Midwestern community where

set in a mythical
everyone is white Protestant and there's only one church. Having this
monopoly, the Reverend (John Lithgow) considers himself the town's
spiritual leader, and he has been instrumental in passing various restric-
tive laws, including one against rock 'n' roll and dancing. His teen-age
spitfire daughter, Ariel (Lori Singer), balks at the restrictions, but no one

openly challenges the laws until Ren (Kevin Bacon), a high-school boy
with a punk haircut, arrives in town from Chicago. A clean-living, coura-
geous boy of the highest moral calibre, Ren is nevertheless misunder-
stood by the townspeople. Still, he manages to lead the students in a
campaign for a senior prom. And, with Ariel's aid, he is able to cite
chapter and verse from the Bible in support of music and dance.
Ten years ago, would anyone have believed this as the plot of an
eighties musical? Directed by Herbert Ross, from a script by Dean
Pitchford, who is best known for the lyrics he wrote for the songs in
Fame, Footloose is so immaculately retrograde that the Midwestern
town seems to be in a Brigadoon time warp; Ren, with his punk haircut,
has stumbled into a peachy-keen fifties where high-school boys wear
cardigans. The only memorable thing about this piece of neo-Andy
Hardyism is the title sequence: an exhilarating short-short film featur-
ing pairs of dancing feet in a variety of footgear. After that, there's one
good brief scene: a little boy asleep in church is roused by his father,
listens to a few words of the sermon, and goes right back to sleep. And
there's an entertaining sequence in which Christopher Penn, as a slug-

139
gish hayseed —
he's Uke a junior version of the nasal, frowning Charles
Grodin in —
The Lonely Guy is taught to dance by Ren, starting with
getting rhythm in his hands. (There's a neat bit with Chris Penn and
Bacon moving together, both wearing headphones attached to the same
Walkman.) And Lori Singer has a startling, zingy radiance; she obliter-
—
ates the other people on the screen not a major feat, considering that
Kevin Bacon has been made so smooth-skinned and well mannered that
his grin is frozen on his face, and Lithgow, playing the glum Reverend
earnestly and thoughtfully, as if he were a character in Ibsen, keeps
bringing the film to a halt.
Footloose never really gets going; the moviemakers just exhaust
one bad idea after another. They raid Rebel Without a Cause and give
us a tedious game of chicken with the good lad Ren in one tractor and
a big bad bully who has been dating Ariel in another. This rotten bully
causes so many harsh, bloody fistfights that when we're finally on the
homestretch, hoping for some dancing, and he turns up again, looking
for another fight, there were groans in the theatre. Most of the action
sequences seem bizarrely neurotic: Ariel deliberately risks her neck in

stunts involving cars, trucks, and a train, and she provokes a nasty
beating from the bully. My guess is that these were the moviemakers'
passes at women's liberation; they exalt Ariel's death-defying battiness
as were glorious bravado. But their machismo leaks through: as soon
if it

as this disturbed girl hooks up withRen she seems sane as anybody, and
a whole lot saner than the men who made the movie.
A musical can be forgiven almost everything else if it just has some
good singing and dancing. But the singing here is only on the white-
bread soundtrack, and the dance numbers are gymnastic specials. The
kids seem to be warming up to dance rather than dancing, and in the
hero's one big solo his movements are cut together with the movements
of ringers. Just once, near the end, we see a dancer with his face in full
camera, as he wriggles his shoulders and arms (the way Buddy Ebsen
used to in the musicals of the thirties), and you can feel the people in the
theatre rouse themselves, like that kid in church, and then, when the
dancer disappears, sink back into apathy. Herbert Ross was a dancer
himself. Doesn't he see that even with all the work done by the virtuoso
editor, Paul Hirsch, the miracles of splicing aren't as entertaining as one
eccentric dancer wriggling his shoulders? A lot of people must have gone
through nerve-wracking labors and pots of money to produce these
stupid wonders, and what's the point? The country is full of actor-
dancers, and, like Bobby Di Cicco in the jitterbugging sequence of 1941,
they bring a movie an excitement that can't be faked. They have per-

140
 —

what these numbers produced in the editing room don't

sonalities; that's
have. Footloose is what they're not. There's no freedom in the dances
they've been choreographed to death, chopped to pieces, and reassem-
bled. For a viewer, it gets to be like watching programmed androids.
March 5, 1984

KING CANDY

plash has a friendly, tantalizing magic. In the prologue, Allen

Bauer, a quiet, moony kid of eight on an excursion ship off Cape Cod,
hears a siren song and plummets into the water; before the child mer-
maid who yearned for a playmate can get a grip on him, he's pulled out.
The little sea nymph looks back at him longingly, rubs the tears out of
her eyes, and, with a pert toss of her tail, dives down into the deep.
Twenty years later, Allen (Tom Hanks) is a tall, skinny fellow with curly
dark hair that stands up above a rounded, childlike forehead; he looks
vaguely like a question mark. Allen runs the family wholesale-produce
business in New York; it's a frenzied, disaster-prone business, and
Allen's older brother Freddie (John Candy) is delighted to let him run it

—that leaves Freddie free to play. But Freddie also worries, because he
loves Allen, and Allen — obscurely disgruntled— never seems to go crazy
about a girl. It all changes one weekend when Allen gets into a funk at
the wedding of one of his workers and, hearing the siren song again,
heads up alone to Cape Cod.He falls off a tiny motorboat, which whizzes
around, knocking him unconscious; when he wakes up on the shore, we
—
see who has saved him it's the full-grown, svelte young mermaid
(Daryl Hannah), with long blond tresses and the iridescent color tones
of a goldfish. She kisses him and disappears in the water.
Daryl Hannah —
she was the murderous dancing doll in Blade Run-
ner — is lithe and strong-shouldered, so that the tail and fins, which

141
elongate her body, seem to complete her. A mermaid's eyes must, of
course, be blue, and Hannah has wide, piercingly blue eyes; she also has
smiling curvy lips and the look of a beatifically sexy Nordic goddess, yet
her flashing tail —
and fins are like a butterfly's wings they're her most
ravishing feature. But Allen doesn't see that part of her —not con-
sciously, anyway. When this lovely nymph, whose scaly extremities are
transformed into legs when she's on dry land, trails him to New York
City, he's totally smitten by her but reacts to her unfamiliarity with
American customs as if she were from another country, a stranger,
rather than from a magical species, and strange. To Allen, she's like a
dream of a Swedish au-pair girl.
Made by the team who were responsible for the 1982 comedy Night
—
Shift the director Ron Howard and the writers Lowell Ganz and Baba-
loo Mandel — along with, this time, Bruce Jay Friedman, Splash is the
opposite of deadpan comedy. Even the bit players let you know how they
feel, and Tom Hanks has the expressiveness of a little kid who can't hide

a thing. When Allen is with his au pair, flickering shades of unbelievable

joy cross his face, and he's so unused to simple pleasure it gives him tics.
Ron Howard has been an actor for most of his thirty years, and he has
a knack for bringing the sweetness out of his performers without linger-
ing on it. He keeps a lot of activity going, and the produce market seems
like a real place of business, with a bunch of raffish guys hanging around

and Allen kept on the go every minute. (He barely has time to look at
the aquarium he keeps in his office.) You get the sense that Allen isn't
vitally interested in the business he inherited or in anything else, until
he meets this amazing foreign girl and starts looking dazed. Daryl
Hannah's unself-consciousness about being naked is the key to the film's
charm; the mermaid is simply innocent of the ways of the world, and that
includes clothing. She stares at Allen with undisguised adoration, and,
of course, not being human, she's innocently sexy.
Ron Howard has a happy touch, and he's the first film director who
has let John Candy loose. This gigantic, chubby Puck has been great in
brief appearances (seventeen movies in the past five years), but the role
of Freddie the playboy is the first role big enough for him to make the
kind of impression he made in the SCTV shows and in his guest shots
on "The New Show." John Candy is perfectly named; he's a mountainous
lollipop of aman, and preposterously lovable. As Freddie, who carries
a cooler with beer when he goes to play racquetball with Allen and
appears on the court cradling a beer in one hand and smoking a king-size
cigarette, he doesn't have a hypocritical bone in his body. When he
encourages his brother to give in to temptation, he's not playing devil's

142
advocate; Freddie the girl chaser gives in to his own giddiest impulses
— he doesn't want Allen to be deprived. Candy has the same function
here that Michael Keaton, the brainstorming hipster of Night Shift, had.
He stirs things up and spars with Tom Hanks. As a bon vivant and man
about town, Freddie takes an almost lewd pleasure in his own vanity; he
fancies himself debonair and light on his feet, and he is. But he also
makes you aware of his bulk by the tricks in his verbal timing: when
Hanks has said something to him and you expect him to answer, his
—
hesitation it's like a few seconds of hippo torpor is what makes his —
answer funny. There's a certain amount of aggression built into a frame
as big as Candy's: he simply occupies more space than other people do.
But Candy doesn't have anything like John Belushi's insane volatility or
the gleam in his eyes that told you he was about to go haywire and smash
—
things up; Candy is the soul of amiability it's just an awfully large soul.
Freddie is the older brother you always wanted to have. He's Falstaff
at fourteen, and the picture probably wouldn't work without him; he
doesn't add weight, he adds bounce and imagination.
There is a whole cartoonish side of the film, involving a nuthead
scientist obsessed with finding a mermaid, and a different, quite horrible
mad scientist who's eager to perform sadistic experiments on one; most
of this involves a lot of chasing around, and basically it's dumb. But
Eugene Levy, of SCTV, who plays the nut case, is inspired; his voice is

a raspy, deep foghorn, and his wiry hair and his specs are so vivid they
seem to have taken over the man. Levy exults in the comic-book eccen-
tricity of the role; everything he does is insanely deliberate — every parti-

cle in hisbody waits for instructions from the paranoiac brain. (As the
sadist, Richard B. Shull doesn't have much to do. Mercifully.) It's easy
to see the reason for all this subplot busywork: the writers needed to
supply danger and urgency to keep the film in motion, and demented
scientists were the best thing they could come up with. (And this yock
material may actually be a relief to the part of the audience that likes
the familiarity of TV humor.)
Splash is frequently on the verge of being more wonderful than it

is —more poetic, a littleThat verge isn't a bad place to be, but

wilder.
the movie doesn't go far enough with, for example, the mermaid's de-
light in her discovery of the sounds that street musicians make, and of
earth music in general. There's a fine joke that's set in Bloomingdale's
and involves Allen's pressing the heroine to tell him what her name is,
and her letting out a series of shrill, rhythmic sounds that remind you
of dolphins and whales. (Her quick mind is dolphinlike, too.) But
though the moviemakers encourage their young hero to plunge into

143
the unknown, too often they keep their own feet on the ground. The
writing is Hkable and clever, but in limited ways, and the plot is an
—
encumbrance it doesn't release the possibilities it in the theme,
shunts them aside.
Some scenes let you down. When the nuthead, who has been stalk-
ing the girl, spots her and Allen leaving a hotel where the President of
the United States has been guest speaker at a fund-raising bash, he
sprays her with water from a hose. She metamorphoses and is helpless
on the sidewalk, a fish out of water, and is surrounded by press and
photographers with strobe flashes. And Allen, who is separated from her
in the melee, is stunned and somewhat repelled by her turning into a
mermaid. This doesn't make much sense in terms of his character (he
thought he saw a mermaid when he was eight, so he should feel vin-
dicated), and it leaves a vacuum at the center of the film. Matters aren't
helped any by his being thought to be a sea creature, too. He's caught
and put in a tank in a back-room laboratory in the Museum of Natural
History, and when the mermaid is brought in, wrapped in a net, and
lowered into the tank with him, while the scientists observe them, he's
frightened of her and doesn't go near her. The picture seems all balled
up, because his confused emotions aren't what a magical story calls for;
he fails the first test of his love —he's not imaginative enough to deserve
out and Freddie talks sense to him that
this treasure. It isn't until he's let
he pulls himself together and the movie gets back on course (but nothing
he does afterward quite makes up for the revulsion he showed). Mean-
while, the nuthead scientist sees her and is appalled at what he has done.
She's huddled in misery at the bottom of the tank, tendrils of spun-gold
hair waving around her in the water. She's like a Pre-Raphaelite illustra-
tion for a fairy tale about a princess in captivity; it's a lyrical image of
total depression —she looks near death.
Allen finally goes to the rescue, and everything ends as it should,
except that we're a little shorted on poetry even at the very last. We need
between the tank she was dying in and the oceanic
to feel the contrast
freedom she returns to; we need to feel that she reenters a boundless
magical realm. What we get is too modest, too confined. The underwater
photography dreamily satisfying, and Daryl Hannah moves like the
is

glistening vision of mermaids that we all carry from childhood, yet more
time is given to the cars chasing the car that takes her to New York
Harbor than is given to the final mysteries of the deep. (There don't seem
to be many.) And there's just one redeeming detail in that stupid car
chase: the full blast of Eugene Levy's voice as he says "Move!" But the
picture has a generous spirit: even this paranoid has a change of heart.

144
And the heroine's having a tail gives romantic love the edge it needs.
Splash gives you part of a movie you've always wanted to see; it's
entrancing enough to suggest how blissful it might have been. The day
after you've seen it, you may find yourself running the images over in
your mind, and grinning.

"od, how I have come They've become an

to hate car chases.
empty ritual. In Against All Odds, macho contest between Jeff
it's a
Bridges in a Porsche and James (The Snake) Woods in a Ferrari; racing
side by side, they play their game of chicken through heavy traffic on
Sunset Boulevard. And it's so grotesquely pointless that the embar-
rassed director, Taylor Hackford, tries to salve his conscience by includ-
ing an apology: Bridges, the narrator, tells us that it was stupid and he
shouldn't have done it. The apology should take in the whole revved-up
movie, which is of the "everybody uses everybody" genre, set in swank
surroundings and outfitted with electronic music to make you twitch. It's

a mystery thriller, but the only mystery is how Hackford worked up the
energy to keep going from one hollow scene to the next, and its idea of
have the one likable person in the cast (Swoosie Kurtz) try
thrills is to

to open a safe while she's being menaced by a Doberman. (If I never saw
another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any
feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.)
Some of the first reviews of Against All Odds have praised the
—
gaudy chase maybe because that's the only time in the movie that the
reviewers were absolutely sure what was going on: i.e., nothing. Sug-
gested by the 1947 Jacques Tourneur suspense film Out of the Past,
which had a slight and rather vaporous plot centering on a cunning
femme fatale (Jane Greer), Against All Odds runs hog-wild on plot.
Lifting mostly from Chinatown and North Dallas Forty, it has so
many convoluted double crosses that each time you're told what was
"really" going on behind the scene you just witnessed you care less. The
one thing the picture never lets you forget is that capitalist decadence
permeates the society. The femme fatale is now Rachel Ward, who steals
and kills, lies all the time, and makes love alternately to Bridges, a pro
football player, and to Woods, a gamblin' man. But she isn't really a bad
girl: it turns out (disappointingly) that she's just confused, from having

grown up in a nest of vipers, with a real-estate-tycoon mother (played

145
with considerable cool by Jane Greer) and a smoothly villainous stepfa-
ther (a hambone special by Richard Widmark).
Retro hipness is in the air now, and, like a lot of other directors,
Hackford is trying to prove he's hot stuff. Against All Odds has some
of the eagerness to impress that marked the 1981 Michael Mann picture
Thief; it has the same cinematographer, Donald Thorin, with the imper-
sonal bravura of his high-definition, overlighted shots, and it, too, comes
close to being a parody of film noir. Some sequences should earn their
place in the annals of camp. My first choice is the sex-and-sweat scene
that takes place in a studio reproduction of an ancient Mayan steam
house at Chichen Itza. Bridges, who has been hired by Woods to find
Rachel Ward so that she can be brought back, has instead, after much
searching, found her in a fishing village and run off with her, and they've
been going to one remote spot after another, giving us a tour of Yucatan
and Quintana Roo, with special attention to such sites as Isla Mujeres,
off Cancun, and the Mayan city of Tulum. But there they are, having sex
high up in the jungle in the ruins of Chichen Itza, and who should walk
in on them but Alex Karras, the trainer of Bridges' football team. The
love-in-the-ruins scene is pretty funny anyway. Bridges' musculature
has become excessive (every position he takes looks like a pose for the
Mr. Universe contest), and here in the steam house, with the inscrutable
faces of stone deities peering down and Rachel Ward, naked
at them, he
and writhing together, seem to be gilded, like the dead girl in
Goldfinger. When Karras casually trots in and just stands there, we're
probably meant to think important thoughts, such as "There's no place
for lovers to escape to in this corrupt world." But a hoot or a giggle is
—
more to the point. Alex Karras the man who punched out a horse in
—
Blazing Saddles looks as if he'd walked into the wrong movie; he's
outclassed by these burnished love wrestlers and the fancy electronic
zhooms and vroops on the track.
Probably Taylor Hackford, the director of An Officer and a Gentle-
—
man who served in the Peace Corps, made investigative-reporting
documentaries for the public-television station in Los Angeles which
were highly regarded, and is married to Lynne Littman, the director of
—
the nuclear-calamity movie Testament is perfectly serious about
Against All Odds. He may be more than serious: the scenes aren't
shaped to get anywhere, so even though the movie hops about L.A. and
Mexico, the effect is —
static in the way that obsessional fantasies often
are. Probably, as Hackford saw it —he commissioned the script (by Eric
Hughes) —the Bridges character, trying to locate the girl, was a search-
er-investigator entering a world where he didn't understand who was

146
connected with whom. And this would mean an opportunity to expose the
full extent of slick, modern corruption.
It's this seriousness, I think, that fouls him up —he wants to indict

everything and everybody, and whip up a hot delirium. That impressive

actor Dorian Hare wood seems to be in the movie (as the gambler's
flunky) just so he can learn that "nobody in Beverly Hills will ever do
business with a black man." Saul Rubinek is a skillful comedian, but as
a loathsome, coke-snorting lawyer who routinely sells out his clients he
just makes you feel queasy.Even Jeff Bridges can't do much with his
role; he's used as a set of waxed and polished pectorals, because the
director is so far into his big subject that he's lost his perspective on
character. And Rachel Ward, the celebrated model turned glamour star
who's at the center of it all and is meant to be irresistible, must think
that by not acting she communicates mystery; there's no way to know
when the character is lying and when she's not everything she says—
has equal weightlessness. As the secretary to the wormy lawyer, Swoo-
sie Kurtz has only two or three minutes onscreen, but she gets a relation-
ship going with the audience; she draws you in, so that you put yourself
in her place. She's the only member of the cast who doesn't seem to have
been pulped. Rachel Ward can't get anything going. She's like a teeny-
bopper imitating Joan Collins, and people coming out of the theatre were
saying, "She's not as beautiful as I thought."
March 19, 1984

HUGH HUDSON OF THE APES

'hat kind of a title for a movie is Greystoke: The Legend of

Tarzan, Lord of the Apesi A pompous, foolish one. There can't be many
people who will remember this triple title, or many theatres that are
equipped with colons for their marquees, either. When Edgar Rice Bur-

147
roughs wrote Tarzan novel, back in 1912, he managed with just
his first
Tarzan of the Apes. As people all over the world know, Burroughs' piece
of kitsch has everything —adventure, mother love, romance. And as a
subject for popular art it's close to perfection; forty-odd pulp movies
haven't killed it. But Hugh Hudson, the director of Chariots of Fire,
which won the 1981 Academy Award for Best Picture, was handed the
plum of mounting a new, big version of Tarzan from a script by Robert
Towne, and Hudson brought the project his unique mixture of pomp and
ineptitude. In interviews, Hudson says such things as that the movie is
about "how society lives, halfway between the apes and the angels,
aspiring to go up yet coming from down there" and that it's about
"self-discovery, lost innocence, evolution, coming to terms with evil, the
use and abuse of the earth, and the delicate balance between our moral
and physical beings." This man has too much on his mind to put together
an exciting adventure movie.
Robert Towne' s idea was to tell the story of the lost infant, John
Clayton (who would inherit the title Lord Greystoke), in terms of what
is known now about ape life, so that the movie could center on the

infant's dependency on his ape foster mother, the boy's gradual discov-
ery of the ways in which he was different from the apes, and the adult
Tarzan's learning what it means to be human. The film was to be called
Greystoke, because the ancestral home of the Claytons represented
Tarzan's human heritage. Towne's script, which I've read, was marvel-
lously detailed; had sweep and a sense of wonder, and everything fitted
it

—
together you could visualize an epic with a beautiful, classical shape.
Hudson hired Michael Austin to trim the script and rewrite it. Towne's
conception exists now only in vestigial form; it's in some of the bits and
pieces of Hudson's scraggly mess, and Towne uses a pseudonym in the
credits —P. H. Vazak, the kennel name of the dog he loved, who's now
dead.
It's unlikely that anyone will ever congratulateHugh Hudson for
seamless moviemaking. When Hudson sets something up, chances are
there won't be any follow-through. Men who look like villains appear and
are never seen again; the hero is given portentous advice that never has
any application. After a while, you lose that sense of expectation which
is one of the glories of big adventure films. Periodically, Hudson fills the

wide screen with idyllic long shots of wiggling rivers and distant moun-
tains, and sometimes a volcano, other times an orange ball in the sky;
you wonder where this place is and why you never get any closer to it.
(Did the cinematographer, John Alcott, take slides on his vacation?)
The maddening thing about this Greystoke is that everyone seems

148
to be doing his job except the director. The actors playing the apes are
very well made up (so that each has distinguishing features), and they
comport themselves convincingly, but the director doesn't give them the
extra few seconds of screen time that would fix their personalities in our
minds and enable us to remember them. And although the apes them-
selves might be perhaps the chief attraction of the film —
especially to
—
children he has made their scenes inordinately brutish. Burroughs said
that the name Tarzan (which isn't actually used here) meant "White-
Skin" in ape language. (Burroughs never set foot in Africa.) You're

certainly aware of how exposed the infant's white flesh is. Hudson has
his child Tarzan experiencing so much physical torment and humiliation
— —
the apes are constantly batting him around that young kids are
likely to be horrified.
From infancy to adulthood, this Tarzan is more sufferer than hero.
The young Frenchman Christopher Lambert, who plays the part, has a
fine physique —he's muscular yet graceful —
and he has a resemblance
to Charlton Heston, with a fleeting suggestion of Brando. Lambert has
been in several French films that haven't come over here, and he seems
to be a competent, trained actor; he doesn't disgrace himself —he's never
ludicrous (though he comes close in a seduction scene that he has been
directed to play on all fours). But he's a charmless, unmagnetic Tarzan;

you don't develop any special feeling for him. Hudson seems to have
directed him to suggest Truffaut's Wild Child, but the beast in him is
—
never very vivid despite a full complement of scars on his face and
body. Lambert has dark, deep-set eyes (which make him seem attentive
yet remote), and his low eyebrows are almost straight lines; his normal
expression here is a scowling wariness. You'd think a man who grew up
among apes would have a sense of humor, but not this fellow. He's never
—
allowed to be playful not even in the second half, in what is probably
meant to be Scotland, when he's wooing Jane at the banquet table at
Greystoke, and his mimicking the warbling of a bird and the roaring of
jungle cats could easily be part of a teasing game. The audience is dying
to laugh, because, of course, there's an element of make-believe right at
the heart of the story: Burroughs tapped our fantasy lives. But Hud-
son's approach is to make the film prestigious. He doesn't seem to
understand that if viewers don't identify with Tarzan and laugh with him
the story has no power.
The only performer who is clearly enjoying himself is Ralph Rich-
ardson, who plays Lord Greystoke, Tarzan's grandfather. This was Rich-
ardson's last screen appearance, and the old prankster comes up with
one emotional flourish after another. It's a vigorous, cuckoo perform-

149
ance, and a source of joy. When his role ends (with the grandfather's
death), the movie would have done better to close up shop, because its
energy One other performer comes through. Andie Mac-
level sinks.
Dowell, an unconscionably beautiful American model turned actress, is
a softly enticing Jane. Though this is her screen debut, she's at ease, and
Jane, who comes across as poised and well educated, seems to have been
waiting all her life for Tarzan. It's an elegant romantic performance
(even if she's dubbed); know how to present his
Hudson does appear to
heroines. (Alice Krige's flirting over a supper table was probably the
high point of Chariots of Fire. One actor makes a strong visual impres-
)

sion: Nigel Davenport, in a small part as a gun-happy British major, who

is struck down by the arrows of pygmies while he's posing for a photo-

graph with an ape he has shot. Davenport is an imposing replacement

for C. Aubrey Smith.
The first half of the movie, in the jungle, is fairly absorbing; the
material retains some of the momentum of Towne's plan, and there are
images and scenes that carry some emotion: the boy Tarzan crying in his
grief as his ape-mother dies; D'Arnot (Ian Holm), a Belgian member of
an expedition that has been attacked by pygmies, lying wounded and
feverish in a tree and seeing Tarzan for the first time, as if in a vision;
Tarzan taking care of D'Arnot and feeding him grubworms; D'Arnot, in
his recovery, humming, Tarzan copying his sounds, and D'Arnot embrac-
ing him as he recognizes that he'll be able to teach Tarzan to speak and
one day they'll talk together. But somehow the movie never shows us
the culmination of D'Arnot's dream: Tarzan never does use language
very expressively, and when the picture was over I had a hard time

remembering the timbre of Lambert's speaking voice. It's a disembodied

—
sort of voice; he doesn't sound like anyone in particular and that, of
course, makes us feel even more detached from him. But then you feel
detached from the whole movie. For one thing, you don't get a sense of
where you are on either continent. And when Hudson gives you some-
thing like that humming scene it doesn't seem to occur to him that the
—
song itself should have some meaning in the story it shouldn't just be
a nothing song for Tarzan to mimic.
What's essentially wrong with a director like Hugh Hudson, who
comes out of the London world of TV commercials, is that he thinks he
can transcend the kind of adventure picture that C. Aubrey Smith used
to appear in, and he doesn't understand the mechanisms that made those
movies work. Hudson may think it doesn't matter if he uses pieces of the
Towne script and leaves out what they connected to. He gives us the big
scenes without the steps that prepared us for them, and they're no

150
longer big scenes —they're flat. When the expedition group that D'Amot
is part of finds the remains of the tree house where Tarzan was born,
and where his parents' bodies he rotted away to bones and dust, there's
no awe or horror in the scene. And what should be a wrenching moment,
with D'Arnot telling Tarzan that the ape who loved him and protected
him wasn't his real mother, and Tarzan refusing to believe him a con- —
frontation in which you couldn't help knowing how Tarzan felt is —
played backward, with D'Arnot complaining that Tarzan won't believe
that the dead woman in the tree house was his mother, and you don't feel
much of anything.
Hudson and, presumably, Michael Austin have concocted scenes
where the tone is so obviously off that you may find yourself open-
mouthed. When James Fox, as a churlish aristocrat who proposes to
Jane and is rejected, takes out his anger on a symbolic counterpart of
Tarzan, who seems up for the sole purpose of being abused (you
to turn
can fill a mute? a stableboy?), Tarzan jumps
in his identity for yourself:

down from the battlements of Greystoke castle and protects the victim,
whereupon the aristocrat delivers himself of this injunction to Tarzan:
"You have a lot to learn, jungle man!" And the picture seems to have
—
got garbled when Tarzan now Lord Greystoke, with an estate of many
—
thousands of acres surreptitiously releases an ape from the British
Museum of Natural History and, instead of arranging to take the ape
home with him or to take him back to Africa, ushers him out into the
streets of London; when this impulsive act leads to the ape's death, we're
meant to condemn "civilization." Even that hardly prepares a viewer for
the full collapse of the film's tone when D'Arnot, who has been visiting
his friend at Greystoke, suddenly makes a speech —
this is at the turn of
—
the century denouncing "this absurd society." From then on, the movie
simply loses its mind, and dribbles to a pathetically indecisive conclusion.
Hudson twists the story into knots in order to deliver his "state-
ment" that apes are more civilized than people. He appears to believe
that by giving us this gimcrackery he's turning pop art into high art. All
he actually does in this movie is take the pleasure out of pop.

'pening at Christmas, 1942, Racing with the Moon is the story

of two Northern CaUfornia small-town boys (Sean Penn and Nicolas
Cage) who are due to report to the Marines in six weeks. Penn, a slim,

151
introspective kid with what are now called "caring" parents, falls in love

with a new girl in town, played by Elizabeth McGovern, who is soon

sweetly googly-eyed over him. Cage, his pal from childhood, is almost an
orphan, and though he isn't big, he's a hulk; a lonely loudmouth and
self-centered creep, he gets a girl pregnant and, in desperation, puts
pressure on Penn to raise the money for an abortion. And Penn puts
pressure on McGovern, whom the boys imagine to be rich. That's the
whole movie. Nothing there, but nothing terribly wrong there, either.
Richard Benjamin directed, from a script by Steven Kloves (who has just
turned twenty-four and wrote it when he was twenty-two), and the
picture is all of a piece. heavy on forties atmosphere, but it
It's a little

has a pleasant, reminiscent texture, and Penn continues to be remark-

able. He's a juvenile lead who approaches his roles like a character actor
— he creates young lived-in characters. The part here might easily have
— —
been played as "sensitive" i.e., soupy but he brings it emotional
crosscurrents. He shows you a bright, if inarticulate, adolescent who's
still partly attached to the rituals of his childhood but balks at being

treated like a kid and has begun to enjoy the freedom of adulthood. And
though this boy hasn't been provided with enough to say, Penn gives a
great reading to the lines that aren't there. He does it with his reactions
and movements; there's no busyness or waste, and you
his expressive
never catch him trying to create a character out of effects you see the —
full person, with nothing closed off. Elizabeth McGovern has a slow
response pattern that is lazy and sensual and — in a free-form way that's
all her own —witty; she keeps you staring at the movements of her
cherry-red lips. McGovern and Penn develop a quiet humor —they really
seem to have something going. And as the kind of jerk that it's easy to
have a sentimental attachment to, Nicolas Cage makes the most of his
sheik's dimples, his hound-dog eyes, and his ace comedy timing.
Benjamin directs the three of them lovingly, so that the nuances
they bring to their roles sustain our interest, and he blends in good small
performances by the lively Shawn Schepps (as a girl that McGovern
double-dates with), Carol Kane (as an agreeable flooze), Arnold Johnson
(as a tattoo artist), and many others. Except for a sequence that creates
a tense false expectation (out of The Hustler) that Penn, who plays the
piano, is going to have his hands injured by the sailors he's shooting pool

with, and a dumb scene with McGovern almost committing a theft,

there's nothing that doesn't seem to fit in. Why, then, does the movie
seem so and unsatisfying? (When it was over, I was in a relaxed,
slight
receptive mood, still waiting for something to start.) I think it's because
we knew all this. There are no revelations about the period or the people.

15a
There isn't a thing in Racing vrith the Moon that you can get excited
about or quarrel with (except, maybe, such a trivial point as whether
Penn's language ismodern when he expresses his disgust with Cage
too
for treating the pregnant girl crudely). The script might be an exercise
in conventional fine writing; it's a reminiscence based on earlier reminis-
cences. And the movie doesn't feel first-hand. It's too smooth, and it's
square. When the two boys discuss how to raise the hundred and fifty
dollars for the abortion, it's tedious; and when Penn watches the burial
ceremony for a serviceman whose body has been shipped home the
pensiveness of the scene is too carefully brought out; and though the
love between Penn and his father (John Karlen) is ''nice," it's clearly
meant to be "nice." The picture is too conscious of its own deft touches,
such as McGovern's brushing off Penn's arm after she has helped Cage's
girl into the abortionist's office. This stuff becomes self-congratulatory,

and we register it too approvingly.

I,In was considered axiomatic

Hollywood a few years ago, it

that over fifty-five miles an hour Burt Reynolds was a star. (Then he
made Stroker Ace. ) Sloshed, Dudley Moore is a star. Arthur a huge —
—
success was able to keep him happily stewed throughout. His new film,
Unfaithfully Yours, takes too long getting him falling-down uncon-
scious.
This new version of Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours doesn't
risk the calamitous box-office fate of the original, in 1948. Sturges' film
was a great musical joke. Just after a world-famous and supremely
arrogant symphony conductor (Rex Harrison) is given reason to believe
that the young wife he adores has been unfaithful to him, he must step
onstage to conduct works by Rossini, Wagner, and Tchaikovsky, and the
three compositions inspire three different fantasies of how he will
suavely and masterfully handle the situation, each fantasy being in
rhythm with the music. When the concert is over, he fumbles through
a slapstick mixture of all three. The new version, directed by Howard
Zieff, from an ingenious script by Valerie Curtin, Barry Levinson, and

Robert Klane, has an outward resemblance to the Sturges film, but the
—
main idea that the mood of the music affects the fantasy is gone. —
Now the conductor, played by Moore, fantasizes only while conduct-
ing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, with his supposed betrayer, Ar-

153
 —

mand Assante, as the soloist, and the concerto has no special tie to the
action. The tone of this new movie isn't much like that of the original,

either; it's a coarser piece of slapstick, partly because Zieff fails to give

the characters a quiet minute or two. Richard B. Shull, who plays the
part of the private detective played by Edgar Kennedy in the original,
doesn't have a chance to be as touching and eccentric as Kennedy's
music-loving detective was (even though, if my ear is to be trusted, Shull
is the only actor in the cast who gets to speak a few lines from Sturges).

It's the quiet scenes where we get to know the characters that make

their other scenes work, but Zieff must be afraid that if he quiets down
the picture will die. And so he directs with the frantic pacing of TV
commercials, and we don't particularly care what happens.
Zieff's Unfaithfully Yours isn't a film that people are likely to
laugh about for decades (as some of us have been doing with the Sturges
version), or even to remember the next week; I didn't enjoy the picture
until Moore began to get manic and apoplectic, but it does hold you it —
isn't a total dud. Smoldering is Assante's thing, and his role here is to
smolder. His bedroom-voice and sleek, well-pleased-with-himself manner
are a serviceable contrast to Moore's sudden, violent self-doubt, and the
idea of the conductor's thinking he's being betrayed by his own protege
and concertmaster is rather nifty. Albert Brooks, who plays the conduc-
tor's manager, is really brilliant; his dialogue —
some of which, I gather,
—
he himself came up with gives the film a crazed, hip subtext. When he's
onscreen, Unfaithfully Yours doesn't seem like a remake; it seems to
be happening right this minute. There's also a chance for Richard Liber-
tini to do a comedy turn as the conductor's Italian chef-barber-valet;
Cassie Yates is just right as Albert Brooks' bored, straying wife; and a

Hungarian singer, Magda Gyenes, adds giddy tempestuousness to a

New York restaurant scene where Moore and Assante do an impromptu
duelling-violins number.
Dudley Moore is at the center of things, and there's no question
—
about it when he's finally polluted, he's a slapstick virtuoso. But Moore
isn't really an actor; he's a revue artist, and he's outside his roles. He

dominates the screen partly because you're always aware of him as

Dudley Moore. And because of that you may feel that he hasn't been as
well protected by the director here (or by the script) as he might have
been. When Rex Harrison's dapper, smugly-sure-of-himself conductor
he was formidable in the manner of Sir Thomas Beecham and Leopold
Stokowski — felt betrayed, it was funny (and this remake was originally

planned for Peter Sellers, who had a special flair for being cuckolded, as
he demonstrated in the Pink Panther pictures). When Dudley Moore

154
(who is almost forty-nine and isn't getting any taller) feels betrayed, he's
rather too pitiable and you get a little uncomfortable. This is
and elfin,

emphasized by the writers' having made the conductor's bride, who's

half his age, a glamorous Italian movie star, played by Nastassja Kin-
ski.* This young actress becoming more striking and assured mus-
is —
kier, too —and it certainly would have helped if the movie had given the
wife some reason to be as passionately in love with the conductor as she
is; at one point, she jumps into the air at the sound of his voice, like an
eager puppy. Moore is so dedicated to getting comic effects that in some
of his dishevelled scenes he seems perfectly willing to suggest a sack of
potatoes with hair on it —which can be funny but appalling, too. And he's
needlessly infantilized at the end of the movie. In the last scene, the
conductor collapses in front of his Park Avenue apartment house, and

his wife picks him up and carries him inside. This may be some sort of
first, but I didn't hear anybody laughing. By the time the film is over,

you're not eager to see Moore again; he has been exploited here as if
there were no tomorrow.
April 2, 1984

CIRCUS

documentary shown on television a few years ago Vladimir —

Rif 's —
When I Think of Russia ended with two transplanted artists,
Baryshnikov and the poet Joseph Brodsky, talking together late at night
at a party; they were probably a little drunk and definitely very sad, and
what came across was the bond between them. They knew they'd never
get over their sense of didn't think a regular movie—a movie with
loss. I

actors — could communicate the emotions of Russian expatriates the in

* Starting with this picture, she changed the spelling of her first name from Nastassia to
Nastassja.

155
way that this was wrong. Paul Mazursky's Moscow
ghmpse did, but I

on the Hudson does it. Mazursky has hit on just the way to go about
it: with Robin WilHams as his Russian saxophonist hero, he has made a

—
comedy about a tragedy about going away forever, about not being
able to go home.
In the first part (which is in Russian, with subtitles), the sax player,
the bearded Vladimir Ivanoff, who worships American jazz musicians,
goes through his daily grind in Russia. He has a job in a circus band, lives
among three generations of his family in a one-room apartment, and has
to arrange to use a friend's place when he wants to be alone with his girl,
who, before going to bed with him, hounds him to join the Party. Vladi-
mir queues up automatically whenever he sees a line in front of a shop;
he queues up even if it makes him late for rehearsals and he has to use
half of whatever he's bought as a bribe, so that Boris, the K.G.B. man
who supervises the circus, won't penalize him.
When Vladimir meets a friend who was a teacher before being sent
to a mental hospital and now works paving streets, the friend asks, "Are
you still with your music?" Vladimir says, "Still playing for tigers and
bears." But he and the other band musicians love their instruments; you
can see it in the way they hold them as they march, in close formation.
(During a break, they sit close together, eating oranges.) Vladimir is a
rumpled, uncomplaining survivor, accustomed to the endless lying and
spying and toadying. He's also used to the temperamental outbursts of
Anatoly (Elya Baskin), the circus clown; Anatoly, who has the
his friend
face of a clown even when he takes off his makeup, dramatizes his suf-
fering —he cries out, "I hate my life!" Vladimir, who addresses his

friend, with great courtliness, as "my dear clown," understands his

emotion, but when Anatoly says that he has got to have his freedom and
is going to defect when the troupe performs in New York, Vladimir
doesn't want to take him seriously.
We know that Vladimir himself is going to defect, because the
story is told as a flashback. In the opening scene, he's on a New York
City bus giving directions to a Frenchman and saying, "It's pretty
tough getting around here at first," with the look of satisfaction of
someone who has mastered the bus routes. But we don't know how or
why this fellow who loves his family (and adores his grandfather) will
do it. By the time it happens —during the half hour that the circus
troupe is given to shop in Bloomingdale's, on the way to the airport
and home —
we know Vladimir so well that it seems natural and inevita-
ble. What makes him love his family deeply is what makes him lose
them forever. Vladimir embodies the Russian tradition of the holy fool.

156
His passivity is deceptive; he has inner strength —he can't help feeling
the truth. Given an opportunity to say no to the K.G.B., he can't resist
it; he can't not defect.
—
Bloomingdale's no more than a bit player in The Electric Horse-
man, where the store's name was used for a gag is a star in both —
Splash and Moscow on the Hudson. Mazursky uses it as the hub of the
New York world, and the plot radiates from this temple of the mouth-
watering temptations of capitalist decadence. The script (by Mazursky
and Leon Capetanos) is slyly and gracefully designed so that the people
Vladimir encounters in the store during the dizzying few minutes it
takes him to escape from the control of the K.G.B. —people whom we at
first assume to be minor players —become the most important people in

his new life. Vlad (as these Americans call him) walks into this capitalist
cornucopia and finds friendship and love. A black security guard (Clea-
vant Derricks) protects him from the K.G.B. ''You're in my jurisdiction,"
—
the guard tells the Soviet agents the workers at Bloomingdale's talk
about it were a country. And when matters are settled the guard,
as if it

who has offered to put Vlad up, takes him home to Harlem, where three
generations of his family live together. A shark-faced Cuban immigra-
tion lawyer (Alejandro Rey), who happens to be shopping in the store
during the defection, leaves his card. And Lucia (Maria Conchita Alonso),
an Italian girl who works
perfume department, becomes Vlad's
in the

steady date. Yet it doesn't take long before he discovers the isolation and
paranoia of living in New York. The brutality of the city confuses him;
in Russia, he says, he knew who the enemy was.
Nobody in New York wastes time offering Vlad sympathy, because
there's nothing unusual about his plight. Perhaps the sneakiest, most
original aspect of the movie is that just about everyone Vlad meets,
except some of the black people, foreign-born (or an out-of-towner). He
is

starts as a busboy, hustles his way from one crummy street vender's job
to another, drives a taxi, chauffeurs a limo; he studies English, saves
enough money to buy a sax in a secondhand shop, and acquires an
apartment in the East Village. And all this time he's surrounded by
Puerto Ricans, Lebanese, Haitians, Iranians, Brazilians, Cubans, Viet-
—
namese every variety of Hispanic, Asian, and European. These "eth-
nics" are in the service jobs that white native Americans have scrambled
out of, and they're on the streets hustling alongside him. They talk
English mixed with their own languages, their lips twisting over the
syllables in different ways. ("When you speak English, does your mouth
hurt?" Vlad asks another immigrant.) He builds a new, makeshift family
out of this disparate group, but it can't fill the void created by what he

157
left behind. (The Russia of this movie is a country where the grandfa-
thers look like Harpo Marx.)
Paul Mazursky's distinctive funky lyricism is in the scene with Vlad
outside Bloomingdale's waving goodbye to the circus troupe in the char-
tered Liberty Lines bus that's taking them to the airport; he already
knows that he has cut himself off from his own life. (And from then on
there may be some extra moisture in his shining eyes when he laughs,
or a smile will end a little abruptly.) The lyricism is in the way Vlad tries
to dance American style; it's in the double joke of his pleasure at the first

joke he makes in English. It's in the Old World politeness of his manner
as he talks to an F.B.L man, and in the courtesy he extends to a gay,
whom he smiles at, taking him for another F.B.L man. And it's in the
delicacy of the scene in which a newly arrived legal emigre —a Russian
Jewish young man, very shy and looking a bit like Kafka—brings Vlad
a letter from his family. It's the magical element in some parts of the
movie. You may be saying to yourself, "This scene shouldn't work, it

can't work," while you're laughing because it's working. That happens
when Vlad and Lucia are in the bathtub eating mu shu pork and fooling
around while she studies for her naturalization exam and recites the Bill
of Rights. And it happens again in the naturalization ceremony.
The film wins your good will by its comic rhythms (especially in the
first half). It's shaped so that when the band, in New York, strikes up

the circus march you're eager for both the circus and the escape, and
then you're in Bloomingdale's (what a place to get lost in!), which turns
And Mazursky's instinct was really working for
out to be another circus.
him when he paired Robin Williams with Maria Conchita Alonso, a Vene-
zuelan beauty who's an unself-conscious cutup, like the young Sophia
Loren, and has a glorious, full-choppered grin. Her Lucia is outgoing,
independent, sunshiny; she has come to this country to make something
—
of herself she would like to be a newscaster. Robin Williams' Vlad is
an anonymous Soviet man hoping for the creature comforts of a home
—
and a family a supplicant always. The bathtub scene, in which Lucia
leans back against his furry chest while his furry arms enclose her, is
physical in a way that disposes of the steam-house contortions of the
lovers in Against All Odds. These two suggest real people.
That's the plain, open secret of what makes this movie so pleasura-
ble: you get to know the people in it, and Mazursky shows you how

normal it is to be a little crazy. (Alejandro Rey's Cuban, who seems to

be gleaming with predatory intentions, turns out to be a decent fellow
who has oversold himself on the natty Latin look.) In spirit, Moscow on
the Hudson is like a more imaginative Harry & Tonto, with a mellowed

158
style; Mazursky has become a far more skillful filmmaker, and his
cinematographer, Don McAlpine, and the rest of his team help to give
the picture a textured simplicity that is rare in a comedy. When you
actually see Mazursky (he plays a tourist called Dave basking on a
Florida beach and complaining about the rotten service at the hotel), he
gives the film a manic zap —a heightened comic tension—that the other
scenes don't have. What they do have a smoothness — a relaxed appre-
is

ciation of what the performers are doing, as if Mazursky were as sur-

prised and exhilarated as you are.
Vlad is the most Chaplinesque of Mazursky's heroes. The term is

often used as a putdown, but this film provides a reminder of the good
side of Chaplin. There's nothing wrong with suggesting an ordinary
reasonable man who doesn't want to cause any trouble, as long as he
isn't pathetic it, and Vlad doesn't slip into that
about —
not even in the
scene in Russia where he plays his sax for the circus animals, and
definitely not in the scene in the East Village where he goes on playing
despite the complaints of a neighbor but retreats farther and farther into
his apartment and winds up in the water closet. Robin Williams' Vlad is
sturdy and resourceful— that's what's touching about him. Robin Wil-
liams was extraordinary in his last picture (Michael Ritchie's The Survi-
vors), and he gets better and better. He isn't a comic "doing" a Russian;
he just plays a Russian, and it's as if he'd been born one. (I could have
been fooled if I hadn't seen him before.) He has nothing of the pixillated
Mork about him; his Russianized pronunciation of American names is
just funny enough, and when he cries it's Russian style, starting around
the mouth.
A —
few scenes are poorly acted one in an Immigration office with
a noisy black woman officer, and several involving Boris, the K.G.B. man,
who's much too coyly aware of being a comic bad guy, and who turns
up for a final hammy bow when we'd thought we were rid of him. There's
—
also a misconceived scene Vlad, alone and drunk, having a vision of his
grandfather capering on the street. And one sequence seems truncated:
when Vlad gets to sit in with the black saxophonist he idoHzed from
records back in Russia the film cuts from their playing together to a
—
scene of Vlad's despair afterward presumably because his idol had not
been enthusiastic about his work. We really need to get a sense of what
the man told him; the way it is, we can't gauge if Vlad is over-reacting
or if his playing is too derivative and his idol made that clear to him.
These weaknesses are minor; the only larger one is the faltering of the
film's rhythm (though not its mood) in the last third. Mazursky seems
to need several things going on at once (as in that bathtub), and offhand,

159
peripheral jokes, too. When Vlad and Lucia quarrel and the black friend
goes to Alabama for a time, Mazursky doesn't have enough elements to
juggle. Vlad trots around by himself and visits people, and a few scenes
feel insecure, as if nothing's going on.
In terms of what this comedy offers, this, too, is minor. What counts
is that it tackles a wonderful subject without preening, and brings it off

unassertively —so danger of being

unassertively that the movie is in

overlooked. {Variety has already dismissed it as something "for a very

limited audience.") We're getting to the point where the press assumes
that movie audiences won't be willing to bring anything to a picture, and
warns them off. This is a movie in which you are expected to understand
the hero when he tries to explain the difference between being unhappy
inNew York and in his homeland. "In Russia," he says, "I did not love
my life but I loved my misery, because it was mine." Those who respond
to his words may, I think, love this picture as much as I do.Back in
Russia, Vlad waited in line and bought two pairs of shoes (the wrong size
but the only and gave one pair to the K.G.B.; in New York, he buys
size)

flashy red, yellow, and white shoes that look like part of a pimp's ensem-
ble, and when Lucia objects to them he points out, "They were made in
Italy." It's a one-world circus.
Apnl 16, im

EXALTATION/ESCAPISM

i \ceman, the new Fred Schepisi film, begins with perhaps the
greatest opening shot I've ever seen: a wide-screen image of Arctic ice
and snow, with fluttering helicopters, and the small figures of men
moving around a blue-white glacial cave. They carve out a block of ice
that has a dark form inside, and the helicopter flies off, carrying the block
dangling in a net. It's an eerie and enthralling sequence. Somehow,

1 60
Schepisi and his two longtime collaborators, the composer Bruce Smea-
ton and the cinematographer Ian Baker, achieve that special and over-
whelming fusion of the arts which great visual moviemaking can give
us. Iceman doesn't have a good enough script, but it has a marvellously
suggestive idea for a movie, and it has scenes that affect us with some-
thing like the mystical power of primitive fairy tales. It also has the star
presence of the Eurasian-American actor John Lone, who is awesome in
the way he stirs our empathy with the film's hero, the prehistoric man
who has been asleep inside that glacial ice for forty thousand years and
hangs from a helicopter like Fellini's Christ statue in La Dolce Vita.
—
After being flown to an Arctic outpost a research center run by the
same mining and exploration company whose drillers found him the —
Iceman is thawed out, in a sequence that is comparable in creepiness and
fascination to the famous laboratory scene in James Whale's 1931 Fran-
kenstein, in which the monster comes to life. But the tone here is
altogether different: the water dripping from the icy casket suggests
weeping. The creature's mouth is open, as if in a cry, and his arms are
extended, as if he's asking for help, and when the rest of his body is
revealed it recalls the rigid figure and pallid flesh tones of the Mantegna
Christ.
The thirty-one-year-old John Lone lived at the monastic school at-
tached to the Peking Opera in Hong Kong from the age of nine to
eighteen, and was trained in the formal theatrical arts. His teachers
there called him Little Dragon, and since the Chinese word for dragon
sounds like "lone," he took that as his name when, after a brief career

in Hong Kong kung-fu movies, he came to this country, where he worked

first with the East West Players, in Los Angeles, and then, in New York,
with the Public Theatre. As the powerfully built Iceman, Lone, whose
name would be more appropriate for the character than Charlie, which
his only new friend calls him, moves in a crouch that's a bit reminiscent
of Toshiro Mifune's barbaric stance in Rashomon; his brow has been
built out, and he wears jagged dentures that change the shape of his
mouth. He makes scratchy, toneless sounds, yet they're expressive;
everything about him is expressive. He's sociable and eager to communi-

cate, and —this is —

John Lone's subtle achievement he soon has an air
of indefinable sadness. Uncouth as this Neanderthal may look, he has a
full range of feeling in his eyes. He's unmistakably human, and he's

confused about where he is; he's lost, he's alone.

As the head cryobiologist at the research center, Lindsay Crouse
wears a no-nonsense short haircut and efficiency outfits; she sees the
discovery of the Iceman as an opportunity for a medical breakthrough

i6i
—she hopes to find the cryoprotectant that has kept him ahve. The eight
or nine scientists she works with want to take the creature apart so they
can find out how to extend people's lives by freezing them. But Timothy
Hutton, as the scruffy, post-hippie anthropologist who is brought in,

wants to get to know the Iceman, so he can learn more about our
ancestors and how we The two competing learned doctors
evolved.
bicker, compromise, cooperate. She worries; he's benignly blank. And
the Iceman is placed in a glass-domed vivarium a simulation of the —
—
natural environment in a temperate zone which is adjacent to the cen-
ter. The scientists observe him and listen to his cries and moans, without

his knowing they're there. I think that this vivarium was probably the
filmmakers' worst mistake: it traps the movie along with the Iceman.
The idea of the film almost demands that he come into contact with the
modern world; instead, the film becomes constricted as he examines his
prison and puzzles over artifacts, like a hose and a sprinkler. (They're
magic objects to him.) And we're put off by plot developments, such as
nobody's being on watch when the Iceman breaks out. This science
fantasy is of such beauty and quality that we may be more put off than
we are at a routine sci-fi picture, where we expect this sort of sloppiness,
and even enjoy it.
The scriptwriters. Chip Proser and John Drimmer, don't develop the
conflict between medical science and humanism which Grouse and Hut-
—
ton represent. It falls by the wayside which is probably for the best,
because it's dull stuff. (There's also a stupefying scene in which one of
the batch of scientists expresses doubts about whether mankind has
advanced in the last forty thousand years; his nose should light up, and
everyone on the screen should have a turn at punching it.) The Lindsay
Grouse character is like a modern woman written to the specifications
of a feminist magazine. And Timothy Hutton, whose slightly scared look
suited his teen-age roles, has retained the look; it may be that he's
frightened by the camera —he seems to hold back. In the scenes in which
he enters the vivarium and makes friends with the Iceman, it isn't man
to man; he's still a juvenile — his body doesn't seem lived in. The scien-
tists take flesh and fluids out of the Iceman when he's unconscious, and
he blames his diminishing strength on his anthropologist friend; Hutton
should be able to summon up some rage at the vivisectionist experiments
— something to match the Iceman's profound sorrow but he doesn't —
quite have it in him. The Iceman has been crazily dislocated in history;
he thinks he has been enchanted and that he's being punished. The
anthropologist needs to feel disoriented too. The gleam of insanity in
Lone's eyes is what Hutton lacks. Yet he isn't bad. He and Lone play off

162
each other in a way that makes the film work, and this may be because
of Hutton's slightly opaque, child-man quality.
The young anthropologist benefits from his contact with this primi-
tive man; like the boy in E.T. and the hero in Splash, he needs to learn
from the stranger. The anthropologist begins to see things through the
Iceman's eyes, and so do we. When the Iceman breaks out and runs
through the lab, we know that to him the rooms and passageways are
a series of mythic challenges. Schepisi has been able to provide a modern
interpretation of the events while making it possible for us to experience
them as if we were primitive. The picture keeps us in an awestruck state,
and at the end I felt that it fulfilled itself. The Iceman's visionary fervor
takes hold; we can believe in his terrified worship of a trickster God in

the sky, and in his triumph as he joins his God.

It's a very strange, elating movie, with the Iceman at its emotional
center. It givesyou the sensation that you're breathing pure air and that
your senses have become more acute; you go out and look at the shops
and streets as if you were a stranger. A real dramatist might have been
able to provide dialogue and conflicts worthy of Lone's performance, and
of the imagery and the music. But, working without a great script,
Schepisi has still done something major: Iceman is like the flawed Her-
man Melville novels. It's full of passion and craft, along with parts that
might be the work of a stumblebum. It's thrilling.

ft.lomancing the Stone, a slapstick adventure comedy in the

commercial genre of Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a simpler, more likable

entertainment than Raiders; it doesn't leave you feeling exhausted. The
picture's greatest asset is its taking-off place: a woman's wanting a more
exciting life. Written by Diane Thomas, who got fed up with her jobs in
advertising and studied to be an actress before sitting down to write this
first script (while she supported herself as a waitress), the movie is about
a timid, pleasantly slobby author of best-seller romances. Joan Wilder
(Kathleen Turner) cries over the end of the novel she's typing, because
she loves it so much. Padding around her Manhattan apartment, she
sniffles happily —she left her heroine experiencing ecstasy —and feeds
her Romeo. Just after delivering the manuscript to her publisher,
cat,

she receives a frantic telephonecall from her sister, who is being held

captive by smugglers in Cartagena, and in a few hours she's lost in the

163
jungle in Colombia, ducking bullets. She's thrust into the kind of perils
she has dreamed up for her books. The extravagant, self-mocking adven-
tures that follow are kept on ahuman scale, because Kathleen Turner's
Joan Wilder always there reacting. Turner is particularly adept at
is

letting herself be seen through. Her star performance is one long, infi-
nitely varied double take, and it's exhilarating.
The picture has a bravura opening and a jolly kind of movement, but
it becomes too slam-bang; the score is cheesy and loud, and there are a

few too many unrealized gags. Still, the director, Robert Zemeckis, the
Spielberg protege who, with his sometime partner Bob Gale, wrote 1941
and made / Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978) and the juicy satire Used
Cars (1980), sustains the carefree tone; and the wide-screen imagery,
—
which is stunning at the start, is always good to look at the cinematog-
rapher Dean Cundey and the production designer Lawrence G. Paull
must love their work. The film also has a terrific suave and swinish
villain: the Mexican actor Manuel Ojeda as Zolo the knifer, the head of

the military police, who keeps following Joan and casually murdering
people. In the single funniest scene, a crocodile chomps on Zolo's arm,
and the bite has just the right amount of violence to release our laughter.
Another Mexican actor, Alfonso Arau (of El Topo and The Wild Bunch
—
and Used Cars), has an affable slapstick spaciness he's all toothy
—
smiles and bushy hair as a drug-trade chieftain who's hooked on ro-
mance novels. And the scriptwriter has set up some explosively comic
dilemmas, such as the scene in which the hero is torn between saving the
loot (the gigantic emerald that everyone covets) and saving the girl (who,
of course, having been romanced, is the real jewel).
But that hero, who has been given the phallic name Jack T. Colton,
is played by the producer of the film, Michael Douglas, who isn't a

comedian. The script was probably shaped so that Joan's fictional hero
would materialize but he'd be tougher and more practical-minded than
she expected, and she'd have to learn to take care of herself in order to
keep up with him. With Douglas in the role, it isn't clear whether Jack
is intended to be the fearless and dashing man of Joan's dreams or a

parody of that swashbuckling cavalier. Douglas must know or, at —

least, suspect —that he's wrong for the role. (It calls for a Harrison Ford,
or perhaps a big, bland bruiser like Tom Selleck.) Douglas tries too hard.
He talks in a low, hoarse voiceand acts gruff; his face exaggerates
everything and registers nothing. And no matter how fast he moves he
seems to slow down whatever is going on around him. Some of the other
casting is dubious, too. Mary Ellen Trainor seems all wrong as Joan's
sister, and Danny DeVito, who plays a smuggler, is used for his cute-

164
ness, and as if our hearing him dehver commonplace expletives would
knock us silly.
Luckily, Kathleen Turner is onscreen almost all the time, and the
affection we develop for her in her early, dowdy scenes carries over to
the action sequences. In the second half, when her hair is loose and she
has become more conventionally sexy, this actress knows how to use her
dimples amusingly and how to dance like a woman who didn't know she
could.She and Zolo's stump of an arm help to give the movie some
Too bad that this cleverly worked-out woman's fantasy got
personality.
muddied by the producer's fantasy that he could be the answer to a
woman's steamy dreams.
April 30, 1984

SMALLER THAN LIFE

1 In Swing Shift, the director,

recapture the atmosphere of the
Jonathan Demme, attempts
"home front" during the Second World
to

War. He has the kind of respect for working people's homes that James
Agee had for the shacks of tenant farmers, and he shows you the details
of lower-middle-class life without satire or condescension. Demm.e could
be said to have a reverence for kitsch. His tenderness —his looking for
poetry in the tacky — is a rare quality, but in Swing Shift it isn't backed
up with much of anything else.

Demme's vision of the lives of the workers on the swing shift (4 p.m.
to midnight) at an aircraft factory in Santa Monica has a glazed lyricism.
Goldie Hawn isKay, a cuddlebug housewife who married her blue-eyed
Iowa high-school sweetheart (Ed Harris) and moved to California; he
joins the Navy right after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and she
becomes a riveter at the factory, where she meets a foreman (Kurt
Russell) who's also a trumpet player. He develops a crush on her, and

165
eventually they begin an affair. Christine Lahti is Hazel, who sings with
a dance-hall band; she breaks up with her lover (Fred Ward), the dance-
hall operator, and goeswork on the assembly line, and she and Kay
to
—they both live insame set of tiny garden-court bungalows be-
the —
come pals. Most of these performers, along with others in the cast, seem
too old for the parts they're playing. They look stuffed and posed, as if
they were consciously trying to re-create themselves in the images of the
shiny-faced teen-age servicemen and girls-next-door in the forties issues
of Life. It's a case of talented, intelligent actors turning themselves into
waxworks. The cramped, stage-set look of those bungalow interiors
seems deliberate, and the way the workers are positioned at the factory
makes you think the movie is about to turn into a musical, with candy-
colored production numbers. For Demme, the film must have been an
exercise in style, in the way that New York, New York was for Martin
Scorsese, but Demme's style is softer, pastel, mild.
Kay and her husband hear the news about Pearl Harbor when
they're spending their Sunday at an outdoor skating rink; we can't fail
to observe the picturesqueness of the era. The people in this movie don't
do anything that wouldn't have been done in forties movies, and the
cliches of those movies are played here as daily life. Demme isn't de-

bunking anything; on the contrary, he seems to insist that the images

of innocence given to us by the magazines and the movies are accurate.
And from the way he sees things it's as if movies never had a darker side.
(In some ways, Demme's vision seems as privately enraptured and as —
superficial —
as that of his near namesake, the French director Jacques
Demy, in his weaker films, such as his 1969 American production. The
Model Shop. ) The insubstantiality of Swing Shift may make us feel as
if we were dozing. Or we may be tapping a toe, waiting for the heroine

to lose her virtue —

waiting for the public images of virtue to come into
conflict with the characters' desires. But Demme doesn't appear to regis-
ter that the audience has a problem; he sticks by this false innocence.
And he keeps the camera gliding romantically, though its movements
don't seem to relate to the situations that the characters are in.
Goldie Hawn dampens the picture. It's not that she gives a bad
performance. Like Private Benjamin, this film was made by her own
production company, and she certainly doesn't have the kind of cruddy
role that she played in, say. The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976);
she doesn't repeat herself, either, the way she has been doing in pictures
such as the more recent Seems Like Old Times. The role of Kay is a
stretch for her, all right, but Goldie Hawn as a subdued ingenue is not
a stretch that does anything for the audience. A passive Goldie Hawn

1 66
seems a violation of nature. We're used and infec-
to her all turned on
tiously funny, and for us not to feel let down by her performance in a
straight role it would have to be a really good one. As Kay, she's trying
to make herself simple and ordinary —
she's playing a new stereotype:
the child-woman who learns how to be a competent person. And there's
very little she can do without calling up echoes of Jane Fonda in Coming
Home. She has fallen into a very old acting trap: she wants us to identify
with her character, and she thinks that she will become typical by flatten-
ing herself out. It's a stretch in reverse: she diminishes herself. At times,
her mouth is set; she looks uncomfortable, repressed —not as the charac-
ter but as an actress who's unhappy with what she's doing. (Maybe she
senses that the picture is turning into a neutered version of Private
Benjamin. )
Goldie Hawn and her moviemaking team have also made a basic
mistake in strategy: they've given Christine Lahti's Hazel the wise-
cracks. Christine Lahti, who has dark hair, high cheekbones, and a long
neck with great cords in it, is one of the marvellous new towering
Venuses who are changing our image of women. Like Sigourney
Weaver, Joanna Cassidy, Kathleen Turner, and, of course, Vanessa Red-
grave, she's heroically feminine. She's also a ripsnorting comedienne,
and she gives the picture whatever spark and intensity it has (which is

mostly Her role doesn't make much sense: she's a singer

in the first half).

who never even hums after she takes the job in the factory, and she goes
on for years carrying a torch for the man she broke up with (until he has
an offscreen change of heart). But Lahti plays this role to the hilt, and
the simple fact is that her height plus her tough manner and her few

wisecracks make
Goldie Hawn's Kay seem dim and shrimpy. (For one
more of Lahti for clothes to look great on, though she has
thing, there's
become shockingly thin.) If Kay had been conceived as more hip and had
swapped cracks with Hazel, Goldie Hawn might have had all her tickling
charm to draw upon. But she's got both arms tied behind her back. And
Lahti, a spangly goddess with her little forties hat propped on the side
of her head, is smiling down at her.
At times, I Swing Shift was
got the feeling that everything in
muifled because the moviemakers were afraid of covering the same
ground as Connie Field's documentary The Life and Times ofRosie the
Riveter and also of overlapping with New York, New York. It's a wisp
of a movie, with vague aspirations to be touching, and I got the impres-
sion that therehad never been a very strong script. (The writing credit
goes to the pseudonymous Rob Morton; the writers who were listed
before and during production were initially Nancy Dowd, then Bo Gold-

167
man, then Ron Nyswaner, and there was last-minute, attempted-rescue
work by Robert Towne.) The scenes rarely last more than twenty sec-
—
onds. They don't quite come to anything; they abort with a sometimes
audible pop —and always before we can get a sense of what's going
it's

on with the characters. There are no high spots, no exciting moments.

The picture just goes popping from one recessive, undeveloped scene to
the next. Swing Shift was reedited after Demme turned in his cut, and
so to gauge his plan for the movie, but it may be that he
it's difficult

didn't want a stronger script. The charm in Demme's movies is in the

small talk. He knows how Americans sound when they're relaxed, and
Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell have an easy, casual way with each other.
But Demme isn't good at building scenes to move a story along, and this
picture is never satisfying at more than a minute-to-minute level.
Last year, I sat all the way through Romantic Comedy and that —
rather puzzled me, because I've walked out on a lot of much better
movies. Then I realized that the reason I'd sat there was that the picture
drained me of the strength needed to get up and leave. Swing Shift isn't
Romantic Comedy, but it, too, is draining. You
stupid, like sit there
wondering what nothing is going to happen next. There's a feminist-
Kay's story: she gets a job and proves her worth by
fairy-tale aspect to
saving a fellow-worker's hfe, she has her sexual fling, and then she goes
back to her husband, and, in some screwy way, what she does seems
meant to parallel and represent what happened to women in general.

There's also something sickening about the way Hazel's lover turns up
and apologizes for the way he treated and then turns up again,
her,
cringing, asking for forgiveness. Maybe part of what makes this movie
seem so befuddled is that Demme's nostalgic fixation on the ambience
of the war years excludes any real interest in the lives of women work-
ers, and the feminist script sees the characters as precursors (with
lessons to learn) rather than as people.The women's experiences in the
"home front" are treated as a warmup, a rehearsal for the women's
movement of the sixties and seventies. The point of this picture is that
men laughed at the idea of women riveters and welders but that the
women "showed them." It's as if the women were pampered darlings
who went to work just to prove something to their husbands and to
themselves. The fact is that many women needed to work before the war
and had only been able to find low-paying jobs, and after the war they
were pushed out and were once again trapped in domestic service,
"women's" factory jobs, and department stores. The softening of eco-
nomic facts devitalizes Swing Shift. You can't keep all that pie-eyed
lyrical innocence without betraying the subject. The movie doesn't even

1 68
put across the feeling that's so rousing in documentaries about the
period: the sass and bounce of the women workers, earning good money
for the first time, and strutting because they were doing what was
considered "a man's job."
May U, 1984

THE CANDIDATE

I, In 1924, on the train that is taking him to a tryout with the

Chicago Cubs, young Roy Hobbs (Robert Redford), who feels he has it
in him to be the greatest baseball player there ever was, makes the

mistake of saying so. "I'm going to break every record in the book," he
tells a beautiful brunette vamp. Convinced, she invites him to her hotel
room, and shoots him in the abdomen at close range. (She may be a

madwoman; she may be an agent of dark forces. Perhaps both.) It takes

Roy until 1939 to make it back to the major leagues this time, he is —
signed by a scout for the New York Knights. A rookie at thirty-six, he
seems to be caught in a time warp. And so is the movie. The Natural.
A platinum-blond temptress (Kim Basinger) goes to work on Roy; she's
the pawn of crooked gamblers, and not above slipping him a poisoned
bonbon. But a purehearted honey-blonde (Glenn Close) who was Roy's
childhood sweetheart believes in him. And with these incarnations of evil
and good contending for his soul, the movie asks: Will Roy be spiritually
strong enough to triumph? In this era of inspirational time- warp hits
such as the Rocky pictures and Chariots of Fire and An Officer and a
Gentleman and Flashdance and Staying Alive and Footloose, there's
no contest. Redford mimes innocence and hurt like a dreary master. He's
the injured party, the blameless white Knight.
There isn't a whisper of surprise in the performance. It's guarded
and dry; it's timid. Some movie stars are like political figures: they try

169
to hang on to a constituency, and they approach their roles as if they
were running for high office. If they've had their biggest successes as
high-minded, shining-eyed Nice Guys, that's all they'll do. Watching The
Natural, you get the feeling that Redford is making one of those politi-
cal commercials that show you the candidate in "private" moments,
playing with neighborhood kids. Redford doesn't take the camera by his
acting; he takes it as a star —
he's photographed looking like a wary,
modest god, with enough back lighting and soft focus to make him
incandescent even when he isn't doing a thing. The movie is a fantasy,
and the director, Barry Levinson, must have wanted the picturesque,
prose-poetry style that the cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel, supplies,
but Redford is its principal beneficiary. Though part of the point of the
movie is that the rookie hero is older than his teammates, we never see
a well-lighted handsome young face; the other Knights are photo-
graphed as if they were made of putty. There may be a rule of thumb
for gauging when a star has become so concerned with the politics of his
image as a hero that he's afraid of acting: it's when he'll only play roles
in which he's more sinned against than sinning. And the way that this

picture has been designed, the myth of Robert Redford transcends the
myths of baseball heroes.
Stars like Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson and Sean Connery are
all there on the screen, but Redford (like Warren Beatty) is so hesitant
to reveal himself emotionally that he seems distanced and distracted. He
holds back. He presents his handsome face to the camera, but reluc-
tantly; as an actor, he's hiding. Even Redford's smiles seem forced here;
they're certainly rationed. (Heroism is such a burden.) In Heaven Can
Wait, Beatty died and then reappeared; The Natural is Redford's Heav-
en Can Wait, but without Dyan Cannon. Roy Hobbs might almost have
—
died before the picture started Redford is ghostly, absent, a noble
loner who doesn't interact with the other performers. He is no more than
polite in his response to Kim Basinger's seductiveness —she's left to play
her hot-number scenes in a vacuum. Glenn Close fares worse: Redford
seems self-absorbed when he's with her, and the director keeps the
camera staring at her reverently, as if she were a First Lady of the Stage
who had deigned to drop in on his movie set. (She's being Meryl
Streeped.) With nothing to play except the spirit of good-womanliness,
she stares back. The love relationship is a disaster.
Part of the performers' problem is that the characters they play
originated in a work with a completely different structure of meaning.
The script, by Roger Towne (the younger brother of Robert Towne), with
a credit also to Phil Dusenberry, who wrote an earlier version, is adapted

170
from Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952. The book is

about a natural man who has it in him to be great but also has it in him
tobe weak. Malamud's Roy Hobbs succumbs to every temptation, and,
given a miraculous second chance, he makes the same damn mistake he
did the first time. He's human; he's a fool. What gives the novel its

liveliness is Malamud's inspired mixture of an everyday American ver-

nacular (it'sreminiscent of Ring Lardner) with suggestions of the magi-
cal and the mythic. He tucked a lot into that mixture: the legends and
scandals of baseball, a plot that was a variation on Joe E. Brown's 1933
hit movie Elmer the Great (which was based on a play by Lardner and
—
George M. Cohan), and a sense of mystery the kind that charms you
and you don't need explained. And he makes it all seem easy. The novel
is in the pink —
it's fresh —
but the movie feels dated, because the people
who made it don't keep a balance between the everyday and the magical.
Their version is all mythic; it's wrapped in metaphysical mothballs. The
—
framing device an early sequence and a final one in which fathers and
—
sons are out in the wheat fields playing catch is "Little House on the
Prairie" mythic. Before the young Roy goes off to Chicago, he says
goodbye to his sweetheart: they embrace, Glenn Close says, "I love you
so much," Redford says, "I want you to marry me," unenthusiastically,
and Randy Newman's tender, drippy, hymnlike music is heard. The
conception of mythology here is old-movie make-believe; it's religioso-
romantic sentiment and stale glamour. The hero is so pure he has no lust
or greed in him; there is nothing to bring him down, and by the end of
the picture the golden Redford has practically ascended to Heaven.
Each time Roy is about to pitch or hit with supernatural help, he's glori-
fied in slow motion, and the rhythm of the shots is unvarying. And
we're supposed to sit there oohing and ahing over Robert Redford lift-
ing his leg.
Except for the showiness of the photographic effects the images —
are often very dark when evil characters lurk about this is a film that—
Louis B. Mayer, in the mid-thirties, might have been proud to put his
name to. The Natural has the message that Mayer used to send out to
the world; it was also the credo of the heroine of Flashdance: Hold on
to your dream. (In pop hits, people have only one dream, and it's un-
changing.) This is an old-fashioned movie, but it lacks the dramatic
precision and some of the payoffs that movies used to provide. When
Roy's angel sweetheart first appears at a Knights game and stands up,
with the sun giving her a halo, his luck changes, but we aren't shown
the instant when he registers her presence and is transformed into a
winner. Robert Duvall plays the part of a corrupt sports columnist; he

171
 —

sneers and grovels and acts parasitic —

he climbs the rafters, to no appre-
ciable purpose. Perhaps the role was trimmed in the editing some gaps —
suggest that. One of them is sizable: although the columnist, who was
on the train in 1924, spends most of his time trying to figure out where
he remembers Roy from, we never get the recognition scene that we're
set up for. And the moviemakers ought to have had enough pride not to
stage the clumsy, postponed revelation about the angel's angelic off-

spring. It's primordial hokum.

There are a few performers who stand apart from the sludge of
moral uplift. Barbara Hershey brings a hint of deviltry to the small, key

role of the mystery woman who shoots the young athlete; she looks
dangerously chic in her twenties clothes, and her veneered face says.
Boy, do I have a surprise for you. As the Whammer (who's unmistakably
Babe Ruth), Joe Don Baker manages to be mean and jovial at the same
time; it's a big, hearty, malevolent caricature. And John Finnegan, who
plays Sam, the old scout, in the opening scenes, carries the feeling of an
earlier America. Other performances —such as Wilford Brimley's gruff,
lovable Pop Fisher, the manager of the Knights, and Richard Farns-
—
worth's decent, understanding coach satisfy the archetypal demands
of the roles but are of no particular interest.
Was The Natural made cynically? I don't think so. It probably
wouldn't be so self-conscious and plodding (or so dark) if it had been
made by wiseguys. This picture looks to be a case of intelligent people
putting enormous care into a project that they have emasculated to the
point of idiocy. And instead of editing the movie for greater speed to-
ward the end, they let it run down. Its box-office success or failure
probably depends on the equivalent of a laugh track: when Roy performs
his feats on the baseball field the crowds in the stadium go crazy, and
their shouting and cheering (and Newman's victory music) are so all-
encompassingly loud that some of the people in theatres are bound to
join in. If they do, they'll probably feel that they've seen a terrific pic-
ture. And the moviemakers may have the hit they wanted (more than
anything Roy's team wins the pennant; he triumphs just the way
else).

Rocky and the way those two runners trying to escape the Vangelis
did,

fanfares did, and that hustler who was regenerated by military disci-
pline, and the welder-ballerina, and the writhing chorus boy, and the kid
who had to fight the town laws against dancing. Roy is a real baby-
kissing politician's role. He makes a pal of the pudgy batboy who idolizes
him, and when he's shown in a 1939 newsreel patting little boys' heads,
he turns, sees a little girl, and has the foresight to include her in his
constituency. And he gives the game of baseball everything he's got

172
with blood seeping out of a wound and staining his uniform. At times,
this movie is reminiscent of classic tearjerkers like and Madame X
Smilin Through, but with a male sufferer. Moviemakers can be calcu-
'

lating and shameless and still be perfectly solemnly serious. New movies
reshape stories in terms of the prevailing box-office values of the era.
But the people who do the shaping can feel that they're expressing what
they believe (and, in some terrible way, they are).

Hxteen Candles is about suburban Chicago teen-agers, but

it's less in tone than most of the recent teen pictures; it's closer
raucous
to the gentle English comedies of the forties and fifties. It doesn't
amount to much, and it's certainly not to be confused with a work of art
or a work of any depth, but the young writer-director John Hughes has
a knack for making you like the high-school-age characters better each
time you hear them talk. The picture has a good, simple premise: Saman-
tha (Molly Ringwald), a high-school sophomore, is having the worst day
of her life. It's her sixteenth birthday, and, in the midst of preparations
for her older sister's wedding, the whole family has forgotten about it.

And in the evening, when she goes to a school dance and longs to be
noticed by the handsome senior (Michael Schoeffling) who's the man of
her dreams, she's subjected to the humiliating attentions of a scrawny
freshman (Anthony Michael Hall), who's known as Geek a pesty, leer- —
ing smartmouth with braces on his teeth, (His attempt at a sexy smile
is pure weirdness.) Geek follows her wherever she goes, ogling her, and

he tries to court her on the dance floor, circling around her like an
impassioned whooping crane. He moves quickly, with his head down:
—
he's not watching his feet he's concentrating on the action of his body.
He's turning himself on, and he feels masterful; he isn't aware of the
effect he's having on Samantha until she runs off. Samantha gets so
down on herself and the world that when the senior, who feels he's alone
when he's with his prom-queen girlfriend, comes over to her she panics
and bolts. The senior, misunderstanding, feels rejected.
Molly Ringwald, who played Miranda in Paul Mazursky's 1982 Tem-
pest and was the young heroine of Lamont Johnson's 1983 Space-
hunter, has an offbeat candor. Only fifteen when Sixteen Candles was
shot, she plays a free-spoken modern cutie, and it's perfectly clear that
Samantha's freedom is the result of a pleasant middle-class home and

173
loving parents. There's nothing submissive about her, but she isn't rebel-
lious, either. When Samantha is alone, she sometimes talks out loud,

telling us what she thinks, and Molly Ringwald does it so artlessly it

seems like a normal way of behaving. Her acting gives the picture a lyric
quality. The tilt of Samantha's head suggests a guileless sort of yearn-
ing, and there's something lovely about the slight gaucheness of her
restless, long arms. In one of the film's best scenes, she finds herself
alone with Geek and discovers that she can actually talk to him about
her troubles. She recognizes that the reason she hasn't liked him is that
he's young, like her. He drops his brash, coming-on manner, and she tells
him about its being her birthday that everyone forgot as she puts it, —
her family "just sort of blew it off." He confesses that he has never
—
"bagged a babe," and she tells him her deepest secret that she is still
"on hold," and that she has been saving herself for the handsome senior.
Geek treats that confidence very respectfully; he also loses his crush
—
on her fast he's not on the prowl for a maiden. During their conversa-
tion, he begins to look less Geeky and just unformed. He has pale

eyelashes, and his fair hair sticks up on his head but is too downy to
achieve the punk effect he hoped for; he has the soft features of a
fledgling. Anthony Michael Hall is in fact no more than a year older than
the freshman he's playing. His Geek is a computer-age teen version of
—
the early Woody Allen character the fast-talking genius nerd but —
Hall moves like Steve Martin, and even more confidently. Geek, with his
pitchman's hard sell, is a product of television (and his appearances are
heralded by the theme music of TV shows). What's best about him is his
self-awareness; he knows that he looks like a jerk, but he's not going to
let that stop him from making out. He has nerve; he's an operator, and
—
he knows how to put what he learns to use he has a man-to-man talk
with the senior which is a model of suave diplomacy. Part of what makes
Sixteen Candles entertaining that the senior—a confident-looking
is

jock —has his own uncertainties and turns out to be as romantic at heart
as Samantha, while Geek comes through as a stud.
was John Hughes' debut as a director (he wrote the
This picture
scripts for a couple of National Lampoon films and for Mr. Mom), and
he may have got in a little over his head. Samantha has a full complement
of family: in addition to siblings (her younger brother is played by Justin
Henry, of Kramer vs. Kramer, who's going through an odd phase —he
looks like a Stephen King), she has two parents, and her four
little

grandparents have arrived at her house for the wedding. All these peo-
ple are part of Hughes' farcical superstructure, and maybe there's too
much of this apparatus. One set of grandparents (a huge man and a tiny

174
woman) compete with each Samantha at the same time;
other, talking to
as dumb gags go, it's Hughes shows
not bad, but no particular emotion
—
about the people nothing to make it more than a dumb gag. The four
grandparents come off as sitcom characters, and so do the new in-laws
and most of the people involved in the wedding. And somehow the
relationship between Samantha and her sister (Blanche Baker), the
bride, seems lost in a haze. It isn't clear what sort of girl this sister is
meant to be, and though her scenes are skewed to be funny they don't
quite get there.
The children in this family are a strange assortment they couldn't —
look more unlike. But they sound like siblings. John Hughes has a
feeling for verbal rhythms, and he knows how kids toss words around,
especially the words that set them apart from their elders. What gives
Sixteen Candles its peppiness is his affection for teen-agers' wacko
—
slang phrases carrying such strong positive and negative charges that
they have a dizzy immediacy. And he's on to how kids use computerese,
as in "By night's end, I predict that me and her will interface."
May 28, 1984

A BREEZE, A BAWD, A BOUNTY

1 I he great thing about a tall tale on the screen

be shown the preposterous and the implausible. In Indiana Jones and
is that you can

the Temple of Doom, the director Steven Spielberg is like a magician

whose tricks are so daring they make you laugh. He creates an atmo-
sphere of happy disbelief: the more breathtaking and exhilarating the
stunts are the funnier they are. Nobody has ever fused thrills and laugh-
ter in quite the way that he does here. He starts off at full charge in the
opening sequence and just keeps going. There isn't a letdown anywhere
in it. A friend of mine denounced the picture as "heartless"; another

175
 ) —

friend called it "overbearing." In a sense, they're right, but they're also

off the beam. This kind of storytelling doesn't have to be heartfelt; it just
has to hold your interest (and delight you). Indiana Jones is a series of
whoppers — it depends on verve and imagination to concoct the next big
fib. And it leaps from one visual exaggeration to another —overbearing-
ness is part of its breakneck style. (If it were modest and unassuming,
it would fall apart.)

Set in 1935, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom probably has
tobe called a pre-sequel, or prequel, to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which
was set in 1936, but it isn't pulpy in the way that Raiders was. It doesn't
have the serious undercurrents that Raiders had; it's less "sincere"
and that's what is so good about it. The two films have the same adven-
turer-archeologist hero. Dr. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), who wears
a brown fedora and carries specs and a bullwhip. Indy seems more
assured now, and more formidable physically —he's a professor with the
chest of a horse. The plot is minimal this time: the action starts in
Shanghai, at the Obi Wan night club, where the lusty blond Willie (Kate
Capshaw), in a spangled crimson gown, struts in front of a line of
tap-dancing chorus girls and belts out the film's keynote song, "Any-
thing Goes," in English and Chinese. After a scramble at the club that
features a diamond, a dose of poison, a vial of antidote, a lazy Susan, a
pack of Oriental gangsters, and a rickshaw, and turns into a full-blown
masterpiece of cheerful slapstick, Willie and Indy and his tiny, daredevil
sidekick, the Chinese orphan Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), make a fast
getaway by plane and drop off (literally) in India. There they are greeted
by an elderly tribal chieftain who believes they have come in response
to his prayers to Siva. He takes them to his blighted village; the land is
arid, and the starving villagers are in mourning. The sacred stone that
they believe conferred blessings on them has been stolen, and their
children have disappeared. The three agree to go on a mission to retrieve
the stone and the children, and the chieftain provides them with ele-
phants to ride, and guides. The quest takes the three to the sumptuous
palace of an odious boy maharajah (where the gold-digger Willie
breathes the atmosphere of wealth and is momentarily in ecstasy), and
from there, by underground passageway, to the temple where the vil-
lainous high priest Mola Ram (Amrish Puri), the leader of the Thugs,
presides over human sacrifices to the goddess Kali. (The name Mola Ram
is an anagram for Malomar; the Thugs —
expert stranglers and sneaks
— and the evil cult of Kali will be familiar to people who have seen the
1939 adventure comedy Gunga Din.
The subject of a movie can be momentum. It has often been the true

176
— even if not fully acknowledged — subject of movies. In Indiana Jones
and the Temple of Doom, it's not merely acknowledged, it's gloried in.
The picture has an exuberant, hurtling-along spirit. Spielberg tried ki-
netic comic-strip routines in his 1941 and couldn't quite make them work;
here comparable routines come off just about perfectly. Spielberg uses
old wheezes like the lazy Susan and you're charmed by it, remembering
how, as a kid, you were nuts about these spinning discs. Indiana Jones
is the kind of comedy in which the hero, in the middle of terrifying

circumstances, and with his foot smoking, yells for water, and a deluge
comes at him. The film sets the comic-book context for the hyperbolic
perils that the three central characters get into, and keeps us laughing
at the very fact that they don't get a chance to catch their breath. The
whole movie is designed as a shoot-the-chutes, and toward the end, when
the heroic trio, having found the sacred stone and freed the stolen
children from the maharajah's mines, are trying to escape in a tiny mine
car, and a shift in camera angles places us with them on a literal roller-
coaster ride, the audience laughs in recognition that that's what we've
been on all along. Yet Spielberg seems relaxed, and he doesn't push
things to frighten us. The movie relates to Americans' love of getting
in the car and just taking off — it's a breeze.

Sometimes when a director gets a chance to do a sequel, he starts

with the knowledge that he gained on the first film. Coppola and The
Godfather, Part II are the classic example. In its own, very different
way, Indiana Jones stands in relation to Raiders of the Lost Ark as
The Godfather, Part II stands to The Godfather. Though the picture is
a Lucasfilm production, and the story idea is by George Lucas (with a
script by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz), it doesn't resemble the Star
Wars movies the way that Raiders did. It's more cohesive, and it's much
more clearly and confidently a Spielberg movie, with parody links to The
Wizard of Oz and Gunga Din, and also to Saturday-afternoon serials
and the Hope-Crosby Road movies and more recent screen adventures
such as the cliffhanger stunt in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
The jokiness about the Mysterious East has something of S. J. Perel-
man's waggery; to an American kid a man in a turban is automatically
not to be trusted.
Spielberg and his team come up with sequences that have an elusive
mixture of comedy and wonder. At night in the jungle, the three travel-

lers pause on the way to the palace; Indy and Short Round sit on the
ground playing cards, squabbling amicably, and ignoring Willie, who has
thus far been nothing but a shrill, complaining nuisance to them. It's like
a nostalgic American campfire scene or picnic on a Saturday Evening

177
Post cover, but Willie, in the background, is being attacked by vampire
bats and menaced by baboons, iguanas, snakes, and even an owl. She
rushes around shrieking; the man and the boy are oblivious. This gag
may have seemed terrific even on paper, but the look of it—the American
small-town-boys '-world images it recalls — is inspired. Kate Capshaw's
Willie is the clown on the team; she has routines right out of burlesque.
There's a classic cockeyed-comedy bit involving her and her elephant,
who treats her as derisively as the others do —the elephant likes to come
up behind her, nudge her, and spray her with water. Willie gets so fed
up that she grabs at what she thinks is its trunk, and throws a python
at Indy. (She's too exhausted to marvel at how she managed to detach
it.) And there are sequences that are like what children dream up when

they're having a gross-out and trying to top each other: the three hungry
travellers sit down to a banquet, with the boy maharajah at the head of
the huge table and the high-ranking members of his court in evening
dress, and the servants bring platters of delicacies slippery, squirming —
baby eels, baked beetles, eyeball soup, and, for dessert, chilled monkeys'
brains to be scooped out of the skulls.
Later that night, Willie and Indy separate, but before he goes across
the hall to his room she bets him that he'll miss her so much that in five
minutes he'll be back at her door, and he bets her that she'll come to him.
With each of them pacing, hoping for the other's arrival, this is the one
relatively quiet interlude in the movie. Indy's pacing is interrupted by a
gigantic Thug who's determined to strangle him. It's a long, terrifying
fight, won only with Short Round's help. When it's all over with, Indy

rushes to Willie's room to make sure she, too, hasn't been attacked, and
she's triumphant. It feels like just five minutes.
Kate Capshaw had me laughing right from the start, but she and —
—
her role made me uncomfortable in the first half hour or so. You could
—
see that she was trying to be funny she squealed like Betty Button and
she acted like a cross between Ginger Rogers and Bette Midler. She was
playing a self-centered brat who was useless in emergencies; Willie's
only response was to scream. And since Willie doesn't contribute much
to the visual heroics, she could have used wittier — or at least a
lines
moment of intelligence —so that when she and Indy kiss there's a reason
for it.seems as if they're getting together just because they're male
(It

and female.) But Kate Capshaw won me over: her low-comedy brazen-
ness and the whole conception of Willie as uncouth give the picture an
additional layer of parody. Instead of being a pallid little darling in
distress, she's a broad in distress, and the situations gain from her noisy
wholesomeness.

178
 This entire flying-carpet movie, with its comic-strip frames, is a
pastel tourist paradise, as if a kid had filled in the numbered spaces to
show what colored pencils can do. The look of it is itself funny. (Older
kids may think the picture is a demonstration of what mattes can do.)

Part of the fun of moviegoing for children is in getting wise to what's

fake and what isn't. There are so many degrees of "reality" and fakery
involved here that it could almost have been designed to keep them
guessing; the stunt work and the laboratory special effects seem insepa-
rable,and at the close of the Shanghai night-club sequence there's a fall
through several canopies which evokes the lineage of modern movie
—
trickery the Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., pictures, and the famous opera-
house shot in Citizen Kane, and every cowboy movie in which the hero
jumped from a building into a wagon or onto his horse. Indiana Jones
plays with the whole idea of movie magic. This spirit of play (which I felt

was present only intermittently in Raiders) makes possible some glim-

mering storybook effects that probably weren't planned at all and were
achieved only half-consciously. When our three find their route from the
palace to the temple, they go through a passageway carpeted with
creepy, crawly things. But this isn't a gross-out. Our reaction is a mix-
ture of horror and awe, because the shining, symmetrical insects look
like crawling jewels. They're —perhaps inadvertently—beautiful. And
when some of them fall from the walls and are tangled in Willie's frizzy

reddish-gold hair they're like the precious gems she has always wanted.
The picture has fun-house skeletons and a night scene with a shooting
star (a Spielberg signature); it has startling twists and sometimes small
poetic curves. When Short Round wants to get into the speeding, out-of-
control little mine car that Willie is in and a huge villain is clinging to,
he uses the man's body as a staircase and climbs right up. It's pure
Buster Keaton; that's real magic.
The stunts are brought off with incredible precision. (The way the
editor, Michael Kahn, clips shots, you can almost hear him chuckling.)
But plot points are occasionally fuzzy. There's a bit of information
planted early on: Willie tells Indy that her father made his living as a
magician, and so when the three are hiding in the temple (they're posed
so that the scene an homage to a shot in Gunga Din) and they look
is

down into the vast cave where Mola Ram is conducting the rituals of
Kali-worship and plucking the heart out of a man's chest and as the —
man is consigned to fire, his heart, held high in Mola Ram's hand, bursts
into flame —
everything is prepared for Willie to spot Mola Ram as a con
man who had a heart up his sleeve. But that revelation never comes, and
since Lucas's special-effects company. Industrial Light & Magic, has

179
become virtuosic about simulating the look of flesh being torn into, the
poetic flourish of the burning heart may be too "real" for some viewers.
The movie is set in a make-believe world, with cross-references to both
Lucas's and Spielberg's other films, but this sequence is said to frighten
some people, and there has been talk on television and in the press of
making the film's PG classification more restrictive.
It's my impression that almost invariably the media stir up a fuss

about the wrong movies. If you take a child to Disney's Dumbo, this is
—
what the child sees: Dumbo's mother a circus elephant is so angry at —
kids who taunt Dumbo and pull his ears that she attacks them, and as
a result she is beaten and locked in a cage for mad elephants. Dumbo
is left on his own, and the other elephants humiliate him constantly. He's

made into an elephant clown, and during a routine he's left at the top
of a fireman's ladder in a burning house, crying elephant tears, because
the human clowns fail to rescue him. His only friend is another outcast
—the mouse Timothy. Each sequence is brought up to its maximum
psychological resonance, and when a child projects himself into this vat
of bathos and moroseness it's agony: the situations on the screen have
immediate correlations with his own terrors. But what correlatives could
there be in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doomi It doesn't take
advantage of childhood traumas. With its Road to Morocco sensibility,
it constantly makes fun of itself, and it's as remote from children's

real-life fears as Sabu's escapades in The Thief of Bagdad. The emo-

tional mechanism of Dumbo is to make what happens to the cartoon

animals real to kids; the emotional mechanism in Indiana Jones is to
make what happens to the human characters unreal. And the hero car-
ries you through —
you know Indy won't die. Grownups who are upset
by the menu at the banquet must be forgetting how cheerfully kids have
traditionally sung such macabre ditties as "The worms crawl in. The
worms crawl out. The worms play pinochle on your snout, And one little
worm. Who's not too shy. Climbs into your ear. And out your eye" and
"Great green globs of greasy grimy gophers' guts. Mutilated monkeys'
meat. Little birdies' dirty feet, Great green globs of greasy grimy go-
phers' guts. And I forgot my spoon. Aw shucks."
The fuss media may be caused simply by the fact that there's
in the

something slightly off in the tone and the timing of the cult-of-Kali
sequence. All through the picture, the comedy dominates the thrills, but
here, when, at Mola Ram's instigation, Willie is put inside a contraption
that looks like a deep-fat fryer, lowered partway down toward a pit of
red-hot molten lava, and raised and lowered several times, Spielberg's

i8o
 —

control seems to slacken. The sequence is tense but flat; Willie has no
wisecracks to deliver, and even her shrieks (which we've learned to
laugh at affectionately) aren't very funny.
Spielberg's work in this movie is being called mechanical, but there
are machines and then there are Rube Goldberg machines. Just because
the slapstick requires brilliant timing (and the director's genius for com-
position) doesn't mean it's cold or impersonal. Possibly some people have
got that idea because Spielberg shies away from giving the audience
full, clear satisfaction. When the rotten Mola Ram pours some horrible

guck down Indy's throat, Indy fights it but is held down; the scene
suggests a child's fear of a dose of medicine. The guck a "potion" —
puts Indy in Mola Ram's power; he's in a trance, and we wait to see what
will get him to snap out of it, but Spielberg doesn't point up the instant

of awakening (though it appears to be the result of Short Round's quick

thinking). And although Ke Huy Quan's Short Round is a nifty concep-
tion — this grasshopper-size kid is smarter and more resourceful than
Indy, and a good case could be made for his being the true (and invulner-
able) hero of the adventure — his victory over the boy maharajah isn't

moment seems to call for. The name

given the rush of feeling that the
Short Round is an homage to Samuel Fuller, who used that nickname for
the Korean kid in his 1950 movie The Steel Helmet; for Fuller, action
is everything —and that's the acknowledgment being given here—but
Fuller also piles on moral sentiment. Spielberg doesn't, and although
that's part of his elegance as a moviemaker, he slights the emotional
resolution of the plot. Having made the visual point that after the chil-

dren were stolen from their village the land became a desert where
nothing grew, he almost owes us a drenching downpour and lush vegeta-
tion to signify the children's return. It isn't quite satisfying to see them
united with their families on land that looks only a little greener. Spiel-

berg's not providing a formal closure makes the film's structure seem
weaker than He polishes off routines like that five-minute gag
it is.

perfectly, but he may be a little embarrassed about giving us the same

kind of pleasure on the larger plot points. He just comes to the end of
the story and stops. Still, this is the most sheerly pleasurable physical
comedy I've seen in years. And I'm grateful that Spielberg doesn't give
the audience a chance to revel in how noble Indy is.

The only thing that really bothered me about the movie was the John
Williams score, which is always selling excitement; it's too heavy for the

tone of the and it's set too loud. Although there isn't much talk, the
film,

film gives you such a lot to respond to that the nonstop music produces

i8i
 —

overload; you feel as if you'd been listening to a crowd roar for two
hours. (And for almost the full time you are: the audience's enthusiasm
is uncontainable.) Away from the discomfort of the sound, the movie
plays even better, in memory. But that sound level isn't anything as
simple as a miscalculation; it's more like a guarantee. There is still the
question of why a director as skillful as Steven Spielberg should make
a succession of "ultimate" roller-coaster movies. (He has indicated that
he may do a third in the Indiana Jones series.) It can't just be that he
wants the money. It must go deeper. What I think makes this movie so
overwhelming that some people recoil from it is that there is an emo-
tional drive in it. The picture's momentum may be congruent with Spiel-
berg's own impetus. Having had the most meteoric rise of any young
director in the history of movies, he may feel that he has to push on to
ever more inventive fantasies. He has made the most successful movie
of all time (E.T.) and three of the runners-up {Jaws, Close Encounters
of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark). His own career is a
roller coaster. How can he make a picture about "normal" life? He has
only his childhood to draw upon. As an adult, he rides a fantasy wilder
than anything in his movies.

rendira, which was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez,

seems like the work of someone faking Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There's
a stir in the audience each time one of his "touches" appears —a profu-
sion of paper flowers in planters and hanging pots, paper birds and
butterflies that But the touches have no hallucinatory tingle here;
fly.

they not winged. The Brazilian director Ruy Guerra

may fly, but they're
calmly and systematically puts them in place Erendira is like a mu-
seum exhibition of Garcia Marquez artifacts. The only resonance these
touches have is that they remind us of Garcia Marquez's other writing.
Though the material was apparently written first as a screenplay and —
then (when no film seemed likely) summed up in a single paragraph in
One Hundred Years of Solitude, and later turned into both a novella
and a short story — it doesn't have the feeling of something freshly
conceived. The is said to have been lost, and Garcia
original screenplay
Marquez supposed to have rewritten it from memory (and from his
is

other versions). That, combined with Guerra's directing, may help to

explain why this fantasy, which is about a mad old witch (Irene Papas)
who forces her virginal fourteen-year-old granddaughter Erendira
(Claudia Ghana) to work for her as a whore, is in the author's surreal-
picaresque mode yet has almost none of the shocking beauty of his
writing. The movie suggests the work of a gray-bearded professor hav-
ing his little tease.
The picture is a moderately amusing nothing; despite its attempts
to be magical, it doesn't take hold of a viewer's imagination. But Papas

ishaving a good time, and she's out to give us one, too. Papas isn't fake
anything; she's an original, and in this role she has a tattoo on her back
and she wears the ensembles of a regal ragpicker. She goes in for the
layered look: quilts and tablecloths, and drapes preferably black and —
—
purple with ball fringe. She's carried in a sedan chair as she and Eren-
dira travel through the desert (the film was made in Mexico), setting up
shop wherever they go. And before long the witch is festooned in gold
ingots. Little Claudia Ghana is lovely, and the scene of Erendira's sexual
initiation —by rape— is affecting in a semi-prurient way; the actress is

very convincingly just a budding young girl. But Erendira's mechanism

for dealing with her customers is to turn catatonic and feel nothing while
they do what they want with her, so Ghana —who, to judge by this

performance, isn't a very distinctive actress — doesn't need to do much

but suffer blankly. She's Sleeping Beauty as a whore, and she's G.K. to
watch, but it's Papas who puts on a show.
When the old bawd sits at her baby grand and sings in French, she
sounds a bit like Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim, and there's a sugges-
tion of better days inAnd when she sits up in her bed at night,
her past.
talking out all dramas in her sleep, the power in her voice is
her life's

—
scary. Her voice is more than an instrument it's a club. You know why
people do what she tells them to. She also laughs in her sleep a laugh —
that can turn into a snore. (It's too bad that her nocturnal raving doesn't
have anything to do with the events Erendira is involved in; the movie-
makers miss a chance to tie things together for us. They miss many a
chance.) Papas is marvellous in the scene where she blows out the can-
dles on her birthday cake in one quick, impatient gust, sinks her hand
into the cake (which is full of rat poison), eats it gluttonously, and burps
with pleasure. In the morning, she says she hasn't slept so well since she
was fifteen. And when her hair starts falling out in tufts she cackles as
she lifts it off. Roaring with laughter and giggling on top of it, the witch
survives one attempt on her life after another; she may be the hardest-to-

movie monster since Rasputin. I can't think of another actress whose

kill

merriment can be this gargantuan. Papas could play a female Falstaff.

(This is not a suggestion.)

183
 —

The Bounty, the new version of the famous story of the

In

mutiny aboard the British naval vessel in 1789, Captain Bligh (Anthony
Hopkins) is not a sadistic despot; he is a disciplinarian who sticks to
regulations, but he's a fair man. In this account, based on Richard
Hough's 1972 book, Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian, Fletcher Chris-
tian (Mel Gibson), the second-in-command, who leads the men in taking
over the ship, signed on because Bligh, his friend, wanted him The to.

ship is to transport breadfruit trees from Tahiti to Jamaica, on the theory

that the starchy fruit will provide cheap fodder for the slaves there.
Christian, who comes from an aristocratic background, calls it "a green-
grocery who comes from the middle class and whose rank
trip." Bligh,

lieutenant, hopes that the trip

is still —
he plans to go around Cape Horn
—
and circumnavigate the world will make his reputation, and get him a
better command. (The Bounty is a small vessel too small for the task —
ahead.)
Directed by Roger Donaldson, who made Smash Palace, this film
originated with David Lean, who, with backing by Warner Brothers,
commissioned Robert Bolt to write two scripts from the Hough material.
After the replica of the Bounty had been built, Warners learned that the
budget for the two films would be prohibitive; the project was sold to
Dino De Laurentiis, who gave the go-ahead to Donaldson to make this
twenty-five-million-dollar movie from a condensed version of the scripts.
Donaldson has made a passable, tense action film out of something that
needed to be bigger. This Bounty is shot very close in for dynamic power
—you're thrust right in among the men on the crowded ship —and it's

certainly not boring. But it doesn't work as an epic: it doesn't have the
scope or the emotional surge of epic storytelling — or the clarity, either.

Bligh narrates the film; presumably what we see is the account he gives
But the movie
at his court-martial. violates that point of view almost
immediately, showing us events he didn't know about. And, probably
because of the condensation, the story is misshapen.
We want more background and narrative detail to give meaning to
the action, and we want more characterization; we need it, since the
simple explanation that the earlier movies provided for the mutiny
—
Bligh's sadism has been quashed. The reasons are now somewhat fuz-
zier: they seem to lie mostly in Fletcher Christian's and the other men's

response to the sexual freedom of Tahiti. (The movie might be called

184
Blame It on Tahiti. ) The story is now about the two cultures,
conflict of

and that's where the picture falls short. Donaldson doesn't seem to have
much feeling for the period. We need to see at the start what the back-
ground of the sailors is —what kind of society they came out of. There's
not much point in suggesting the class distinctions among the officers if

we get no clue to where the men come from. We don't even know if they
are conscripts or voluntary seamen. We also need to see what the basis
of Bligh and Christian's friendship is, so we can understand what sort
of men they are and why they react so differently to the people on the
And if we are to experience what the hedonism of the Tahitians
island.
might mean to repressed, inhibited Englishmen of the eighteenth cen-
tury we need something more than shots of giggling bare-breasted
beauties with flowers in their hair coming out in canoes to meet the
Bounty, and more than orgiastic dancing and sex, Donaldson doesn't too.
provide the kind of sensuous imagery (and editing) that would have
made us feel what it was like for Englishmen of that time to be among
people who lived without backbreaking labor and threats and punish-
ments.
We do get reasonably exciting shots of the men on the Bounty
during a tempest, with lightning crackling and a seaman set on fire, but
the sequence comes too early, before we're involved in how this event
changes Bligh's plans and affects the crew's view of him. We also get
a compelling, showoffy performance by Hopkins especially during the —
five months in Tahiti, as he becomes more tormented and more isolated
in his attempts to enforce discipline. There's a strong suggestion of
sexual jealousy toward Christian during this period,
in Bligh's attitude

with Bligh almost hiding on the ship, as if to keep pleasure from corrupt-
ing him. He orders Christian to stop "mixing with the damned degener-
ate natives." When the trees are on board and the ship leaves Tahiti, it's
apparent that some of the men are having a hard time readjusting to
authority and to their cramped quarters. Bligh suddenly changes; he
reacts to the men's hostility by becoming an angry, unforgiving martinet
— he keeps complaining that "the ship is filthy." (Is he flipping because
he didn't permit himself any sexual indulgence?) Hopkins wears his hair
close-cropped, so his features look larger and pudgier, and he gives his
vocal cords a workout. At times, he carries on a bit like Bette Davis; what
he's doing in this part of the film doesn't make a lot of sense, but his
obsessive busyness is magnetic. Mel Gibson's performance is considera-
bly spottier. There doesn't seem any character written into the role
to be
of Christian, and Gibson is made faintly absurd when he's posed romanti-

185
cally against the wind in shots that look like inserts. He's playing the
open-shirted man of impulse and instinct versus Hopkins' man of order
and restraint, but beyond the indication of his upper-class background
there are no clues to why he goes native so quickly or what he's giving
up when he decides to spend the rest of his life with a lovely Tahitian
princess (Tevaite Vernette). It really doesn't mean much to see a man go
native if we don't know what he was before. And whether because of the
condensing or cuts in the editing room or just plain miscalculation, in his
big scene —his emotional outburst during the mutiny—he seems to be
having a nervous breakdown.
With Bligh as no worse than ambitious, repressed, and somewhat
harsh, and Christian as a moody flower child who's drugged on love,
we have no particular interest in either. As I watched this film, which
doesn't have much narrative pull, my mind kept drifting to what wasn't
there, mainly because what was there seemed less vital to the story. We
observe a prolonged fight belowdecks that's provoked by a powerfully
built brute who beats up a much smaller man, but nothing follows from
it. We don't find out what happened to the little guy, and though the big

fellow is in many subsequent scenes, we never see anything in his char-

acter that links with the viciousness he displayed. There's a burial at sea,
but we can't put a face to the dead man's name, so the melancholy music
doesn't mean much to us. We get no more than glimpses of the Tahitians
who go with the mutineers to Pitcairn though the relations on the
Island,
ship between the British and the Tahitians might give us some insight
into what's going to happen to their new society.
The picture might be more pleasing without the hype of Vangelis's
pulsing, important-movie music during the credits, and without the omi-
nous boom-booms that he provides when Christian first touches the
Tahitian princess's hair. Much of Gibson's screen time is given over to
his going water with this girl to kiss and play and to his being
in the

ceremonially tattooed. In one scene, which could have been played as a

sad love-sick joke, he gives her his only treasure: his gold watch. (What's
—
she going to do with it listen to it tick?) Meanwhile, back at the ship,
Hopkins frets and worries. This Bounty isn't different enough from its
predecessors; it's the same old breadfruit story.
June 11, 1984

i86
THE POP JUNKPILE

'hen you look at the opening images of Joe Dante's Gremlins,

you almost hear the words "Once upon a time, in a small-town mov-
ie ... " Dante sets us down in Kingston Falls, a vaguely Middle American

community that's based on dozens of other movie-created nice, sleepy

—
towns especially the ones that are familiar to us from Frank Capra's
1946 It's a Wonderful Life and from the 1956 Invasion of the Body
Snatchers. The people who live in Kingston Falls have no more depth
—
than comic-book characters; the town even has a meanie a Wicked
Witch-Scrooge, Mrs. Deagle (Polly Holliday), who gets a kick out of
foreclosing mortgages, especially now, at Christmastime. She threatens
—
to destroy the only creature in town who defies her Barney, a little dog
who yaps at her and tries to attack her. Barney is the pet of the hero,
Billy (Zach Galligan); at twenty, Billy aspires to be a cartoonist and
comic-strip artist but is stuck in his job as a bank teller, because he's
supporting his parents. The only scenes that take place away from
Kingston Falls are set in a Chinatown where Billy's father, Mr. Peltzer
—
(Hoyt Axton), an impractical dreamer-inventor he devises contraptions
—
that backfire wanders about, trying to obtain orders for his malfunc-
tioning gizmos, and in a nameless city he goes to for an inventors'
convention. It's in the Chinatown, in the basement curio shop of an
ancient Chinese sage (Keye Luke, in a long gray beard and with a
milk-white glass eye), that Mr. Peltzer hears the near-human sounds of
a mogwai, a tiny creature with the big, round eyes of a Pekinese and
four-digit paws, who nests in a box. Peltzer wants to buy the mogwai
as a present for Billy and offers two hundred dollars (rather casually, I
thought, considering that he's living off Billy's wages). The sage refuses,
— —
but his grandson ^just a kid follows Peltzer out, slips him the critter,
takes the money, and gives him three instructions: don't get him wet,
keep him away from bright light, and never, never feed him after mid-
night.

187
 —

The movie is, of course, about what happens when these rules are
inadvertently disobeyed. The —
mogwai Billy calls it Giz, for Gizmo
multiplies, and those mogwai also multiply, and though Giz remains
harmless its progeny turn into greedy, demonic little gargoyles: dwarf
dragons, with the jaws and teeth of crocodiles. About two feet high,
they're like the little devils of Hieronymus Bosch, but with a spark of
drollery. They torment Giz the way, in the cartoons, Sylvester the cat
—
tormented Tweety Pie. At times when they play cards and carouse
they're like race-track touts or underworld hipsters. And in one trium-
phantly insane sequence they invade the bar-and-grill where Billy's girl-
friend, Kate (Phoebe Gates), works nights, and, as she tries to keep up
with their orders, they gorge themselves like a gang of happy juvenile
delinquents, gloating over the size of their appetites.One of them flashes
her, another wears leg warmers and does some break dancing, while yet
another woozily sings the blues. When they get completely out of hand,
Kate (in a takeoff of Rear Window) grabs her camera and shoots flash-

bulbs at them.
Good little Giz takes no part in their revels. Giz is an icky-sweet
lap-dog sort of creature that sits in a box day waiting to be picked
all

up and cuddled; it doesn't seem even to be ambulatory all it does is —

make gentle cooing sounds and bat its eyelids. But the scuzzy, malicious
peewee dragons are everywhere; one of them hides among a pile of
stuffed animals as E.T. did, and now there's a stuffed E.T. right next to
the demon. What Dante appears to be up to is a demonstration that
something charming, like E.T., can get multiplied beyond a movie-
maker's control. He's also doing his own, black humorist's parody of
—
Steven Spielberg's E.T. a demonstration that the underside of E.T. is
like the monster in Ridley Scott's Alien. Or, to put it more baldly, he's
showing that E.T.'s id is Alien. Gizmo is a good child; the other mogwai
are its aggressively vulgar, beer-guzzling brothers — children of the
night. When one of them blows his snout on a drape, he's like Jean
Renoir'sBoudu expressing his contempt for bourgeois life by wiping his
shoes on a bedspread. These demons are like bad pets making messes.
Dante has the sensibility of a freaked-out greeting-card poet. In
Gremlins, even when he's at his weirdest the blandness is there under-
neath, and when he defiles his vision of the good American life it's Frank
Capraland that he's defiling. Once again, as in his segment of Twilight
Zone (the family terrorized by the ten-year-old TV addict), there are too
many kinds of parody floating around, but this time there are also too
many kinds of old-movie cloyingness. The incongruities are tantalizing,
but they don't work to any larger effect, and the movie never turns into

i88
the malevolent fun it should be. For a good part of the time, Dante's tone
is (perhaps deliberately) uncertain. Kate has told Billy that she doesn't
likeChristmas, and the explanation comes in a monologue she delivers
about how she lost her father; it belongs to the theatre of the absurd,
but Dante presents it in such an unresolved way that we don't know
quite when to laugh. And what are we to make of the fact that the first
casualty of the demons is the one black man in the movie, the high-school
science teacher (Glynn Turman)? Is the movie using the old, standard
ploy of disposing of black characters fast, or is this a parody of all those
movies which the good, kind black fellow is the first victim of whatever
in

menace is at hand? The scene doesn't play like parody, but with Dante
you often can't tell what's parody and what isn't.
The director builds suspense by postponing the audience's first view
of the mogwai: we aren't allowed to see it when Mr. Peltzer buys it, and
when he brings it home it's in a box tied up with ribbon. We don't see
it until Billy first seesbut this revelation has no sock to
it, because it,

—
the creature is such a wet-eyed blob a kitten painted by Walter Keane,
adorableness incarnate. Billy might be more likable if he were appalled
by his father's assumption that he'd want this itty-bitty furball, and had
to struggle to conceal his feelings. Billy is an autobiographical hero: as
a boy, Joe Dante wanted to be a cartoonist (which, in a sense, he is: he
never gets past cartoon characters with cartoon emotions). But Billy has
been made out to be a considerate and responsible fellow a personable —
dishrag. We can't tell if we're meant to see him as a younger version of
his dreamer father or as a young man with the practical good sense that
his father lacks. We don't even know if Zach Galligan and Phoebe Gates,
who look alike in this movie (they have matching sets of teeth), are meant
to be a charming pair or a spoof of dopey wholesomeness. (Where are
their ids?) Gremlins doesn't play by the rules or by the anti-rules,
either. And Joe Dante seems to be trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle
with too many pieces. The young actor Judge Reinhold looks as if he
enjoyed playing smarminess, and he's fine as a bastardly junior vice-
president of the bank who brags about how quickly he's rising (and
leaving Billy at the bottom), but the picture introduces him, sets him up,
and then seems to forget about him. Billy is provided with the dog
Barney, who then has to be shunted aside while Billy becomes attached
to Giz. Why didn't the writer, Chris Columbus (an N.Y.U. film-school
graduate), or Dante simply combine the plots and have Mrs. Deagle vent
her anger on Giz, using that as the mechanism for setting Giz's id in
motion? (That might have given the picture a little more coherence.)
Movies are Joe Dante's only frame of reference, and he slips in and

189
 —

out of movie conventions; I'm not sure that he himself knows when he
means to be funny, since he seems to find the whole idea of making
movies funny. But Gremlins isn't dull; there's always something going
on. In one scene, we discover that Giz can reproduce musical tones;
nothing comes of it. —
The picture is an unholy mixture a whimsical pop
—
shocker and finally nothing comes of any of it. Dante can't pull his
ideas together, and the movie has so little emotional impact that it might
be called affectless. Yet it's obvious that Joe Dante is a genuine eccentric
talent with a flair for malice, and it's certainly clear why Spielberg,
whose production company made the film (and who glides through a shot
at the inventors' convention, riding a little motorized cart), believes in

him. There are some crack sequences. Upstairs in Billy's house, the first

batch of Giz's progeny are in some gooey metamorphosing state while

downstairs Billy's mother —very well played by Frances Lee McCain
is in the kitchen baking gingerbread men. And although we may wonder
whom they're for —her husband and her twenty-year-old son? —they're
metaphorically perfect. McCain's big scene comes just a minute later.

Mrs. Peltzer, hearing strange noises upstairs, goes up to investigate.

But she isn't one of those dreary fools who inhabit the usual horror
movie —the ones who go up to be slaughtered. She takes a very sharp
knife, and from the set of her chin we know she means business. When
she encounters the repugnant little dragons, she goes at them systemati-
cally,one after another, and when a couple of them make the mistake
of invading her kitchen she traps one in the juicer (the only time her
husband's gadgets come through for her) and the other in the microwave
oven. Her efliciency is a thing of beauty. This tough and determined Mrs.
Peltzer wouldn't be staying home playing housewife while her young
son supported her (instead of having his own life); she'd be out making
a living. But when a sequence is directed with the snap and freshness
of this one, who cares?
The veteran horror-film actor Dick Miller (he looks like an older,
more wizened Robin Williams) appears as Mr. Futterman, the town
drunk, who accounts for his tractor's not starting by referring to the
gremlins that were supposedly planted in machinery in the Second World
War. Miller gets a chance to show what a likable low comic he is in the
kind of part that Barry Fitzgerald used to play. When Mr. Futterman's
TV goes on the fritz, he looks up at the antenna on his roof, which the
demons have been using as a jungle gym; at that moment they come
driving his tractor out of the garage and right through his living room.
And Polly Holliday is a wonderfully astute and polished actress. She
brings the Margaret Hamilton role a whiny, self-justifying undercur-

190
rent. You laugh at Mrs. Deagle because she's just so awful; she's some-
one you could love to hate. In her last moments on earth, Mrs. Deagle
hears what she thinks are Christmas carollers, rushes to fill a pitcher of
water so she can douse them, and opens the door to the fearless little
devils (who should never be got wet).
For a movie that's a pop junkpile of movie references, Gremlins has
a surprising number of good things in it. There's a marvellous effect
when one of the mogwai falls into the swimming pool at the Y, and the
whole body of water roils and smokes, like a Blakean vision of Hell, and
from outside the building you can see the shadows of the demons who
are taking shape. But the scenes that can make a claim to be inspired
take place in the Kingston Falls movie theatre. It's an ingenious location,
since the mogwai have and they have multiplied so
to be in darkness,
lavishly that they fill the seats. The theatre is packed with these lewd
hipster dragons watching their gnomish counterparts on the screen in
Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; they pad up and down the
aisles, eating, laughing, commenting on the action, and tearing up the

place. And when the Seven Dwarfs on the screen start to sing "Heigh-
Ho," the mogwai join in the singing. In their enthusiasm, they spin
around on the projectors, and rip the screen to shreds. It's a delirious,
—
kitschy travesty a kiddie matinee in Hell. In some ways, Joe Dante
makes these antic demons as disgustingly adorable as Giz. They're Kat-
zenjammer Kids, and the action is all kiddie pranks in a cluttered comic
strip.

It's typical of Dante's paranoid-cartoon approach that after this

sequence Billy and Kate, who battle the demons in the theatre, must
rush to do battle again in the town department store. The moviemakers
have so many ideas that they lose track of their own central metaphor.
—
The mogwai can't stand bright light it kills them. The movie and this —
ties in with Kate's monologue — is a Christmas Eve dream of something
fearful coming down the chimney. When we see the mogwai at the
debauch in the theatre, we may reasonably expect the sun to come up
on Christmas morning and take care of them. The whole picture seems
to point to that ending, because when the sun comes up movies end and
our dreams are over. Gremlins just keeps going from one cartoon idea
to another. There's a lovely last shot of Keye Luke in a Christmas-card
landscape, but the picture has already self-destructed.
Gremlins is leaving something behind, though. Is Giz meant to be
as mawkish as I found it? A little boy who visits the Peltzer house fusses
over how cute it is; Giz makes a face and says something on the order
of "Oh, that again." Joe Dante is certainly conscious of the creature's

191
ickiness; Giz is designed to make everyone say ''Aw," and the whole idea
of the demons is based on Giz's repression of everything that isn't pure
and sweet. But Dante and his moviemaking team are aware of what
if

a soft bundle of anthropomorphic ick this creature is, how can they be
party to launching stuffed Gizmos into the toy stores of the world for
children to covet and caress? It's one thing for a movie to lead to the
manufacture of toys that delight the public because they delighted the
moviemakers. But selling Gizmos is a horrible joke.

eriodically, a new comedy is acclaimed for all the things it

wants to be but isn't. Last summer. Trading Places, with Eddie Murphy
and Dan Aykroyd, was greeted as "an event" and "a film of real wit and
imagination"; before that there were such pearls of wit and imagination
as Nine to Five and Foul Play. The bummer that's getting the tributes
this summer is Ghostbusters, which features Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd,
and Harold Ramis as parapsychologists. Thrown out of their cushy
university research jobs, these three doctors set up a business: they
advertise themselves as experts in trapping any ectoplasmic manifesta-
tions that may be bothering people. That's actually not a bad premise for
a scare comedy, and the producer-director, Ivan Reitman, has assembled
a good backup cast. What goes wrong? Aykroyd and
Well, the script (by
Ramis) provides Murray with funky lines, and he delivers them stun-
ningly; he can make even the simplest statement seem a gambit or a
—
fraud his pores ooze untrustworthiness. Murray is the film's comic
mechanism: the more supernatural the situation, the more jaded his
reaction. But nobody else has much in the way of material, and since
there's almost no give-and-take among the three men, Murray's lines fall
on dead air. (Sometimes the niftier the line the bigger the thud.) Part of
what goes wrong is in Aykroyd and Ramis were too self-
the script:
effacing —they didn't give themselves enough to do. A larger part, I
think, is in Reitman's directing. He brought off the 1981 Stripes, which
was a big jump up from his earlier comedy, the 1979 Meatballs, but this
time his work is amateurish. He may have been overwhelmed by the
scale of the production; at roughly thirty-two million, it's much more
ambitious than anything he has attempted before. The sets and special
effects include crowds watching as spirits come shooting out of the top
of a Central Park West apartment building and skies go purplish it's —

192
 a

big, all right, but it isn't very funny. When the ghostbusters the three —
have been joined by a fourth, a black actor (Ernie Hudson), in what
seems like an afterthought —rush to save the city from spooks, they're
in the converted ambulance they call an ectomobile, at the head of a
procession of police cars, with an escort of police motorcycles; the scene
is uncomfortably like the big convergence of vehicles in The Blues
Brothers. I think Reitman also made a mistake in choosing Laszlo
Kovacs as his cinematographer; the images have a heavy, overdeliberate
look —they're too rigid for comedy. The actors look impaled in Kovacs'
lighting.
The movie does have some things going for it: its logo, for one —
doughboy or a member of the trio
small, blobby ghost (like the Pillsbury
in Casper, the Friendly Ghost) who pops out of the "o" in Ghostbusters.
(I came lump of dough with Aykroyd, who seemed
to associate this
rather unformed, and soft and sleepy.) Mainly, the movie has its per-
formers. Playing opposite Bill Murray, Sigourney Weaver is a living
zinger. She has a great set of bones and planes, and she's blazingly alive;
she must be the least recessive beauty in movies. When she stands
talking to Murray, she's eye to eye with him, and she looks indestructi-
ble. She throws herself into her role here, but her scenes don't go any-

where, and just when she's building up her "possessed" number, and
seems ready to take off, the action cuts away. Annie Potts, who plays
the ghostbusters' receptionist, uses her wonderful self-enclosed quality;
she's wacked out in a petite, all-by-herself way. Rick Moranis, as a mild,
nerdy accountant, takes the role so far that you can see the raging,
bigger nerd at his core. And, of course, Bill Murray. His patent insincer-
ity makes him the perfect emblematic hero for the stoned era. He has
a genuine outre gift: he makes you feel that his characters are bums
inside — —
unconcerned and indifferent and he makes that seem like a
kind of grace. (He's always an onlooker; he won't commit himself even
to being in the movie.) What's surprising about him as a performer is the
amount of alertness and energy he pours into being burned out and
bleary and blase. He turns burnout into a style. Murray does his damned-
est in Ghostbusters, but he can't set therhythms of his performance the
way he has sometimes been able to on television, and the way he did in
Stripes and in Tootsie; he's left with joke on his face. It's possible that
the director's sluggish, kids-movie pacing is the reason Murray is get-
ting a terrific response from people who had queasy reactions to him
before; maybe he's so slowed down humor (and
that they finally get his
their laughter helps to fill To be more charitable, maybe
the dead spots).
audiences are roaring at him because he acts in a more outward and

193
endearing way than usual: waiting near the fountain at Lincoln Center,
he does a happy little hop, and after the majestic Sigourney has appeared
and agreed to go out on a date with him he lifts his arms toward heaven
and twirls.
June 25, 1984

SNEAKS, OGRES, AND THE D.T.S

i In the Dutch thriller

Gerard Reve, author of scandalous gothic

The 4th Man, the arrogant boozehound
tales, who has come to loathe
the younger man he lives with, and is broke, as usual, prepares to go to
the seacoast town of Flushing, where he is to pick up a fee for speaking
at the local literary society. At the Amsterdam train station, he sees a
muscular, boyish fellow, and every other thought is driven from his
mind. He chases after the fellow but isn't fast enough, and, irritated, he
boards his train. In Flushing, where the scene of his being introduced
to the gathering recalls Joseph Cotten's literary lecture in The Third
Man, Reve goes home with Christine, the blond widow who's the trea-
surer of the group. Reve has no particular interest in her he just —
doesn't want to spend the night at the hotel. Without much enthusiasm,
he allows her to mount him; the only thing he likes about her is the
boyishness of her body. The next day, she tells him how rich and lonely
she is, and propositions him to stay on and let her take care of him. He
isn't interested until, nosing around her things, he spots a picture of a
young man swimming trunks: it's her longtime lover, Herman the
in —
man he chased in the Amsterdam station.

The fun of The 4th Man, which was directed by Paul Verhoeven, is
in Reve's caddishness and in the nasty comic skill that Jeroen Krabbe
brings to the role. Krabbe played the second lead in Verhoeven's Soldier
of Orange, but this part is much trickier —the film's comic tone depends

194
on our being tickled by Reve's mean-spiritedness. The novel that the
movie is based on is by the Dutch writer Gerard Reve, who endows the
hero with his name and homosexual and his
also with his reputation as a
conversion to Roman Catholicism. Krabbe's Reve practically jumps for
joy when he maneuvers Christine into inviting Herman for a visit; when
Krabbe is sneaky he's reminiscent of James Mason in Kubrick's Lolita,
courting Mrs. Haze while he can't wait to get his hands on her daughter.
And, being a Catholic, Reve can be blasphemous: when he goes to church
and stands in front of a sculptured figure of Christ on the Cross, he
imagines that it's Herman hanging there, in his trunks, and, in ecstasy,
he pulls them down. The author of the novel has also endowed the hero
with his own methods as a writer. At the literary gathering, Reve ex-
plains that he takes incidents from life and lets his imagination embroi-
—
der them "I lie the truth," he says, clearly self-infatuated. All through
the movie, we see glimpses, like the Herman-on-the-Cross scene, of
Reve's embroideries; they're not conscious, they're involuntary imagin-
ings — omens, forebodings, warnings. They prepare him for situations he
Some of these dream glimpses
finds himself in just a little while later.
relate to Ingmar Bergman movies, some of them to Catholic symbolism,
and some to the hero's phobia about women. In his visions, Christine is
—
a deadly spider and castrater a witch.
The dialogue in this movie is sharp and pungent. Verhoeven and his
(usual) scenarist, Gerard Soeteman, are out to give us a shocking good
time, and the picture doesn't waste words. Reve is brusque and slangy,
and you can see him congratulating himself on his incredible rudeness.
He enjoys his affectations, too: after he has told Christine that he'll stay
on, he goes to a stationery store with herand takes a sensual delight in
loading up with such items as a huge supply of penholders and nibs. He's
the kind of articulate monster you can enjoy in a play or a movie but
would detest in a room. What keeps The ^th Man from being anywhere
near the class of The Third Man or of Lolita is that Christine isn't as
entertaining as Reve is. She needs to be a teasingly ambiguous figure,
who would have us puzzled about whether Reve is deluding himself that
she's a killer witch who has already dispatched three husbands or
whether his hyperactive imagination is alerting him to the truth. As the
part is played by Renee Soutendijk (she was in Verhoeven's Spelters and
was Eva Braun in the TV Inside the Third Reich), Christine is smooth
and completely opaque. Her yellow hair is in a sleek pompadour, and she
does indeed suggest a lithe, boyish strength, and no doubt her softly
draped red dresses are meant to signify danger. But she's disappoint-
ingly placid. Verhoeven and the scenarist failed to work out a psychol-

195
ogy for her; we never for a minute feel we understand Christine, and we
don't get much kick out of watching her (apparently) luring men to their
doom, because there doesn't seem to be any kick in it for her.
In a sense, the picture is locked inside Reve's phobia; there's no
distance between his view of Christine and the movie's. When Christine
stands naked before Reve and he blots out her breasts with his hands
and tells her that she "looks hke a beautiful boy," the scene has a campy
frisson. The women in the audience can enjoy his pleasure in the naughti-
ness of his remark as much as the men can. It's funny to hear Reve
express his homosexual preferences so languidly and, in his insolent
way, so openly. But Christine has no reaction to what he says, so the
movie comes across as no more than a tongue-in-cheek homoerotic fan-
tasy. This is a tale of a woman Bluebeard, yet the moviemakers show
no more curiosity about her than Reve does. The picture is locked inside
Reve's I'm-a-bad-boy-but-I-love-the-Blessed-Madonna Catholicism, too.
Verhoeven uses symbolism for sinister effects that have the
religious
—
tone of a put-on they have no more emotional weight than such bitchy,
semi-porno touches as Reve's imagining himself picking up a black bra,
twisting it, and strangling his apartment-mate lover with it. But the
structure of the story requires, finally, that we accept these effects as
genuine religious experiences, and this gives the viewer a slightly soggy
letdown at the finish.

Though the picture is amusing, there's nothing underneath its calm,

pseudo-modernist surface —the musique concrete during the opening
credits (while a spider devours its prey and crawls over the face of the
The Third
crucified Christ), the frontal nudity, the creamy, intense color.
Man and Lolita have a dirty, glittering obsession underneath. But when
The 4th Man is over it's really over. And if you think back on it at all
the only life in it is in Jeroen Krabbe's performance. He really loves
playing a worm, and he loves the scenes in which Reve exhibits his sleazy
savoir faire. Herman turns out to be a plumbing contractor who's eager
to hear about the sex lives of celebrities; he's a self-righteous bore, but
he isn't boring to Reve, who sits back and skillfully dishes up the dirt.

rith Leonard Nimoy as the director and a script by the pro-

ducer, Harve Bennett, the Starship Enterprise keeps plugging away

196
through space in The Search for Spock. This one is really
Star Trek III:

only for Trekkies; others are Ukely to find it tolerable but yawny, and
to be worn down by the long mourning period for Spock. The crew can't
get over his death: he gave his life to save theirs in Star Trek II: The
Wrath of Khan, which ended with his casket's being sent to the newly
created planet, the paradisiacal Genesis, where, the audience could as-
sume, he would be reborn. But this new film seems to take a churlish
attitude toward its lighthearted, delicately self-mocking predecessor;
almost vindictively, the new film requires that Genesis disintegrate.
Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) and his venerable crew must steal the
now mothballed Enterprise and fly to the cracking-apart Genesis to
rescue Spock —whatever form he's —and take him home to Vulcan.
in

Along the way, they have to fight off a bunch of ogres whose brains
appear to be on the outside of their foreheads; these barbarians, who
suggest Viking aeronauts, are called Klingons, and their Lord is the
funky Christopher Lloyd (of the TV series "Taxi"), who manages to be
droll despite the absolute nonexistence of comedy scenes in this movie.
Star Trek III does have its share of eccentricities: the Klingons, who go
in for droopy Mongol mustaches, lean their yucky foreheads close to
each other and talk in hoarse, conspiratorial whispers even though
they're out in space. (They hiss, like old cattle-rustling villains.) And
every once in a while the music makes a pathetic stab at working up our
emotions.
Directed by a Vulcan, the picture is achingly prosaic and so clumsily
staged that when Kirk's young scientist son is killed it looks as if we're
being fooled and he'll The stoic Kirk, preoccupied
turn out to be fine.

with regenerating Spock, shrugs off the loss, and the team moves on to
Vulcan to try to unite Spock's body with his logical mind, which has
somehow got "melded" with the sentimental thought processes of Bones
McCoy (the likably silly DeForest Kelley). The mind-unmelding cere-
mony is conducted by a Vulcan priestess, played by Judith Anderson,
now in her eighty-seventh year, and she gives the picture a sudden lift.
For a minute or two, we listen to a voice that's so commandingly intense
it's scary. (This is not the voice of someone you'd want for an enemy.)

Anderson wears robes that might have been designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright in his Incan Art Deco period, and she stands very still an —
imperious, predatory bird of a woman. She brings a spot of high style
add to her grandeur. When the
to this movie; her huge, pointy ears only
ceremony is over and Spock, his mind restored, is once more the glum
Nimoy, it's not an occasion for dancing in the streets.
Nicholas Meyer, who directed Star Trek II, gave the longtime mem-

197
 —

bers of the crew of the Starship Enterprise a chance to loosen up and

have some fun with their and their performances had a little wit.
roles,

They didn't come across as such bad actors. But Nimoy gets them back
to a liturgical reading of their lines, and you can't help feeling that
there's a special vacuity about this crew. At least part of the cause must
—
be the collection of hairpieces they wear each neatly and individually
styled but with no organic relationship to the lined, thickening faces
underneath. It can't be true, but it certainly looks to be true: empty is
the head that wears a hairpiece. These actors have become puppet ver-
sions of themselves.

Ihave friends who swear by the greatness of Malcolm Lowry's

—
Under the Volcano by the density and expressiveness of its language.
I don't know whether the lack is in me or in the novel I've never been —
able to get through it. But in the case of the new film version, directed
by John Huston from a script by Guy Gallo, I'm reasonably sure that the
fault isn't mine. What we see on the screen is Albert Finney wrestling
with a big role: the self-destructive Geoffrey Firmin, who was formerly
the British Consul in Cuernavaca and is still a resident, as he lurches
about the city for twenty-four hours, during the Day of the Dead festivi-
ties — it's November 2, 1938, which is also the last day of his life. There
are two other main characters —Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset), the actress
wife, who left the drunken, impotent Firmin a year ago and divorced him
but now returns, and his callow Marxist half brother Hugh (Anthony
Andrews), a journalist whose affair with Yvonne precipitated the
breakup of the marriage. But Finney is essentially alone on the screen
—the other characters are just there for Firmin to talk to or to react to.

The by a drunk, is widely regarded as the best novel

novel, written
ever written about a drunk. That may be why it has attracted so many
adapters and directors in the years since it was published, in 1947
more, it is generally agreed, than any other book. In 1957, Lowry, sotted
and depressed, swallowed an overdose of Amytal and drowned in his
own vomit. That is, essentially, what Firmin is doing throughout the
movie. But Lowry had a mystique about alcohol: he somehow got himself
to believe that this self-destruction (and only this self-destruction) would
give him access to the states of mind necessary to set words on fire. To
put it bluntly, his hero Firmin has come to Mexico to see into the heart

198
 —

of darkness and write an unwritable book. (Actually, Lowry proved that

it wasn't unwritable — only, for some of us, unreadable.) Artists who
take drugs have often claimed that they need the brilliance or the rush
that drugs give them, but this sort of claim is less common among
an alcoholic pays a physi-
alcoholics, probably for the simple reason that
cal price almost immediately —
he becomes hung over, smelly, and dis-
gusting even to himself. But Lowry, with his mysticism, saw Firmin as
a staggering drunk who was also a high priest. Lowry gave Firmin the
status of a visionary. He's meant to be a dying giant —not just a man
destroying himself but a genius with the courage to destroy himself so
that he can transcend the limits of ordinarymen and see things more
The young literary critic Charles Baxter has speculated that
intensely.
—
arson was Lowry's metaphor for creativity he wanted to capture the
way things radiated just before they turned to ash. (The volcano in the
title isn't only a reference to Popocatepetl, the Cuernavaca tourist at-
traction.)
It's not surprising that the adapters and directors who were at-
tracted by the novel were defeated by —and
it I include Huston and Guy
Gallo. If there is a good way for a movie to suggest Lowry's conviction
that art requires the alcoholic self-destruction of the artist, the team that
worked on this production hasn't found For the story to mean any-
it.

thing resembling Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, we would have

to see something of what Firmin —with his psyched-up consciousness
perceives. Possibly, would have had to be done by visual metaphors,
it

or by techniques comparable to the hallucinatory intensifications of the

landscapes in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Mexico
itself might have had to be visualized as a phantom country of the

—
heightened senses a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't country. The Mexico
provided by Huston and the cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa, and the
production designer, Gunther Gerzso, has an unvarying visual texture
— the images are statically composed, with a deep-toned flossy and "ar-
tistic" clarity. You could give these images high marks for neatness (and

hollo wness). They suggest the kind of perfectly detailed stage sets that
make you not want to see the play, and when Firmin strays into a low
—
dive a cantina that's a hangout of thieves and Nazis it has its quota —
of carefully positioned dwarfs and trans vestites. All that the film does
is take a literal approach to the novel, as if it were no more than an

account of the final binge of a drunken former consul who becomes

suicidally careless and gets himself killed. Since there's almost no at-
tempt to find equivalents of Firmin's visions or of the excitement of
Lowry's passages of incendiary prose, the film puts a terribly heavy

199
burden on Albert Finney. The drama has to come from his performance,
in a big yet virtually unwritten role.

It isn't what Firmin says in the novel that expresses his conscious-
ness; the whole inchoate novel does it. Trying to suggest what isn't in

the script, Finney can't help making us aware that he's giving the role
more than his best shot —that he's pushing too hard (frequently in
closeup) —right after his big, pushing performance
The Dresser. (This
in

is two movies in a row in which everything is geared toward his death.)

In some scenes here, he still has the actorishness that he built up for
The Dresser: he overuses his facial muscles, the way he did in his parody
of Donald Wolfit; even when he's not talking, his mouth is busier than
anything else in the picture. And in a scene at a benefit for the Red Cross,
where he takes the microphone and makes a crazed, incoherent speech,
he still looks like Wolfit. (Sometimes, he can't help recalling Dudley
Moore's drunks.) In The Dresser, Finney could at least use his humor
and his flair for satire, but here, with the exception of a few bits and one
scene involving a conversation between Firmin, who has passed out in
the middle of the street, and a pip-pip Britisher (James Villiers) who
stops to help, the movie is bereft of comedy. And the role doesn't take
over Finney the way his role in Shoot the Moon did. There was no
—
forcing in that; he was caught up in it he and Diane Keaton were acting
together. Here it's a long monologue of a performance, with too many
stops pulled out. He looks right for the part: he has a massive head, and
he's barrel-chested and thick-necked, like Lowry; bulky and bull-like,
he's believable as a man with the constitution to drink night and day and
to hold himself straight even when he's walking around in a stupor.
—
Finney isn't bad he keeps giving us emotional shifts and inflections.
And when he's with Jacqueline Bisset he seems to be built on a different
scale from her; on the bed with her, humiliated by his impotence, he
suggests the bloated carcass of a beached whale. But there's nothing he
can do to suggest what Lowry meant when he said, in the posthumously
published Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, that "not an
hour, not a moment of my drunkenness, my continual death, was not
worth it: there is no dross of even the worst of those hours, not a drop
of mescal that I have not turned into pure gold, not a drink I have not
made sing."
we try to accept the movie not as an adaptation of Under the
If
Volcano but simply as the story of a drunk, that doesn't work, either,
because the movie is inept in a peculiarly literary way the dialogue —
doesn't sound like living people talking. And the score, by Alex North,
ages the material, gives it a terrible kind of pompous emotionalism. I

200
retained some small hope that the picture might get going until Andrews
(familiar to audiences from his starring role as Sebastian Flyte in the TV
"Brideshead Revisited") appeared; then everything sank. He gives an
arch, acting-by-the-manual performance; each flicker of expression sig-
nals an obvious meaning. Firmin couldn't be upset by his wife's adultery
with this twit —
would have to be laughed off as a joke.
it

Thinking about this movie and about Lowry (who was the first to try
to adapt the material to the screen) has made me feel ashamed of not
finishing the book. The pages in my copy have yellowed; I mean to get
back to it before it disintegrates.
July 9, 1984

ETHNICS

1 Pope of Greenwich Village is like a doughy plum cake

\he
with wonderful plums sticking out of it. The plums are the performers.
—
The movie has colorful "ethnic" dialogue Italian and Irish by Vincent —
Patrick, whose script is based on his 1979 book, and the actors run with
it. One of them, Geraldine Page, as a crooked cop's tough, caustic old

mother, does more than that: she exults in it, and she gives an enthrall-
ingly hammy performance, smoking, boozing, and picking horses. She
seems to be from another picture, and the tension she brings to her two
scenes is jolting. But viewers (me included) are delighted, because there
have been scenes with no tension at all. The acting and the overacting—
— gives The Pope of Greenwich Village its only vitality. Directed by
Stuart Rosenberg, it's a moderately entertaining bad movie (and of
considerably more interest than the novel).
Like Richard Price's Bloodbr others, Vincent Patrick's book was
influenced by the Martin Scorsese film Mean Streets, and Patrick's
work, too, reads like a movie. But Patrick's talent is almost all in his ear,

201
and the story is no more than a tabloid-style, broad-humored variation
on Scorsese's subject: the ties among small-time Catholic hoods. The
half-Italian, half-Irish Charlie (Mickey Rourke) and the Italian Paulie
(Eric Roberts), distant cousins and pals from childhood, work for a
living, but they expected to grow up into a world of unimaginable luxury

and they're proud of knowing how to spend money. So they're always

in debt, and caught up in chiselling and part-time thievery. Charlie is the

more responsible of the two. He explains his fondness for Paulie in terms
of tribal loyalty, and he's protective of Paulie, who at times seems so
ignorant you could take him for retarded.
At first, Mickey Rourke seems in fine control of his character. He
has a confidential, flirty softness in his voice and an angelic, secret smile;
his lips dimple up at the corners —
he seems to be smiling in his head. The
discreet Charlie is the maitre d' of a Village restaurant, and he enjoys
being suave and professional, and puckering up to signal a kiss to the
hat-check girl across the room. He's a smoothie with women it's easy —
to see what has attracted Diane (Daryl Hannah), Wasp girlfriend
his
from Maine, who teaches aerobics. Eric Roberts' Paulie, who holds his
job as a waiter because of Charlie but skims so much off his checks that
he gets both of them fired, is a thin, nervous, jumpy mess, and the
performance may seem irritatingly mannered. Besides, you can't help
dreading the violent consequences of the stupid robbery that he involves
Charlie But whether through the fault of the director, or the way
in.

Charlie's role is written, or Rourke himself, Charlie doesn't appear to

have enough interior life to sustain audience interest. He's slightly with-
— —
drawn maybe a little passive and he lets the babbling, crazily extro-
verted Paulie talk him into things. Then, when he's disgusted with him-
self for having let Paulie louse up his plans, he bops Paulie, slapping him
around in the manner of the Three Stooges. It's a tiresome, unpleasant
—
reflex^a limited man's reflex and he uses it repeatedly, without varia-
tions (which suggests that Rourke is a limited, repetitive actor). When
Diane walks out on Charlie, he punches the wall in rage and dismay, and
his readiness to explode seems no more than a convention of the genre.
Rourke's light, soothing vocal range works against these explosions;
—
when he goes into a rage, nothing ever snaps there doesn't seem to be
anything in him that could snap. His rages are polished. And we don't
feel that he really has all that much pent-up energy —that he's keeping
the lid on something. Rourke has humor (which counts for a lot), and he
plays his scenes several shades cooler than they require —that's his
style. But he isn't as daring here as he has been in smaller roles (the
professional arsonist in Body Heat, Boogie the girl chaser in Diner),

202
and he doesn't take himself a quarter of an inch further than he has gone
before. He may be miscast: his Charlie seems too rational to put up with
Paulie. Probably what we need to see is that although Charlie thinks he's
hip and in control, in the back of his head he has the suspicion that maybe
Paulie's demented ideas will work, and so he's the eternal patsy some- —
thing in him wants to be caught up in folly,
Paulie is childishly (and pitifully) dependent on Charlie, but it's clear
—
that Paulie has a spark that he's the leader (even if only in getting them
in trouble). And Eric Roberts' weird, out-at-the-edge performance gives
the picture whatever drive and point it has. Roberts dominates the film;
what goes on between the two actors seems to parallel what goes on
between the characters. Roberts is trying for something outre: he goes
way past realism into a stylized, exaggerated clowning. Itmay be that
Rourke's cool is what makes Roberts go so far; Roberts may be trying
to shake Rourke up, so he'll have something to play against. His head
covered with tight curls, he has an androgynous quality here, and in his
tight, hot-shot clothes (no hip pockets, tan shoes) he looks like a Pre-
Raphaelite pimp. His manner is often heady and nonchalant; his words
seem to get tangled in his upper lip, but when they come out they're
bitchy and persnickety. And there are scenes in which, despite Charlie
and Paulie's tough-guy talk about women and their ritualized contempt
for "fags," Paulie calls up echoes of Chris Sarandon's nakedly desperate
candidate for a sex-change operation in Dog Day Afternoon. Roberts
keeps us guessing: Are these overtones a deliberate choice, or is it that
he was having fun with the cliche role, trying to make it work, and it
went nelly on him? Two macho Italian fellows aren't likely to walk with
their —
arms around each other in the Village especially in the Village.
Are we supposed to see Charlie and Paulie's arm-in-arm saunter as a
put-on of some sort? Are the actors kidding buddy-buddy movies, or are
Charlie and Paulie pretending to be so supremely confident of their
masculinity that they can tease the world? Paulie's head is held high; he
sniffs the air like a dowager. There's no way to be sure how we're meant
to take this display.
Roberts succeeds in bringing off some wild effects, though. When
Paulie gets scared, he has to urinate. With his bloodshot eyes and anx-
—
dog a neurotic little poodle that needs
ious expression, he's like a toy —
to go out all the time. He
from leg to leg, in the nervous rhythm
shifts
—
that he has anyway this is just another part of him that gets jazzed up.
Roberts made me laugh in surprise several times, and I don't know of
any other young actor who could give this role the final, impervious-to-
reason charm that he does. I don't know of anyone else who goes so far

203
from himself in a role. He's barely recognizable as the star of King of
the Gypsies and Raggedy Man and Star 80; all I remember from King
of the Gypsies is that he glowered proudly, but, whatever the range of
his other roles, he has always been at its extreme end, reaching further
into the character than seemed possible. In Raggedy Man, he went to
—
an extreme openness he went to the heart of openness. Here, as Paulie,
he goes to the heart of gaga optimism. Roberts doesn't keep his feet
firmly on the ground; that's what makes him initially hard to take. But
he's probably the most imaginative high flyer of the younger actors. He
has the audacity to risk going too far for the audience, and maybe even
bewildering it. I've heard people say that he spoils
this picture, but if he
had given a performance the picture would be deadly.
less original
Bad as the movie is, it's fun to watch these two Rourke being —
fatherly and tolerant, Roberts spinning off into space. The Pope is like
those old studio-factory melodramas, where you can't figure out what
the director and the actors had in mind, or whether it was anything like

the same thing. In one scene, Charlie, worried about Paulie's health,
fixes him food and feeds him, and the scene goes on long enough to make
you wonder if Stuart Rosenberg is trying to suggest a deep, loving
attachment between the two or if he's just being clunky. Scene after
scene makes you uneasy, because the director doesn't appear to take into
account the meanings that are floating around. (Checking in the book is
no help; you just get into a book-movie Rashomon. ) The picture is by no
means carelessly made; a great deal of planning has gone into the thriv-
ing Little Italy atmosphere, and the imagery (John Bailey was the
cinematographer) has a shine, though the interiors may be a bit too
elegantly dark and "rich." But The Pope is a pointlessly handsome
production; it's a shallow movie that gives itself heavyweight airs. It's

a candied Mean and impersonally paced; it has no tem-

Streets, evenly
—
perament it doesn't even have any get-up-and-go.
That's what the performers help to compensate for. As the detest-
able lump of a Mafia boss Bedbug Eddie, Burt Young is better than he
has been in years; sitting at a table in the back room of an Italian men's
"social club," he leans forward to conduct an inquisition on Paulie, and
his mad little porcine eyes are outposts of Hell on earth. As Geraldine
Page's conniving cop son who has put in his twenty years on the force,
Jack Kehoe has just the right kind of cagey, callow anonymity. Tony
Musante, M. Emmet Walsh, Philip Bosco, and several other actors have
big moments. Kenneth McMillan, who has slimmed down about fifty
pounds, has been handed a role that's drenched in pathos: he's Barney,
the old safecracker who needs to pull off one last job in order to provide

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for his retarded son. Honorable actor that he is, McMillan dries it out;
it's a sly, astute performance —the ex-con Barney lets others speak first

while he gauges how far he can trust them. The director, though, can't
resist shooting the scenes so that you'll admire McMillan's demonstra-
tion of restraint. Stuart really like actors who pour it
Rosenberg must
on; when they have too much pride, he pours it on for them.
He doesn't do much for Daryl Hannah, though. She isn't given
anything more to play than Diane, the aerobics teacher. That's the kind
of occupation moviemakers select for a woman now, because it allows
them to get some movement into her scenes; Diane is a blank — essen-
tially, she's a physically stronger version of the sexy schoolmarm of
earlier movies, and that makes Charlie and Diane a dull pair. Maybe the
moviemakers think blankness is Diane's character that could be how —
they think of a Wasp (without considering what goes on underneath). In
the scheme of the movie, Diane stands for hypocritical Wasp preachi-
ness. But shouldn't she at least have some qualities that make it appar-
ent why the guy who is attached to Paulie is also attached to her? It
would certainly be livelier if, say, Diane were as much of a nut case as
Paulie but in a hidden way and in —
an opposite direction if, maybe, she
were as security-mad or as respectability-mad as Paulie is blithely un-
aware that there's a next week. (Teaching aerobics might be what a
security-minded girl would feel safe in, on the theory that people will
always need to be healthy.) Actually, Daryl Hannah does have a big
scene, but it's not a display of her acting. Diane has a conversation with
Charlie while she's standing in front of a mirror trying on clothes. That
way, each time she's down to her undies the audience gets to see her fore
and aft. When Charlie and Paulie fuss over their outfits, the scenes are
about what clothes mean to the characters; the Daryl Hannah scene is
about giving the audience an eyeful. The director's obvious manipulation
has the quality of a joke being played on the actress, but the joke
backfires, and part of the audience laughs —
not at Daryl Hannah, who's
so great-looking that she can take people's breath away, but at the lack
of finesse of the director, who couldn't find a better way to show her off.
A pretty good case could be made that The Pope of Greenwich
Village is really a consumer-oriented movie about food and clothing. It's

full of scenes featuring people eating or talking about eating. Paulie the
bum is an aesthete on the subject of cuisine; he's haughty and offended
when he's expected to eat ordinary fare. And the film opens with Charlie
putting on his sharpest duds to go to his job at the restaurant; the music
that accompanies him is Frank Sinatra's record of "Summer Wind," with
that Sinatra phrasing that sounds so sexy and easy. The connection is

205
 —

made for us: that's the —

way CharUe wants to feel he wants that buoy-
ant, graceful high. And that's how Paulie does feel when he's dressed
in spiffy leather and eating fine food and sipping good cognac; every-
thing else goes out of his head. These two hoodlum connoisseurs of food
and fabrics are soft; they're infantile narcissists who steal so they can
dress up. And with so much attention given to Charlie's and Paulie's
coquettish wardrobes, there may be some comedy in the fact
potential
that Diane is in leotards most of the time. Part of what makes this a
contemporary movie is that Charlie and Paulie care more about what
they're wearing than the women do. Diane doesn't need to worry about
clothes.
July 23, 1984

THE WOMAN QUESTION

'hen Henry James wrote The Bostonians, which was first

serialized in The Century Magazine and then published in book form,
in 1886, his sentences hadn't yet hit the grand stride of his later manner.
His writing wasn't as imperturbably cadenced as it was to become in the

maniacal, formal perfection of the novels he brought out after the turn
of the century (The Wings of the Dove in 1902, The Ambassadors in

1903, The Golden Bowl in 1904). It's easier to recognize the greatness
of those later novels: they are so circumspect and finespun they're al-

most abstract. You can get heady from the rarefied air. And even those
of us who take an intense pleasure in their super-subtlety can recognize
that there's a kind of battiness about them. It's James's battiness that
we come to love, breathing to the roll of those arch, loony sentences
seem to constitute a world of their own. The
equilibristic feats that
Bostonians has a more earthly kind of greatness. Set in the period after
—
the Civil War, among the abolitionists, who are now it's 1875 turning —
206
their energies to the emancipation of women, it's a wonderful, teeming
novel, with darting perceptions. It's perhaps the most American of
James's novels —not just because it is set here but because all the char-
acters are Americans, and because Boston, with its quacks and mystics,
its moral seriousness and its dowdiness, is contrasted with New York's
frivolous "society" and the South's conservatism. James had immersed
himself in Hawthorne's work (he published his biography of him in 1879),
and he may have been influenced by Hawthorne's novel about the Brook
Farm socialists and idealists, The Blithedale Romance. He sees Boston
as the capital city of the high-minded —the freethinkers, whom he views
satirically, yet admiringly, too. The book is packed with rude (and de-

tailed) psychological observations, and with ironies that aren't quite

focussed —he's still in the process of discovering them when the story
ends. It's the liveliest of his novels, maybe because it has sex right there
at the center, and so it's crazier — riskier, less controlled, less gentle-
manly —than He himself seems to be pulled about,
his other books.
identifying with some of the characters and then rejecting them for
others. I think it is by far the best novel in English about what at that
time was called "the woman question," and it must certainly be the best
novel in the language about the cold anger that the issue of equal rights
for women can stir in a man. I first read the book when I was in my early
twenties, and it was like reading advance descriptions of battles I knew
at first hand; rereading it, some forty years later, I found it a marvellous,
anticipatory look at issues that are more out in the open now but still

unresolved.
The mind-lock of the central male character, the tall, distinguished-
looking, and intelligent young Mississippian Basil Ransom, is chilling.
Ransom thought women "essentially inferior to men, and infinitely tire-
some when they declined to accept the lot which men had made for
them." Their rights "consisted in a standing claim to the generosity and
tenderness of the stronger race." James is so sensitive to nuance that
every time Ransom puts on his mask of chivalry and addresses a woman
chaffingly, jocularly — —
gallantly you just about feel your teeth grate.
Impoverished by the war in which he fought. Ransom, who belongs to
the aristocratic, plantation-owning class, has come to New York to be a
lawyer and to try to repair the family fortunes. On a visit to Boston, to
make the acquaintance of a distant relative, the wealthy, ascetic blue-
stocking Olive Chancellor, he accompanies her to a meeting at the home
of a Miss Birdseye, an elderly leader of the suffragettes. The featured
speaker is a lovely, flaming-red-haired young Verena Tarrant, who
girl,

is the daughter of a mesmerist faith healer and has a golden voice and

207
a "gift" for inspirational oratory. Her father has to "start" her
he puts —
her in a semi-trance, but then she keeps going on her own. Verena has
been brought up as a perfect hypnotist's subject: she has been trained
to surrender her mind. Both Ohve Chancellor and Ransom are drawn to
her, and the novel becomes a tug-of-war between the repressed lesbian
Olive, who takes Verena into her fine house on Charles Street and
grooms her to be a spokeswoman for the emancipation movement, and
Ransom, who likes women to be "private and passive." He thinks that
the movement is a "modern pestilence," and he's only half joking when
—
he blames the Civil War on women the abolitionists, he says, were
"principally females." He is offended by the idea of Verena's speaking
in public —
he wants her for himself alone.
The book has a whole gallery of women, with James's tone ranging
from the affectionate (almost adoring) satire of the aged, selfless Miss
Birdseye (based on Hawthorne's sister-in-law, the abolitionist Elizabeth
Peabody), who is "in love . . . only with causes," to the caricature of
Verena's mother, the inane, ever-hopeful-of-attaining-a-high-social-posi-
tion Mrs. Tarrant. There is the diminutive Dr. Prance, a shorthaired,
no-nonsense Boston physician with a friendly, dry manner of speech; she
is absorbed in her work and has no inclination to listen to emotional

feminist rhetoric. And there is Mrs. Burrage, the shrewd, rich New
Yorker who arranges for Verena to speak at her home, because her son
is in love with the girl and, besides, the movement is the latest fashion.
Virtually everyone in the novel loves Verena. She's a darling. She's
one of James's incorruptible American innocents —the girls (Daisy Miller
is the most obvious example) who are so often his trusting, ingenuous
heroines. Ransom speaks for the author when he tells Verena, "You are
outside and above all vulgarizing influences." And like James's other
generous-hearted innocents — his fatally impressionable girls who fall in
love with the wrong men — she wants to please. James shows us the
mechanisms of the Southerner's manly will and certitude which would
make him attractive to a soft and trusting girl. Poor pale Verena, who's
only nineteen, is a conventional, perky, flirty girl. She's an asset to the
movement just because she's agreeable and pretty rather than forceful.
And it's because of her submissiveness she can't say no that she— —
becomes the battlefield for the battle of wills between Ransom and Olive
Chancellor, who, on meeting Verena, feels that she has found "what she
—
had been looking for so long a friend of her own sex with whom she
might have a union of soul." Alone with Verena for the first time, Olive
immediately asks, "Will you be my friend, my friend of friends, beyond
everyone, everything, forever and forever?" Verena, the mesmerist's

208
daughter, is, of course, willing. She's like an actress eager for a role. She
has an appealing manner but no content; she's an exaggerated version
of many men's (and women's) feminine ideal she's an empty vessel. —
Ransom and war over a vacuum. (At times, this book comes
Olive are at
close to modern magic realism; it's no wonder it was a terrible flop when
it came out.)
Olive takes on the task of educating Verena, and they study to-
gether —they study the history of "feminine anguish." James writes,
"Olive had pored over it so long, so earnestly, that she was now in

complete possession of the subject; it was the one thing in her life which
she felt she had really mastered." And she wants revenge: she feels that

men must pay. James is at his most devastating with the humorless Olive
Chancellor. He writes that "the most sacred hope of her nature was that
. she might be a martyr and die for something." And he shows us how
. .

Olive unconsciously coerces Verena while talking the rhetoric of free-

dom. Yet he comes to stare in wonder at Olive's quivering sensibility and
her capacity for suffering. She says, of not having the vote, "I feel it as
deep, unforgettable wrong. I feel it as one feels a stain that is on one's
honour." She develops such neurotic exaltation that even her creator is

impressed. In her intertwined folly and nobility, Olive, who has taken on
protegee after protegee, and had each one desert her and the cause to
which she has consecrated herself —always for a man— is the most he-
roic figure in the novel.
There's every reason in the world to read the book, and to do it

before you see the movie (so that you don't let the movie images saturate
what you read). The only good reason to see the film version is Vanessa
Redgrave's performance as Olive Chancellor. Her voice shaking with
emotion, she gives this woman who is "unmarried by every implication
of her being" mythological size. Physically, she's so much stronger and
riper than the tremulous fanatic of the book that she stands as proof of
the absurdity of women's position in the society. With her powerful neck
and broad shoulders, she's like a mature swan; she's gloriously neuras-
thenic. (And an actress who can be glorious in a role in which she never
gets to laugh is a miracle worker.) She brushes off Ransom's flowery
condescension as a minor indignity.
Vanessa Redgrave gives the film the force of repressed passion, and
I don't know how she does it with so little help. (My companion sug-
gested that she pulled the performance out of her skin.) The Bostonians
was produced by Ismail Merchant, and directed by James Ivory, from a
script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and although it's not as limp as some
of their other collaborations, they don't dramatize the great material

209
they selected, and Ivory doesn't shape the performances. Christopher
Reeve's handsome, mustachioed Ransom has too Hkable a presence; he's
wholesomely romantic, and when he delivers the rigid-minded, contemp-
tuous-of-women lines that James wrote, his crinkly smile and boyish
affability take the sting out of them. He's more Rhett Butler than Basil
Ransom. That makes him pleasant, dumb fun to watch, but the tensions
that are necessary to the theme don't build. His Ransom isn't bitter; he
isn't replaying the Civil War, determined that this time the South will

win. And you just don't feel the irony of the bird-in-a-cage life he offers
Verena. With Reeve as Ransom, that life seems rather jolly. I don't know
what to make of Madeleine Potter's film debut as Verena. Her plaintive.
Trilby-like Verena is certainly not the fresh, sparkling ingenue that the
material calls for; she'smore odd than anything else, and she's overcon-
trolled.Her pallor is rather depressive. (I've seen Potter on the stage and
have found her problematic there, too: she works hard, but it isn't acting,
—
exactly not yet, anyway; it's more like thoughtful pretending.)
Some of the other performers seem so right for their roles that you
may want to yelp in pain at the way they're wasted. Jessica Tandy could
do so much more with the angelic Miss Birdseye, and Linda Hunt is just
a shade away from bringing out the full ironic possibilities in Dr. Prance.
Nancy Marchand is luckier: as the New York society woman Mrs. Bur-
rage, she gets to play a long scene (right from the book) in which the
drama is allowed to develop —a conversation between Mrs. Burrage and
Olive Chancellor, with Mrs. Burrage trying to strike a bargain, suggest-
ing that Olive should encourage Verena to marry her son, as the lesser
evil, and as a way of keeping her in the suffrage movement, which the
Burrages will back with money and influence. Marchand's face perfectly
expresses the "detestable wisdom" that, according to James, Olive sees
in her; it's as if you'd looked into Mrs. Burrage's soul and a ravaged old
panderer returned your gaze. The only other performer who makes an
impression is, Wesley Addy, as Verena's ineffectual father.
surprisingly,
Dr. Tarrant, the mesmerist who doesn't have enough conviction or en-
ergy to be a real charlatan. Addy (who from some angles looks like a
fuddled version of Jean Cocteau) brings just enough grotesquerie to his
facial contortions —
Tarrant seems always to be on the verge of saying
something that no one will listen to. Other performances such as Bar- —
bara Bryne's Mrs. Tarrant, John Van Ness Philip's young Burrage,
Nancy New's Adeline (Olive's sister), and Wallace Shawn's newspaper
reporter, Mr, —
Pardon don't come through at all, or, as in the case of
Pardon, come through awkwardly, as if the lines were being read from
the script without ever entering the actor's consciousness.

aio
 The movie follows the book faithfully, except for an attempt at an
upbeat ending —a story-conference type of ending—to reassure us that
the movement will go on. (Is there some danger that we'll think it

stopped?) Until then, the film's worst mistake is that it's full of short
scenes in —
which nothing develops glimpses of Ransom walking in the
woods with Verena or standing on the shore with her at what's meant
to be Cape Cod. These glimpses are simply intended to carry the narra-
tive further —
they're like those vacuous montages of couples cavorting
in photogenic surroundings which were so common in sixties movies,
persisted into the seventies, and then finally seemed to be consigned to
commercials and MTV. They're filler in The Bostonians, and an embar-
rassment, because what is crucial to Henry James is that every scene
have its exact emotional weight. In The Bostonians, he hadn't yet got
to the point he reached in the later novels, where a single line of dialogue
would explode and reverberate back over everything we'd read; The
Bostonians has many explosions of meaning, and at the end there's a
climactic one, in which you'd have to be a fool (or a saint, like Miss
Birdseye) not to register that Basil Ransom isn't just expressing his
devotion to Verena, he's also skewering Olive Chancellor. That has been
part of his motivation from the start. He's sticking it to her.
Ivory's The Bostonians is the Henry James novel without the reve-
lations. And the movie's upbeat ending deprives Olive of her tragic
stature. But, in its own insignificant, washed-out way, it goes along
fairly inoffensively until the last sequence, when we're given the impa-
tient sounds of a large Boston audience that has come to hear Verena
speak and is being kept waiting. The shouts and stomping noises from
the audience are so unconvincing that the movie falls to pieces. The
whole last section is nightmarishly mangled; it's as if the director had
said, "Let's really foul this thing up."

lepo Man is set in a scuzzy sci-fi nowhere: it was shot in the L. A.

you see when you're coming —
from the airport the squarish, pastel-
in

colored buildings with industrial fences around them, though they don't
look as if there could be much inside that needed to be protected. The
action in the film takes place on the freeways and off ramps, and in the lots
in back of these anonymous storefronts and warehouses that could be

anything and could turn into something else overnight. It's a world

211
inhabited by dazed sociopaths —soreheads, deadbeats, and rusted-out
punkers. The young English writer-director Alex Cox keeps them all

speeding around —always on the periphery. There's nothing at the center.

We're not asked to identify with the teen-age Otto (Emilio Estevez),
the kid with a cross dangling from his ear who gets fired from his
supermarket job, goes to work repossessing cars, loves the excitement,
and takes off the cross, or with his clearly deranged mentor, the veteran
repo man Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). L.A. is the perfect setting for a
movie about men who take out their frustrations by confiscating other
people's cars; there's a definite element of realism tucked into this low-
budget nihilistic fantasy. It's a woozy comedy for people who will appre-
ciate the idea of the mean, gaunt Stanton's being called Bud, and of his
being anybody's mentor. (Or even just the idea of Harry Dean Stanton.)
Bud teaches Otto the repo "code," and points out that "not many people
got a code to live by anymore." That certainly looks to be the case.
—
There's no civility or courtesy left people kill for minor provocations
and casually dispose of the corpses. And though there may still be police
helicopters and clandestine government agencies, they don't seem to
connect to anything. The attraction of the movie is its friendly, light
tone, its affectlessness, and its total lack of humanity. Cox never once
slips — he never lets it get sentimentalized or organized.
Repo Man is far from a brilliant movie, though it takes off from one
—Godard's Weekend, the 1968 visionary satire that also dealt with cars
as possessions and the hostility that drivers have toward one another.
In some ways (especially at the beginning), Repo Man is an amateur's
try at Weekend. Produced by Michael Nesmith, who was one of the
Monkees, it's a little like something left over from the sixties that cheer-
fully moldered into the eighties. Cox may have picked up ideas from
Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and Zemeckis and Gale's Used
Cars (1980), but the film's catatonic, shoofiy humor is all its own. Cox
has underhand ways of being funny, and the jokes don't often jump out
at —
you sometimes they barely peep out at all, because of the film's
ramshackle ineptness. But the whole atmosphere of druggy burnout
gets to you. The characters include a scientist from Los Alamos who has
had a lobotomy and recommends it highly, a girl trying feverishly to
locate the aliens deposited by a flying saucer "before they turn to
moosh," and an acidhead philosopher in overalls (Tracey Walter, who
makes everything he does seem loco and rather wonderful); he tends
fires in garbage cans, and gets to deliver the film's only statement: "The

more you drive, the less intelligent you are." Robby Muller's cinematog-
raphy sustains the fiat grunginess of the conception, the sense of stagna-

212
tion; so does a song by the L.A. group called The Circle Jerks. The movie
gives you the feeling that you've gone past alienation into the land of
detachment. It takes place in a different dimension —a punkers' waste-
land where you never really know where you are, and nobody cares to

make things work, and everybody you see is part of the lunatic fringe.
A movie like this, with nothing positive in it, can make you feel good.
Augiist 6, 1984

THE CHARISMATIC HALF-AND-HALFS

star of
1 'm disposed to like Prince, the twenty-six-year-old pansexual
Purple Rain, because he is, as a friend of mine put it, "the
fulfillment of everything that people like Jerry Falwell say rock 'n' roll

willdo to the youth of America." I like the teasing sexiness of some of

hissongs of a couple of years ago ("Little Red Corvette," especially, and
—
"1999" and "Delirious" they have a piquancy), and I like the brazen-
ness that he shows at the end of this movie when, in a variation on Jimi
Hendrix's guitar bashing, he puts on his impish smile as he holds up his
own guitar and it ejaculates. But Prince the passionflower imp is only
intermittently in evidence in Purple Rain, which his managers produced
for him, and which in its opening week was the No. 1 attraction at the
nation's theatres —at the same time that his Purple Rain album was at
the top of the music charts. This custom-made movie, shot on location
in Minneapolis, where he lives, features Prince the vulnerable loner. As
a struggling musician known simply as the Kid, he's trying to break out
of the bondage represented by his parents' violent love-hate marriage.
His self-pitying black father beats his white mother, because he blames
her for his failure to achieve success as a composer. The moody Kid is

a tortured soul, who when he falls in love with Apollonia (played by the
Hispanic American actress Patty Apollonia Kotero) begins to repeat the

213
 —

pattern. But, of course, the love that is the source of his torment is also
the source of his redemption. The Kid learns to share with others, and
conquers the brute in himself (but only after several reels of apocalyptic
anguish). It's not difficult to see the attraction that the picture has for
adolescents: Prince's songs are a cry for the free expression of sexual
energy, and his suffering is a supercharged version of what made James
Dean the idol of young moviegoers —this Kid is ''hurting." And this
picture knows no restraint.
In his live performances, when Prince mimics Little Richard or Mick
Jagger, or whomever, he does it with a knowing, parodistic edge. And he
retains this knowingness in his screen performance. But the moviemak-
ers aren't skillful enough to use it; the movie is directed as if the maudlin
story it tells were all there is to the Kid. Prince, though, uses his flair for
outrageousness, and when you least expect it he will do something
petulant or flirty. Alone with the overpoweringly sultry Apollonia, whom
he presumably adores, he reacts to her light touch on his collarbone with
an ingenue's high, breathless ''Stop!" He's quite willing to pose as the
little-boy wallflower at the rock 'n' roll orgy, but he doesn't seem willing
to take seriously the plot devices that he had a hand in shaping. The poor,
struggling Kid is dressed in the neo-Liberace finery of Prince, the star
the skintight pants, the ruffled shirts with high flounces at the throat, the
spangled, embroidered vests, the white lace gloves, and the chains. He's
lighted,by the cinematographer Donald Thorin, like a Josef von Stern-
—
berg heroine a minx with sucked-in cheeks, pouting and making deeply
religious doe-eyes at thecamera from under a cluster of curls. When the
Kid supposed to be a failure as a performer at the Minneapolis club
is

where he and his group. The Revolution, are an introductory act and are in
danger of being fired for not giving the customers music they can respond
to, Prince is not about to put on a closed-in, selfish performance just
because the script calls for it. He whips those customers to a frenzy; he
struts and preens himself with the same sexual bravado that he shows
after the Kid has made his breakthrough.
This is a commissioned was directed by Albert Magnoli (who
film: it

also wrote the final scriptand was the co-editor), but Prince is in charge,
and he knows how he wants to appear like Dionysus crossed with a —
convent girl on her first bender. And his instinct is right: if he had
performed the role more realistically, the picture would be really sodden.
This way, his narcissistic, mock-shy pranks make the audience laugh,
and his musical numbers keep lifting the movie's energy level. (The plot
becomes a kind of shared joke between Prince and the audience.) Even
the songs that are undistinguished have a good hot beat and a jangly

814
plaintiveness and the punctuation of his falsetto shrieks and flourishes,
and the lament "When Doves Cry" has something more (although it's
presented as soundtrack music while the Kid thinks over his treatment
of Apollonia and his hellish home life, and we have nothing to do but
words, which are not its strong point). Prince's movements
listen to the
during his numbers are as provocative as he can make them, and near
the end he finally gets around to some orgiastic but perfectly precise—
— dancing. Maybe he doles it out so sparingly because he only has a few
—
moves but they're good ones. He's much more fluid than Mick Jagger
(whom he often suggests); he's very fast without being at all spastic.
He's a cutie when he dances.
Prince saves himself by his impudence, and the picture also in-

troduces a full-fledged young comedian, Morris Day. The lead singer of

the group The Time, he is cast as Morris the villain —the more conven-
tionalfunk rocker, whom the Minneapolis audience responds to. Morris's
music represents clowning and escapism; the Kid's music is meant to be
a working through of his conflicts. (And that's part of what's the matter
with Prince's lyrics; they're prosy, they explain what the Kid is suffering,
theydamn near have a program. "Maybe I'm just like my father, too
bold/Maybe you're just like my mother, she's never satisfied/ Why do we
scream at each other/This is what it sounds like when doves cry.")
Decked out in a glittering gold zoot suit and black-and-gold shoes, Morris
Day does his vain, lecherous routines with the ease of the top vaudeville
artists of decades past; he feasts his eyes on the mirror, giggling with
joy at how he looks, all lighted up like a Christmas tree, or he hurls his
magnificence into a waiting car —almost everything he does gets laughs.
And when he and his handsome Jerome Benton (who looks like
sidekick,
a dark Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.), dance to The Time's music they have a
loose, floppy grace. Morris Day suggests a Richard Pryor without the
genius and the complications. Part of the pleasure of watching him is

that his musical numbers are shaped; so is his performance —he uses
distance and tension. This is certainly a contrast to Prince, who doesn't
want us to react to a performance —he wants us to react to him, to his
greatness. It's clear (and infinitely regrettable) that he sees himself as
a sexual messiah, and wants to overwhelm us. He's trying to shortcut
his way by a show of naked self-expression. (You see
to artistic heights
a lot of this in work of the rock stars, such as Bruce Springsteen,
the
that the rock press takes the most seriously.) Prince is trying so hard
to show us sex as salvation that his musical numbers have no shape.
(Even on the Purple Rain album, the songs don't take form or come to
a satisfying finish; they maunder on.) The picture, being designed to

215
show that the Kid's way is the right way and that The Time's way is a
sellout, doesn't do much with the other characters. But as the Kid's
frustrated-artist father, Clarence Williams III, who has a horrendous,
completely unrelieved role, brings it off with conviction and earns the
audience's respect. The women Most of them seem to be
aren't so lucky.
selected for how hooker lingerie or hooker leather,
they'll look in
(Couldn't Apollonia just once have put on civvies?)
As a movie. Purple Rain is a mawkish fictionalized bio it's as if —
Lillian Roth (rather than Susan Hay ward) had starred in I'll Cry Tomor-
row, or Barbara Graham (rather than Hay ward) had starred in / Want
to Live! It's pretty terrible; the narrative hook is: will the damaged boy

—
learn to love? There are no real scenes ^just flashy, fractured rock-video
moments. The Kid and Apollonia meet via the camera: it zings back and
forth recording closeups as they look at each other, and that's all there
—
is it's like the way a cat and a dog meet in an animated cartoon. And

this movie goes beyond jump cuts to plot leaps. (Morris talks to his crony
Jerome about his designs on Apollonia before he has so much as seen
her or heard of her.) The director isn't a man of subterfuges: when he
wants you to share in the characters' steaming emotions he throws hot
red mood lighting on them; when Prince, doing his act at the club,
writhes on the stage floor in an ecstasy of longing and sings "I want
you," the director cuts to Apollonia watching teary-eyed with empathy
for his pain. Rock critics are being quoted in the picture's praise; one
suggests that it's the Citizen Kane of rock movies, another ranks it with
A Hard Day's Night. They've probably waited so long for a rock-movie
classic that they were keyed up to see something inspiring and innova-
tive in Prince's mere presence on the big screen. For several years, rock
writers have been saying things like "Prince challenges listeners to
examine their lives" and citing lyrics such as "Stand up everybody, this
is your life/Let me take you to another world/Let me take you tonight

/You don't need no money, you don't need no clothes/The second com-
ing, anything goes/Sexuality is all you'll ever need/Sexuality, let your
body be free." Prince may consider himself a revolutionary force be-
cause he (like his band) represents a fusion of the races and the sexes
and because his music is his own, self-taught eclectic mix. But there's
nothing revolutionary in Prince's wanting to be Susan Hayward and
commissioning a film to enhance his star mystique.
Purple Rain is a landmark of sorts, though. It's the black crossover
movie that many of us expected a decade ago, when Diana Ross ap-
peared in Lady Sings the Blues and showed the kind of talent that made
her seem a natural to attract both black and white audiences. (Although

216
Pryor has done it, that has been strictly in comedy.) But, as
turned out, it

Diana Ross wanted to be like the goddessy, self-glorifying white stars

that moviegoers were fed up with; she appeared in Mahogany and The
Wiz and lost the white audience. Purple Rain is Prince's bid for god-
dessy big-time stardom. In quality, it's about on a level with Mahogany.
But a new generation has come along that isn't jaded about old movie-
star self-absorbed emoting, and when Prince turns his life into a soap the
audience loves it. The Kid's sequinned psychobabble goes over big. He
learns to reach out and touch somebody's hand, and that frees him to be
a star. And, yes, he does it his way.
A movie like this can make you wonder: Weren't all the people who
learned to love better oif before?

%
\he Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai is a kind of fermented
parody of M*A*S*H, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the TV
series "The A-Team," and it made me laugh a lot. It's about mankind
learning to pass unharmed through solid matter —a nifty trick that re-
quires the use of an Oscillation Overthruster. The half-American, half-
Japanese hero, Dr. Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller), refuses to divulge
the secret of its operation even after he has been captured by the mad
genius Dr. Lizardo (John Lithgow), whose matted henna hair flies sky-
ward off his high forehead. Dr. Lizardo commands his underlings to
"take him to the Shock Tower," and when Buckaroo has been hooked up
to a diabolic torture machine, its wires as tangled as the colored paper
streamers at the end of a New Year's Eve party, Lizardo shrieks, "I
want the missing circuit —now!" To his assistants, he
cries, "More power
to him." Weller has a tall frame, but as Buckaroo he has petite, angelic
features, wide blue eyes that seem to be off on a secret faraway trip, and
a quirky, private smile; he's like a male version of Mia Farrow a jewel. —
The huge Lithgow, white-faced, with bloodshot eyes, dark, greenish
teeth, and a wild foreign accent (Italian-Icelandic?), is a comic-strip mix-
ture of Caligari, Eisenstein, Klaus Kinski, and a Wagnerian tenor.
The script, by Earl Mac Ranch, that W. D. (Rick) Richter, the highly
successful young screenwriter (Slither, Invasion of the Body Snatch-
ers, Dracula, All Night Long, Brubaker), has chosen for his directing

debut is a post-Altman jamboree, and he's a long way from being up to

it. He has picked some terrific performers (Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin,

217
and Christopher Lloyd are among them), but he doesn't characterize
them, and he doesn't bring out the baroque lunacy of the material.
Richter's directing is almost nonexistent: the plot (which includes an
inspired twist on Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast) is laid
down piece by piece, with nothing related to anything. Richter doesn't
seem to know what to do with the hip dialogue —he has no follow-
through. But though the characters don't develop and the laughs don't
build or come together, the film's flat-footedness is somehow likable. I

didn't find it hard to accept the uninflected, deadpan tone, and to enjoy
Buckaroo Banzai for its inventiveness and the gags that bounce off
other adventure movies, other comedies. The picture's sense of fun
carried me along.
There's more than enough going on. Buckaroo is a laser-wielding
neurosurgeon, a physicist, a jet-car racer (who goes right through a
mountain), and the leader of a team of seven dapper, whizbang Renais-
sance men called the Team Banzai. He is also, for relaxation, the top man
in a rock group formed by some of the members of theTeam Banzai and
called the Hong Kong Cavaliers. And there are so many different kinds
of villains and humanoids and friendly and hostile aliens —some of them
in the guise of Earthlings —that I'm not sure if we're meant to keep them
straight or if part of the comedy is that we can't sort them out quickly
enough to be sure what's going on. Some of the humor is in little doodles
of plot that appear to be deliberately left dangling —the way Richter
directs, you can't be sure. At times, the blandly presented inexplicable
events are definitely satirical. In the middle of the Cavaliers' high-decibel
performance at a New Jersey night spot, the hypersensitive Buckaroo
catches the disturbed vibes of someone in the audience. It's a girl sob-
bing drunkenly, and he sings a song to comfort her. That's how the
heroine. Penny Priddy (Barkin), is introduced. This is followed by a
lovely detail, of the kind the movie features: alone at her table. Penny
(not sufficiently comforted) takes out a gun to kill herself, but at the
crucial moment her arm is accidentally jostled; at the sound of the
(harmless) shot, everyone on the stage pulls out a gun.
The Team Banzai includes a platinum-haired fellow called Perfect
Tommy (played by Lewis Smith); he never gets to demonstrate his per-
fection. And maybe it's enough of a joke that Jeff Goldblum, who's done
up in full cowboy regalia (including the thickest chaps ever), is called
New Jersey. From what we see, the seven knights belong to a peculiarly
random interplanetary fantasy world. Mac Rauch and Rick Richter are
Dartmouth men, who met some years after graduation after Rauch, —
who was living in Texas, had published the novels Dirty Pictures from

218
the Prom and Arkansas Adios. Richter persuaded him to move to L.A.
and become a screenwriter (he wrote the script for New York, New
York, which was only partly used, and that film's novelization), and they
hatched the idea for Buckaroo Banzai almost a decade ago. (By the time
they got to film it, the tall, cool men of the Hong Kong Cavaliers acquired
New Wave hairstyles.)
The fantasy's origins are in a boy hipster's dreams of glory that are
almost pre-sexual. (Buckaroo is the only one on the team who even has
a girlfriend.) This may help to explain why the movie's cleverness isn't
at all campy: it has no sexual innuendo, and when Penny is in a sleeping-
beauty trance she is awakened not by a
by an electrical buzz
kiss but
from Buckaroo's nose as he leans over her. The teammates aren't really
integrated into the action, though. They're posed like a bunch of male
models, and at the end, when Penny walks with them chest held high, —
short, fringed shocking-pink dress swinging we seem to be looking at —
a trailer for the team's next movie before we've figured out what's going
on in this one. (Rauch's novelization is intellectualized pulp —sub-
Thomas Pynchon.) Some of the other actors have a little more to do. Carl
Lumbly is instantly likable as a friendly alien from Planet 10, who when
he comes to Earth on a mission disguises himself as a Rastafarian with
truly luxuriant dreadlocks; he's like a black Louis XIV. Matt Clark has
some bright slapstick moments as everybody's straight man —the
square Secretary of Defense, who keeps trying to persuade the Presi-
dent (Ronald Lacey, with a suggestion of Charles Foster Kane) that
authority should not be invested in the Team Banzai. A tiptop sixties-
style gag and the President is
follows: there's a nuclear emergency,
handed the papers to sign for a Declaration of War: The Short Form.
The picture went through a change of cinematographers (it was
completed by Fred J. Koenekamp), but it has a consistent visual style,
and that helps to compensate for the absence of directorial style. The
young production designer J. Michael Riva (he's Marlene Dietrich's
grandson) probably deserves some of the credit for the radiance that
keeps you attentive to the images on the screen. Every once in a while,
there's something awesomely whimsical up there, like shots of peaceable
bug-eyed aliens hovering above Earth in a spacecraft; they sit on ex-
tremely high stools (the pedestals must be a full eight feet) at what
might be tall bridge tables, and idle away the time while they wait to
hear the results of Buckaroo's daring efforts to save the world. (Visually,
they're magically right.) And
most of the action isn't clearly located
if

in this, too, becomes a joke when Jeff Goldblum turns to

time or place,
Buckaroo and asks, "Where are we?" It's the perfect Jeff Goldblum line;

219
he finally got to deliver it —and in the right movie, because unrootedness
is the picture's chief characteristic. If we can't quite figure out what
Rauch and Richter's angle of vision is, that may be because they don't
really have one. What they've got is an unmoored hipsterism —a wise-
guy love of the ridiculous.
Mostly, I laughed at John Lithgow, who brings the movie the anchor
it needs. It's a great relief to see him being a scurvy nut case after his
god-awful sincerity in Footloose. He's amazing here. Having been
locked away in a hospital for the criminally insane ever since his failed
attempt to go through solid matter drove him into the eighth dimension,
the homicidal Dr. Lizardo sits in his cruddy room —piled high with espio-
nage novels and the debris of his calculations and thinks over what he—
did wrong. Alone with his rage, he gives himself shocks on his tongue;
that's how he reenergizes himself. (The shocks stir his memory, and
there's a flashback to his crackpot effort to go through a wall and getting
stuck midway.) Dr. Lizardo's gargantuan warped mind appears to have
frazzled his hair, which is like a comic-strip artist's representation of
electricity coming out of someone's head, and he looks as if he has been
gnashing his teeth and gnawing on wormwood. When, having broken
out, he delivers a speech to a batch of aliens, he's the II Duce of the space
age. He brushes aside Earthlings who don't believe in his genius with
phrases like "Laugh while you can, monkey boy!" His scenes can make
you crazy with happiness.
August 20, 1984

ROGER & EDWINA, SHEENA,

AND UNCLE JEAN

1 loger (Steve Martin), the hero oi All of Me, loves jazz and has
been moonlighting as a guitarist, but he doesn't quite have the guts to

220
quit his squirrel-cage job as a lawyer and take his chances as a musician.
On his thirty-eighth birthday, he comes to a decision —the wrong one.
He'll give up his music, marry his fiancee—the boss's daughter— and
buckle down to work. On this fateful day, the boss assigns him the task
of going to the Beverly Hills mansion of the tyrannical rich invalid
Edwina Cutwater (Lily Tomlin), who wants to revise her will. Born with
a weak heart and bedridden from infancy, Edwina has been told by her
doctors that she has only a few more days to live; she has used her
immense wealth to research the situation and buy a new life, because she
hasn't had any fun in this one. She has imported a Tibetan swami,
Prahka Lasa (Richard Libertini), who will see to it that at the moment
of her death her spiritual substance is astrally projected into another
body. The curvy, long-legged frame she is scheduled to acquire belongs
to the obliging blond Terry (Victoria Tennant), her English stableman's
daughter, who has agreed to vacate it. Edwina instructs Roger to ar-
range for her entire estate to go to Terry, so that when she takes over
Terry's luscious physique she'll finally be able to enjoy her millions.
Roger, with his new commitment to the grindstone, is in no mood
to listen to Edwina's talk of fulfillment in another life. She squints in her
foxy, spinsterish way and tells him bluntly that she can come back from
the dead in a different body "because I'm rich." He thinks she's insane,
and refuses to revise the will. She throws him out, and she and her
— —
entourage Prahka Lasa, Terry, and all drive to the law firm's down-
town L.A. offices. There she talks to the boss, and he fires Roger and
makes the changes she wants. Her rage at Roger and the expedition to
the business district prove too much for her, though, and she expires
right there in the office. The poor flustered swami captures her spiritual
substance in his special bronze pot, but, caught off balance, he drops it
out the window and it klonks Roger, who's leaving the premises, on the
noggin. Edwina can't take full possession of his body, because he's still
in it; she enters into joint occupancy with him —
she controls the right
—
side of his body, he the left and though she talks to him all the time,
when he looks in the mirror. All of Me is
she's visible only a romantic
comedy about how these two antagonists in the same body fall in love
and find happiness.
This nifty premise, taken from an unpublished novel, Me Two, by
Ed Davis, is given classic American-comedy contours in the script, by
Phil Alden Robinson. It isn't an elegantly written script; at times it's

rather rudimentary and just sketches things But Robinson juggles a

in.

whole raft of major and minor characters and variations in the manner
of movies such as the Gary Grant-Constance Bennett-Roland Young

221
 —

Topper, or the Gary Grant-Irene Dunne The Awful Truth and My

Favorite Wife, or the more recent Tootsie. If the movie doesn't quite
—
have the snappiness of those pictures and it certainly lacks the high
spirits and dazzlement of a comedy such as The Lady Eve —the reasons
aren't in the structure. They're mostly in the casting of a couple of key
roles, and in the directing, by Garl Reiner.
He isn't a terrible director; he has an intuitive rapport with his funny
performers —
with Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin and Richard Libertini,
and with Jason Bernard, who plays Tyrone, Roger's black musician pal,
and with Madolyn Smith, the talented and stunning brunette (she was
the sophisticated lech in Urban Cowboy) who plays Roger's nasty and
extremely self-possessed fiancee. But Reiner doesn't have the instincts
of a movie director. The gags just don't seem to be thought out visually
in terms of the locations, and so we don't take an aesthetic pleasure in

them, the way we do in, say, the gags of the most visual of all comedy
artists. Buster Keaton. We don't even get the crackle of excitement that

we get in the work of a director like Sydney Pollack. The camera doesn't
seem to enter into Reiner's thinking; he uses it as if it were simply a
recording device. The only time he uses it expressively is in the film's last
—and best—moments. Reiner's The Man with Two Brains had more
visual —maybe because the cinematographer was Michael Ghap-
vitality
man, who brings some directorial instincts to his framing. This time,
Reiner is working with Richard Kline, who's often a virtuoso cinematog-
rapher but who probably, like most cinematographers, expects the direc-
tor to tell him exactly what he wants. Reiner, however, is thinking only
of what he wants from the performers. The camera setups here are
klunky, especially in the scenes at the mansion, and the film often has
the bland ugliness of sitcoms.
All of Me has charm, though, because of that yummy premise, and
—
because Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin who would have guessed it?
are a perfect match. Tomlin packs a personality and a whole language
of movement into her early scenes; she's a distinctive enough caricature
for us to intuit her presence when Martin simulates her being inside him.
And we can respond to the gradual thawing out of that caricature as
Roger begins to have tender feelings for this all but invisible woman. (In
most of the movie, except for her brief appearances in mirrors Tomlin
has to win us over with her voice.) Martin keeps her vivid for us. Right
after the astral potty lands on him, Edwina jerks him around, and at first
he recalls Roland Young's Topper being yanked about by invisible
hands. But Martin's peculiar wizardry is that he evokes Edwina so accu-
rately that he makes you feel it's she who's doing the yanking. He makes

222
you feel that he has two conflicting spirits in him, and then, by the
changes in his movements, makes you understand the developing har-
mony of those spirits. And he does some showier stunts, too. In a court-
room sequence, the exhausted Roger has fallen asleep, and Edwina
takes over his legal duties for him, trying to speak and gesture like a
man. So we get Steve Martin acting as Lily Tomlin acting as a gruff
Steve Martin. Though Martin is on the screen most of the time, there's
less of him than you may want, because he gives himself over to Ed-
wina's spirit so thoroughly that she seems to dominate the picture. (In
the courtroom scene, you're thinking of her while you're watching him.)
When Roger begins to understand how deprived Edwina has been
and how much she wants to live, they start to empathize with each other
— they've both been repressed, they both need a new life and soon —
they're a loving couple inside him.The scriptwriter has come up with just
the right bit of invention for what softens her: Roger hires his pals in
a Dixieland band to escort her remains to the burial site. She loves the
music, and she's touched by his wanting to give her cadaver a real
sendoff. When he borrows Terry's compact and looks in the tiny mirror,
he sees Edwina sniffling. Tomlin makes you know that Edwina really
digs being inside Roger's body with him. And, in one flash of mad inspira-
tion, Roger, who's trying to carry out Edwina's original plan and put her

spirit where it was supposed to go (into Terry), crashes a party by

disguising himself as one of the musicians; in dark glasses and a tuxedo,
and with his gray hair, he somehow turns into Gary Grant. It's only for
a second; when he takes off the dark glasses the illusion evaporates.
All of Me doesn't spill over in your mind the way some comedies do
— maybe because, despite the originality of the premise, the situation
(the heiress heroine, the hero's slightly antique commitment to the jazz
of an earlier era) feels a little dated, a little too "nice." Besides, every
scene that doesn't click takes a toll of a comedy. Dana Elcar, who plays
the boss, isn't a character —he's just smooth pink padding —and the
bedroom-farce subplot that he's involved in is halfhearted and un-
developed. The film also suffers a dip in energy after Roger succeeds in
having Edwina's spirit projected into Victoria Tennant's Terry. Victoria
Tennant is a perfectly beautiful woman, but she doesn't seem to have
a funny bone in her body. She doesn't have much crispness or enthusi-
asm, either. And when Edwina's spirit moves into Terry's vacated body
Edwina disappears, because Tennant isn't any different with Edwina
inside her; she's still a droop. There's probably an idea behind Terry's
equability in the early scenes, but Victoria Tennant doesn't put it across,
and it's depressing when she fails to suggest that Edwina has taken over

223
her chassis. This mild, minimalist actress seems born to be on television.
(Too bad that Madolyn Smith, who knows how to make guile and bitch-
ery funny, and who has a comic charge comparable to Lily Tomlin's,
didn't get a crack at the role.)
I wish All of Me were better, because it's so likable —
parts of it give
viewers the kind of giddy pleasure that is often what we most want from
the movies. I swami helmet (with
loved watching Richard Libertini in his
horns), which always a little tipsy on his head. As the totally disori-
is

ented Tibetan, he steals scenes without your ever catching him asserting
himself; it's as if he were helplessly funny. He has a real Libertini
moment when Tyrone and Prahka Lasa make music together: Tyrone
toots "All ofMe" on his sax, and the swami plunks a piano key at regular
intervals. And Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin are great unclassifiables.
The romance here is in the partnership of two performers who are both
uninhibited physical comics. They tune in to each other's timing the way
lovers do in life, only more so. They're unified in their love of comedy,
and in the last sequence — it's —they dance together and
set in a mirror
generate an explosive joy.

meena features some of the best animal actors ever to grace

a movie —an elephant, a rhino, chimps, They're dream
lions, leopards.
animals, and they form a peaceable kingdom around Sheena (Tanya
Roberts) in this lighthearted adventure film —a takeoff of the late-thir-

ties comic-strip heroine who was featured in a mid-fifties syndicated

whose white parents were killed
television series. Sheena, a girl Tarzan,
in an avalanche in in Africa, is raised by a hyper-
"Zambuli territory"
cultured black woman shaman, played by Elizabeth of Toro, the Cam-
bridge-educated lawyer princess who was Uganda's Minister of Foreign
Affairs before she had differences with Idi Amin and went into exile in
Kenya (where the movie was shot). The majestically beautiful Elizabeth
of Toro puts Tanya Roberts, late of "Charlie's Angels," in the shade, and
Roberts is too tense anyway; she takes her role a trace earnestly she —
seems afraid to loosen up and come to life. But she has the face of a
ballerina, a prodigious slim, muscular form, and a staring, comic-book
opaqueness. She gazes into space with eyes as exquisitely blank as if

they'd been put on with pale-blue chalk. She's a walking, talking icon,
and she's fun to watch.

224
 Trained by the ultra-chic shaman, Sheena can communicate tele-

pathically with animals and creatures of the sea and sky by pressing two
fingers on the center of her forehead and thinking hard. Legions of
waterbucks turn their heads at her unspoken command; tall birds unfurl
their necks and fly —
swarms of them wheel about and do her bidding.
—
When she draws a magic circle on the ground in the jungle as she does
to protect Vic, the American TV-sports-producer hero (Ted Wass), and
his cameraman (Donovan Scott) —
even the mosquitoes stay out. Her
zebra-striped horse is an amusing design element; it's like the horse of
another color in the land of Oz. It's an honorary zebra, and she rides
bareback, her blond hair blowin' in the wind. But best of all are her
guardians, padding around her like household pets: the amiable lion who
pokes his gigantic head into the jeep that the cameraman is in and
nuzzles him, the big chimp and little chimp who trot around holding
hands, the rhino who's always barging into scenes and backing out, the
enormous, stately elephant who, as the shaman prepares for death,
sadly digs a grave with its trunk (and not in a cutaway but in the same
frame with the shaman). Sheena's pets, who are said to have constituted
the largest shipment of animals ever sent to Africa, were trained by
Hubert Wells, the head of an outfit called Animal Actors of Hollywood,
and he is clearly the real hero of this project.
Written by David Newman (of Bonnie and Clyde and the Super-
man films) and Lorenzo Semple, Jr. {Pretty Poison, King Kong, Flash
—
Gordon), the script has a central reversal-of-sex-roles joke Sheena has
the skills to survive in the environment, while the city-boy hero is almost

helpless. Most of the time, Vic stands around lovestruck while Sheena
does everything; it's a role that could wipe out an actor, but Ted Wass

treats it and pleasantly. (He has his best line early on, when he
lightly
looks at Sheena and says, "Who is that girl?" It sounds just like "Who
is that masked man?") The script also plays with the conventions of the

white-goddess, queen-of-the-jungle genre, and it contrasts the Western-

ized style of the corrupt Prince Otwani (Trevor Thomas), who plays pro
football in the States, with the Zambuli tribal values represented by the
dignified shaman. (When Otwani, in his orange satin Cougars jacket,
bounds into the government offices, a secretary addresses him deferen-
tially as "Your Highness," and he responds with "Hi, baby." He greets

Vic at the airport with "Hey my man, what's happenin'?") The plot gets
going when Otwani murders his brother the king, who has been protect-
ing the Zambulis' land, and tries to grab it.
The director, John Guillermin, shows you Sheena's troops doing
battle— elephants pushing boulders at Otwani's invading mercenaries.
the rhino charging a tank, the chimps doing whatever damage they can.
Guillermin also has his pensive moments: he spends time at the edge of
a lake just looking at the water birds, and there are lovely shots of the
dusty plains and the African cities with their flowering plants. The
cinematographer, the celebrated Pasqualino De Santis (he shot Zeffi-
relh's Romeo and Juliet, Visconti'sDeath in Venice, and Francesco
Rosi's Three Brothers and his new Carmen), never starves the eye.
(When the animals are up close, De Santis finds surprising, rich colors
in them —
purple and yellow and silver swirling around each other the
way they do in an oil slick.)

Sheena is stilted, and on some level it isn't quite awake. It needs

some big climactic scenes; moments that could be emotionally powerful
are muffled (despite the use of fiery effects). But the picture never for-
gets its own silliness. When Vic, hiding from Otwani's mercenaries,
sneezes, a chimp in clear view of the soldiers covers for him with a
perfect matching atchoo. Children should love the animals and like the
—
movie there's a dizzy slapstick sequence of Sheena's guardian elephant
knocking down a prison (Otwani has made the mistake of locking up the
shaman), and there are magical images, such as the child Sheena sleep-
ing peacefully in the custody of a giant snake who is coiled around her.
The little Sheena has a jungleful of playmates, and when the lovely
shaman calls her "my daughter" it's like a title. For the riffraff among
us, there are throwaways such as Sheena's asking Vic to "tell me more
about the places you'fl show me where the jackals eat '21'?" And there
—
are gags such as having the villains toss the TV men's camera high in
the air and use it for skeet shooting. The friends I saw the picture with
stayed in a good mood; when Sheena was summoning the Zambuli warri-
ors and all the creatures of the jungle to fight against Otwani, one of
them called out, "Send in the tsetse flies!"

kids today are scum," says Uncle Jean, the dotty, broken-down

filmmaker played by Jean-Luc Godard in his latest movie. First Name:

Carmen. When his young niece. Carmen (Maruschka Detmers), who is
mixed up with a gang of terrorist robbers, comes to see him in his
hospital room and tries to entice him to make another film (so that the
gang can use it as a cover for a kidnapping), he says, "We should close

our eyes, not open them." Godard plays a dishevelled, grumpy old dear
 —

with stubble on his chin; he's the film's comic relief, muttering spacy
epigrams, whacking himself in the face, and generously giving his niece
whatever she asks for. She wants to use his apartment at the seashore;
he tells her it's empty but, it. Adapted by Godard and/or
yes, she can use
his collaborator, Anne-Marie Mieville, from Prosper Merimee's brief
novel that became famous when Bizet used it for his opera, this Carmen
is scored to Beethoven string quartets, with only a teasing echo of Bizet

— passersby are heard whistling bits of the "Habanera."

The conception of woman as a (helplessly) destructive, amoral force
is retained in the film, but it's presented in a French modernist way

as a given. We're not meant to question it, or even think about it. Carmen
meets her red-haired, long-jawed Joseph (Jacques Bonaffe) while she and
her confederates are robbing a bank where he works as a security guard;
smitten, he joins up with her then and there, and very soon (lifting a line
from Carmen Jones) she tells him, "If I love you, that's the end of you."
(He agrees, without so much as a "Huh?" or "What are you talking
about?") She's completely explicit: "What do I want in life? To show the
world what a woman does to a man." In this movie, either a man's
passion is frustrated or it's partly fulfilled, and then, when he's more
deeply aroused, he's crushed. Joseph has to kill the proud and defiant
Carmen because she has rendered him incapable of doing anything else.
The movie is about fate and impotence. Joseph tries to rape Carmen but
can't get an erection; Uncle Jean used to make movies, but his fire is
banked —
may not have gone out completely, but it doesn't flare up,
it

either. A —
man's passion whether for a woman or for movies is what —
destroys him. In the film's terms, it's Godard's it's man's fate to — —
be frustrated. (The picture carries the epigraph "In memoriam small
movies.")
Uncle Jean, the madman artist who can say anything (and have it

come out sounding witty and apropos), is a bemused self-parody. He's

a crank who knows he's a crank; at the same time, he's meant to be the
only voice of sanity. You can see that Godard enjoys playing his slapstick
role —he brings something like a twinkle to his cynical, scatological
utterances. Besides, he's the only performer in the movie who has a
clear-cut idea of what's wanted of him, and Uncle Jean is the only
character I could feel any connection to. The others (Carmen included)
are like actors seen walking through a rehearsal. They don't even make
much of a visual impression, because Godard as director doesn't have the
emotional bonds with them that he had with the performers in his movies
—
during the period from Breathless to Weekend 1959 to 1967. We were
entranced with Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean-Pierre

227
Leaud and Marina Vlady and many others because he was; the camera
seemed to look right into their essence. In First Name: Carmen, the
camera looks at the performers with the eyes of an apathetic stranger,
Godard uses a number of alienation devices. The crime scenes aren't
led up to: we're suddenly thrust into the scramble of the bank heist,
which is stageda brawl in a Western; it's a theatre-of-the-absurd
like
heist that negates any element of suspense or excitement. Or Godard
will give us voice-overs of people who are at a distance, and they'll be
delivering tangential remarks that relate to the director's past concerns
— remarks that are like family jokes. Or he'll interrupt the dialogue
track and leave us watching Carmen and Joseph moving their lips while
we hear the sound of the sea. Right after the bank holdup, he sends
Carmen and Joseph (tied together at the wrist) to a men's washroom and
keeps the image of Carmen sitting on the urinal totally sanitized, except
that a slob of a man is standing at the washbasins eating something like
jelly out of a container with his fingers —slurping it greedily, disgust-
But we don't need to be alienated from this movie Godard
ingly. — (as he
works now) can't help alienating us. We need to be drawn in.
His dissociation techniques here may be similar to the ones in his

earlier movies, but they're not used to wake you up. They're his way of
brushing the narrative aside. (It's no more than a few familiar signposts
of the femme-fatale genre anyway.) From the way this movie is put
together, we can guess that though Godard is resigned to having to tell

some sort of story, he feels it's an imposition on him —an irritation, or

worse. And he displaces the sensuality that people expect from a Carmen
movie onto images that have no specific relation to her story. Part of the
picture is set in the seaside town of Trouville, where Carmen and Joseph
use Uncle Jean's empty apartment (in a lackadaisical reminder of Last
Tango in Paris), and, throughout the film, shots of the waves breaking
against the rocks are intercut with Carmen and Joseph's travails; there
are also intercut images of the Paris traffic at dusk and of two Metro
trains crossing over a canal at night, and frequent views of the string
quartet that is practicing and (sometimes) performing the Beethoven we
hear on the soundtrack. (Actually, we're hearing recordings by several
different groups, and a ringer —the actress Myriem Roussel, who has a
small part — is put among the musicians to give the music a whimsical
tie to the story.) The movement of the sea and the flow of traffic have
a sense of mystery, and the musicians are photographed glowingly,
where the feelings are, and the scenes that
serenely. These cutaways are
we might expect to be voluptuous and hot are perfunctory, and some-
times depressive, sometimes coy. Initially, at least, a viewer may be

228
charmed by the mournful, unkempt Uncle Jean (who fumbles with his
slide rule the way Godard in public appearances sometimes fools around

we never get to know Carmen or Joseph,

with his pocket calculator), but
and their nudity has an impersonal chill, a vapid "frankness." When
Carmen stands, wearing only a red T-shirt, next to the seated Joseph,
his eyes are on a direct level with her pubic area —and so are the eyes
of the audience. Godard may be playing a few games here, but the point
of the scene is that Carmen is so contemptuously indifferent to Joseph
that she doesn't care if what makes the
she tortures him or not. This is

poor lug impotent: he's alone with a half-naked girl who treats him as
if he were part of the furniture. And the director treats both of them as

part of the furniture. Godard might almost be taking a weird sort of

revenge on the supple, pretty girl with a puffy lower lip and free, tangled
hair. He might be saying, "I'm not entranced by you. You don't drive me
crazy."
The women in his sixties movies did drive him crazy that's part of —
what gives those movies their lyrical zing. The 1965 Pierrot le Fou —
—
which was his real Carmen had such a poisonous masochistic charge
that the hero wrapped dynamite around his head and blew himself sky
high. And that, metaphorically, must be what Godard felt his relation-
ship to moviemaking was. From the way this new film is made, it appears
that Godard feels hurt on some deep level and he thinks the movies did
it to him —
and he's not going to let himself get hurt again. He won't
throw himself into this project. He gives the story a flat, dry treatment
and entertains himself with Beethoven and the rolling surf and with a
—
limited palette soft, somber tones and subdued golden ones that sug- —
gests the classics (but not of movies).
The surf has too
close a relationship to the ineluctable-fate aphor-
isms: used meaningfully (the pull of the sea, the power of woman),
it's

—
and so there's a redundancy here, and if I may be forgiven an old- —
wave banality. (After dunking us in the wet over and over, the film
actually has Joseph explain his passion for Carmen to the girl who's
playing viola in the string quartet by telling her that he is driven toward
Carmen by a force "like the tide.") In this context, even simple shots of
ships passing each other are banalized. Some of the images, though, are
redemptively beautiful: the nocturnal views of cars gliding out of Paris,
the moving white line of the surf at night —
an abstraction with no senti-
ments attached. And Godard keeps all his sets of images in motion: he's
the rare case of an artist whose command of his medium becomes more
assured as his interests dry up. Working with Raoul Coutard as cinema-
tographer, he gives you the feeling that he can do almost anything and

229
you'll keep watching it, mesmerized by the rhythms of sound and image.
But you may not feel very good afterward,
Godard's movies have always been self-referential, and this one has
links to his whole body of work (particularly to Pierrot le Fou, in which
he used Sam Fuller the way he now uses Uncle Jean, and to the 1975
Numero Deux), but it doesn't have the fresh, exploratory quality of the
sixties movies —the excitement of going back over earlier themes and
seeing new them. The references — such as the use of a
possibilities in
Tom Waits song that recalls Coppola's One from the Heart — seem
empty. The picture is Godardian in a way that is sometimes amusing but
makes us condescend to it, fondly —and, after a while, not so fondly.
Despite Coutard's ravishing lighting, it feels drained. I began to long for
the jazzy primary colors that gave Godard's sixties movies their Pop
clarity,and for the contemporaneity that kept a viewer's mind leaping
— and did it impudently, joyously. When you see a highly praised new
work by the man who is the greatest innovative artist of modern movies
— —
the man who reenergized movies it's a letdown to see something as
thin and precious as First Name: Carmen. If there are some not-bad
jokes and some neat little tricks (such as a slapstick bit of dissociation:
the musicians are playing on camera while seagulls screech on the
soundtrack), there are also metaphysical quizzes, like Joseph's "Why do
women exist?" and Carmen's "Why do men exist?," and garbled profun-
dities
— "The police are to society what dreams are to the individual."
And there's indifference.
Uncle Jean has lost his interest in youth, in Pop culture, and — if he
is to be believed — in movies. And he makes the mistake that many other
artists who have lost their strength make: he condemns the public.
("Kids today are scum.") The picture isn't as rancidly self-pitying as
Godard's 1979 Every Man for Himself, but it's more shallow, more
withdrawn. He's contemplating the eternal; he's also wryly (and ambiva-
lently, of course) celebrating being out of it. The basic feel of Carmen
is"What's the use?" Godard can hardly bring himself to throw up his
hands. He gives the impression that maybe he'd rather sit around listen-
ing to Beethoven's late quartets than make movies. (Uncle Jean the
comedian wanders through the action turning away from whatever he
sees and muttering comments like "I won't work under these condi-
tions.") At the start of Carmen, Uncle Jean doesn't want to leave the
seclusion of his hospital room; he wants to stay inside. And by the end
of this movie you may agree that he should —that he's in need of healing.
September 17, 1984

230
TIGHT LITTLE THRILLER

1 'reamscape starts with Eddie Albert as the President of the

United States,who is tan and fit-looking in his bed in the Western White
House but is racked by nightmares of nuclear war; seeking peace for
himself as well as for the world, he decides to make a disarmament deal
with the Russians, and arranges for a conference in Geneva. Max von
Sydow is a research scientist who, with Kate Capshaw as his assistant,
has a small experimental project in one wing of a Los Angeles college
hospital; there especially gifted psychics attempt to enter the dream
world of the tortured patients whose disorders have been resistant to
other treatment, locate their unconscious fears, and help the patients
conquer them. Dennis Quaid is Alex, a young psychic who has been
having a fine time hanging out at the race track picking winners and
making out with girls; when von Sydow sends
for him, Alex discovers
that he doesn't have any choice in the matter —
government agents come
for him. Von Sydow is a decent enough fellow, but his project has been
financed by the government, and it's under the aegis of Christopher
Plummer, the head of covert intelligence, who will do anything to pre-
vent what he regards as the weakening of our defense system. He is so
sleekly entrenched in power that even the President dare not touch him,
and he is a man known for his patriotism and his rectitude. When he
suggests that the President spend a night at the hospital to see if he can
be helped, the President assents. Plummer doesn't believe in taking
chances: in addition to controlling the project, he has a special relation
to one of the resident psychics —David Patrick Kelly—who knows ex-
actly what Plummer wants him to do and has no compunction about
doing it. Meanwhile, Alex is working with von Sydow
honing his skills,

and Capshaw' s psychiatric patients by entering the funniest, most auda-

cious dream sequences I've seen on the screen since the 1962 The Man-
—
churian Candidate which was also a fantasy thriller about a political
assassination (and was also, as I recall, dismissed by most of the press).

231
 — —

The young director Joseph Ruben made his first feature, The Sister-
in-Law, in 1973, not long after finishing his film courses at the Univer-
sity of Michigan. (He was twenty-three.) That was followed by The
Pom-Pom Girls and two more pictures about teen-agers Joyride, and
Our Winning Season, which also starred Dennis Quaid. In Dream-
scape, Ruben takes you out on little flights of parody and imagination,
—
and then snaps you back everything fits into place. He's an entertainer-
director; he starts off with a cocky swagger, and he can sustain it,
because he has the bedrock of a script, by David Loughery, Chuck
Russell, and himself, that has real development and structure. This
sharp-witted script (with its echo of an early passage in Gravity's Rain-
bow) makes it possible for him to use the dream sequences as separate
extravaganzas, suspense stories, and jokes. Though we enter these
dreams with Alex, each of them belongs to a different dreamer with —
—
whom Alex then interacts and each dream is in a different, easily iden-
tifiable style. A boy patient who's terrified of going to sleep because "the

snakeman" is out to get him dreams in the Joe Dante manner of The
Howling and the Dante cartoon episode of Twilight Zone. When Alex,
who hasn't been able to break through Kate Capshaw's professional
aplomb, catches her napping in her office and sneaks into her dream, it's
in the languorous soft-core-porn style of Emmanuelle —
Alex joins her
in her train compartment, she tears off his shirt, and they make gauzy,

passionate love. (When she awakes, she glowers at him.) The President's
dream is in the manner of John Carpenter's Escape from New York and
George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. And it seems perfectly
natural for the dreams to be in these movie styles, because, of course,
people's dreams do take off from the movies. (Would the President be
likely to have seen Carpenter and Romero pictures? It's hard to tell, but
President Reagan sometimes whiles away his mornings at Camp David
watching movies.) The dream sequences are designed slyly, artfully
the snakeman dream has a great, twisty staircase (a stark-mad staircase
that might have come out of Dr. Caligari's fertile mind). Each dream
advances the plot while having an enjoyable sophomoric bounce of its
own. As the movie proceeds, we may notice that its atmosphere has
become more nocturnal. By the time Alex is being chased by Plummer's
men, who are shooting at him, his reality has become as crazily dark as
the horror dreams.
Dreamscape really moves, and its movie jokes (such as a quick
display of martial arts out of Enter the Dragon and a visual allusion to
The Pom-Pom Girls) don't slowdown. They're part of the texture
it

part of the characters' consciousness. The actors seem to be eager and

232
on their toes; they seem to enjoy thinking well of themselves, and the
director must be in on it. The whole movie has a playful cockiness
working along with the suspense. (This extends even to the dream decor:
the tilt of that staircase to no paradise makes you gasp and laugh.) The
main characters are all smart and, in varying degrees, highly intuitive
— in the case of Quaid's Alex and David Patrick Kelly's Tommy Ray
Glatman, preternaturally so. Quaid plays smart here as convincingly as
he played dumb in All Night Long, and he does it without the element
of moral ambivalence that he used as Gordo Cooper in The Right Stuff.
Quaid combines braininess with a physical ease; he's completely unapolo-
getic about playing a smart character, and he manages to suggest that
Alex is capable of putting his brains to use. Quaid plays intelligence and
intuition as a sexy advantage, and his slightly mocking free-and-easy
manner makes it possible for him to hold his own against Kelly, whose
cunningly evil Tommy Ray might otherwise have walked away with the
picture. As Kelly demonstrated in a smaller part in The Warriors, he has
a gift for giggly psychopathology of the kind that movies thrive on; his
performance here is in the tradition of Richard Widmark's tittering
Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death. Kelly never lays it on that flamboyantly,
yet his thin-lipped, calculating sadism gives the assassination plot the
—
primal terror it needs. Small and compact as if the better to slither in
—
and out of the walls Tommy Ray enters a woman's dream and shocks
her into a massive coronary, just for practice. He's pleased at his prow-
ess; he gives himself an A. When von Sydow first tells Alex about the
research he wants him to engage in, the two actors seem to enjoy their
—
interplay they appear to be charming each other. When Christopher
Plummer, the arch-patriot, talks to Tommy Ray, the killer, there's an-
other kind of interplay: Plummer is such a past master at suggesting
that there's something tainted about his characters that when he ad-
dresses Tommy Ray as "son," the little psycho psychic does seem to be
his oifspring —a devil child.
Plummer's trying to use psychics for secret political purposes may
suggest the John Cassavetes role in De Raima's The Fury, but it's only
a superficial resemblance. This movie doesn't have obsessive, hallucina-
—
tory moments of greatness, like The Fury it's an efficient, clever
thriller in happy control. I suppose some people might call it a B picture,
because it doesn't aspire to be anything more than a clever thriller. But
it's awfully good for what it is. Joseph Ruben lays things out simply and

clearly; the narrative is easy to respond to, yet none of the actors wear
labels and you never get the feeling that they're trying to act up to some
big conception. Everybody in the movie seems distinctive and perfectly

233
comprehensible, and that goes even for the sharpers at the track who
are furious at Alex for not letting them in on which horses are going to
win, and the thugs who do Plummer's bidding. Kate Capshaw plays in

a comedy style that's completely different from the shrillness she

affected in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. She's funny in a
much softer way; she has reddish light-brown hair and an intimate, small
voice that's full of comic modulations, and, sitting in that train compart-
ment, she somehow sexualizes every inch of herself. Ruben's light touch
brings out a form of acting magic: the actors here respond to each other
so intuitively that their leaping into each other's heads seems just one
more step. It seems to be just what intuitive people ought to be able
to do.

fith some movie stars, the more successful they become the
Country, the opening-night presentation of
less interesting they are. In
the New York Film Festival, Jessica Lange doesn't have a single scene
in which she shows anything like the giddy sensuousness she brought

to King Kong, or the heat she brought to The Postman Always Rings
Twice, or the tension in her Frances, or even the cuddle-me dreaminess
she had in Tootsie. She's doing a performance that's all interior, and she
isn't playing a character —she's playing a set of virtues that she associ-
ates with her idea of an "ordinary" luminous Midwestern woman, a
contemporary Ma Joad. When the tornado hits and Ma's teen-age son is
buried head down in a truckload of grain, she's the first one to realize
what has happened and to dig for him. And when the Farmers Home
Administration moves to foreclose on the hundred-and-eighty-acre farm
that has been in her family for over a hundred years, and the men fall

apart, she's firm in her resolve and she holds on to that land. Country,
which Lange conceived and had a hand in producing, is, like some of Jane
Fonda's productions, an attempt to raise the audience's consciousness.
With Richard Pearce as director and with a script by William D. Witliff,
it's trying to be a feminist The Grapes of Wrath, and doesn't succeed

—
at all awful as that would be. The picture is reverential about showing
you the outside of the house where Ma and the family live; the camera
moves toward the building over hallowed ground. The people here are
good 'cause they work the land. (Watching them, you may find yourself
muttering "granola, granola.")

234
 Country is set in the eighties, but when Dad (Sam Shepard) goes
into the bank to borrow money on the farm he's crushed by the discovery
that loans are now made on the basis of an economic evaluation of the
farm's prospects rather than on a judgment of "the man" — of his moral
fibre. (What mythical era did this fellow grow up in?) Early on, there's
a tenderly observed scene of the the family— she's about nine
little girl in

—amusing herself while taking care of her baby sister by putting Ma's
lipstickon the baby's soft mouth. Later, that scene has a nagging irony,
because Ma Jessica never wears any lipstick. With her wide, noble brow,
strong jaw, clear eyes, tousled honey-blond hair, and the light from
—
within, she doesn't need artificial aids makeup would soil her image.
This is the kind of eighties-farm-life movie in which the characters show
you that they're into deep, eternal values by wearing plain print dresses
as faded and shapeless as if they'd been in and out of the washtub since
the thirties. Jessica Lange looks great in them, of course, and is quite
chic her well-worn plaids —roughing-it classics. This family has a TV
in

— on Sunday, after church. Dad watches football with Ma's father (Wil-
ford Brimley) —and the boy has a Walkman, but they're not culturally
polluted. At a local shindig. Ma and Dad dance together in the courtly

way country folk in the movies have been doing for decades, and you
don't see any kids trying out break-dance moves. There's some sweet,
nostalgic stuff about Ma's getting allworked up over the discovery that
her son has a condom hidden in his room; nobody has ever heard of drugs
or dope.
These people are made virtuous by being turned into old Saturday
Evening Post covers. When the threats of foreclosure start, with a long
list of families to be evicted, it never seems to occur to anybody to talk
to a lawyer; the people in this movie have been made too dumb and too
passive to go to court and fight for their rights. You wonder how they've
survived as long as they have. When a neighboring family with a beloved
brain-damaged son under the pressure of having its livestock confis-
is

cated, the boy, seeing the animals being prodded, becomes upset, grabs
one of the prods, hits a deputy sheriff with it, and is arrested. (In movies,
only bad guys prod animals.) There are no visible efforts to get the poor
kid out of jail; the father in his hopelessness and grief shoots himself.

There was considerable television coverage of the farm liquidations

and foreclosures that took place in 1982, and the farmers weren't taking
it lying down. They were lively and angry; they had personalities, and

they were using all their resources to fight back. In the movie, Sam
Shepard looks whipped at the first hint of trouble and takes to the bottle,
and Gramps, or Pops, or whatever Wilford Brimley is called this time.

835
complains bitterly, mumbles about how things used to be, and shrivels
into decrepitude. (It's never explained why the land, which was in
Lange's family, isn't still in her father's name —Pops is treated as if he
were a family retainer.) The other farmers are caving in, too. Everybody
is pooped but our Ma. Hauling the plump baby on her shoulder, she goes

from farm to farm asking the people to come to the auction at her place,
and when they do she starts a chant of "No sale! No sale!" that spreads
and drives the auctioneers off. And since the entire foreclosure policy is
attributed to the push of one inhumane bureaucrat who's trying to clean
up his books, there's an easy happy ending.
Richard Pearce's background is primarily in documentary (his only
other theatrical features are Heartland and Threshold), and the lack
of dramatic impetus in his work is probably at least partly responsible
for his reputation —he seems to be doing something higher. After the
opening scenes, in which Dad is revealed as the family humorist, and
there'ssome cozy old barnyard humor, Pearce gives us standard hokey
melodrama (brain damage as moral force), but he doles it out as if it
were full of integrity. (Although Country doesn't contain nearly
enough factual observation, it's staged like an acted-out documentary.)
The movie's sensitive observations, such as Dad's feeling emasculated
when he faces the loss of the farm, are usually stale. And since the
trained actors are reaching for the common —the universal—and com-
ing up with a kind of non-acting acting, the only members of the cast
who have anything fresh to give us are the children. They aren't trying
to be types; they're responding to the situations they've been placed in,

and Levi L. Knebel, who plays the teen-ager, gives an affecting per-
formance. The stars in this movie have nothing to give us but their
self-celebratory look: in his narrow-cut jeans, Sam Shepard is the man
with the Gary Cooper legs; Jessica Lange could be posing for a new
Statue of Liberty.
I know there are people who will applaud Country for the worthi-
ness of its subject and the seriousness of its tone. But Country isn't a
serious treatment of its subject. It's a morally uplifting treatment of its
subject: every frame is planned to be a work of American art, and we're
meant proud of these farmers and their heritage. This is a movie
to be
about Jessica Lange's spirit-of-the-prairie face. This ordinary woman
brushes mere mortal men aside and does what needs to be done. Lange
the star presents herself as totally self-sufficient, which is a big mistake
— it means that as an actress she doesn't relate to anyone. (Lange

doesn't seem to have a clue to why people enjoy watching her.) Here,
she's the people, she's the land, and she will endure. The director has too

236
much taste to end with a closeup of his star superimposed on the Ameri-
can flag, but that's the general idea.
The teen-age boy raises the only practical issue in the movie. When
Dad is going in to town, the kid reminds him that they're low on feed
for the sheep. Since Dad ashamed to ask for more credit, he doesn't
is

do anything about it. Days

pass, and the boy informs him that there's
no feed left; the father ignores him. It gets to the point where the boy
is announcing that the sheep are starving. By then, the father is boozed
up and in a funk. At the end of the picture, the family faces a bright,
heroic future, but the sheep still haven't been fed.

Folker Schlondorff's Swann in Love doesn't even have the

force of real desecration; it's easy to forget you've seen these stiff

arrangements of people in ornate, cheerlessly lighted rooms that every

instinct tells you they never lived in. As Swann, Jeremy Irons doesn't
stick, a dried-out Wasp, with dead
suggest intelligence or feeling; he's a
more miscast; he's out of Poe, not Proust.) You
eyes. (He couldn't be
expect something from him and he gives you nothing not even his —
voice, which has been expressive in other roles. Here, speaking French,
he has to use it tres carefully. Ornella Muti is a wily, plausible Odette.
made up to look appropriately sallow and Botticellian, and she does
She's
manage to suggest that she could torment a man without half trying.
(She squirms beautifully, and her luscious, smiling underlip turns sullen
very quickly.) As Swann's friend the eminent pederast the Baron de
Charlus, Alain Delon (with a little thumbprint of hair under his mouth)
looks game enough to handle at least the lighter side of the role, but he
only gets to come on for a few turns —he's like a painted vaudevillian
who ogles the boys or twinkles knowingly. Of all the imaginable material
for the screen, Proust's writing requires the most subtle feeling for
rhythms —the meaning is in his rhythms —and neither the director nor
the scriptwriters (Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carriere, Marie-Helene Es-
tienne) seem to do anything to draw us in. It's an empty shell of a movie.
Schlondorff doesn't achieve an emotional tone even in what is (arguably)
the most emotionally devastating passage in all of Remembrance of

Things Past: the Due and Duchesse de Guermantes's rushing off to a

dinner party and not wanting to be bothered when their old friend Swann
tells them he's dying.

237
 —

\ightrope has been the No. 1 box-office attraction in the coun-

try for several weeks. Why? Clearly, people don't go to see Clint East-
wood films for a demonstration of congeniality or charm. (The movies in

—
which he has tried to be a likable guy such as the quaint Bronco Billy
—
and the lachrymose Honkytonk Man have been relative commercial
failures.) People do go to the conventionally structured movies in which
he's a man of action; when he's a big-city cop he doesn't talk he punches —
and shoots. Charles Bronson only draws crowds overseas; John Wayne
is gone; Burt Reynolds is a joke. Eastwood is the only one left who makes
these movies about how tough it is to be a man. They are worked out
in such primitive terms that there aren't even any crosscurrents or
—
subplots you just watch Eastwood as he marches from scene to scene
blasting his enemies with an auto-mag or, as in Tightrope, handcuffing
women to bedposts.
Written and directed by Richard Tuggle, Tightrope is a seamy,
gaudy melodrama, in which Eastwood is Homicide Inspector Wes Block,
of the New Orleans Police Department, and the devoted father of two
young girls —his wife left them behind when she took off. Wes is investi-

gating a series of murders: young prostitutes are being tortured, raped,

and strangled. The gimmick is that the killer is Wes Block's doppel-
ganger. Wes is good and the killer is evil, but Wes's anger at his ex-wife
has knotted his insides and he has developed a taste for bondage; he likes
to handcuff the prostitutes he has sex with, and the killer knows it. He
dogs Wes's steps through the French Quarter, and if Wes talks to a girl in
the course of his investigation and has sadistic fantasies about her, the
killer —sometimes masked, sometimes just hidden in the shadows car- —
ries them through. Once a few of the girls have been murdered immedi-
ately after Wes has been with them, you'd think it might occur to him that
he's the real target, but he just goes along providing the man in running
shoes, who is right behind him, with more candidates for extinction.
Tuggle keeps whomping us on the skull with the good-evil symbol-
ism, and the laudatory reviews suggest that there is real daring and
soul-searching in Eastwood's playing a man struggling with dark, sexist
impulses. But the movie has no more depth than the usual exploitation
film in which pretty girls are knocked off. The victims aren't given the
kind of introduction that would make us have some rapport with them;
the affectless way they're presented, you get the feeling that they're
tough cookies selling sex and they deserve to be tortured and killed

238
 —

they're asking for it. Their naked corpses are photographed more ten-
derly than their Hve bodies. And the movie has a queasy (unexplored)
aspect: Eastwood's own twelve-year-old daughter, Alison, who looks like
him and acts like him, plays Wes's daughter Amanda, whom the doppel-
ganger means to rape.
In order to keep the symbolic apparatus going until Eastwood
finally rips off the killer's mask (and it's a long, long movie), Tuggle
makes Wes Block the most inept police investigator of all time. He has
to be paralyzed by his own sense of complicity, so that the corpses can
keep piling up; there's a scene in which the doppelganger literally pre-
sents him with a male prostitute, and Wes innocently sends the fellow
off to be murdered, as if it had never occurred to him that that might

happen. Tuggle never uses the possibilities in the doppelganger idea:

Wes ought to be able to outwit and trap the killer by reading his own
mind. Instead, he keeps chasing the man who's following him, and Tug-
gle keeps them both running through colorful New Orleans locations,
with plenty of masked figures (it's Mardi Gras, of course) and a ware-
house with grotesque big papier-mache celebrities, including Reagan
a touch that can mean anything you want it to. This is a crudely commer-
cial movie that offers a tour of flesh-peddling establishments and a psy-

chobabble seriousness. A black woman psychologist (Janet MacLachlan)

explains to Wes how we're all on this tightrope between good and evil,
and he is given a girlfriend (Genevieve Bujold) who runs a rape crisis
center; she's handily qualified to help him exorcise his sexism.
Tightrope is the opposite of sophisticated moviemaking. There's no
—
progression in the plot it's just one body after another. And there's no
—
point in ripping off the killer's mask we don't know him anyway; the
mask is just there to serve the movie's schematism. (At one point, this
killer, shrouded in a ski mask with tiny eye holes, is being chased around

a railroad yard, and you do wonder why he doesn't take it off so he can
see better. The symbolism makes no narrative sense.) The scenes that
show Wes as a gentle father are dismally bland, and there are traditional
gags, such as Wes's always having one dog or another in bed with him
(his daughters take in strays); like John Wayne, Eastwood keeps the

—
audience comfortable. A sadistic fantasy may sneak in he's human, and
the audience likes that. But there won't be any art or style, or even much
emotion. Audiences appear to like him undemonstrative, or, to put it
bluntly, wooden.
Wes, like Eastwood's San Francisco cop. Dirty Harry Callahan, is
a gritty realist, with no ideals. That's probably what makes Eastwood's
cops accessible to a huge audience. Eastwood takes account of disgust
in a way that few other trash filmmakers do. He New York
has a real
Post side to him: in his up as a jungle, and
cop movies, the world is set
you're one of the beasts in it, and so is he. Beatty and Redford play
idealists, but Eastwood found what disgusts him in hippies {Dirty Harry),

in homos {The Enforcer), in lesbos {Sudden Impact), and now, as Wes

Block, he sees that the source of what disgusts him is partly in himself.
—
That could make Tightrope effective he's wrestling with self-disgust.
And that may be what the New York Post junkies among the movie
reviewers are responding to. When they find something deep and austere
in the good-evil gimmickry, that may be their way of feeling low-down

and honest.
If there's anything new going on in Eastwood's performance, it's

that he seems almost to be punishing himself for wanting to act. At

times, he seems to be trying to blast through his own lack of courage
as an actor. But the picture just grinds along, and it's like an emanation
of Eastwood's dullness. He seems to want to be fiery, but he doesn't have
it in him —
there's no charge in his self-disgust. Tightrope isn't exciting,
because there's no vigor or puritan grandeur in Wes Block's character
—
and there's nothing in the psycho doppelganger he's just a bogeyman.
Without flamboyance of his own, Eastwood needs a director who can set
—
some flamboyance swirling around him Sergio Leone did it in the spa-
ghetti Westerns, and Don Siegel did it in Dirty Harry. But Tightrope
is no more than a sombre, pedestrian Halloween. It's Halloween taking

itself seriously.

October 1, 1984

MIRRORS

leoff Murphy, the director of the New Zealand film Utu, has
an instinct for popular entertainment. He also has a deracinated kind of

240
 —

hip lyricism. And they fuse quite miraculously in this epic about the
relations between the Maori, the dark-skinned Polynesians who started
migrating to the volcanic islands that form New Zealand around a thou-
sand years ago, and the British, who began to migrate there in large
numbers in the eighteen-thirties. By 1870, the year in which the movie
is set, the British were the government (and within the next few decades

—
confiscated millions of acres of Maori land much of it as "punishment
for rebellion"). Murphy uses the conventions of John Ford's cavalry-and-
Indians Westerns, but he uses them as a form of international shorthand
— to break the ice and get going, and for allusions and contrasts. His
primary interest isn't in the narrative; it's in how the characters think
and what they feel. By 1870, the Maori, trained and educated in mission
schools, speak English and are imbued with Englishness. And they cer-
tainly know how to mock the English —playing off the Englishmen's
expectations that they will behave like ignorant savages,
Te Wheke (Anzac Wallace), the troublemaker at the center of the
story, is a literate, Europeanized Maori with a taste for Shakespeare.

He's a uniformed scout with the British colonial forces who returns to
—
his tribal settlement a village friendly to the British —
and finds that the
huts are still smoking: the cavalry rode in and set them ablaze after
casually slaughtering everyone there, leaving the bodies where they fell.
In grief and rage at the death of his people, he feels the need to exact
—
utu the Maori word that means honor and includes ritualized revenge.
Te Wheke's honor requires that he achieve balance through reciprocal
acts utu can be attained only by the shedding of blood.
By the thirteenth century, the Maori in New Zealand were having
disputes over land, and warrior-cannibal tribes built fortified villages
and ate or enslaved the enemies they defeated. Since the justification for
the raids and killings was the need for utu, the members of the tribe that
had been attacked would then have the same need, and the warfare was
—
continuous it was the normal way of life. Because of this tradition, the
Maori weren't united even in resisting European encroachment on their
land. Some were with the British troops, some tried to remain neutral,
and by 1870 the hostile Maori were so demoralized by defeat and slaugh-
ter that they couldn't manage much more than occasional guerrilla raids.
As more and more land-hungry British settlers arrived, the wars be-
tween the Maori and the British became wars of atrocities (on both
sides).

Te Wheke prepares for his return to the barbaric, mystical heritage

of the warrior tribes by having his face carved to symbolize his new
purpose. In the Maori variant of tattooing, deep lines are cut, so that the

241
skin in between stands out in ridges; Te Wheke, with curves and spirals

covering his face, has a new aura. He's hke a living version of the totemic
figures exhibited in the Maori show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With his long, thick black hair and his mustache and elated eyes adding
to the symmetrical pattern, he suggests the posters for the Broadway
—
show Cats. He's a commanding presence a Maori Che Guevara. He's
—
also engaged in a form of make-believe he's a travesty of an ancient
warrior. When he's dressed for utu in his red British Army jacket, and
with a military cap perched on his matted hair, it's as if all the contradic-
tions in the society were popping out of his skin —as if he couldn't
contain them anymore. He formally announces his utu in a rural Chris-
tian church after chopping the pastor's head off. He challenges the
bewildered white and Maori parishioners by assuming the openmouthed
pose of the totems and jiggling his protruding tongue at them.
Joined by a band of guerrilla recruits, Te Wheke sets out on his
rampage. The code that governs utu does not require that the specific
perpetrators of the oifense be killed; any members of their tribe will do
— so all Europeans are fair game. When the guerrillas attack the idyllic
—
farmhouse of the Williamsons Bruno Lawrence (of Smash Palace) and
—
the fine actress Ilona Rodgers they assault the two and proceed to
desecrate everything European; they shoot up Mrs. Williamson's china,
loot the place, and dance to the pounding of her grand piano before
shoving it out the window. Picking up a volume of Shakespeare, Te
Wheke entertains himself by reading a passage from Macbeth before
setting fire to the house. It's an insane vandalization, and he knows it,

but he's committed to this mad course of action because the history of
his country appears to have left him with no other recourse.
At times, when you're looking at Maori, with their beautiful broad,
relaxed faces, you can't which side they're on; then you realize that
tell

They're on both sides: almost ev-

this confusion is part of the subject.
eryone in the movie wavers in his allegiance from time to time even —
the young Lieutenant Scott (played with a likable mixture of callow-
ness and elan by Kelly Johnson), who has been posted here by the
British War Office, because he has been with the Boers putting down
the natives in skirmishes in South Africa and has learned new, experi-

mental counter-insurgency tactics. He turns out to be a flop, because

he was born in New Zealand and becomes attached to a lovely, fleshy
Maori girl; he can't give his work the wholehearted, career enthusiasm
he had in South Africa. And the by an eighteen-year-old
girl (played

Maori student, Tania Bristowe), who is tied in with Te Wheke's band,

acts the part of dusky enticer to Scott but feels closer to him than she

248
 —

does to her Maori friends; she gets to the point where she's marked for
execution by both sides. As for Te Wheke, he runs his army as a par-
ody of the white man's army. He and his guerrillas deck themselves
out in a ragtag assortment of parts of British military uniforms and
scraps of Victorian clothing they've picked up in raids on farms, and
have hatchets and knives and guns tucked into their belts and boots.
They have turned themselves into the Europeans' images of them as
butchers and buffoons. (They're like American blacks playing Jungle
Bunny.) If that's what the Europeans think they are, that's what
they'll be. That's all that's left for them to be. In murdering the Brit-

ish, they're murdering themselves anyway. In a trancelike sequence,

Te Wheke's guerrillas take over a wagon full of supplies for the militia
and use it to ride in for a surprise night attack; along the road, one of
the men rips open a sack of flour, plunks his face down in it, and says,
"I've only been one of them for a minute, and already I hate you
Maori." As the wagon rolls on, his white face is almost phosphorescent
in the moonlight —he's like a phantom.
Mimicry goes on at so many levels in this horror comedy of colonial-
ism that the viewer may be laughing, exhilarated by constant discovery,
yet be a little discombobulated and scared. Murphy throws you at the
start —he may want to disorient you, as Te Wheke disorients people
and he keeps you in a state of suspension. A few scenes go by before
it's clear that the movie is cutting back and forth between the trial of
the captured pattern-faced Te Wheke and the events that led the smooth-
faced manto transform himself. At the trial, when Wiremu (Wi Kuki
Kaa), a smart, fair-minded Maori who's a mercenary with the British
forces, explains what has been going on to the officers, Te Wheke yawns.
Wiremu, who plays chess with the racist colonel and puts a crimp in his
theory of Maori inferiority by winning, has noble twin arches in his
upper lip (like V. S. Naipaul) —he's smiling even when he isn't smiling.

(He has some of Naipaul's gravity, too.) I doubt if any other director has
treated the conventions of this colonial-epic form with Murphy's offhand
audacity. He turns the form into a mirror of racism.
Murphy uses an abrupt, lurch-ahead editing that works well (ex-
cept at the beginning), and there are real streaks of madness in the
pursuit story. This isn't an impassioned lament, like the great Aus-
tralian filmThe Chant ofJimmie Blacksmith; the lamenting quality
is And Utu doesn't have a strong protagonist;
implicit in the material.
there are a whole string of leading characters Lieutenant Scott, the —
—
young Maori girl, and others who take over for a sequence or two
and then recede, but may return. Left for dead, Bruno Lawrence's

243
bald, bearded Williamson gets on Te Wheke's trail with the obsessive-
ness of a man who has lost his wife and seen the destruction of every-
thing he has worked for. He's in the same position as Te Wheke, and
has only one desire: to kill him. Slogging through the countryside car-
rying a quadruple-barrelled shotgun that he has put together (it's the
size of a baby cannon), going for days and nights without sleep, and
speaking in a dry rasp of a voice that gets lower and lower, Williamson
is the only other character with the intensity of Te Wheke, who keeps

firing at him but can't seem to kill him. Williamson has the same trou-
ble killing Te Wheke. One with too much hair, the other with hair in
the wrong place, they're like the pairs of adversaries in Sergio Leone's
Once Upon a Time in the West, and we expect them to meet in a final
shootout. But Murphy and his co-writer, Keith Aberdein, skewer your
expectations, and you think, Of course, it's richer this way. Murphy
throws you curves all through the picture: Te Wheke will suddenly be
singing "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," or the soundtrack will make a
satirical comment on the action, using "Marching Through Georgia,"
or Lieutenant Scott will casually survive being shot a few times, or Te
Wheke's grimaces will remind you of Toshiro Mifune's Macbeth in
Throne of Blood. (Anzac Wallace's performance as Te Wheke his —
first acting —
may owe something to his own experiences as a wild, socio-
pathic thief; he spent fourteen years in prison before becoming recon-
ciled to living with other people, leading an industrial strike, and becom-
ing a union organizer.) There are other reminders of Kurosawa, and of
Macbeth, too, when Te Wheke stages his own version of moving Bir-
nam wood to Dunsinane.
Te Wheke's Shakespearean flourish in the Williamsons' vandalized
home may be somewhat fancy and more than somewhat trite, but Geoff
Murphy has the popular touch to bring it oif This fellow, who in the late
.

sixties was a scat singer and trumpet player in Bruno Lawrence's rock
group and travelling road show, and also its visual-effects man, seems
to be directing with a grin on his face. (After years of working in film,
—
Murphy had a big hit relative to a country of only three million people
— in 1980, with Goodbye Pork Pie, which played around the world; that's

probably what enabled him to get hold of the three million dollars it took
to make Utu. ) The score, written by John Charles, who was also with
the road show, and recorded by a traditional Maori flautist and the New
Zealand Symphony Orchestra, takes risks, and most of the time the risks
come off gloriously. The film has sweep, yet it's singularly unpretentious
—irony is turned into slapstick.
As the militia ride out to go after Te Wheke, young Lieutenant Scott

244
asks Wiremu, "Whose side are you on?" Wiremu answers, "Same side
as you, sir. I was born here, too." The fatahstic, pragmatic Wiremu
knows there's no side to be on; there's no justice. It's obvious that the
British will win, and just as obvious that Te Wheke is a folk hero. He's
a hero even when he has become so cruel that he is more like a bug than
a man, and his own followers are disgusted by him. No doubt Murphy
was conscious of taking a balanced, nonjudgmental position, but you feel
—
that the material itself and his own instincts —
dictated it. He couldn't
have made this movie any other way, because it's a comedy about the
characters' racial expectations of each other, which come out of the
—
tragedy of their history a history too grotesque for tears. In one se-
quence, the soldiers are tracking the guerrillas, and Te Wheke, catching
their scent, sniffs the air; his dogs, also sniffing, turn their heads this way
and that. Murphy's absurdism is a matter of temperament it's part of —
the texture of the movie, which appears to be a reasonably accurate
version of a totally crazy birth of a nation.
Probably what Murphy does that makes a viewer respond so freely
is that he distances us —very slightly—and makes comedy out of the
distancing. (He's a joshing, razzing director.) And because we're not
asked to respond in the banal ways that action-adventure movies usually
impose on us —there's no one we could conceivably root for—we're free
to respond to much more. We're turned loose inside this epic, and the
freedom is strange and pleasurable. Some of it has to do with the Maori,
who have the placid features of Gauguin's Polynesians but appear to be
completely expressive, and have such a fluent, unaffected wit that they
seem to be plugged into the cosmos in a different way from the British.
(In a scene out in a remote woodland area. Lieutenant Scott, talking
companionably to a Maori soldier, says that Maori laugh at things that
aren't funny. He gives as an example a horrible prank that some Maori
—
played on the British adding human meat to a barrel of pickled pork.
When he finishes the story, the Maori laughs.) And some of the pleasure
has to do with the quality of the light and the uncanny splendor of the
New Zealand landscapes. There's a vista of an army encampment small —
white tents dotting the pale-green hills —that's like a child's dream of
outdoor living. Much of the film was shot in high country in wet weather,
and the cinematographer, Graeme Cowley, lets us see the mountains and
forests and mist-covered farms as if we just happened to look up and
there they were. In New Zealand, no one is ever more than seventy miles
from the sea, and maybe that helps to account for the feeling of exalta-
tion and spirituality that hovers over this film. We know this basic story
of colonialism from books and movies about other countries, but the

245
ferocity of these skirmishes and raids is played off against an Arcadian
beauty that makes your head swim.

m
some might
I he smooth meticulousness of Places in the Heart
call its craftsmanship — drives me a little crazy. And
—what
since
I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table
(not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral
strength of a household), the opening montage of Sunday-night supper
in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas, in 1935 a whole com- —
—
munity saying grace made me expect the worst. The movie's major
accomplishment is that it never goes over the brink into utter corny
shamelessness —that's where the pristine, courteous style of the writ-
er-director Robert Benton comes in. This is another movie, like Tender
Mercies and Terms of Endearment and On Golden Pond, that has a
positive human message; a lot of people are calling it a masterpiece,
and it's likely to be around for a while and rack up a few Academy
Awards. (God knows it's got heart, but it doesn't need that slopes-of-
Parnassus title. What places? A ventricle? An atrium? It turns out
that the places are where we lived as children where our roots are. —
But those places may not be in our hearts.) Sally Field is Edna Spald-
ing, a homebody in the town, thirty miles south of Dallas, who has
been married for fifteen years and has been busy taking care of her
sheriff husband and raising two kids; widowed suddenly, by a stray
bullet, and left without enough money to meet the next mortgage pay-
ment, she holds her family together and hangs on to her house and
forty acres by, of course, grit and total determination. The film isn't

just about Edna, though; it's about the lives of Edna's family and
friends, and about the community. And more than that it's about
America, and about Christian love, and about forgiveness of those who
fail to live up to it. It's about decency.

The story, I'm afraid, centers on a cotton-pickin' contest. Gallant

little Edna goes after the money to save the farm by trying to win the

hundred-dollar prize that goes to the one who brings in the earliest
harvest of the season. (This may be the first time the movies have given
us white folks pickin' cotton, sweatin' in the sun, and havin' their hands
Edna has the help of two men who
torn, right alongside black folks.)
become part of her household: Moze (Danny Glover), an itinerant black

246
laborer, whose on her behalf get him in trouble with the local
efforts
branch of the Ku Klux Klan, and Mr. Will (John Malkovich), a blind First
World War veteran, whom she takes in as a boarder. Floating around the
edges of Edna's life are her sister (Lindsay Grouse), who runs a small

beauty parlor, and the sister's weakling husband (Ed Harris). He has
been having an affair with his best friend's wife, an elementary-school
teacher —
played by Amy Madigan, who gives the most persuasive per-
formance in the film. She has a passionate delicacy, and her guilt takes
the form of making her recoil just a trace from all human contact she —
looks as if she were withdrawing into herself. It's a small role, but Amy
Madigan, with her precisely modelled, tiny features and dark, wavy hair,
suggests a major presence. Except maybe for pink, shiny-faced Bert
Remsen, who turns up as a hymn-swinging musician at the local dances
(he lip-syncs "Cotton-Eyed Joe" to a Doc Watson record), she was the
only person in the movie I wanted to see more of, though there are two
other impressive performances. Danny Glover has greater vitality than
anyone else onscreen and gives the all too endearing role of Moze a
humorous, eccentric force, and Malkovich is certainly attention-getting
as Mr. Will.
Whenever Malkovich is on, he creates a stillness —a hush—and Ben-
ton clears other things out of the way so we can admire his great acting.

He has a soft, rather high voice and a large, rounded forehead with a
slightly receding hairline,and as Mr. Will he holds his lips small and
puckered, and, with his almost expressionless face and empty gaze, he's
—
so touching he's creepy he's spectral. Malkovich succeeds in conveying
the impression that blindness has made him unsure of things, and that
his mind always teeming with incompletely developed ideas. He's
is

affecting, but Mr. Will's hush doesn't vary —

it's as if there were a brief

patch of blank film before and after his appearances, and it gets to be
dead space. And he's too sensitive. Benton has conceived Mr. Will as if
blindness purified him and drove out ordinary faults; blackness does the
same for Moze.
As for Edna, who's based on Benton's great-grandmother (her sher-
iff husband was shot in 1882), she's a good Ghristian woman, firm in her

faith from the word go. The movie is a tribute to what Edna represents,
and Sally Field seems to have got the Jane Fonda bug— she's being
earnest and archetypal (and she doesn't seem to enjoy acting, the way
she used to). She gives us her all, but that doesn't include much depth
or subtext. She's a one-emotion-at-a-time actress, and her face is always
floodlit with whichever one it is. Fortunately, when Sally Field, our
leading exemplar of gumption, holds the thought "careworn and anx-

247
ious" she's likely to look plain rattled. She doesn't really have a star
presence here, and so she isn't a pain. She has a saving kind of giddiness:
she's playing the equivalent of the role that Gregory Peck had in To Kill
—
a Mockingbird, but she's not a Lincolnesque lawyer she's more like a
sweet, light-headed woman working in a small-town five-and-dime or
stationery store. It's easy to forget about her. And the kids are just
standard-issue movie kids.
Places in the Heart is a series of set pieces of the utmost conven-
tionality; it's like a remake of a prestigious movie of the forties about
"the home front" and what we're fighting for. There is even the scene
that —
was popular in twenties and thirties films the one where the
blind man asks the heroine "What do you look like?" and the audience
always gulped. Here the music gulps for us, swelling with emotion as
Edna describes herself for Mr. Will (though, oddly, she doesn't say
what color her hair is, which you might expect would come first). Mr.
Will listens wistfully. That's the closest Edna ever gets to a love scene.
The quotes in the ads say Places is about growing up American, but
it's about growing up at American movies. Benton seems to have put

together family stories he remembered from childhood and scenes

from naive, prettied-up movies, and blended them into a mythological
view of the American past, scrubbing them (in this movie the Ku Klux
Klansmen wear the crispest, whitest sheets you've ever seen) and
shaping them into an expression of the very highest innocuous values.
Humility comes easy to Sally Field; that must help to explain the cast-
ing. And she can stand for land and church and family without putting
an audience off.
When Benton plays with characters and ideas, as he did in the script
of Bonnie and Clyde and in The Late Show (which he wrote and di-
rected), there's more of him at work than in the projects, like Kramer
vs. Kramer and this one, where he's "sincere." The sincere Benton falls

back on hollow craft and tastefulness and restraint. They serve as a

neutralizing force, a form of protection. It's quite a mean town, Benton's
Waxahachie. Except for Edna Spalding and, to a lesser degree, her
sister, and Mr. Will and Moze, and possibly the other black people, there

isn't a true Christian around. The bank manager uses a form of black-
mail to dump Mr. Will (who's his brother-in-law) on the destitute widow.
Nobody gives her a helping hand. The merchants and traders try to cheat
her, and when Moze prevents it they get into their KKK robes and go
after him, and when Mr. Will rushes to his aid they're not above threat-
ening a blind man. These people aren't above anything: a mob of white
men lynch a black teen-ager. But somehow Benton's gentle presentation

248
muffles all this. His craftsmanship is like an armor built up around his

refusal to outrage or offend anyone; it's an encrusted gentility. A friend

of mine says that Benton knows how There may be something
to swim.
to that: he goes with the currents. In the sixties, he (and David Newman)
wrote Bonnie and Clyde and other scripts with an impudent countercul-
tural tone. In the seventies, he wrote and directed Kramer vs. Kramer,
a primer for sensitive men in the "Me" decade. And now he's out there
with this subdued, inspirational vision of a righteous America, healed by
love and decency. (All it lacks is Lassie.) He's the same Robert Benton
who (with Harvey Schmidt) wrote that guide to staying au courant The
In and Out Book. I don't mean to suggest any conscious deception; I'm
sure he believes in what he's doing. But he has exquisite feelers.
October 15, 1984

MOZART AND BIZET

1 I
he story of a genius
has the same basic appeal whether
who isn't

its
appreciated and dies in poverty
subject is Stephen Foster or
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. That's not the kind of story the director
Milog Forman and the writer Peter Shaffer set out to tell in Amadeus,
but it's essentially what they wound up with, and that appeal is probably
what saves the movie from being a disaster. Amadeus has a very compli-
cated surface —
there's a steady stream of rhetoric about high-flown
things. But after a while the rhetoric cancels itself out, and what we see
is the unworldly Mozart (Tom Hulce) caught in a web of intrigue by his

enemy, the unctuous Hapsburg court composer Salieri (F. Murray

Abraham), and worked to death, in 1791, at the age of thirty-five. The
story is told to a priest (and to us) many years later, by the mad, suicidal
old Salieri, and there is the suggestion that what we're seeing is his
delusion, but the weight of the production, which is reminiscent of big

249
biographical movies such as The Life of Emile Zola and A Song to

Remember, asserts its own kind of authority.

Peter Shaffer writes eloquent confrontations between two adver-
The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Pizarro and the Inca king;
sarial figures: in
in Equus, Dysart and the teen-age patient
the sterile psychiatrist Dr.
with his psychotic head full of Dionysian ecstasies and mysteries; and,
here, the minor composer and the incomparable Mozart. This
Salieri

conflict was formulated play Mozart and Salieri that

in the brief, ironic

Pushkin wrote in 1830 (which Rimsky-Korsakov used as the basis for an

opera); the play takes only ten pages in the D. M. Thomas translation in
The Bronze Horseman. Pushkin has Salieri soliloquize:

I will say it

To myself — I am envious. I

Envy. heaven! where is justice,

When the sacred gift, when immortal

Genius, is sent not to reward
Self-sacrifice, burning love, toil.

Ardour, supplications, but illumines

The head of a madcap, an idle rake?
Mozart, Mozart!

And when Mozart comes to see him, Salieri cries out, "My God, Mozart,
you are not worthy of yourself." He poisons Mozart's wine, and Mozart,
offering the toast "Let's drink to the true bond linking us two sons of
harmony," swigs it down. Shaffer elaborated on this small conceit in his
—
stage play Amadeus probably choosing this name because it can be
—
construed to mean "beloved of God" and he has further elaborated on
it in the screenplay he wrote in consultation with Forman. Peter Shaffer
can give cliches a glitter, and the polarities that are his specialty may
sound convincingly clever at the beginning of his plays, but when he
starts to add elements the polarities are contradicted, and the conflicts be-
come highly abstruse and drift off into the murk. (He is the twin of the
playwright Anthony Sleuth Shaffer —which isn't really parenthetical.)

What is Amadeus about? Salieri, who has worked hard at his music,
been a servile courtier, and achieved fame and high position, is envious
of Mozart's incredible talent. You might expect him to ask himself
whether he'd want Mozart's talent if Mozart's money troubles went with
it, but this movie isn't about such mundane matters. Shaffer has Salieri

declaring war on Heaven for gypping him, and determined to ruin Mo-
zart because God's voice is speaking through him. Shaffer turns Push-

250
kin's metaphor into a whole megillah. At first, it's quite funny when the
—
shmy-smooth Salieri complains that his exertions his always doing the
—
proper thing, studying, going to church haven't been rewarded. He's
—
the least humble of Christians he seems to expect God to give him
exact value for every prayer he has ever delivered. (He's like a kid saying
to Mommy, "I was always a good boy and ate my spinach and did my
homework, but you love my brother more than you love me and he uses —
dirty words and chases girls.") Salieri thinks that because he suffers so
much he should be a genius.
The movie, though, by showing you Mozart as a rubber-faced grin-
ning buffoon with a randy turn of mind, as if that were all there was to
him, begins to lend credence to Salieri's mad notion that Mozart doesn't
have to do a thing —
that his music is a no-strings-attached, pure gift
from God. The tone of many of the incidents and details is quite opaque.
Are Mozart's bushy white wigs (and the sometimes faintly pinkish ones)
a shaky attempt at historical fidelity, or is it Shaffer's or Forman's
thought that the young audience will identify with Mozart if he's made
to look like Harpo Marx as a rock star? (The effect was also used in the
stage version.) Many of the scenes appear to support Salieri in his belief
that Mozart's prankish obscenities and his boastfulness are proof that
he's unworthy of his artistic gift. Ribald cloacal jokes were an accepted
part of ordinary people's conversation in the Vienna of the day, but in
the movie Mozart is the only person who seems to enjoy talking dirty.
And the movie doesn't make it apparent that his scatological games and
his carousing were quick vacations from his work, or that when he
gleefully tells the emperor that he shaped a duet into a trio, and the trio
into a quartet, and so on, it's not boastful one-upmanship. It's because
of his delight in shaping playful structures —the delight that is at the
heart of his music.
There's nothing but confusion at the heart of the movie: it's a semi-
realistic musical biography of Mozart built on a madman's justification
for envy. Forman has something working for him here, though: this
aspect of the film ties in with the very old popular beliefs that artists are
bawdy and undisciplined, and that genius comes from God that it's just —
handed to some people. And later on, when Hulce finally gets out of his
fright wigs, and Mozart, ill and desperate, stays up nights working with
total concentration on his music, Forman switches to that other popular
mode —the dedicated artist who lives only for his art, and, sweating
feverishly, dies for it. (Mozart's suffering redeems him.) The cominess
in Amadeus is that the view of artistic accomplishment which Salieri
spouts —that if art comes without plodding it must be a gift from above

251
— is at least half shared by the writer and the director. They don't appear
to register that the whole notion of dictation from God is an insult to
Mozart.
Forman's insensitivity to what Mozart might have been like is so
flagrant that for the first hour or so you almost think you're being kidded
— "Wolfie" Mozart and his wife, Constanze (Elizabeth Berridge), are like
teen-agers in some mid-American Dogpatch. And the use of Mozart's
music and to provide the film with comic
to illustrate snippets of his life
(and gothic) punctuation is (Composing the overture to The
offensive.
Magic Flute, Wolfie dances a clumsy jig and thumbs his nose at the
framed portrait of his stern, disapproving father on the wall.) Each time
you hear the music, it invalidates the movie's bumpkin Mozart, with his
hideous, high-pitched whinny-giggle. And if you've read Mozart's letters
you know this twerp couldn't have written them. But Forman's crude-
—
ness is a form of showmanship not one I respect but one I'm forced to
acknowledge. He trudges through the movie as if every step were a
major contribution to art, and he keeps the audience hooked the same
way people were hooked by Hollywood's big, obvious, biographical epics.
Some members of the audience (and of the press) seem to be awed as
well.
There are some real aberrations in this movie, such as a shot of
Salieri in a cuckoo's nest where the passageways are lined with bare-
chested loonies chained to the walls who seem to be giving a perform-
ance of Marat/Sade. There's also a long deathbed sequence the muzzi- —
est part of the movie — with Mozart, who looks as if he'd been painted
light green, innocently and pathetically dictating his Requiem to Salieri,
who's plotting to steal the music. And it's definitely one plot too many.
The episode totally fuddles the fratricidal issues; Salieri seems about to
echo the boy's cry to his God in Equus — "Make us one person." This
whole section appears to have leaped out of the end of Ken Russell's film
on Delius, where it made more sense, since Delius was blind.
Despite the uses to which Mozart's music is put, the musical pas-
sages are the best thing about the movie, and that's allied with Twyla
Tharp's staging of the dances and the opera excerpts. Most of the picture
— especially the scenes in Em-
Mozart's chambers and at the court of
peror Joseph H — manner of opulent costume epics of the
is static, in the
—
past. And the court scenes are harshly bright probably Forman and the
cinematographer, Miroslav Ondf iCek, want us to see the pomp coldly and
realistically. So each time there's a musical sequence it's like a reprieve
—^Twyla Tharp brings the picture some lightness and wit. Her staging
of the operas (with sets by Josef Svoboda) shows her great flair for

252
 —

theatrical artifice, and she also stages a parody-pastiche of Don Gio-

vanni that Mozart attends (and loves). It's a featherweight low jinks by
—
Bosch a whirling tableau, with actors playing puppets, a horse that
comes riding through paper walls, a soprano who comes crashing
through the set, and a dove that flies out of a paper horse's rear end.
As written for the screen, the big, showy role of Salieri seems to be
an impossible one (he has too many schemes), and, the way the material
is laid out, F. Murray Abraham doesn't get to shape his performance. It

never comes together. But Abraham's intensity has a theatrical charge

to it in the glances that tell us what's going on under Salieri's polite
smiles. And some of the scenes he's in are just about irresistible
arriving at the court in Vienna, Mozart thoughtlessly improves on the
march that Salieri has composed to welcome him, and Salieri listens, his
face falling apart. Abraham is a wizard at eager, manic, full-of-life roles,

and he gives Salieri a cartoon animal's obsession with Mozart —he's Wile
E. Coyote. He's also (in his later scenes) a reptile, with an obscene vitality
in his crazy eyes. Tom Hulce's Mozart is jarring in the first half— I found
it hard even to look at him. He was less unbearable toward the end
possibly because he was confined to bed and couldn't toddle around
anymore. Forman probably got the performance he wanted: he seems to
like amateurish, telegraphic acting, just as he likes to load the aged

Salieri with too much froggy, rotting-old-man makeup. (Abraham's tri-

umph is that a vile kind of humanity gleams through.) A word should

also be said for Jeffrey Jones, who plays Emperor Joseph II: maybe
because of his imperial rank, he's the only member of the cast who gets
to shine by giving a restrained performance. (He does amusingly pol-
ished, vapid —
Une readings the emperor is a boob.) And John Tomlinson,
who Commendatore in Don Giovanni, has such
sings the role of the
power he can give you Downtown Prague does just fine as eight-
chills.

eenth-century Vienna. It was fine as Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five

and as Hanover in Saraband and in many other roles, but I can't remem-
ber its ever being cast in a good movie.

m I he composer Georges Bizet, a child prodigy who never knew

success as an adult, worked at hack jobs —
as an audition pianist, a
chorus master, a teacher, an arranger —and died at thirty-six in 1875, a
few months after the (dismal) opening of his opera Carmen, adapted

253
 —

from Prosper Merimee's short novel by the Henri Meilhac and

librettists
Ludovic Halevy. (Ludovic's cousin, Genevieve Halevy, was Bizet's wife;
several years after his death, she married the wealthy lawyer Emile
was frequented by Marcel Proust, who used her
Straus, and her salon
Mme. Verdurin, as well as the Duchesse de
as one of his models for
Guermantes. Somehow, this movie season seems to tie together.) The
opera entered the public domain in 1980, and producers, directors, and
assorted artists of several countries converged on it. Francesco Rosi, a

great moviemaker who is open enough to admit to interviewers that this

economic fact was what set his project in motion, has made a version
Bizet's Carmen —that has a clean, raw vivacity and is supremely ro-
mantic.
Rosi selected 1875 for the period and filmed entirely on locations in
Andalusia, using Ronda and Carmona and Seville itself to simulate the
Seville of that era. But the natural settings are never merely naturalis-
tic; they have an extra, formal dimension. They're both theatrical and
austere, and the striking perspectives provide something that filmed
opera needs: the recognition that the singers are not ordinary people
performing ordinary tasks —they're part of a ritualized performance (in

this case, in four acts, with interludes). The subdued colors are toned
differently in each sequence,and the screen is often intersected by dia-
—
gonals the ramp of the hilltop fort where Corporal Don Jose (Placido
Domingo) is stationed, the narrow, crooked street where he walks with
shining-eyed Micaela (Faith Esham), the young girl from Navarre who
loves him, and whom he thinks he loves. With its whitewashed houses
and stone walls, the film has the lustre of nineteenth-century painting
with the near-abstract clarity of twentieth-century art.
The images are never mawkish or Zeffirelli-ish, and the scenes aren't
overemotional. Rosi lets the music carry the passion. What he supplies
is ideal conditions for the viewer to experience the opera as a totality.
Working with his longtime collaborator, the cinematographer Pas-
qualino De Santis, and with Enrico Job supervising the sets and cos-
tumes, he achieves lighting so beautiful (and so evocative) that the
—
images seem serenely right ^just what the arias call for. When Carmen
(Julia Migenes-Johnson) taunts the priggish Don Jose, they're out on the
dusty beige streets, under gray-blue skies. But when he is sent to investi-
gate a disturbance at the cigar factory, he enters the dim labyrinthine
building where she and five hundred other girls work half naked. In the
gypsies' camp Carmen,
at night, small campfires tint the darkness, and
though she's temporarily in love with Don Jose, keeps in practice by
charming the torero Escamillo (Ruggero Raimondi). The locations look

254
 —

as if they had been created by a master scenic artist —a God with a pastel
vision. And when Carmen has lured Don Jose into the life of a smuggler,
and all four of the leading singers are up in a mountain pass just before
dawn, the mountains, too, and the faint orange glow suggest a magnifi-
cent stage set. The images may call up Corot or Goya, but Rosi acknowl-
edges Gustave Dore's illustrations for Baron Charles Davillier's Spain
(which was published in serial form in 1873) as his principal source; he
believes that Bizet, who was never in Spain, was guided by these engrav-
ings, some of the exact places that Dore drew.
and he has shot scenes in
gamine Carmen is the chief glory
Julia Migenes-Johnson's freckled,
—
of the production; she revitalizes the story if we have come to regard
it as banal, she makes us rethink it. The proper Don Jose, who comes

—
from northern Spain, is afraid of Carmen he's repelled by her. Her
strutting, her dark, messy, frizzy hair —her sexual availability—attract
him and drive him crazy. Carmen, who's true to her instincts, represents
everything he tries to repress. This tiny Carmen has something of a
tough street urchin about her, and she has a marvellous combative
stance. Migenes-Johnson, an American singer who has been appearing
in musical comedy, on television, and in opera since childhood, moves

—
quickly and impudently; she's very flexible vocally as well as physi-
cally. She often sings quietly — —
seductively and then has sudden, witty
always has a sense of dramatic rhythm. And
shifts of timbre; her singing
she's an uninhibited carnal comedienne. Her Carmen enjoys tantalizing
Corporal Don Jose —she tempts him mercilessly, and when she's dis-

gusted with him her voice has the crack of a whip. (There's the possible
suggestion that she teases men to show her erotic power because it's the
only power she has.) When she wants Don Jose to join her in a smuggling
job, and he wants to respond to the bugle sounding roll call, she razzes
him as a little tin soldier.

In these scenes, Migenes-Johnson, with her childlike naughtiness

and her twitching thighs, has a restless eroticism that makes you laugh
—
at poor Don Jose he can't hold out against her. But after he has de-
serted the Army and lost the respectability that meant everything to
him, he thinks she owes him lifelong devotion. As Don Jose sees it, she's
nothing more than a whore (she's perfectly willing to be a harlot-decoy
for her smuggler friends), yet he's having trouble hanging on to her. By
then, Carmen sees him for what he is: a suffering middle-class clod. Sick
of his ordering her around and his moping over what he gave up for her,
she's ready to fall in love with thehandsome torero.
—
was Don Jose's stuffy middle-classness his being a big fool
It

that amused Carmen in the first place; he was a challenge. Her mistake

255
 a

was in own terms. The

thinking she could take him as a lover on her
film's romantic motor Carmen's trying to assert her sexual freedom,
is

and Placido Domingo's Don Jose looms very large as an implacable lump
blocking her path. Domingo's Don Jose has a self-centered sameness
—
about him he has no light side, even vocally. He has no brutal side,
either. Domingo has beautiful modulations, yet his musicianship seems
to homogenize emotion: his voice is majestically bland. But his tenor is
perhaps peerless for storytelling: narrative arias roll out of him with
superb ease. And his squareness here has its own operatic quality. He
has the sturdy oppressiveness of a man who thinks to persuade a woman
to stay with him by saying that he'll be anything she wants. Domingo
plays the clod to perfection.
The movie has many felicities. Initially, Faith Esham's Micaela has
a lovely squinty smile that's like a good-luck charm; she has something
of a minx about her. After she has lost Don Jose, the smile is gone, and
when she's alone in the mountains singing the soprano aria that may be
the finest song in the opera, her voice has the plangency of a young
woman who sees no end to her aloneness. The resplendent basso Rai-
mondi is a tall, elegant Escamillo —a man who has been a popular idol

for so long that he's like a natural aristocrat. Riding through the moun-
tains on his white steed, he cuts a great profile. You feel he appreciates
Carmen for her gaiety, her fearlessness —for her not being the middle-
class woman that Don Jose wants to turn her into. The straightforward
screen adaptation that Rosi (and Tonino Guerra) worked out stays with
Bizet's original version, which used spoken dialogue. (The infernal
recitatives were a later "refinement.") With choreographic help from
Antonio Gades, Rosi deploys the choruses to better effect than I can
recall ever seeing before in opera on the stage or on the screen his —
handling suggests the most fluently stylized movie musicals. There's a
wonderful courtly old man (Enrique El Cojo), short and heavy-set —
man bowed down by the weight of the years —who partners Carmen in

a dance in the square outside the factory. Rosi takes the time to fit in

moments like this which round out the movie.

Much of the pleasure of the film is in its satisfying structure. At the
opening, the matador Escamillo is seen in the bullring. He's in closeup
and the bloodied bull is in closeup. Escamillo comes in for the kill, and
the tragic black beast sinks down, as the overture begins. The crowd
cheers, and the bull's carcass is dragged out on the sand while the
bullfighter is carried around the ring on the shoulders of his admirers.
Then another ritual is seen: a religious procession, with figures in black
carrying tall candles around a statue of the Blessed Virgin. In the fourth

256
act, Escamillo is once more in the ring, and once more we see a closeup
of the bull's head —the deathly blackness filling the screen. These scenes
are as stylized and ritualistic as the rest of the movie, but in a more
intense way. At the end, just outside the bullring where Escamillo is
being cheered Don Jose and Carmen have their final fracas. He's in a
black suit, and Carmen, for the first time, is dressed in a ladylike outfit
—a deep-rose tailored dress with a bolero top that suggests a toreador's
jacket, and a black lace mantilla. The conventional clothes — she's wear-
ing them to please Escamillo, who bought them—seem to diminish her.
And her defiance of Don Jose and the brute force he incarnates is all the
more poignant because of gypsy urchin
this dress-up dress. She's a
defying the male-dominated. Church-dominated social system. She dies
in what is probably the only expensive dress she ever had, and it's all

wrong on her.
October 29, 1984

FAKED OUT, COOLED OUT, BUMMED OUT

It Drummer Girl, Diane Keaton is

the start of The Little
jittery and off-putting. As
an American actress working in a
Charlie,
small, third-rate repertory company in England, she comes on strong
and talks faster than anybody else. She's like someone on speed or on
a caffeine jag: she responds to what people say before they've finished
saying it. Then she's dissatisfied with what she hears herself rattling off,
and before the words are out of her throat she half wants to take them
back. The conception of Charlie is a modern cliche, a piece of psychobab-
ble: she's an actress — i.e., a woman without a center, a flighty woman
who empty and is looking for a role to play that will make her feel
feels
"real." But Keaton takes this conception so far that she gives it a
painful, shrill validity. She doesn't do anything to make you like Charlie.

257
Rather, she shows you this woman's avid attempts to be lovable, and she
plays the part without creamy makeup; her dark, smudgy eyeliner and
the pile of curls covering her forehead make her look flirtatious and
anxious. It took me a while to comprehend that Diane Keaton was being
off-putting because she was totally in character. Charlie is emotionally
hungry. Smart and brazenly attractive, she's so miserably starved
there's something wolfish about her. At the same time, she's trying to
be tough —she's trying not to let herself be kidded. She's a jangled,
poignant mess.
This George Roy Hill version of John le Carre's The Little Drum-
mer Girl,adapted by Loring Mandel, suffers from a dramatic flaw that
is built into the material. The movie is set in 1981, during a rash of

Palestinian terrorist bombings of Israeli institutions around the world.

Charlie, a left-wing pro-Palestinian, has taken part in demonstrations in
Trafalgar Square and shown her enthusiasm at a meeting addressed by
a Kurtz (Klaus Kinski), the head of an Israeh intelligence unit
terrorist.
that engaged in counterterrorist activities, perceives that this actress,
is

eager for a cause, and already associated with the pro-Palestinian left,
could be used as a shill to trap the chief Palestinian terrorist. He turns
her thinking around, and recruits her to infiltrate the Palestinian guerril-

las and serve as a double agent. The flaw is that as the movie is presented
the two sides are tarred with the same brush: decent, intelligent, disci-
plined people in both camps commit unspeakable, barbarous acts. But
this pseudo objectivity seems to cancel everjrthing out. The film is
proudly noncommittal, while the audience is waiting for something (or
someone) to commit itself to.
The tragedy of these two peoples, killing each other because each
has just claims to the same plot of ground, is presented with efficient,
impersonal evenhandedness, so that we care about neither of them. "We
weren't making a political film," Hill told an interviewer from the Times
last month. What, then, were they making? According to Hill, "a sus-
pense story that happened to have a background." That may
political

sound perfectly reasonable, but there's a lunacy about using an ongoing

tragedy as a plot convenience. (And Hill must know it, because in the
next breath he expressed his pride in having treated the Palestinians as
he believes they were treated in the book
— "in a human light.") The
movie was shot on locations in West Germany, England, Greece, and
Israel, with intricately staged realistic bombings and tortures and a
Palestine Liberation Organization training camp, and with characters of
many nationalities played by actors of an even larger number of na-
tionalities. Hill has the willingness to take on a project with these huge

258
 —

logistical problems, and he's able to lay out the plot lucidly, profession-
ally. What he doesn't have is the ability to create the texture of a conflict
where no justice is possible or to give you any feeling for the spirit or
He proceeds in a detached, businesslike
the individuality of either camp.
way, showing us cruelty now on one side, now on the other he balances—
the books.
And when becomes apparent that Kurtz's manipulation of
it

Charlie's need for involvement and approval is the emotional center of

the movie it isn't enough. When Charlie's activities become more danger-
ous and she begins to respond to the intelligence unit as a family cheer-
ing her on to greater deeds, the narrative develops a viselike effect, and
we experience some of the tension of what she has been drawn into. Yet
the atmosphere is a blank, and the movie is too big to be a suspense story
about the effects of violence on Charlie. There's a disproportion here. We
see too many Israelis and Palestinians murdered for us to zero in on
whether thiswreck of a woman is emotionally destroyed or finds love
or both, which is what the ending suggests.

Clearly, Diane Keaton's Charlie digs being center stage, but in the
glimpses of her as Shaw's Saint Joan and as Rosalind in As You Like
It she's peculiarly offhand and unemotional. Even an actress who's los-

ing her youth and knows that she's not getting anywhere could have a
little more showmanship; Charlie seems too flaccid a performer. As

Keaton plays her, she's much more vivid and emotionally naked offstage.
Klaus Kinski's Kurtz maneuvers her like a master puppeteer, and she
responds gratefully. (Kinski still has his purring, Peter Lorre accent, but
he cuts down on his eye-popping shenanigans and does a respectable
enough piece of work; he brings a plausible streak of impatience to the
rather conventional role of the longtime agent who doesn't fool himself
with the niceties of idealism and gets the dirty job done.) Although
Keaton works hard at it, there's no electricity between Charlie and the
stolid, manly Israeli agent Joseph (played by the Greek actor Yorgo

Voyagis), whom she is supposed to fall in love with; Charlie doesn't seem
to be the sort of woman to respond to a man who's like an oak tree with
yearning, cow eyes. There's a lot more spark in the air when she's with
—
Sami Frey, who plays Khalil, the star Palestinian terrorist the man she
is sent to ensnare. Frey, in black leather, gives the movie it's only

bravura. He has a small role (in terms of screen time), but when Khalil
realizes that Charlie has set him up for slaughter his twisted smile at his
own gullibility makes you feel what's missing from the role of Charlie.
As Khalil, Frey makes direct contact with the audience in a way that
Keaton doesn't until well into the second hour.

259
 A woman without a clear sense of identity is highly problematic as
the protagonist-victim of a journalistic spy melodrama. Diane Keaton
has, of course, played women with identity problems before; that was
—
Annie Hall's trouble she kept putting herself down, apologetically, and
Keaton made a light art out of indecision, exasperated sighs, eyes rolling
upward. Charlie, though, isn't comic. She has all of Annie Hall's self-
consciousness and self-doubt, and, yes, she's distrustful yet overeager.
But it isn't charming flakiness; it's desperate flakiness —you can read the
panic in her flickering expressions. And the character of Charlie, who,
wanting to be a heroine, gets into a world of horrors beyond her imagin-
ing, is maybe too flaky to give the shallow picture substance and reso-
nance.
Keaton's performance starts clicking when Charlie is in the Pales-
tinian camp and has to condemn an Israeli boy to death, and it snaps
together in a shocking scene toward the end, when Khalil asks Charlie
what she and she howls out what she feels is the truth about herself.
is,

Keaton takes you right into the core of Charlie's neurosis; she galvanizes
the audience, and for an instant the movie seems to work. But the tense,
abrasive Charlie doesn't have anything of the conventional heroine
about her, and she's at odds with Hill's logical methods of storytelling.
(If she were more conventional, she might fit into the movie better, but

we'd forget the whole thing immediately.) Keaton leaps right over lika-
bility and crowd-pleasing —
she's out there all alone doing something
daring. Sometimes the performances we remember the most are the
ones that threw us off initially; I wasn't prepared for Keaton's passion-
ate immersion in her role. Her Charlie is a compulsive liar who keeps
trying on styles and discarding them, looking for one that will convey
sincerity; she winds up a compulsive truthteller. It's maddening that this
performance can't carry the dead weight put on it.

'im Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, which was honored

atCannes this year and received an enthusiastic press at the recent New
York Film Festival, is an easy film to like. Jarmusch, a young American
writer-director, uses a minimalist aesthetic for low-key comic effects.
The film is in black-and-white, and each scene is a single take followed
by a blackout. So each bit of action (or, as is mostly the case, stagnation)
is separate, discrete, and the three anomic principal characters —dead-

260
pan deadbeats — live in dead space. They're like druggies, but without
drugs; they're drugged on their own —
and this is
apathy. They're also
what makes the film a popular novelty item on the order of the 1959 Pull
—
My Daisy rather sweet.
The first section is set in the bare Lower East Side apartment of
Willie (John Lurie), who is forced to take in Eva (Eszter Balint), his
sixteen-year-old cousin from Budapest, for ten days. The joke here is the
basic joke of the whole movie. It's in what Willie doesn't do: he doesn't
offer her food or drink, or ask her any questions about life in Hungary
or her trip; he doesn't offer to show her the city, or even supply her with
sheets for her bed. And it's in Eva's not expecting any civility. Willie is
tall and skinny and glum, with broad lips and a long, squashed nose, and

even when he's sitting at home in his suspenders watching TV he wears

a little, narrow-brimmed felt hat on top of his sad horseface. Willie has
a lumpen, melancholic look, and you'd think there wasn't another person
in the world like him. Then Eddie (Richard Edson), who hangs out with

him, comes in, and he's like Willie's long-nosed twin, even to the dumb
little hat, except he's not as tall. Eddie is more sociable than Willie but

even further down on the lumpen scale. Willie bets on the horses; Eddie
bets on dog races. These two go out into the cold streets to loaf around,
— —
and in this movie with virtually nothing going on we fixate on Eddie's
regretful look. He thinks they should take Eva along she's rather —
pretty, and, with her toneless way of talking (on the rare occasions when
she speaks), she seems to fit right in. But Willie vetoes the idea. He

doesn't show any cordiality to her until shortly before her ten days are
up, when she brings home some groceries and cigarettes she has
—
snitched; then he shakes her hand and tells her she's all right he means
she's scroungy and marginal, like him.
The movie is a punk picaresque. Eva, who never gets to see more
of New York than the drab, anonymous-looking area where Willie lives,
goes off to Cleveland to stay with Aunt Lotte and work at a hot-dog
stand. And when, a year later, Willie and Eddie take their winnings from
cheating at poker, borrow a car, and go to Cleveland to see her, all they
— —
see is an icy wasteland slums and desolation and Eddie says, "You
know, it's funny. You come to someplace new, and everything looks just
the same." When the men decide to go to Florida, and they take Eva with
them, they stop at a crummy motel on a bleak stretch of windswept
coast, and, yeah, once again everything looks just the same. But only in
this movie— though I swear I heard someone quoting Eddie's line ap-
preciatively, as if it weren't part of a gag, as if there were something
deep to it. Stranger Than Paradise is a nothing-ever-happens movie; it

261
has something of the same bombed-out listlessness as Paul Morrissey's
1970 Trash — it's Trash without sex or transvestism. Jarmusch pays
more attention to the film frame, though, and to keeping the movie
formal and cool.

The images, like the characters' lives, are so emptied out that Jar-
musch makes you notice every tiny, grungy detail. And those black-
outs have something of the effect of Beckett's pauses: they make us
look more intently, as Beckett makes us listen more intently because —
we know we're in an artist's control. But Jarmusch's world of lowlifers
in a wintry stupor is comic-strip Beckett. There's no terror under or
—
around what we see the desolation is a gag. And the three charac-
ters' unexpressed affection for each other gives the film a pulpiness.
These three are some kind of cross between what punk used to mean
and what punk has come to mean. (Their affectlessness seems both
pre-civilized and post-civilized.) Tough, forlorn Eva, listening to the
woozy rhythms of the Screamin' Jay Hawkins record "I Put a Spell on
You," really just wants a little sunshine and companionship, and the
men would like to give it to her, but they don't know how. The film
draws you in by its use of an absurdist style to show you people who
walk through their lives expecting almost nothing. Then it holds you
by their efforts to get closer to each other. Punk cool plus glimmers of
—
warmth, and a too cute downer ending that doesn't add up to an aes-
thetic crime, but it's not a big deal, either.
Stranger Than Paradise has an odd, nonchalant charm; it's fun.
— —
But it's softhearted fun shaggy-dog minimalism and it doesn't have
enough ideas (or laughs) for its ninety-minute length. It has its own look
— —
which is a genuine accomplishment but it isn't as entertaining as the
messier Repo Man. Jarmusch (who raised the $120,000 to make the film)
and his cinematographer, Tom DiCillo, clearly know what they're doing,
and the idea of single-take scenes to convey comic anomie is a very
astute one, but the format wears thin. When the two bozos head out for
Cleveland and we see them during their dismal, wet drive, there's no
—
variety no relief from the gloom. It's just a long, boring trip. At times
all you can admire Jarmusch for is his relentlessness in holding to the

dejected, empty look. At his best, he has the kind of irrational, instinctive
timing that can catch you off guard and make you laugh out loud as —
I did at the scene where Willie and Eddie are playing cards with decrepit

old Aunt Lotte (Cecillia Stark), and she loudly announces, "I am the
veener." But to think Stranger Than Paradise was a knockout of a
movie you'd have to tune in to its minimalism so passively that you
lowered your expectations. The film is so hemmed in that it has the feel

262
of a mousy Eastern European comedy; it's like a comedy of sensory
deprivation.

I.If Brian De Palma were a new young director, Body Double

would probably be enough to establish him as a talented fellow. In its
own terms, this murder mystery set in L.A., in the overlapping worlds
of "serious" acting and performing in porno films, is stupid yet moder-
ately entertaining, and it has a tickling performance by Melanie Griffith
as Holly Body, a porno star with a punk-vamp haircut and a sprig of holly
tattooed on her rump. But, coming from De Palma, Body Double is an
awful disappointment: the voyeuristic themes and the scare sequences
are so similar to elements of his earlier movies that you keep waiting for
the thrills —the moments when he'll top himself. And he doesn't. He
doesn't equal himself, either. He stages the big scenes mechanically,
without the zest that used to send them off to horror-comedy heaven. He
has grown past this material, and he must know it. (According to his
statements in the press, he took on the directing end of this project,
which he had been scheduled to produce, only after repeated failures to
raise money for projects he had prepared —
one on the Yablonski mur-
ders, with a script he wrote with Scott Spencer, and one on a rock star
likeJim Morrison, with John Travolta in the part.)
The central role here is played by Craig Wasson, which is the worst
piece of casting in a De Palma movie since Cliff Robertson stared at the
camera and drifted through Obsession. Wasson may, in a sense, seem
right for the part —a clean-cut, not too bright young L.A. actor who
easily slips into voyeurism and fetishism —but what makes him seem
right for what makes him too bland to play it. He looks like the kind
it is

of guy who as a kid had an old man's face and was always praised for
being mature. Whatever Wasson does, he's dead earnest about it, and
his conscientious acting is a drag on the movie. Dennis Franz plays the
horror-film director who fires Wasson from his job as the vampire in
Vampire 's Kiss good reason that the claustrophobic Was-
for the very
son is paralyzed with fear if Franz does his scuzzo
he's put in a tomb.
number: the guy who's so blatantly uncouth he's funny only this time —
he isn't. The movie has no center, and it's a washout until Holly Body
arrives, close to the midway point; we were waiting for something, and
she turns out to be it.

263
 Double-entendres in the movies used to be labored; here it's as if the
—
atmosphere around Holly where she works, what she does were so —
porny that she couldn't talk except in double-entendres. She's like a
dirty-minded teen-age seductress, and what she says has an element of
surprise even for her; her talk is so sexy it gives her ideas and drives
her eyebrows up. De Palma's affection for funkiness makes Melanie
Griffith's performance possible, and in scenes such as Holly's barging
into the middle of traffic trying to hail a taxi De Palma gets a fresh visual
quality, too. Most of the film's bestmoments have to do with actors and
actors' lives; there's a sisters-under-the-skin moment when Holly Body
meets a "serious" actress who's looking for a job, and tries to be helpful,
neither of them realizing that they're not in the same line of work. (It's
like the wonderful fluke encounters in early De Palma films, such as Hi,
Mom!)
But the big, showy scenes recall Vertigo and Rear Window so
obviously that the movie is like an assault on the people who have put
De Palma down for being derivative. This time, he's just about spiting
himself and giving them reasons not to like him. And these big scenes
have no special point, other than their resemblance to Hitchcock's
work. Crude, real fears were addressed in De Palma's earlier films.
Phantom of the Paradise made everything you'd heard about the rock
come true, Carrie was about the
industry as a gigantic casting couch
dread of menstruation, Dressed to Kill was about your qualms that
sexual pleasure would get you into trouble. Blow Out was about your
apprehensions that you were a coward and would fail those who

counted on you, and so on. But Body Double has no subject other than
the plot contraption that De Palma and his co-writer, Robert J. Avrech,
thought up —unless there are a lot of claustrophobes in the audience.
The only thing that's new here in terms of getting at deeper fears is

the dirt flung onto (living) people in graves, and that isn't particularly
well worked out.
Body Double is not, to put it mildly, a spirited piece of moviemak-
ing. It features (on a character called "the Indian") the worst makeup
job of recent times. And the score (by Pino Donaggio) seems to have been
ladled over the images. (The thought of what some of the scenes might
have been like without it is a little frightening.) There's a key difference
between this picture and good De Palma. In Carrie, when the camera
moves languorously around teen-age girls in a high-school locker room
there's a buzz between the camera and what it's filming. But here De
Palma and his cinematographer, Stephen H. Burum, get away from the
out-of-work actors' low-rent apartments and the litter of pizza rinds very

264
quickly, De Palma saves the languorous camera for the sleek, expensive
settings, such as the Beverly Hills shopping mall called the Rodeo Collec-
tion, —
and there's not only no comic buzz the camera seems wowed,
impressed. The voyeuristic sequences, with Wasson peeping through a
telescope, aren't particularly erotic; De Palma shows more sexual feel-

ing for the swank buildings and real r.-tate.

November 12, 1984

THREE CHEERS

m
iq,
'top Making Sense makes wonderful sense. A concert film by
the New York new-wave rock band Talking Heads, it was shot during
three performances at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in December,
1983, and the footage has been put together without interviews and with
very few cutaways. The director, Jonathan Demme, offers us a continu-
ous rock experience that keeps building, becoming ever more intense and
euphoric. This has not been a year when American movies overflowed
with happiness; there was some in Splash, and there's quite a lot in All
of Me — especially in its last, dancing minutes. Stop Making Sense is the
only current movie that's a dose of happiness from beginning to end. The
lead singer, David Byrne, designed the stage lighting and the elegantly
plain performance-art environments (three screens used for back-lit slide
projections); there'sno glitter, no sleaze. The musicians aren't trying to
show us how hot they are; the women in the group aren't there to show
us some skin. Seeing the movie is like going to an austere orgy which —
turns out to be just what you wanted.
Clean-shaven, with short hair slicked back, and wearing white
sneakers and a light-colored suit, with his shirt buttoned right up to his
Adam's apple, the gaunt David Byrne, who founded the group, comes
on alone (with and a tape player) for the first number.
his acoustic guitar

265
 —

"Psycho Killer." He's so white he's almost mock-white, and so are his
jerky, long-necked, mechanical-man movements. He seems fleshless,
bloodless; he might almost be a black man's parody of how a clean-cut
white man moves. But Byrne himself is the parodist, and he commands
the stage by his hollow-eyed, frosty verve. Byrne's voice isn't a singer's
—
voice it doesn't have the resonance. It's more like a shouter's or
—
chanter's voice, with an emotional carryover a faintly metallic wail
and you might expect it to get strained or tired. But his voice never
—
seems to crack or weaken, and he's always in motion ^jiggling, aerobic
walking, jumping, dancing. (They shade into each other.) Byrne has a
withdrawn, disembodied, sci-fi quality, and though there's something
unknowable and almost autistic about him, he makes autism fun. He
—
gives the group its modernism the undertone of repressed hysteria,
which he somehow blends with freshness and adventurousness and a
driving beat. When he comes on wearing a boxlike "big suit" his body—
lost inside this form that sticks out around him like the costumes in Noh
—
plays, or like Beuys' large suit of felt that hangs off a wall it's a perfect
psychological fit. He's a handsome, freaky golem. When he dances, it
isn't as if he were moving the suit — the suit seems to move him. And this
big box that encloses him is only an exaggeration of his regular nerd-
dandy clothes. Byrne may not be human (he rejects ordinary, show-biz
forms of ingratiation, such as smiling), but he's a stupefying performer
— he even bobs his head like a chicken, in time to the music.
After Byrne's solo, the eight other members of the group come on
gradually, by ones and twos, in the order in which they originally joined
up with him, so you see the band take form. Tina Weymouth, the bass
player, who also sings, comes on next; a sunny, radiant woman with long
blond hair, she's smiling and relaxed. (She couldn't be more unlike Byrne
— he's bones, she's flesh.) Watching her, you feel she's doing what she
wants to do. And that's how it is with the drummer, Chris Frantz, and
the keyboard man, Jerry Harrison, and the others in the sexually inte-
grated, racially integrated group. The seven musicians and the two
women who provide vocal backing interact without making a point of it;
you feel that they like working together, and that if they're sweating
they're sweating for themselves, for their pleasure in keeping the music
going. They're not suffering for us; they're sharing their good times with
us. This band is different from the rock groups that go in for charismatic
lighting and sing of love and/or sex. David Byrne dances in the guise
of a revved-up catatonic; he's an idea man, an aesthetician who works
in the modernist mode of scary, catatonic irony. That's what he ema-

nates. Yet when the other Talking Heads are up there with him for a

266
 —

song such as "Once in a Lifetime" the tension and interplay are warm
— they're even beatific. The group encompasses Byrne's art-rock sohtari-
ness and the dissociation effects in the spare —
somewhat Godardian
staging. The others don't come together with Byrne, but the music
comes together. And there's more vitahty and fervor and rhythmic dance
on the stage than there is with the groups that whip themselves through
the motions of sexual arousal and frenzy, and try to set the theatre
ablaze.
It's slightly puzzling that this band's music absorbs many influences
—notably African tribal music and gospel (the climactic number here is

"Take Me to the River") —yet doesn't have much variety. The insistent
beat (it stays much the same) works to the movie's advantage, though.
The pulse of the music gives the film a thrilling kind of unity. And
Demme, by barely indicating the visual presence of the audience until
the end, intensifies the closed-ofi, hermetic feeling. His decision to keep
the camerawork steady (the cinematographer, Jordan Cronenweth, used
six mounted cameras, one hand-held, and one Panaglide) and to avoid
hotsy-totsy, MTV-style editing concentrates our attention on the per-
formers and the music. The only letdown in energy, I thought, was in
Byrne's one bow to variety —when he left the stage for the Tom Tom
Club number. It's number on its own, but it breaks the musical
a likable
number with a cluttered background, and it has
flow. (It's also the only
a few seconds of banal strobe visuals.) One image in the film also stuck
in my craw: a shot of a boy in the audience holding up his white
little

stuffed unicorn. It's just too wholesome a comment on the music. But
these are piddling flaws. The movie was made on money ($800,000) that
was raised by the group itself, and its form was set by aesthetic consider-
ations rather than a series of marketing decisions. (This is not merely a
rock concert without show-biz glitz; it's also a rock-concert movie that
doesn't try for visual glitz.) Many different choices could have been made
in the shooting and the editing, and maybe some of them might have
given the individual numbers (there are sixteen) more modulation, but
in its own terms Stop Making Sense is close to perfection.
The sound engineering is superb. The sound seems better than live
—
sound; it is better it has been filtered and mixed and fussed over, so
that it achieves ideal clarity. (The soundtrack-album versions of some of
the songs that are also on the Heads' 1983 album Speaking in Tongues
are more up, more joyous.) The nine Talking Heads give the best kind
—
of controlled performance the kind in which everyone is loose. At the
end of the concert, they're still in control, but they're also carried away.
And Jonathan Demme appears to have worked in exactly the same spirit.

267
 D

I Ian Bird (Bill Paterson), the hero of Comfort and Joy, is a

prim, innocuous fellow in his late thirties. When we first see him, he's
tailing a beautiful red-haired kleptomaniac as she rampages through a
Glasgow department store at Christmastime, grabbing everything in
sight. He follows anxiously a few steps behind, and we take him for a
store detective who's just about to seize her. But when they're both
outside he says, "You'll be the death of me, Maddy." She kisses him
lightly on the and he looks at her adoringly; he's in paradise, and
ear,
the two of them head home, set up their Christmas tree, and make love.
A little later, Maddy (Eleanor David), who has been living with Alan for
four years, starts throwing things into boxes. When he asks what she's
doing, she replies, "I'm leaving," and she packs up the mountains of
bric-a-brac she has accumulated, strips the house —since the contents
are hers, in the sense that she shoplifted them herself —and goes off in

the van with the movers she has arranged for. Alan now has nothing but
a bed without sheets or blankets, and, outside, the snappy little red
B.M.W. Cabriolet that he dotes on. We don't have to be told why the
sexy, mad Maddy leaves. We can see Alan's pride of possession in the

sparkling clean car and the complacent blankness in his face.

This latest comedy by the Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth has
a character rather than a story. It's about a romance between a man and
his job. (At least, that's what gives the film much of its charm.) Alan, the
disc-jockey host of the local early-morning radio show, is known to the
listeners as Dickey Bird, and this ordinary, rather fussy fellow un-
dergoes a magical transformation when he's in his glass booth, helping
his listeners get through the blur of sleep and into the new day by
playing records (Scottish favorites), reading commercials, supplying tips
about the weather and the traffic, and improvising cheerful chatter. He's
a real smoothie, changing expressions to brighten his voice, signalling
to the engineer in another glass enclosure, waving to greet other mem-
bers of the staff as they arrive. (The booths are much like the glass-

partitioned offices that the hero of Forsyth's Local Hero was trapped in;

Forsyth uses glass reflections in the way Altman did in Nashville and
—
The Long Goodbye you see an image and you see through it at the
same time.) Dickey Bird turns the arriving workers into characters for
his listeners, creating a daily sitcom out of the trivia of what mood
they're in, the tasks they perform, and so on. He's professionally genial,
and with no cynicism underneath; he has a glow of pride in his clear
 —

enunciation and his mastery of the job.

— "The Dickey Bird
It's his show
Early Worm Show." And though there are many other characters — all

of them likable in unexpected ways —we meet them because of their

connections with him. He's the one we hang out with.
The movie, which was shot on locations in Glasgow (Forsyth's native
city), is set in the few days before Christmas, as Alan takes to cruising

around the city thinking about how empty his life is. A stunning girl,
Charlotte (Claire Grogan), in a passing Mr. Bunny ice-cream van grins
at him, but they're both encased in glass. Wanting to meet her, he
impulsively follows the van, and sees it deliberately banged up, with
much shattering of glass, by a couple of thugs. (One of them spots him
and demands his autograph.) The movie is about what Alan gets into
when he attempts to mediate the wrangling over turf and price between
the Mr. Bunny venders and the Mr. McCool venders, two factions of an
Italian family who have started roughing each other up. In short, it's
about a shallow man trying to fight off loneliness and depression by
changing his life, and very soon Alan's job is endangered and his car is

a pathetic battered heap. "I'm a serious person, with serious friends,"

he tells the stunned station manager, in explanation of why he suddenly
sees himself as an investigative journalist digging into the city's hidden
crime (the ice-cream wars he has stumbled on).

In scenes like this. Bill Paterson plays Alan's fatuousness with just
the right tone —so that you like him for it. "You wouldn't believe the
things going on in this city," Alan says to the boss. He's really talking
about his own state of mind; he's trying to break out of "Dickey Bird."
He drives around and is lost in the new subdivisions, which are like glass
enclosures, and he's wide-eyed with fascination watching grown men
the venders — in a miniature power struggle over who's going to get a
choice treat, a kunzle cake. Alan has caught a glimpse of naked passion,
(Sweets and junk-food snacking are a motif in the film,
in all its looniness.

and, of course, a principal item in the commercials on "The Dickey Bird

Early Worm Show." And Alan's closest friend sums up Maddy as "choc-
olate mousse.")Those who saw Forsyth's Local Hero or his earlier films,
Gregory's Girl and That Sinking Feeling, will be familiar with the
movie's swerving, unaccountable humor. In a scene at the Mr. Bunny
—
factory, workers are welding and hammering putting the busted vans
—
back in shape and re-recording the rinky-dink tinkle tune that the vans
play. People in the audience laugh at different times during Comfort
and Joy, and I think that sometimes they may be laughing simultane-
ously at different jokes. (You catch on to Forsyth's jokes at your own
speed, and there are always some piled up at the back of your head.)

269
 —

The movie is somewhat misshapen, though; there's a deeper comedy

here in vestigial form. Forsyth was trying to treat the subject of depres-
sion because he wanted to get down under his comic tone; he wanted to
—
crack the surface to penetrate the image of Scottish reserve and make
contact with the dimness behind it. He might have been trying to do
something like McCabe & Mrs. Miller. But he didn't, and the movie has

more visual depth than he quite knows what to do with. Its visual scheme
is warm and cool — —
amber and fluorescent blue and it's stark raving
gorgeous. The cinematographer, Chris Menges, who also shot Local
Hero (and The Killing Fields), sustains this scheme with colors that are
rich yet seem newly revealed. Much of the movie takes place at twilight
or at night or in the pre-dawn. (Menges is amazing at catching the
quality of light when you first wake up.) Forsyth was trying for a
contrast between the Italians, with their emotions right out in the open,
and the Scots, in their grim industrial city —a place of partitions, and of
walled-in feelings that they keep way down in themselves.
Maddy walks out on Alan, and They probably
the Italians appear.
embody Forsyth's restlessness, his desire to break out of his comedy
shell, to take risks —to take himself seriously as an artist. He wants to
show that there's more irrationality in the Scottish psyche than has been
—
assumed Glasgow in the movie is the Scottish psyche with an Italian
war going on in it. But he backs off from giving the venders any fullness
as characters and uses them as petty buffoons, in some rather pinched
ethnic humor. The actual ice-cream wars among the Italians in Glasgow
caused five deaths last year, shortly after the film was shot, but Forsyth
presents the wars (lamely) as screwball farce. And that's what throws
the movie off. He outwits his own basic impulse; he sets up the conflicts,
then drops them, leaving only remnants of his plan. When, for example,
Alan goes to negotiate between the Italians, the meeting is outside
Glasgow, in a parking lot with countryside behind it it's freedom, it's —
—
release and this is probably the only scene shot in straight sunlight.
And when Alan stumbles upon the recipe that will resolve the dispute
it's ice-cream fritters —
fried ice cream, the unification of hot and cold
and he has the secret ingredient, the agent to bring them together.
But as this material has been treated it seems to be just a stupid
mechanical plot that doesn't relate to Alan Bird's life falling apart. He
seems to become involved in the wars simply because of Charlotte's
ravishing grin, and there's no follow-through: he never even lands a date
with her. We appear to be expected to share in Alan's satisfaction with
the shrewd business deal he makes for thirty per cent of the profits from
the fritters —a deal that includes the Italians' fixing up his car. But

270
money wasn't his problem, and though it's apparent that his self-image
has suffered the bruises inflicted on the car, we're not eager to see him
back in his immaculate glass pod. The end of the movie —Christmas Day,
with Alan doing a virtuoso job on the air, creating the illusion that the
studio is filled with merrymakers having a Yuletide shindig— a marvel- is

lous capper to Bill Paterson's performance, but it doesn't necessarily sit

well with the viewer. It's a kind of finger-snapping end. Alan Bird's
personality comes out when he's on the show, and that's a delight, but
we're invited to see him as a little man, as no more than "Dickey Bird,"
—
and there's an element of betrayal in this and of self-betrayal, too.
Forsyth seems to be laughing at himself because he feels that's what we
expect of him.
Comfort and Joy is much less than Forsyth must have hoped for,

yet even the failed plot doesn't wreck it. Forsyth works against the usual
expectations that things will get bigger; he makes things small. That
may be what he wanted to fight this time (by getting under it), but it still
works for him. And so does the dreamy surface. What's best is the hero's
daily routines —
Alan has a session recording a radio commercial which
is a pure comic triumph. Everyday life is an idyll in Comfort and Joy.

—
And the frothy Maddy has an idiosyncratic burr it sounds fluted that —
you want to listen to forever. It was a pity to lose her so soon in the
movie. (She turns up again, but only in Alan's dreams.) I would have
been happy to see her raid a few more department stores, but Forsyth
never milks a joke. Nothing is forced; something is raised, and then it's
up to you. That's what puts him in a class by himself.

I rather dreaded going to see A Soldier's Story, the film ver-

sion of Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play, because I expected it to be one
of those overexplicit socially conscious plays transferred to the screen
with all making speeches to the camera. Well, it is and
the characters
it isn't.The speeches are there, all right, but the director, Norman
Jewison, who made the crack 1967 comedy-mystery In the Heat of the
Night, can sometimes summon up a highly entertaining kind of crafts-
manship. A Soldier's Story, which has an atmosphere that recalls the
1967 film, has a beautiful sense of pace, and Jewison brings out all the
humor he can find. The movie is set on and around an Army base in
Louisiana in 1944. A black drillmaster, Sergeant Waters (Adolph Cae-

271
sar), has been murdered, and a black lawyer, Captain Davenport (How-
ard E. Rollins, Jr.) —the first black commissioned officer ever to be seen
in this part of the country— has been sent down from Washington, D.C.,
to investigate the killing. As he interrogates the black troops and white
officers at the base, we see, in flashback, what led up to the murder. The
flashback structure is handled very artfully —and this artfulness saves
the picture, I think. Sergeant Waters is and Adolph
a stage villain,

Caesar plays him as a skinny bantam with a strained, angry, low rasp
of a voice and such lip-twisting nastiness that he would have been intol-
erable in the present. (The skillful interweaving of the flashbacks pro-
vides distancing.)
Fuller (who did the screen adaptation of his play) uses the structure
of a whodunit for an inquiry into the psychological dynamics of racism.
And the truth is that even those of us who dread an excess of virtue on
the screen may have a secret hunger for this kind of trumped-up power-
ful situation, in which the actors can be bigger than life. The light-

skinned Sergeant Waters, as we gradually come to learn, was a Regular

Army man and veteran of the First World War who tried to be whiter
than the whites — always snapping to attention,
trim, perfectly creased,
a martinet. He suffered from an inverted form of racism: he hated the
ignorant Southern blacks who he believed confirmed the whites in their
bigotry. A black Hitler — on a small scale —he wanted to purge the
Negro race of its lazy, shuffling clowns. It's a sickness that also afflicts
people of other races and ethnic backgrounds —
quiet, tasteful Jews tend
to loathe ''pushy" ones, —
and so on but Sergeant Waters had it in a
virulent, sadistic form, and he was in a position to make life hell for the
black recruits. As Captain Davenport gathers the horrifying evidence of
how Sergeant Waters treated the men in his platoon, he soon recognizes
that the blacks had more reason to kill him than any of the whites had.
And we get a parade of confrontation scenes between Davenport and the
white officers, who are stunned to see a black officer and don't know how
to deal with the embarrassment it causes them, and between Davenport
and the black soldiers, as he pokes into what they're concealing.
The result is a tense, wholehearted combination of melodrama and
psychodrama, and, as most of the time Davenport is one-on-one with the
people he questions, a number of actors get to dominate the screen for
a scene or two, and they do solid, lightning-fast characterizations. The
standout is Denzel Washington (of the TV series "St. Elsewhere"); as
Peterson, the best educated of the group, he never overacts, yet we
always know what he's thinking, and he draws us into his detestation of
the scummy sergeant. There are also finely detailed performances by

272
Art Evans, Larry Riley, David Alan Grier, Robert Townsend, and David
Harris. And there are several good serio-comic performances in the
white officers' roles —most notably by Dennis Lipscomb, as Captain Tay-
lor, a Bob Newhart type who's trying to be decent to Captain Davenport
but doesn't quite know how. If the black actors come through stronger
in this movie, it's partly the way their roles are conceived, but also, and
maybe in larger share, a result of Jewison's care and feeling, and of the
loving treatment afforded the black actors by the cinematographer, Rus-
sell Boyd. The Caucasians are pasty and pink; the black actors' skins

seem iridescent. And Rollins, who is perhaps the darkest of them, is the
most gleaming, and is photographed so that he has a heroic, sculptural
presence. He's the visual star of the movie, yet he's still rather rigid as
an actor; he doesn't have much give and take, and even when he uses
his aloofness in terms of the Davenport character he lacks excitement.
It may be that we want too much from him, because he's in the role that
Sidney Poitier used to play with a power and a grace that brought you
right inside his emotions and knocked you silly. Rollins has too much
properness in his acting, but he eases up after a while and becomes more
likable.
It's a funny thing about the movie — it almost clicks, except at its

core. There's some daring in Fuller's perception that in a racist society

the temptation toward self-hatred is part of being black, and that Cap-
tain Davenport and Sergeant Waters' killer suffer from it, as Waters did.
—
Yet the moviemakers themselves the black Fuller, the white Protes-
—
tant Jewison don't want to show us the kind of lewd or loutish or plumb
ignorant black who might really make other blacks feel disgraced. The
particular target that the barking-seal Sergeant Waters singles out for
his abuse — Larry Riley's C.J., a guitar-playing, blues-singing Mississippi
farm boy who is also the star of the black baseball team doesn't ring —
any psychological bells. (The easygoing, slow-moving C.J. has his own
dignity; he doesn't represent what Waters hates and fears in himself.)
The movie seems to be a black version of Billy Budd, with Sergeant
Waters as Claggart, but the attraction-repulsion between him and C.J.
is missing. Fuller's conception is totally asexual; that may be what gives

the film a hollowness right at its center.

What's surprising about A Soldier's Story is how enjoyable it is
despite its limitations, and how well shot it is. Even the scenes that open
—
out the play such as the beginning, at an off-base cafe, where Patti
LaBelle sings for the black servicemen, and a blacks-versus-whites base-
ball game, and the going-to-war ending (which is different from the
play's) —
are effective. The people who complain "They don't make mov-

273
ies the way they used to" ought to take a look at this one. The ones who
don't complain might take a look, too.
November 26, 1984

UNREAL

ft \he Killing Fields, which is based on Sydney Schanberg's

1980 Times Magazine article 'The Death and Life of Dith Pran," is by
no means a negligible movie. It shows us the Khmer Rouge transform-
ing Cambodia into a nationwide gulag, and the scenes of this genocidal
revolution have the breadth and terror of something deeply imagined.
The picture is at its most powerful when nobody is saying a word. When
the director, Roland Joffe, and his cinematographer, Chris Menges, are
looking at the wind from the choppers buifeting the American evacuees
or at roads packed with masses of confused, displaced people or at
purplish, hothouse landscapes, each widescreen image seems to make a
complete statement. These images suggest paintings, because the hor-
ror and the exotic colors are "unreal." We see what Dith Pran meant in
the article when he were like
said that "in the water wells, the bodies
soup bones and you could always tell the killing grounds be-
in broth,

cause the grass grew taller and greener." The landscapes appear to
absorb the cruelty and the corpses and remain pristine paradisal. The —
imagery suggests a documentary made by a macabre lyric poet. It's the
shallow foreground story that keeps letting us down.
In the article, Schanberg, who was the Times' correspondent in
Cambodia from 1972 to 1975, recalls his friendship with Pran, his inter-
preter and assistant, who stayed on with him in Phnom Penh after the
Americans were evacuated, because Schanberg was determined to cover
the story and Pran knew that Schanberg would be helpless without him.
The fast-thinking, multilingual Pran was able to save Schanberg and —

274
Jon Swain, the correspondent of the London Sunday Times, and Al
Rockoff, an American free-lance photographer from slaughter by the—
Khmer Rouge soldiers, but his Caucasian friends weren't allowed to
keep him with them, and he had to slip off into the countryside. The
articlewas a record of Schanberg's subsequent efforts to locate Pran,
and the remorse and general anguish that he experienced until the wily,
resourceful Pran, after four years of slave labor and hiding and pretend-
ing to have been an illiterate cabdriver, made his way into Thailand, late
in 1979, and got word to him. Schanberg's account may have seemed like
first-rate screen material: a story of the friendship of an Asian and an
American, against the canvas of a brutal revolution.
But as it comes across Pran, played by Haing S.
in this British film,

Ngor, who was a physician Cambodia and now lives in Los Angeles,
in
is selflessly good, and Sam Waterston's bearded Schanberg is an idealis-
tic journalist driven to pursue the truth, but he's also a manipulative
fellow who's morbidly sensitive, stuck-up, and humorless. In Cambodia,
the film's Schanberg seems to be in chronic pain from the weight of his
determination to get the story: he paces irritably and glowers with
importance; he stands as if he were doing his best to relax while on the
rack. Back home, he mopes and looks distressed, and the hoarseness in
his stagey voice equals moral agony. The way the movie is constructed,
Schanberg's consciousness is the battlefield, the theatre: we're supposed
to be watching what Cambodia makes him feel, and if he'd forgotten
about Dith Pran the movie would have ended. It's almost as if Cambodia
only existed to make Waterston's Schanberg suffer and soliloquize, end-
lessly asking, "Did I do what was right?"
Joffe is making hisdebut as a movie director, but he has had a great
deal of experience in the theatre, on television, and in documentary. He
and the Bruce Robinson, must have known what our reac-
scriptwriter,
tion to Waterston's Schanberg would be: he's always bawling people out,
and the only emotions he offers us are his dry angst and his guilt. The
moviemakers may have intended us to perceive some sort of equivalency
between Schanberg's irresponsible treatment of Pran and the United
States' irresponsible actions in Cambodia: the bombing that Nixon kept
secret, and the invasion, and the support of the corrupt, unpopular Lon
—
Nol government all of which contributed to the demoralization that
made it possible for the Khmer Rouge, under the crude (some say
psychotic) Communist theoretician Pol Pot, to take power in 1975. By
1979, when the rule of the Khmer Rouge was overturned by a Viet-
namese invading force, an estimated forty per cent of the Cambodians
(three million out of seven) had been massacred or had died of starvation

276
or disease. The movie quite explicitly (and cavalierly) lays the blame for
this on Nixon and Kissinger — on American govern-
us. It says that the
ment talked high ideals while lousing things up and then waltzed away,
just as Schanberg did.
Joffe is saddled with the mechanics of crosscutting between Pran's
experience of the atrocities in Cambodia and Schanberg' s worry and
remorse in various settings in San Francisco and New York. The Schan-
berg-in-the-U.S. scenes have no substance; they're just filler, and some
of them are worse than —they're designed to rub Schanberg's nose
filler

in the dirt. In one nastily pointed scene, at a plushy New York gathering
at which Schanberg honored as the 1976 "Journalist of the Year" for
is

his dispatches from Cambodia, he goes into the men's room and runs into
Al Rockoff (John Malkovich), who sneeringly accuses him of having let
Pran sacrifice himself so he could pick up his big award. (It stands in for

the Pulitzer Prize, which the actual Schanberg did in fact win, and the
film punches up the accusation by cutting directly from Pran wading
among human skeletons in the flooded rice paddies to Schanberg being
applauded as he goes up to the dais to speak.)
Striving for prizes and pursuing the truth get mixed up in this
all

movie, and there's an unintended consequence of the emphasis on Schan-

berg's motives. Waterston's Schanberg, who uses the Times as his
shield and his glory (it's what the flag is to the American Ambassador
in Phnom Penh), is so cut off from other people that Pran's loyalty to him

makes a viewer uncomfortable. If the "friendship" isn't a true one, if

Schanberg is a self-promoter with a gnawing conscience and that's —
—
how the movie presents him then the small, smiling Pran is too close
to the patronizing cliche of the trusting, childlike native. And his devo-
tion to the master-race American seems flat and —well, puppy-doggy.
When we see Pran in a Khmer Rouge prison labor camp undergoing
forced reeducation, the light has gone out of his face. It comes back
when we hear him on the soundtrack whispering his thoughts to Sydney.
(It's an indication of the movie's shaping of the relationship that Pran,
who inSchanberg's accounts calls him Syd, is more formal in the movie.)
We don't hear Pran whispering to his wife or children— only to Sydney.
And it —
and sticky a colonial version of "Come back to
feels fraudulent
the raft ag'in, Huck honey!" Perhaps the stickiest moment in the movie
is the one in which Pran, explaining to Schanberg why he has decided

to stay with him, says that he's "a newspaperman, too." The pathos in
this scene is naked and a bit pushy; the moviemakers show us Pran as
a naive man, duping himself. The scene also makes Schanberg more
culpable, but they may not have intended that. They may simply have

276
been trying to make us find Pran more touching and lovable —more of
—
a victim so that the movie would be involving.
The Killing Fields is an ambitious movie made with an inept, some-
times sly, and very often equivocal script; it's written like a TV docu-
drama, but you can't always tell what the scenes are getting at. A major
early sequence, set in 1973, deals with the accidental bombing of a
Cambodian town by an American B-52, but we don't find out what our
—
B-52 was doing there were the bombs intended for another country or
for a different spot in Cambodia? The incident seems included so that
we'll see how Schanberg and Pran work together to get the facts, despite
the attempted coverup by an American diplomatic officer (Craig T. Nel-
son), and to introduce a suggestion of American business interests in
—
Cambodia Schanberg and Pran spend some time holed up in a Coca-
Cola bottling plant. The questions about the B-52 are simply left dan-
gling. Some of the episodes covering Pran's four years of slavery and
escape attempts and beatings and his being tied to a tree and left for
dead are almost as phonied up as the men's-room scene; there are
which Pran, entrusted with the child of a disaffected
fictional episodes in

Khmer Rouge official, tenderly carries the little boy in his arms over
dangerous mountain passes, and the glossy piousness affects even the
cinematography —
becomes blandly pictorial. (The film was shot in
it

Thailand.) Yet the power of the images of urban death squads and the
mass exodus from Phnom Penh stays with you. The great scenes are so
impressive that the weak ones don't cancel out your emotions. And there
are some first-rate dramatic vignettes: Bill Paterson plays a harried
doctor at a hospital packed full of bleeding, mangled children who were
caught in the fighting between the Lon Nol government troops and the
Khmer Rouge; a day or so later, he has nothing to do but tinkle the piano
keys in theFrench Embassy and talk to another doctor (Athol Fugard)
— their patients have been forced out of the hospitals and onto the roads.
And there are tense moments at the French Embassy when Malkovich's
Al Rockoff, in his hippie headband, and Julian Sands' Jon Swain (who's
like a blond, British Edward Albert) hatch a plan to save Pran with a

forged passport, and Rockoff tries to develop a passport photo of Pran,

though he doesn't have the necessary chemicals. Paterson and Fugard
give colorful, accomplished performances, and Malkovich does more: the
function of his touchy loner character is to recede into the background,
and Malkovich somehow creates a drawling, sloppy pothead who would
naturally do just that. (The only sour note in the performance is the
unplayable men's-room confrontation.)
It's likely that the producer, David Puttnam, undervalues the full

277
emotional expressiveness of Joffe's vision of Cambodia under siege.
Sometimes, just when we are holding our breath at what we're seeing,
music, by Mike Oldfield, is poured on top of the images to pump up our
emotions. During the evacuation scenes at the American Embassy,
there's loud chanting. When the central characters have been taken
prisoner, and they watch other prisoners being killed and expect to be
killed themselves, there's music —
it suggests that Oldfield was weaned

—
on Tangerine Dream to make the panic and hysteria more heart-pound-
ingly intense. The executions are so convincing that I would have
—
thought the audience had all the emotions it could handle there are
fresh corpses all over. But the music insists on hyping death. It gets
between the imagery and our responses; it tries to mythologize the
scenes, and it deprives us, I think, of honest feelings. When we see the
dull-eyed young-boy soldiers of the Khmer Rouge forcing the entire
population of Phnom Penh onto the roads out of the city masses of—
—
people, lost children, the wounded, the aged the soundtrack cries of the
people are turned down and we get loud Oldfield. And when Schanberg
is back at home he looks at TV footage of Nixon explaining his decision

to bomb Cambodia and why it had to be secret, and then presses the
fast-forward on his video, and we get speeded up images of atrocities at
—
the same time that the hi-fi is on at full volume Franco Corelli, backed
by a symphony orchestra, singing the "Nessun dorma" aria from Puc-
cini's Turandot. The only bit of appropriate music —
or, rather, music

that through some cross-cultural mystery seems appropriate is heard—

under the final credits, and it's balm to the ear.
Puttnam was also the producer of Chariots of Fire, and in a recent
interview he said, "When you're in post-production, the composer
becomes vastly important. I've seen Chariots of Fire without a score
and can speak with great authority: I don't think it would have won the
Academy Award or very much else without Vangelis." I belive him, and
if The Killing Fields had been made by the director of Chariots of Fire

it, too, might have needed souping up. But the music is an insult to Joffe

—
and to Menges even if they don't know it. In the same interview,
Puttnam, referring to The Killing Fields, explained that "over the
years, I've wanted to try and make a film that could be described as
'operatic realism,' " and said, "I always wanted to try and combine the
toughness of The Battle of Algiers with a story that was a bit more
accessible and mix in some of the operatic quality, if you like, of Apoca-
lypse Now. " This is a case of a producer pinning down his own aesthetic
crime. It's highly doubtful that Sydney Schanberg let Dith Pran stay on
—
with him in Phnom Penh because as the film's innuendo has it he was —

278
 —

looking ahead to a Pulitzer. But it's a cold cinch that David Puttnam is

hoping that the kind of musical inflation which won the Best Picture
Award for Chariots of Fire will do the same for The Killing Fields. As
for the friendship between Pran and Schanberg which is supposed to
make the movie "a bit more accessible," it's what is most ambiguous.
Among the film's lesser aesthetic crimes, there's a tiny, glaring one:
Accepting his award, Schanberg makes a speech in which he refers to
the American officials who made the decision to secretly bomb and in-

vade Cambodia, and says that he and Dith Pran tried to make a record
of the concrete results of those decisions. And we get a cut to a baldish
man in the audience bobbing his head appreciatively. The director may
not have been able to do anything about Puttnam, but surely this guy's
head could have been cut off.*

t.
'an a vacuum love another vacuum? That's the question posed
by Falling in Love, a piece of big-star-packaging in which Robert De
Niro and Meryl Streep look, respectively, handsome and pretty as Frank,
an architectural engineer, and Molly, a free-lance commercial artist
two prosperous Westchester commuters, each married to someone else,
in marriages that have become (who'd have thought it?) empty. We don't

get a clue to what might make their own union any different, because
there's nothing to draw them together. They don't share any tastes; they
don't enthuse over anything; they don't argue over a book, a movie, a
painting, a building, or evenTV. They have nothing to say; each stares
past the other into a separate space. The most compelling thing about
them is the beauty-spot wart on De Niro's cheekbone: it has three dimen-
—
sions one more than anything else in the movie.
Peter Suschitzky's cinematography has a vibrancy that makes you
feel hopeful, and Michael Kahn's editing has an elating precision, but
after a while the pleasures of technical proficiency shrivel. Frank and
—
Molly are too nice too decent and loyal and conscience-stricken to be —
adulterous, but they think about each other longingly, and the camera
watches them think. The screenwriter, Michael Cristofer, is the gent
who made terminal cancer romantic (in the play and TV film The Shadow
*I may have gone too far in this review in exculpating Roland Joffe: in a letter, he states
that he made his own choices, and that David Puttnam is "a good, thoughtful, supportive
producer."

279
Box); this time, he's trying to make not having sex romantic. Frank
finally kisses Molly, after racing through Grand Central to find her, but
maybe he's out of breath, because when he says, "I love you, I do love
—
you," it sounds blah it's remote, dubbed
like a voice-over.
The picture has been called a new Brief Encounter, but it's intermi-
nable, and in some ways it's more like an East Coast Tender Mercies —
it's about two anomics who inch their way to spiritual rebirth. Frank and

Molly are so full of misgivings that when they try to go to bed together
they seem to be crucifying each other; her unhappy eyes are misty and
red-ringed. They can't go through with it, of course. (They can't bring
—
themselves to do much of anything even put a sentence together.) But
they're honest people, and they have to tell their respective spouses the
—
truth about their feelings those gossamer feelings that the camera
can't catch. (We don't actually see Molly tell her husband about Frank,
but we assume she does, because the husband suddenly knows about
—
him; this seems like a glitch, and it's jarring it suggests that these
characters have a life offscreen.) And so Frank and Molly suffer and earn
their right to happiness. Their spouses conveniently reveal moral flaws:
Frank's tense, distraught wife (Jane Kaczmarek, who has been the liveli-
est person in the movie up to this point) slaps him, and doesn't want to

go on with him anyway, and Molly's husband (David Clennon) is untrust-

—
worthy he tells a lie. (This movie takes you back to the moral bookkeep-
ing of the Production Code days; the issue of Frank's kids is neatly
—
squared his wife doesn't want them, so he gets to keep them.)
Cristofer and the director, Ulu Grosbard, must believe that the
—
patterning of old romantic movies in which the hero and the heroine
each have one best friend to confide in, and the cutting goes back and
forth between parallel incidents in their lives —has some kind of formal
magic to it. De Niro and Streep are made up and lighted to look
creamy perfect. And New York City itself has been turned into a mira-
cle of serenity. The commuter trains are shiny and spotless and run
smoothly; there's no litter or noise or abrasiveness in Grand Central, or
in any of the other locations. When Molly visits her father in the hospi-
tal, his room is large and cheerful, and if Frank and Molly go into a

restaurant there's sure to be at least ten feet of clear air around their
table, and the waiters and busboys and the other customers all speak
in hushed tones. (If Grosbard wanted to make a Toronto movie, why

didn't he just go to Toronto?) Grosbard deliberately transforms New

York into a setting for a romantic fable, but since the movie has no
core (no romance, no fable), this city is just a benign, brightly colored
playpen for two people who are bored silly with themselves. The ultra-

280
 —

mediocre music, by Dave Grusin, confirms the cuddliness of the make-

beheve New York.
Falling in Love is too genteel and refined to be a howl. And, except
for Streep's rather charming revamp of an old comic pantomime —as
Molly prepares for a date with Frank, she disgustedly changes from one
outfit to another and another and another, because she doesn't like the
—
way she looks in anything it doesn't even rise to the status of a piflJle.
De Niro appears to be alert and ready to do something, but the inanity
seems to be worse on him than on Streep, who stays fine-tuned, as if she
really thought she was in a movie; he turns numb. It's pleasant to see
these two in a picture where they're not carrying all the sins of mankind
on their shoulders, but they've gone too far in the opposite direction
they're not carrying anything. The purpose of the techniques of natural-
istic acting that they have been trained in is for the inner emotions to

be expressed in the external gestures; what they're doing here is a

—
parody of naturalistic acting it's all externals. The stars didn't need to
be called Frank and Molly; they could have addressed each other as Nada
and Nada.

1
played by Dianne Wiest. I
Love is
Ihe small, coy role of Streep's confidante in Falling in
had the chance to catch her in
just recently
a major performance, in Independence Day, the film by Robert Mandel,
from a script by the novelist Alice Hoffman, which opened in January,
1983, and disappeared almost immediately but has now turned up on
HBO. It's a very fine movie about the small-town youth of a woman
artist. Kathleen Quinlan plays the part with a cool, wire-taut intensity

—the heroine challenges herself to become what she's almost sure she
could be.Her desperation takes the form of affectations and pretensions
that are a little like those of the young Katharine Hepburn in Alice
Adams and the young Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the
Comer, but the Quinlan character has her talent driving her on past all
that. Wiest plays a battered wife, clammy with fear, who revenges
herself on her husband in the grand manner. It's a funny thing about

her performance —you keep expecting it to turn into something trite, but
pretty soon you're forced to admit you've never seen anything like it.
Part of the credit for this goes to Alice Hoffman's writing and to Robert
Mandel, who keeps the whole cast interacting quietly and satisfyingly,

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 —

but most of it has to go to Wiest, who has hold of an original character

and plays her to the scary hilt. Maybe Independence Day is the kind of
small movie that seems better on television than it does in a theatre, but
it has a marvellous look (it was designed by Stewart Campbell and shot

by Charles Rosher), and I'd love to see it on a big screen that would give
the actresses the scale they deserve.
December 10, 1984

DAVID AND GOLIATH

1
Elephant
I
he David
Man and
is

is
David Lynch, who made Eraserhead and The
a painter-director of feelings and moods, of
dreams, hallucinations, textures. He's entranced by the interactions be-
—
tween the organic and the mechanical by corrosion and rot. He likes to
—
have strange things growing things like polyps. Lynch is awestruck by
what is generally considered disgusting; he's hypnotized by it. He shows
you what he sees, and you find yourself looking at things that you
normally couldn't bear and tuning in to his hypnotic state. You're caught
not just by images but by silences and discombobulating sounds and
editing rhythms that give you the dreamy willies. The Goliath is Dune,
Frank Herbert's ecological sci-fi fantasy, with its own galactic system,
hordes of characters parcelled out over four planets, and a Messiah
Paul Atreides, who is pre-ordained to lead the righteous in a holy war
and deliver from darkness and evil. The sto-
this make-believe universe
ries that make up the first Dune book were written on the West Coast,
printed in installments in the magazine analog, starting in 1963, and
then put in hardcover in 1965, and the book and its sequels have together
sold something like fifteen million copies and are now going stronger
than ever. Those are intimidating figures, and the book's reputation as
a sci-fi masterpiece is intimidating, too.
 Herbert fantasized about man's changes in consciousness, and
about the battle over consciousness-altering drugs. The conspiracies and
power struggles of the ruling families of the four planets are centered
on the narcotic spice that is mined on the arid planet Arrakis, which
means "dune" in the language of the natives —the Fremen. The spice
gives people special powers — it raises consciousness, turns the whites
of the Fremen's eyes blue, makes space travel possible, and prolongs
life —but it's also addictive, and if it's used to excess it causes muta-
tions. It holds this universe together,and Lynch brings on the giant
man-eating sandworms that live beneath the desert on Dune and grow
to be more than a thousand feet long. "The worm is the spice," we
—
are told, "and the spice is the worm" they are the same creature in
different stages of its life. Undulating under the sand, these killer
—
worms they're as long as skyscrapers are tall thrash up reddish —
and ochre dust, and when they come near the surface they zap the air
with streaks of static electricity. They put on quite a show, though
they're not as squishy as you might hope they'd be in a David Lynch
movie.
It doesn't take long to realize that basically this isn't a David Lynch

—
movie it's Dune. Lynch doesn't bring a fresh conception to the mate-
rial; he doesn't make the story his own. Rather, he tries to apply his

talents to Herbert's conception. He doesn't conquer this Goliath he —

submits to it, as if he thought there was something to be learned from
it. He's being a good boy, a diligent director. And though Herbert's prose
can prostrate a reader —
it's dry, with gusts of stale poetry Lynch —
treats the book so respectfully that he comes out with a solemn big-
budget version of Up in Smoke.
The movie opens in the year 10,191, and the first half hour is practi-
cally an orientation course. Lynch has so much to do laying out the basic
elements of Herbert's vision and setting the interplanetary treachery in
motion that he doesn't get around to clarifying what the narcotic means
to this galaxy, or to gripping the audience, either. The exposition doesn't
seem to point the way to anything; the story isn't dramatized — it's

merely acted out (and hurried through), in a series of scenes that are like
illustrations. And several of the principal actors —those playing the At-
reides family, especially —are like walking, talking pictures in a book of
legends. Luckily, others (mostly in minor roles) are blissfully warped, so
that we do a double take at our first sight of them, and even if they're
knocked off disappointingly fast — in some cases they go right from an
introduction scene to a death scene —they make their presence felt.
Herbert's grandiose vision plays into only a few of Lynch's strengths,

283
 —

yet it's these strengths (rather than the fidehty to Herbert) that keep
giving you something to look forward to. And, surprisingly, Lynch's best
work here is almost all in comedy.
Lynch is at his neo-Dickensian ease when he presents the addicts:
the fat and fey, red-haired Baron Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan) and his
red-haired nephews (Sting, of the rock trio The Police, and Paul L. Smith,
who was Bluto in Popeye and the brutal chief guard in Midnight Ex-
press). The Harkonnen family, rulers of Giedi Prime an ugly planet of —
oil and factories and industrialization (and one that seems to be devoid

—
of women) have been in charge of spice production on Dune, and per-
haps they have overindulged. They seem to be mutating into something
like overgrown Katzenjammer Kids. They're manic and giggly and

mean. Kenneth McMillan's wild, grinning Baron is so spiced up that he

normally floats in the air about eighteen inches off the floor. When he's
excited, he goes much higher. (Padded out to weigh maybe four hundred
and fifty pounds, and with a belly like a beer keg, he's the biggest Peter
Pan ever.) McMillan's slobby Baron is certainly the villain of the year:
his face is a mass of festering, suppurating boils, which his doctor
(Leonardo Cimino), who's as mad as he is, treats with such adoring care
that you're not really sure if he's lancing them or tending them like a
gardener and trying to make them blossom. The Baron's sadistic pleas-
ures and games can be guessed at when you catch glimpses of his
retainers —their mouths and ears are stitched closed. You don't have to
guess when you see him go gleefully high up in the air and then plunk
down on a young boy. You don't recoil, though. Everything to do with
the Baron is a marvel; that includes the plugs in his body, and his
garments —he's trussed up Band-
in straps that look like gigantic soiled

Aids. And he always seems an uproarious good time. His

to be having
nephews love him for the spectacle: he's obscenely funny a comic-strip —
Nero. (And Nero didn't levitate.)
You don't recoil, either, when Lynch presents you with a spice-
produced mutant —a Third-Stage Guild Navigator, it's called —that some
generations back was human. It looks like an enlarged brain, with a fish
mouth and elephant eyes; it's all pinkish innards, and it floats in a tank
of spice gas like an octopus in an aquarium. This huge tank is carried
into the gold throne room of the Emperor of the Galaxy (Jose Ferrer),
whose home world is the planet Kaitain. The tank is set down on the
green jade floor, and the monster talks to the Emperor. It does more than
that: speaking for its Guild, it gives the Emperor orders. And the power-
broker Emperor, who appreciates his dignified golden splendor he's —
even blessed with a lovely golden-haired daughter (Virginia Madsen)

284
 —

and is dependent on the Guild, which controls all interplanetary travel,

ishappy to oblige.
These orders set the plot in creaky motion. The Guild, which has
secret plans to rule the universe, wants Paul Atreides killed. The Em-
peror sets a trap for Paul's father, who is Duke Leto Atreides (JUrgen
Prochnow), the ruler of Caladan, and lives high up in a wood-panelled
castle on his Earthlike planet of forests and water. In order to separate
the Atreides family from its Emperor offers the Duke
loyal subjects, the
the biggest plum he can: the Duke is to move his family and staff to Dune
and take control of the spice mining. As soon as the Duke arrives on
Dune and is isolated and helpless, the red Baron attacks, slaughters him,
and sends the Duke's concubine, the Lady Jessica (Francesca Annis), and
their fifteen-year-old son, Paul (Kyle MacLachlan), out to die in the
desert as worm fodder. And it's there in the desert that Paul grows into
a mystical warrior-leader. Of course, in this feudal future all these rulers
have their entourages of associates, attendants, spies, and betrayers,
and there's much planet-hopping between the Emperor's gold throne
room on Kaitain, the wooden Atreides castle on Caladan, the repulsive
home site of the slob Baron on Giedi Prime (with its strident, psychedelic
green walls, it's like an industrial prison or a public urinal), and the
fortress cut into the rock which is the seat of the repressive government
of Dune.
Lynch and his designing crew have done a fairly amazing job of
simulating the different ecologies of the planets —their building materi-
als and architectural styles and furnishings. And the cinematographer,
Freddie Francis, lights the various sets and locations to bring out the
different color values and, in some air. The
scenes, the quality of the
visual textures are glorious, and the golds and greens work on you.
Nothing looks new, or right from the manufacturer; Lynch likes things
—
aged, weathered he likes decay. (And he likes dissolves which are a —
metaphor of decay.) The people are dressed in styles that echo many
different old cultures —
among them Renaissance Venetian, Victorian,
—
and (for the Harkonnens) punk and this could be witty if only there
were a hint of tackiness about the clothes. But they're so elegant that
there's nothing to laugh at. Tackiness, though and the wrong kind —
is always present in the insistent, droning score, by Toto, with contribu-

tions by Marty Paich, Brian Eno, and others. And, despite the care that
has gone into the staging, the editing rhythms are limp and choppy, and
the narrative loiters on dull scenes and then rushes past the climac-
tic ones.
The script, which Lynch wrote, has the kind of functional dialogue

285
 —

that pulls an epic movie down; you feel a thud when the teen-age Paul,
still in his happy castle life on Caladan, reflects out loud, "Things have
been so serious here lately." And at the time the handsome, resolute
Paul and his beautiful, stiff-backed mother were first dumped on the
desert, there were moments when I longed for the sight of a dreaded
worm. Lynch seems lacking in vulgar show-biz talents; he doesn't ever
get his heroic characters to lighten up. Francesca Annis's Lady Jessica
is alarmingly stately, and even the miraculously gifted Sian Phillips
who, with her head shaved and almost no eyebrows, plays a sorcererlike
—
Reverend Mother seems a shade monotonous here.
you ask what makes the bland Paul more fit to lead the native
If
tribes of Dune in their rebellion against Harkonnen rule than the robust
native leader (Everett McGill), the only possible answer is that the proph-
ecy stipulated that it was to be Paul. He has less personality than anyone
else in the movie —
except, maybe, his father, the Duke, and his true love,
Chani (Sean Young). He's just a polite, indomitable storybook hero. And
when Sting, as the most agile of the Harkonnens, comes out of a steam
bath stretching like a cat and just stands there half naked, displaying
— —
himself all arrogance and spiky aplomb he's spellbinding in a way
that makes you wish David Lynch could cut Dune loose from its "or-
dained" plot. Trying to be faithful to Frank Herbert's woozy mythology.
Lynch presents a singularly ambiguous and unappetizing Messiah story.
I don't know how we're supposed to take this hero-savior Paul, who

speaks the word of God but is also very quick to make a virtue of
expediency when he decides to marry the Emperor's blond daughter and
keep his true love as a concubine. And I don't know how we're supposed
to react to his leading the Fremen warriors, with their blue, blue eyes,
to domination of the whole Empire. The cry of these highly disciplined
troops is "Long live the fighters!" There's nothing in the tone of the film
to suggest an attitude toward any of this.
Lynch himself appears in a straight-arrow role as the engineer at
the controls in the spice mine. Too bad that he's also such a straight
arrow as a director here. The movie is most otherworldly when he does
—
something Lynchlike something marginal or unexplained. It's other-
worldly, too, when the creepy, precocious eight-year-old Alicia Roanne
—
Witt, as Paul's little sister Alia a miniature sorcererlike Reverend

—
Mother pricks the swollen, leering Baron with a poisoned needle and
pulls a plug in his chest, and he hits the ceiling. Or when Brad Dourif
(he's the Harkonnens' human computer) smiles to himself like a new
Dwight Frye eager to pop a spider in his mouth. Or when Linda Hunt,
—
who's the housekeeper of the fortress on Dune and the most imposing

286
housekeeper since Cloris Leachman in Mel Brooks' Young Franken-
stein —speaks, in her firm you-will-hear-what-I'm-saying tones. What a
voice she has, and what a sense of comic authority! If she declared
herself the rightful heir to the Emperor's throne, the audience would go
wild cheering for her.

1,\n 48 Mrs., Eddie Murphy played a thief, and the joke was in
his sleekness and suavity, in contrast to the uncouthness of the profane
white cop played by Nick Nolte. With Nolte on the receiving end. Murphy
was a hipster delivering nonstop zingers. In the new Beverly Hills Cop,
Murphy is on his own, yelling and fast-talking, and hotfooting the pic-
—
ture to keep it going. He has no zingers he just rattles off pitifully
—
undistinguished profanity but we're cued to react to every stupid four-
letter word as riotous. The whole picture is edited and scored as if it were
a lollapalooza of laughs. And, with Murphy busting his sides guifawing
in self-congratulation, and the camera jammed into his tonsils, damned
if the audience doesn't whoop and carry on as if yes, this is a wow of a

comedy.
The movie is about a Detroit cop who takes a vacation to go to
Beverly Hills and hunt down the men who killed his best friend. But the
plot is slipshod and insignificant even by TV cop-show standards, and
we're not so much as given a scene in which to develop some feeling for
the friend. The plot is just a peg for little set pieces in which the street-
smart Murphy, in his worn-out sweatshirts, saunters through swank
Beverly Hills locations, tells whopping lies, and outsmarts the white
—
dumbos. This isn't a movie about an underdog he's Mr. Top Dog, Mr.
Cool. He goes to an expensive, full-up hotel, without a reservation, and
pulls an elaborate whitey-baiting number in order to get a room; he's so
intimidating he's given a suite, and the audience seems to love it, even
though the script, by Daniel Petrie, Jr., hasn't provided any pretext for
why he goes to this hotel. (The reason is simply to get laughs for baiting
whitey.) Murphy bounces around town outsmarting the hotel clerks, the
restaurant staffs, the crooks, the flunkies, and, especially, the police
officers.The Beverly Hills cops can't drive anywhere without smashing
into each other, and there's no plot point to the car pile-ups —
it's just to

give you a laugh at what jerks they are. The picture starts off with a big,
—
pointless car chase in Detroit just in case you were feeling nostalgic for

287
your TV. And there's no rationale for the mayhem at the end, in which
everybody in the cast seems to be running around with a submachine
gun blasting.
The director, Martin Brest, handles a few of the minor characters
well.Judge Reinhold, a young man with an old man's name, has some
soothing low-key comedy moments as a credulous, velvet-voiced cop.
Stephen Elliott uses his deep, lordly tones eifectively as the police chief.
And Bronson Pinchot does a sweetheart of a comedy turn as the amiable
swishy Serge, who works in an art gallery and speaks in an unidentifia-
ble accent. Pinchot sets his own comedy rhythms, and he steals a couple
of scenes from Murphy —a relief, because Murphy's aggressive oneup-
manship through most of the film kills your interest in him as a per-
former. Your reaction to these other actors reminds you of what un-
forced laughter feels like.

According to this movie, street wisdom means: You talk dirty and
you lie. And if you're a cop you're contemptuous of the law. What the
picture is about is merchandising: in its first weekend, Eddie Murphy
alone did bigger business than Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds rolled
together in City Heat. Murphy is half their age and twice their gross.

Vh Ihe love roundelay Choose Me, written and directed by Alan

Rudolph, on a budget of $835,000, is pleasantly bananas. The characters,
who wander in and out of a bar called Eve's Lounge, are lighted as if
Edward Hopper lived across the street and Reginald Marsh prowled the
alley; they're all vaguely amnesiac, and their dialogue is overintellectual-
ized in a hammy-hilarious way. The songs are performed by Teddy
Pendergrass, and he's just right — he does what Tom Waits is supposed
to do.The entire movie has a lilting, loose, choreographic flow to it.
Rudolph and his cinematographer, Jan Kieser, have developed a swoony
camera style befitting the romanticism of a movie in which everyone is
obsessively looking for love. A friend once wrote me that ten minutes
into Rudolph's first film. Welcome to L.A., he had the urge to walk out
and find somebody doing something: running a jackhammer, fixing a
tire, cutting hair —anything routinely useful. This movie may give him
thesame urge, but it's fun in something like the way that Jacques
Demy's 1961 Lola was fun. Lola was about a girl whose faith in her

288
illusions was vindicated; Choose Me is about a group of lovers whose
madnesses and illusions interlock. It's giddy in a magical, pseudo-sultry
—
way it seems to be set in a poet's dream of a red-light district. And
though you can't always tell the intentional humor from the uninten-
tional, this low-budget comedy-fantasy has some of the most entertain-

ing (and best-sustained) performances I've seen all year.

Eve is played by Lesley Ann Warren, who has a rare kind of off-
and-on beauty. She has acres of eyelids in a face that can seem young
and fresh or agelessly old. At moments she's Garboesque, but in the next
breath she may remind you of someone as contemporary as Susan Saran-
don or Margot Kidder. Her acting isn't as steady as that of the other key
performers, but she brings her pivotal role the mystery that is essential
to the film. (In some odd way that I won't attempt to explain, her beauty
authenticates Rudolph's vision.) Genevieve Bujold has the dippiest and
funniest role: she dispenses sex-therapy advice on a radio show, and
when she's feeling hot she gets listeners hot. Over the years, Bujold has
developed a marvellously close rapport with moviegoers; she can make
us feel we're reading her mind. And here she has us entering into every
twist of her character's nuthead frigidity and nymphomania; after a
while, we giggle happily at sight of her, anticipating that she'll do some-
thing naughty, and she doesn't let us down. Rae Dawn Chong is the
film's biggest surprise. As the part-black wife of a European racketeer,
she puts a sophisticated, comic spin on her line readings, and she's ripely
sensual and dirty-minded. The movie has elements of interracial fantasy:
the hookers in the street outside Eve's place pair up and triple up with
—
mixed combos they meet and go off together like
their Johns in racially
dancers, in rhythm with the music. Rae Dawn Chong's amours are more
intense, and much more fleshly. She's presented like the occasional ex-
otic black woman in French movies —
her husband calls her "mon petit
—
chocolat" but her wit is strictly American. The only big flaw in Ru-
dolph's sex-farce construction is that she's left stranded about half an

hour before the close of the picture, and the romanticism loses some of
its lift when she isn't around.
The central male role —the starring role — is played by Keith Carra-
dine, who may never have been this impressive before, even in his perfor-
mances for Robert Altman. He's playing a perhaps crazy stud, who
comes to Eve's bar straight from the mental ward. It's a literary conceit
—
of a role the kind that almost invariably makes an actor look like an
idiot. He has to suggest that he's a lunatic who's saner than anyone else,

and yet emanate danger and untrustworthiness. Carradine carries it oif,

while boyishly hopping into all three of the women's beds. He's not

289
callow anymore. The years have given him a handsome, sculptural pres-
ence, and he manages to validate every bad idea Alan Rudolph throws
at him. Other directors aren't this lucky.
December 24, 1984

FEVER DREAM/ECHO CHAMBER

day,
n
educated
Irs. Soffel gets into a great subject: repressed, often well-
women who fall in love with prisoners —men in cages. In
we read news accounts of a woman lawyer helping her client escape
our

from prison, or a woman professor abetting a jailbreak, or a business or

professional woman reading about a prisoner, visiting him, marrying
him. Mrs. Soffel is based on an actual case that goes back to 1902, when
the wife of the warden of the Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh helped
two prisoners —the Biddle brothers— escape from Murderers' Row, and
ran off with them. As the movie Kate Soffel (Diane Keaton) isn't
tells it,

radicalized in any ideological sense, and Ed Biddle (Mel Gibson) and his
brother Jack (Matthew Modine) aren't political, or even big-time. They're
just holdup artists who have been condemned to be hanged because
someone got killed when they robbed a grocery store. But they're young
and handsome, the fiery-eyed Ed swears that they're innocent of murder,
and they've developed a considerable following among the impression-
able women of Pittsburgh. Teen-age girls bring flowers to the prison,
—
and the next-to-oldest of Kate's four children the naive twelve-year-old
—
Margaret (Jennie Dundas) is staunch in her belief that though the
Biddies have committed ninety robberies, they're laboring-class rebels
who have never hurt anyone; she pastes newspaper clippings in a scrap-
book so she'll have a record of all the injustices done to them. Their case
becomes political.
Working from a script by Ron Nyswaner, the young Australian

290
director Gillian Armstrong doesn't lay out the reasons for what happens;
she evokes them partially, suggestively, inviting you to feel your way
into Kate disappointment with her marriage.
Soffel's can see the We
torment and dissatisfaction in Kate's face, and the neurasthenia that has
kept her in bed for three months, and keeps her from sharing a bedroom
with the husband she married eighteen years ago, when she was seven-
teen. (At first, we see that she's sick and that she's married to Edward
Herrmann; soon we suspect that she's sick because she's married to
Edward Herrmann.) The family lives in the warden's quarters, which are
built right into the jailhouse structure, and the ornately furnished rooms
seem airless and confining. Surrounded by husband, children, and serv-
ants, the imprisoned Kate sits in her tightly bound clothes; under the
curls on her forehead, her eyes are full of misery. As the warden's
gracious, devout wife, she makes her own rounds, taking Bibles to the
inmates and offering words of moral guidance. But there's something
about her that makes you uneasy; she's telling the prisoners that faith
will do something for them that it has obviously failed to do for her.
What's daring in the way Gillian Armstrong presents this love story
is that we don't quite trust the emotions of either Kate Soffel or Ed
Biddle. She's sickly, frustrated, unstable; he's an opportunist, with only
one opportunity —to make her love him so madly that she'll bring him
and Jack the saws they need to get out. From behind bars, he works on
her, quoting the Bible in a ringing, romantic voice, challenging her by
telling her he's not a believer. He asks her to read to him —that keeps
her close. He writes her a poem; he touches her, grabs her, kisses her.
(And Jack, in the cell next to Ed's, grins.) But Kate isn't a fool, and she's
twelve years older than Ed; she's aware of how he's trying to use her.
At the same time, she's sexually aroused by him —he's like a trapped
animal reaching out to her, pulling her up against his cell.

Mel Gibson, who miscast can seem a lightweight, is superb here.

Much wirier than in his earlier roles, he's convincingly passionate,
shrewd, relentless. There's concentrated emotionality in this perform-
ance —an all-out romanticism that you don't expect from an actor who's
only twenty-eight. As Ed, he's like the young Henry Fonda, but with a
streak of something darker, more volatile, and more instinctively know-
ing. Ed comes on so strong that we don't know
how to read him
quite
— especially since much of the time he's behind bars and we see only part
of his face. He puts the squeeze on Mrs. Soffel, and it makes her feel
alive; it takes a while before we realize that she does the same for him.

Diane Keaton has trouble with the period role: her fast, distraught
manner of speaking, the words she emphasizes, the ones she throws

291
away — it's all very specifically modern. So is her conception of neurosis,
and so, I think, is manner Kate has with her children.
the tender, easy
(Shouldn't she be more erratic, taking out some of her suffering on them,
or, at least, be negligent and indifferent?) But she has a moment here

that's freakishly inspired: Ed has been holding her against the bars and
she has been speaking like a moral exemplar when suddenly, in mid-
sentence, she lets out a dirty little giggle. We know then that Kate is

living in a fever dream and doesn't want to wake up. And the post-hippie
diction and the other surface flaws in Keaton's performance fade into
relative insignificance, because the things that come from inside are so
startlingly right. Kate has a broad, lewd smile when she holds out her
—
Bible to Ed with the saws in it; then she reads the Good Book out loud
to the brothers, keeping watch for them as they saw away.
The movie is set in winter, in the grime and fumes of an industrial
city at its worst, and then in snow-covered farmland as the three try to
escape to Canada. There isn't a single image that looks ordinary or stale;
Armstrong and her cinematographer, Russell Boyd, give us a completely
fresh vision of the American past, and the whites glisten in Boyd's
deep-toned shots. But Armstrong may have overdone the ominousness
—
and gloom of the early scenes the murk indoors and the sootiness
outdoors may make the movie hard for viewers to get into. Even if you
know that Pittsburgh used to need its street lights on in the middle of
the day, the darkness may seem affected. If you give the movie a chance,
though, it justifies the early dreamlike funereal underlay. Each of Arm-
strong's three features has been amazingly different from the others. As
a piece of filmmaking, the first, the feminist princess fantasy My Bril-
liant Career (which she made in 1978, when she was only twenty-seven),
was The second, the pop musical Starstruck,
careful, pictorial, leisurely.
set in modern Sydney and starring the blithe new-wave singer Jo
Kennedy, was visually jangly and all over the place, but exuberant and
likable. Clearly, Armstrong adapts herself to her subjects, and this time
her style has an edginess: the scenes have unexpected tempos, the per-
spectives on the richly furnished Soffel household are always slightly
unsettling, and we never know when we'll hear the clanging of the iron
gates and doors. The prison is a major presence —
it's the prison from

which the actual Mrs. Soffel and the Biddies fled into the night. Designed
by Henry Hobson Richardson to resemble a fortified church and built in
the eighteen-eighties, it's oppressive yet in its way exalted an architec- —
tural marvel that is still in use, housing five hundred inmates. With its
majestic cell-block atrium, and the warden's quarters as part of the
structure, it's a perfect setting for a Gothic romance.

292
 This stone-and-iron monster is so solid that you may get the feeling

that at Kate Soffel could enjoy the titillating danger that Ed Biddle
first

represented because she felt cloistered and secure she could go any- —
where in the prison, but he was safely behind bars. She could go to him,
but he couldn't come to her. One thing that makes their love story
different from the familiar ones is that they finally come clean with each
other. She abandons her protected status; he abandons the public poses
that turned her little daughter into a groupie. (And Gibson has a rare

kind of delicacy when Ed offers Kate proof of his love.) There are some
—
surprising elements in this movie such as the confusion of the prison
break, the shock of seeing Ed and Jack in the warden's quarters, the
hostility that Ed and Jack's friends feel toward Kate, and the brotherly
bond between the Biddies that we're aware of throughout. They match
up well physically, but that's only a small part of it; Modine enables you
to see how Jack takes his cues from Ed, and why Ed feels responsible
for him.
Mrs. Soffel lacks humor, and its themes don't fully emerge. (The
fault may be in the screenplay —that it just doesn't go far enough.) But
the movie builds an excitement that has something to do with the fact
that the flight of the Biddies with Kate in tow is deranged. They're
killing each other by staying together, yet you can see that staying
together is all that matters to them. When the three of them are out in
the snow, rushing toward the border, the hurrying about makes Kate
flush, and her eyes and teeth shine —she seems elated and glamorous.
She's experiencing freedom, and the feelings that were buried in her are
released. When a stranger says something grossly insensitive in her
presence, and she slaps him, all her senses seem to be whirring. She's
a Victorian madwoman heroine.

I, If a whiz-kid director from the three-minute-rock-video field

tries hishand at a Jazz Age gangster musical, the result might be The
Cotton Club. Francis Coppola, who co-wrote and directed it, seems to
have skimmed the top off every twenties-thirties picture he has seen,
added seltzer, stirred it up with a swizzlestick, and called it a movie. The
shots don't look as if he were framing for the movie camera; they're
framed for video excitement. His only goal seems to be to keep the
—
imagery rushing by for dazzle, for spectacle. The thinking (or the

293
emotional state) behind his conception appears to be that it's all been

done before, and that what remains is to feedyour senses. He just wants
to look at pretty lights, movement, color. He's watching his brain cells
twinkle.
The action is centered on the famous Harlem late-night supper club
that from 1923 to 1936 was situated upstairs over a theatre on the corner
of 142nd Street and Lenox —
Avenue a speakeasy with a great floor
show, which "colored" headliners and the "tall, tan, and terrific"
in

Cotton Club Girls (who were required to be "high yaller," under twenty-
one when hired, and at least five feet six) performed for a white clientele.
The club was a showcase for the "primitive" joyousness and sensuality
of the black singers and dancers, and the revues, which were produced
by whites and ran for an hour and a half or two hours, with the last of
the three nightly shows starting at 2 a.m., had motifs in keeping with
the club's advertising itself as a "window on the jungle ... a cabin in
the cotton." (The jungle predominated, and the club itself was decorated
jungle style.) Seven hundred socialites, celebrities, Broadway stars,
bootleggers, and assorted mobsters could be seated at the tiny tables,
arranged in a horseshoe around the dance floor; among them might be
Mayor Jimmy Walker, Fred Astaire, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, Charlie
Chaplin, and such underworld figures as Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz,
and Lucky Luciano. Starting in 1927, the house bandleader was Duke
Ellington, and he soon began broadcasting a nightly radio show live
from the stage; when the show went national, on a weekly basis, the
whole country heard of the Cotton Club and listened to its music. And
people went on listening after Ellington left for other commitments and
Cab Calloway, who at first had just filled in, replaced him. The entertain-
ers, who were the highest paid in Harlem, included Bessie Smith, Jose-
phine Baker, Lena Home, Ethel Waters, Bill Robinson, and, later. Buck
and Bubbles, and the Nicholas Brothers. Financed by a syndicate of
white mobsters, the club had a slightly flexible Jim Crow policy: twelve
seats could be filled by Negro dignitaries, racketeers, and the families
and friends of the performers, and a few more if the applicants were well
groomed and very light-complexioned. (This exclusionary policy was
somewhat further eased under pressure from Ellington, though people
of color were likely to be seated at the back, near the kitchen.)
The movie has its own racial problems: white moviegoers will rarely
attend pictures on black themes or with black stars, and so Richard Gere
—
was signed up to play the leading role on a contract in which he stipu-
—
lated that he was to appear as a cornet player before there was any-
thing resembling a role or a script. After a few attempts at scripts failed,

294
 —

Coppola was brought in; he had trouble, and enlisted a collaborator,

too,
the novelist (and former film critic) William Kennedy. Together, they
—
hatched some thirty to forty versions an insane number. But how do
you make a movie about the Cotton Club starring a white cornet player
when there were no white musicians at the Cotton Club?
In diagrammatic terms, the intricate plot that Coppola and Kennedy
devised isn't bad. They introduced another famous Harlem nightspot
—
the Bamville Club where Gere could go to blow his horn in jam ses-
sions, and then they worked out a gimmicky scene in which Gere, a
smiling-eyed young Irishman, saves Dutch Schultz (James Remar) from
a stick of dynamite planted by assassins. In gratitude, Dutch puts him
on the payroll, and hires his loutish brother (Nicolas Cage), too. This still
doesn't give Gere much connection to the Cotton Club, except that he
sometimes goes there with Schultz, a married man, who uses Gere as
escort to his teen-age mistress (Diane Lane). Having compounded the
initial lunacy of the white-cornettist hero, Coppola and Kennedy created

—
a parallel set of black brothers (Gregory and Maurice Hines) tap danc-
ers who get their big chance at the Cotton Club. These parallel plots
don't converge; there's no more than an occasional "Hi" as Gere and
Gregory Hines go past each other on the street or at the club until close
to the end, when Dutch Schultz, enraged, wants to kill Gere, and Hines,
with his dancer's speed and agility, kicks the gun out of Schultz's hand.
But the two sets of brothers give the movie an illusion of symmetry: both
sets have families and fights, and Gere's troubles with the tough, tarty
Diane Lane are matched by Gregory Hines' troubles with a light-skinned
showgirl and singer, played by Lonette McKee. By then the movie is
packed with characters and complications and incidents that it doesn't
have time for; it's so overloaded with plot that it might just as well have
no plot at all. And I haven't even mentioned that the black crooks who
control the Harlem numbers racket are being challenged by the Irish and
—
Jewish mobsters, and then the Italians led by Lucky Luciano (Joe Dal-
—
lesandro) move in. Maybe because of the need to work around that
horn-player hero, Coppola and Kennedy kept adding elements until the
plot became a composite of the old Warners musicals and gangster
pictures. Coppola apparently believes this pastiche to be an authentic,
epic view of the Jazz Age. Describing it to an interviewer from Film
Comment, he said, "It's a story of the times: it tells the story of the
blacks, of the white gangster, about entertainers, everything of those
times, like Dos Passos, and the lives all thread through with 'Minnie the
"
Moocher' and 'Mood Indigo.'
Actually, it's an echo chamber of a movie. When Warners made

295
those pictures that were snatched from the headUnes, the crude, sim-
pUfied characters had a tabloid immediacy. Reproduced here in compos-
ite form, they have no inner hfe and no emotional force. The Cotton Club
is so dense about so little. It's a movie made by a director who has lost
his sense of character. The joke of the long effort to concoct a script
around the star Gere is that there are no stars in any of Coppola's recent
movies (One from the Heart, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish); stars may
be signed on, but when the movies come out there's just a bunch of
bewildered performers wondering why they don't make a stronger im-
pression.
If there's something more upsetting about this movie than there is

about other failed epics, it's that a great time in the history of black
people has been screwed over. Yes, the Cotton Club was a racist institu-
tion, but it was something more, too: was part of a liberating social
it

upheaval —not the most creative part but the most conspicuous part.
And if some of those white swells were slumming when they went up
to Harlem to watch "the coloreds" they put on their evening clothes to
do it. There was joy in those black entertainers, and there was heat. That
was what the white audience recognized; that was what the radio listen-
ers responded to. It's what the Jazz Age was about: the emergence of
black music —hot jazz—and the thrill that white artists and white audi-
ences felt as black artists began to enter the cultural mainstream, mov-
ing from Harlem to Broadway and across the country. In the thirties,
when was a kid in San Francisco, I thought I would die from pure
I

pleasure when I saw Buck and Bubbles perform in the stage show that
came on before the movie at the Golden Gate Theatre; I'd sit through the
picture over and over so I could watch John W. Bubbles glide through
his tap numbers, smiling crookedly, his eyes hooded, as if he knew that
kids like me had never seen anything so slinky sexy. I thought he was
evil, but I loved it.

Coppola, with his staccato imagery fragmenting the songs and

dances, knocks the life out of the performers. The tall, sinuous Lonette

McKee, with her long, expressive arms upraised, actually gets to com-
plete a number (the torchy "111 Wind"), but she has none of the impudent
energy she showed in the 1976 Sparkle. And the Hines brothers' danc-
ing is fast and proficient yet uninspired. If you look at a clip of the
Nicholas Brothers, say, in the 1942 Orchestra Wives, where they dance
to "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo," you just about go crazy from the sheer
—
aesthetic excitement of what they're doing they're flying. The way
Coppola shoots dance, nobody flies. In a sequence at the all-male Hoofers
Club, Honi Coles and the other great tappers are just starting to limber

296
up and go into their moves when they're chopped into dancing feet
without bodies and wiggling bodies without feet. Coppola doesn't seem
to know that it's criminal not to let these artists do their thing. The movie
is all his thing —he keeps the images scrambling ahead. It's a self-
defeating technique: he's so antsy that he doesn't stop to let us look at
what we've come to see. The picture opens with the dancing bodies of
the Cotton Club Girls in smoky color. Their dancing —intercut with
black-and-white titles and angled spotlights that establish the film's

visual style — is routine and impersonal. It never becomes anything

more, and during the whole movie we never get close enough to these
girls to see their faces, their spirit. We never get to see what we might
expect to be at the heart of the movie: how the black performers and the
white customers (and bosses and floor-show staif) feel about each other.
The movie certainly has a visual style: Art Deco with film noir
lighting, and montages that skitter through the years, signifying what's
happening to the country and the principal characters. But this dark,
lacquered style doesn't come out of the material; it's a fashionable style
that's imposed, like the visual formats of videos. Coppola doesn't build
a dance through editing, as Busby Berkeley did; the jazz singers and
dancers are in the background to be broken into. They're used to give
the movie contrasts and sheen —to give it more of a spin. When Diane
Lane and Richard Gere have their big sex scene, burnished rainbows fill
the room, and then the shadow of the curtains makes lace patterns on
her bare body; these effects are what we get instead of the emotion that
the moment might be expected to call up. Coppola gives us all this design
and he doesn't seem aware of what's missing. He's not taking old tech-
niques and applying them; he's just taking them.
Musicals of the past rarely had fully written characters, but they
didn't need them, because the actors' personalities filled out the roles.
Here most of the actors are hardly allowed to show they're alive. It's a
toss-up whether Nicolas Cage or Diane Lane has the worst part. Cage
easily passes as Gere's younger brother, but he is made such a crude
dope that there isn't a single scene in which we're happy he's around.
Diane Lane was eighteen when she played her role, and that's roughly
the age of Dutch's moll, but she's encased in makeup and wigs. And
though most of the dialogue in the movie is reasonably pungent, her
lines express a callous, moronic cynicism. Statements such as "Money's
the only thing that ever saves you" don't do a lot for an actress, and her
performance is equally blunt. (In the kissing scenes, she and Gere chew
each other's lips so hungrily that something besides passion seems im-
plied, but what?) Gregory Hines doesn't come off as badly, but his role

297
is miserably misconceived. When he's smitten at first sight of Lonette
McKee, the audience can share his emotion, but you expect him to be hip
and to court her with his talent. When, instead, he chases after her,
calf-eyed and stupidly sincere, and gets into backstage squabbles, he

—
becomes embarrassing you don't want to look at him. As for Gere
(whose role is based partly on George Raft), with his hair brushed back
flat and brilliantined, and a natty little mustache, he flashes a pretty

smile and is more agreeable than usual. But there's nothing to draw us
into his simp-sheik character. (In his brief appearance as Luciano, Joe
Dallesandro, who's reminiscent of De Niro in The Godfather, Part II,

has a much more romantic presence.)

A few of the actors seem to be invincible. Lighted from below, Julian
Beck, of the Living Theatre, who plays Sol, a corrupt-to-the-bone hit
man, looks like an Old Testament vulture. He takes his time and delivers
his world-weary remarks in amusingly ghostly, sinister tones —he could
be the John Carradine of the avant-garde. And Bob Hoskins, as Owney
Madden, the cunning gangster who operates the club, and Fred Gwynne,
as his henchman. Big Frenchy DeMange, who welcomes the guests, are
like a vaudeville comedy team. Big Frenchy, as gloomy as a basset hound
and always formal, walks a step behind the little bulldog Owney and
stands behind him when he's seated; he seems to be Owney's butler and
bodyguard, and his partner, too. When they finally have a full scene
together, after Big Frenchy has been kidnapped and Owney has ran-
somed him, they one-up each other belligerently, but in rhythm, and with
undercurrents of so much affection that it's the most touching moment
in the movie — even though it doesn't make a lot of sense.
This Hoskins-Gwynne scene stands out because it doesn't just refer
to old-movie scenes about friendship; you actually experience the emo-
tion. In most of the movie, you don't get the feelings that made old-movie

—
scenes memorable you just watch people referring to those old scenes.
(An example: the break between the Hines brothers causes us no pain,
and their reunion has no exhilaration.) That's why the movie's plot
doesn't give you the pleasures of a plot. Coppola uses the plot pro forma
— he doesn't invest it with meaning. The movie is Felliniesque (especially
in its last section, which cuts between Grand Central Station and a Grand
Central set on the Cotton Club stage), and Coppola, like Fellini, assumes
the role of the master of ceremonies, the eye of the hurricane. But his
expansiveness has become strictly formal. Emotionally, he seems to
have shrunk. The way he directs the cast here, people exist to reflect
light.

January 7, 1985

298
 —

UNLOOS'D DREAMS

to
1 I he title of E. M. Forster's A Passage
in Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and, unlike
one of the loveliest sections
to India is an homage

Forster's other, more neatly constructed novels, this one has an all-
embracing, polymorphous quality, an openness. Forster had lived in
India before and after the First World War, and in story terms the novel,
published in 1924, is about the tragicomedy of British colonial rule. The
liberal, agnostic author projects himself into the Indian characters —into
the humiliation they feel at being governed by people who have no
affection for them, who don't like them. In its larger intentions, the novel
is about the Indians' The
spirituality, their kindness, their mysticism.

novel's flowing, accepting manner is related to Eastern philosophy. It

embodies that philosophy, yet when Forster attempts to explain it
—
when he tries for mystery and depth the writing seems thin, fuzzy,
inflated. (When his exaltation goes flat, it's like flat Whitman; it's like
hearing someone dither on about oneness with the universe.) I don't
—
think the novel is great it's near-great, or not-so-great, maybe because
mysticism doesn't come naturally to an ironist, and in A Passage to
India it seems more willed than felt. But the novel is suggestive and
dazzlingly empathic. Forster never falls into mere sympathetic under-
standing of the Indians; he's right inside the central Indian character
the young Muslim Dr. Aziz. He embraces Aziz, all right; it's the British
he pulls away from.
The movie and edited by David Lean, is
version, adapted, directed,
an admirable piece of work. Lean doesn't get in over his head by trying
for the full range of the book's mysticism, but Forster got to him. In its
first half, the film (it two hours forty-three minutes) has a virtuoso
lasts
steadiness as the story moves along and we see the process by which the
British ofl[icials and their wives, who arrive in the fictitious provincial city

of Chandrapore with idealistic hopes of friendship with the Indians, are

gradually desensitized to the shame experienced by the natives, and

299
become imperviously cruel. The movie shows us the virtual impossibility
of communication between the subject people and the master-race Brit-
ish, and between the Muslims and the Hindus, at the same time that we

observe the efforts of two Englishwomen to bridge the gulfs to get to —

know the Indians socially.
Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft), an elderly woman, whose son Ronny
(Nigel Havers) has been in India for a year as city magistrate in Chand-
rapore, comes to visit him, accompanied, at his suggestion, by Adela
Quested (Judy Davis), whom he expects to marry. Mrs. Moore is dis-
pleased to see her son turning into a dull sahib, and the young, inex-
perienced Miss Quested, who has never been out of England before, is
shocked by Ronny's new callousness and the smugness of the people he
emulates. Mrs. Moore, who has little patience with her son and his
warnings about the dangers of mingling with the natives, strikes up an
immediate, instinctive rapport with Dr. Aziz (Victor Banerjee), a glisten-
ing-eyed, eager doctor-poet, whom she meets by chance in a mosque.
And later the two women have tea with Fielding (James Fox), the princi-
pal of the local Government College, who, to help them socialize, invites

two Indian guests —Aziz and a Hindu scholar, Professor Godbole (Alec
Guinness). Dr. Aziz, a bit heady with the joys of this social intercourse
with English women who treat him as an equal, and unable to invite the
group to his squalid one-room cottage, proposes an excursion —a picnic
at the distant Marabar Caves.
And that's where, despite Aziz's careful, elaborate planning, every-
thing comes to grief. Hearing the echo in a cave, Mrs. Moore is overcome

by heat and fatigue, premonitions of death, and the feeling of a void

where God should be. While Mrs. Moore rests. Miss Quested goes on
alone with Dr. Aziz and a guide, and soon comes rushing from a cave
suffering, perhaps, from what Whitman called "unloos'd dreams" she —
is hysterical, and is convinced that Dr. Aziz has attempted to rape her.

He is arrested, and the British, with their surface unflappability and

their underlying paranoia about the Indians, react as if they were under
siege. The British colony closes ranks, except for Fielding, who asserts
his belief in the doctor's innocence, and the now irritable and distressed
Mrs. Moore, who, without waiting to testify on the doctor's behalf, starts
the journey home. For the others, the supposed attack on Miss Quested
is further proof of the racial inferiority of the Indians. Besides, as the
Superintendent of Police explains at the trial, it's a matter of scientific
knowledge that the darker races are attracted to the fairer, but not vice
versa.
Forster's plot is a very elaborate shell game: in the book, just when

300
you think the nugget of truth about Miss Quested's accusation has been
located Forster evades you again. He's very lordly, in his way; it's a
—
cosmic comedy each group of players has its own God. (The inscrutable
Hindus, with their policy of self-removal, are wittier than the British
Christians, with their disdain. The Muslims are anxious.) Lean isn't as
playful, but he has his own form of lordliness. He knows how to do pomp
and the moral hideousness of empire better than practically anybody
else around. He enlarges the scale of Forster's irony, and the characters
live in more sumptuous settings than we might have expected. But they

do live. Lean knows how to give the smallest inflections an overpowering

psychological weight. The actors don't sink under it.
—
Lean's control a kind of benign precision is very satisfying here,—
because of the performers (and the bright-colored, fairy-tale vividness
of the surroundings). By the time he gets to the trial, everything has
been prepared, and, in a departure from Forster's mode, he delivers
suspense, drama, excitement. The courtroom scenes are far more climac-
tic than in the novel, but Lean has necessarily shaped the material to his
own strengths. This isn't the Passage to India that Satyajit Ray hoped
to make —
though he, too, wanted Victor Banerjee to play Dr. Aziz (and
he had met with Peggy Ashcroft). And perhaps Ray might have been
able to convey the spiritual grace that Forster was reaching for. But
Lean's picture is intelligent and enjoyable, and if his technique is to
simplify and to spell everything out in block letters, this kind of clarity
has its own formal strength. It may not be the highest praise to say that
a movie is orderly and dignified or that it's like a well-cared-for, beauti-
fully oiled machine, but of its kind this Passage to India is awfully good,
until the last half hour or so. Having built up to the courtroom drama,
Lean isn't able to regain a narrative flow when it's over. The emotional
focus is gone, the tension has snapped, and the picture disintegrates. The
concluding scenes, in which he follows the general plan of the book,
wobble all over the place. But by then we're pretty well satisfied anyway,
and we don't mind staying a little longer with these actors, even though
they seem lost.

The cast is just about irreproachable, with the exception of Guin-

ness, who's simply in the wrong movie. The presence of Victor Banerjee
makes you feel embarrassed for Guinness. It's dangerous for an actor
to try that Peter Sellers-Indian routine when he's next to the real thing.
(You keep expecting Guinness to break into a soft-shoe or do something
silly with his turban.) As Dr. Aziz, the slim, compact Banerjee, with his

handsome, delicately modelled face (the round eyes, the cupid's-bow

mouth), belongs to this society —he's like a piece of erotic sculpture, a

301
sensual cherub. When he gets ready to go out, he puts a black line under
his eyes with a swift, practiced motion; he makes the most of his beauty.
This soft-voiced Bengali actor is more fluid emotionally than anyone else
in the cast; Dr. Aziz's feelings of generosity, servility, hurt, and rage
slide into each other, and we get the impression that this is what trying
to please the British has done to the man. He's too easily hurt; he's all

exposed nerves and excitability. He's the most "human" of the charac-
ters, because he's so far from being like the English —and the more he
tries to be like them, the farther away he is.

As Miss Quested, Judy Davis has none of the bloom that she had in
My Brilliant Career; she's pale and a trace remote —repression has
given her a slightly slugged quality about the eyes. But she's still very
attractive in Western terms. Her broad-brimmed hats and virginal,
straight-cut dresses are simple and uncoquettish. You like watching her
— she has an unusual physical quiet, and her mouth is very expressive
(despite the brick-colored lipstick she wears throughout). And it's clear
that India represents her first chance to live. She longs for adventure,
though she's frightened of it. And she's drawn to Dr. Aziz, though she
doesn't know how to get closer to him. So it isn't until the trial that we
register that to the Indians she looks tall, flat-chested, and sexually
undesirable. To them the charge of attempted rape is something of an
insult to Dr. Aziz's taste. All along, there's a lascivious fear that runs
through the proper behavior of the British —a fear of India's voluptuous
erotic traditions. And Lean has interpolated a sequence that makes this
unmistakable: alone on a bicycle ride. Miss Quested chances upon an
overgrown park with a temple covered with statuary coupling bodies. —
She's fascinated, and as she walks about looking at what the statues are
—
doing she seems transformed awakened and beautiful. But the statues
—
are suddenly swarming a bunch of chattering, screeching monkeys
come down to the bottom of the temple and onto the statues. They're like
little demons blending with the lovers, and they charge at Miss Quested,

terrifying her, and chase her as she dashes away on her bike. This
dramatization of Miss Quested's fear of sex is very effective. (It's actu-
ally more effective than the major episode of Marabar.) But we can feel
its function: it's to cue us for her hysteria at the caves, and that's not
how Forster's material works. (Lean gives us a pointed reminder of the
temple scene when Miss Quested is on her way to the courthouse and

a man in a monkey suit jumps on the running board. This is a real

blunder; for a second, it throws us out of the movie.) But Judy Davis's
performance is close to perfection; her last scene (in England) is a little
skewed, but that's no more than a fly speck. Despite her moment of

302
hysteria, this Miss Quested is a heroically honest figure who, in testify-

ing as she does at the trial, escapes being raped of her soul by Ronny
and the British colonial community.
As Mrs. Moore, Peggy Ashcroft comes through with a piece of
transcendent acting. She has to, because Mrs. Moore is meant to be a
saint, a sage, a woman in tune with the secrets of eternity. Forster never
devised anything for her to do; in the novel, she simply is a sacred being
—she's an enigma, like Professor Godbole. It may have been in an
attempt to convey her wisdom that Lean gave her what is probably the
worst line in the script: "India forces one to come face to face with
oneself. It can be rather disturbing." (Substitute "Transylvania," and
that's a line for Dracula to speak.) Except for Mrs. Moore's brief rapport
with Aziz, who tells her she has the kindest face he has ever seen on an
English lady, she's simply a weary, practical-minded woman who's very
sure of things. She's not much of a mother —she's quite out of sympathy
with her son Ronny —and she has no particular feeling for Miss Quested.
She's a cantankerous old lady, yet Peggy Ashcroft breathes so much
good sense into the role that Mrs. Moore acquires a radiance, a spiritual
glow. It makes us like her. Fielding, the character who behaves most
courageously, doesn't seem to have stirred Forster's imagination much;
Forster was probably too much like Fielding for Fielding to interest him.
The character is always on the verge of being too decent, but James Fox
(he was the weakling master turned slavey in The Servant) gives the
part a doggedness that saves it.

The novel wants to be about unresolvability; the movie doesn't, and

What's remarkable about the film is how two such different temper-
isn't.

aments as Forster's and Lean's could come together. There's a tie that
binds them, though: Lean certainly hasn't softened Forster's condemna-
tion of the British officials' poisonous thick-skinned detachment. Like the
book, the movie is a lament for British sins; the big difference is in tone.
The movie is informed by a spirit of magisterial self-hatred. That's its
oddity: Lean's —
grand "objective" manner he never touches anything
without defining it and putting it in its place —
seems to have developed
out of the values he attacks. It's an imperial bookkeeper's style no —
loose ends. It's also the style that impressed the Indians, and shamed
them because they couldn't live up to it. It's the style of the conqueror
— who is here the guilt-ridden conqueror but the conqueror nevertheless.
Lean has an appetite for grandeur. That may explain why, at the start,
he puts the Viceroy on the ship with the two women (and why, the caves
in India not being imposing enough, he dynamited and made his own).

But his appetite for grandeur also accounts for such memorable images

303
as the red uniforms and headgear on the Indian band manghng Western
music in the brilHant sunshine at the whites-only club, and the ancient
painted elephant that lurches along from the train to the caves with Dr.
Aziz, Mrs. Moore, and Miss Quested on its back.
January 14, 1985

LOVERS AND FOOLS

Ucki & Maude is a small screwball farce, a tame and trivial

contraption, and it would probably seem insipid to people who hoped for
something substantial, but there's a special delight about the timing of
actors who make fools of themselves as personably and airily as Dudley
Moore and Amy Irving do here. Moore looks better than he has in his
recent films: he's lighter on his feet and more relaxed, and his changes
of expression seem faster than the speed of thought, yet they're easy
to follow. He plays a TV reporter— he does the human-interest stories
for a local station in L.A. —who becomes a bigamist through his tender
regard for two pregnant women's feelings. He doesn't want to hurt
either his wife, Micki (the blazing Ann
Reinking), a lawyer who has just
been appointed to the California Supreme Court, or Maude (the pearly
Amy Irving), a cellist he got involved with when his wife was too busy
to have time for him. And he's perfectly convincing. You can see why
the two women fall in love with him. He's romantic in the silken, self-
effacing manner of Gary Grant. It isn't difficult to imagine Grant in the
role, or possibly Steve Martin or Robin Williams, but I can't think of
anyone else who could do it with the delicacy and the knockabout athleti-
cism and the faint air of pleading that Moore brings to it. This TV
reporter is an ideal playmate, because he has nothing else on his mind;
all his energies are devoted to making the woman he's with happy,
whichever one it is.

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 —

Micki, the judge, is supposed to be a dynamo; still, Ann Reinking,

with her white skin and raven hair, is a bit too resplendent —she seems
somewhat more turned on than necessary (in a slightly vacuous way),
and too physically charged to play opposite Moore. When she's stretched
out on her bed, her thighs are like a powerful pair of scissors you —
almost fear for him. When Amy Irving's Maude is onscreen, the movie
is in better balance, because Irving attunes herself to Moore's energy

level. Her acting here is a form of heavenly flirtation: her eyes widen and

shine, her voice drips honey. Everything about her is soft and willowy
and funny. Her words seem to be wafted to us on a warm breeze. Amy
Irving is the best partner Moore has had, except for John Gielgud in
Arthur, and Peter Cook a number of years earlier, and she brings out
something ethereal in him. He's peaceful with her —he's half in a dream
—and during the courtship their conversations are cadenced and giddy.
They make verbal music together, like Shakespearean clowns.
Working from a script by the young playwright Jonathan Reynolds,
the director Blake Edwards has got clear of the rancid angry streak that
smudged his recent comedies, and of the dry mold that formed over his
last picture, in 1983 The Man Who Loved Women. The story here is
flimsy, and by the time Moore is taking care of his two infants all we can
think of is: How are the moviemakers going to find an ending? (The way
the plot is set up, there's no way to resolve it, and they don't they just —
sort of bug off.) The story also wastes the lovely Maude character for
the sake of the comic symmetry of two career-centered mothers. But
Edwards' directing has some of the love of free-for-all lunacy he showed
in his Peter Sellers pictures, such as The Pink Panther and The Party,

There are a couple of extended slapstick sequences that suggest rework-

ings of the earliest screen comedies: in one, the women have simulta-
neous appointments with their obstetricians, who have adjoining offices;

in the other, the women are in labor at the same time. Edwards keeps
Moore in constant, darting motion in these scenes, and the gags prolifer-
ate, but there isn'tan instant when you say to yourself, "Oh, I've seen
this before." —
You haven't the timing makes it all new. And these set
pieces click into place because they develop out of the reporter's charac-
ter, with a boomerang effect. He's an urbane, reasonable fellow whose
penchant for pampering women turns him into a comic projectile hur-
tling into walls.
Reynolds' dialogue has a fresh wit, and, whether through his skill

or Edwards', it's tied in with sight gags. The lines spark Dudley Moore.
He often laughs as he speaks, and he'll speak to himself (like Sellers)

while going into a piece of physical comedy. Sometimes it's the counter-

305
point of his words and his tumbles which makes you respond to him. It's
puzzling that a director with Edwards' mastery of sight gags (he's great
on bits like Moore bumping into a tree) would come up with a picture as
visually undistinguished as this one is, especially at the beginning. (It
looks like an in-flight movie.) And a couple of the plot elements have no
payoff: Micki, with all her vim, starts a catalogue business during her
pregnancy, and then almost nothing more is heard of it; and the reporter
has a nibble from CBS, and nothing comes of that, either. (Surprisingly,
neither of the pregnant women watches her husband on TV to keep track
of him.) But there's just one really jarring episode: Maude gives her
husband a green sweater, and he wears it for some time, until Micki, who
doesn't like it, and thinks he bought it for himself, takes it back to the
store. The scene would make perfectly good sense if Micki gave the
sweater away, but her returning it after he has been wearing it steadily
gives you pause. It makes her seem like a tightfisted villainess, yet that
doesn't appear to be the point at all. It's as if no one on the set had
thought out the overtones of what she was doing. But apart from this,
and Edwards' taking too long to wind things up, and Moore's having to
go through too many assorted miseries near the end, the movie keeps
its agility.

Edwards Moore here to bring out the character's living-in-

directs
the-moment hopefulness. This bigamist is convinced that everything will
come out all right, because he doesn't feel he has done anything wrong.
And the audience is put in the position of experiencing unqualified empa-
—
thy with him we share his loony optimism. That's the essence of the
picture, and, of course, anyone who gets fussed over its sexual politics
probably won't be able to enjoy it. (But if you start worrying about
real-life morality you can drain the fun out of almost any bedroom
comedy, and what do you gain?) This small farce has a genuinely frivo-
lous nature. That's not something to sniff at.

I.n Starman,
I the director John Carpenter tries to bring a ro-
mantic-comedy spirit to sci-fi. Although he acknowledges that he was
trying for something like Capra's It Happened One Night, the film's
tone more like that of Capra's It's a Wonderful Life and Meet John
is

Doe. With Karen Allen as a young, childless widow with sad, glazed eyes
and Jeff Bridges as a gentle alien who takes the form of the husband she

306
mourns, Starman has a melancholy gooeyness. The story line is simple:
The starman has come to Earth from a distant planet because of the
greetings that the United States sent into space on Voyager 2 in 1977;
in over fifty languages, we sent a welcome to anyone out there. But
— —
when this alien arrives in the form of a white light his spacecraft is
shot down over Wisconsin by our early-warning air-defense system. The
heartless, scared creeps who run the government's Search for Extrater-
restrial Intelligence Department track him to the widow's cabin on a bay,
—
and soon they prepare an autopsy table with leather straps they mean
to vivisect the starman. But he has fled, forcing the woman, who's in
shock, to drive him, because if he doesn't make it to a designated spot
in Arizona in three days, to be picked up by his mother ship, he will die.

The widow and this exact likeness of her dead husband set out for
Arizona in her souped-up 1977 Mustang. En route, her fear of him
changes to love, and he experiences some of the pleasures and pangs of
being human, male, and American.
Bridges tilts his face upward and moves his head like a bird scenting
—
things out, and he walks with his body tilted forward he's like an
—
automaton without joints. It's mildly amusing he's oddly unhuman
(and he has been given a Paleolithic haircut). But he doesn't have enough
else to do. In It Happened One Night, it was the interaction of Gable
and Colbert with the all- American eccentrics they met along their way
that made them appreciate each other. Carpenter seems afraid of losing
his hold on poignancy; he's a one-note director. He was single-minded in
the way he went for scare effects in Halloween, and he goes for tender-
ness here in the unabashed manner of a Frank Borzage romance such
as the 1927 Seventh Heaven. But Borzage made you feel that he be-
lieved in it. Carpenter just pours it on, and the film slides around in it.
The script, by Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon (rewritten by the
uncredited Dean Riesner), may have been a little peppier than the way
it comes across. The picture is full of opportunities for humor: the star-

man is like a super-serious Soviet youth who has come to study our ways
— he mimics the slang he hears and the rude gestures he sees, he mimics
Sinatra singing on the car radio. But the scenes are deliberately muted,
and most of the gag lines are softened. We keep going back to the
plaintive widow, murmuring her reminiscences of her honeymoon.
Karen Allen is terribly emotional, in a skimpy way. So there's no one for
—
Bridges to play against there's no friction between them, no tartness
or impudence. He falls in love with her ickiness, and she with his. When
the two are in a roadside restaurant, he asks her to define "love," and
she tries helplessly, wet-eyed, thinking of her dead husband, while a

307
synthesized heavenly choir in the distance makes wistful, whimpering
sounds.
As soon as we see a dead deer slung across a hunter's car, we know
that the starman will restore it to life. (We've seen the same movies
Carpenter has.) But when the deer bounds away. Carpenter can't seem
to work up even the tiniest bit of thrill. The scene is enervated and
snoozy until we get the sudden bam-pow violence of the hunter and his
pals attacking the starman. It's preachy violence —we're supposed to see
that the starman is better than we are; he shows us what we've lost and
what our potential is. Watching him through ever-widening eyes, the
widow begins to look like a diligent starlet trying out for the Passion
Play. Soon we get the beautiful-sex rite: we see their heads in silhouette
— first hers on top, then his on top. This is bleeding-hearts sci-fi, and it

isn't long before a dozen or so helicopters are chasing the two lovers
around the slope of a crater in Arizona. (In contemporary movies, heli-

copters are embodiments of evil.) In this victimization fantasy, it's all

sweet innocence between the starman and the widow because every-
thing else has been displaced onto the hunters and the government.
The persecution of these two flower children by the macho hunters
and the government is ritualistic pop hype. The film has something of the
sentimental paranoia of Easy Rider, transposed to the eighties; it even
has a similar draggy holiness. When the starman and the widow have
their kissy parting, her eyes shine with new hope: he has given her the
child she wanted. Wasn't there a National Enquirer headline
— "l had

A MARTIAN'S BABY AND THE GOVERNMENT TRIED TO TAKE IT AWAY"?

ft he Flamingo Kid is about the summer that Jeffrey Willis

Liil

(Matt Dillon) grows up. It's the summer of 1963, and Jeffrey, an eight-
een-year-old Brooklyn boy whose father (Hector Elizondo) is a plumber,
gets a job parking cars at El Flamingo, a beach club on Long Island. The
tips are good, and so are the boy's winnings at gin rummy; he plans to
go to Columbia in the fall, and he's able to put away a chunk of dough
for his college expenses. But when he's taken up by the club's gin-
rummy champ, Brody (Richard Crenna), a foreign-car dealer who
Phil
wears and sports a sapphire on his pinkie, he begins to think
silk shirts

college would be a waste of time. His head is turned by the gaudiness

of the unfamiliar milieu and the money, the sun and water, the semi-

308
 —

naked girls, the sex. At the center of it all is Brody, the big shot, the type
of salesman who's proud of having made it to the top without book
learning —of having got into the big money on his own moxie. Brody
enjoys playing man of the world to the kid, and the kid is temporarily
blinded by Brody's flash. He rejects his family's solid values, and his
father's belief in the importance of education; he decides he just wants
to make money and live it up, like Brody. Of course, by the end of Labor
Day weekend he has got himself straightened out: he sees through
Brody, the father figure he has idealized, and learns to appreciate the
—
fact that his own father is an honest man a hardworking plumber who
gives value for money.
The movie is a crude, convivial sitcom about disillusionment as a rite
of passage. The director, Garry Marshall, is known as the "creator"
—
one of the executive producers of several TV series ("Happy Days,"
"Mork and Mindy," "Laverne and Shirley"), and he has a particular kind
of TV wizardry. His flair for comedy is mixed with a special, trained
reflex —he goes for the audience like a carny pitchman. Television watch-
ers and moviegoers are his mark. Marshall pushes you around, but in an
amiable way, and he gets his laughs, though nothing carries over and
the gags turn into a blur. The Flamingo Kid is a slapped-together
comedy in the genre of the more eloquent Breaking Away and Diner.
It's anti-crass in a crass style; watching it, I began to feel that Phil Brody

had directed it. That's not all bad: part of what's enjoyable in the movie
is its junkiness —
Marshall knows how to stage Fiesta Night at the club,
and he knows how to call attention to the jaunty little butt on Brody's
golden-girl niece Carla (Janet Jones), a Southern California hottentot
who doesn't mind Jeffrey's being a few years younger than she is. (When
head on top.) A beach in the sunset
this pair are in silhouette, it's just his
can get to a director, so Marshall's one outbreak of calendar art can be
forgiven. And a dull sequence at the race track in Yonkers, and another
one when Jeffrey quarrels with his father, who has just bailed him out
of jail, can be shrugged aside. What can't be is the way Marshall

squeezes the good plumber's scenes so that they show "humanity." He's
—
a sanctimonious pitchman he sets up the movie so that it has a moral.
He flattens everything out so the audience will understand it, yet there's
still some vitality in the material that glimmers through. (Elizondo, for
example, shows his skill whenever the plumber father makes an ass of
himself.)
The summer of 1963 was part of a forward-looking time, and I

imagine that the original writer, Neal Marshall (he's not related to the
director), wanted Jeffrey Willis to stand for youth in the days just before

309
Vietnam and the assassinations and the drugs. (Neal Marshall's screen-
play was first optioned in 1972; he later revised it, and then it was
rewritten by Bo Goldman, who had his name removed after the director
reworked it.) In the finished film, nostalgia and realism are packaged
together, and the director presents his version of 1963 as more "real"
than the way things are now. There's a kind of cultural fundamentalism
at work in this movie. Garry Marshall is telling us that the complications
of the last two decades are unimportant. He's saying that what matters
is: Listen to your honest old man and don't sell out. And, so that every-

thing will be cartoon-simple, Brody isn't merely a blowhard he's a —

cheat. That way, he and the kid's honorable, square father can be in
perfect opposition. And, to make the moral package even tidier, Jeffrey
—
doesn't merely reject Brody he punishes him. The director has been
trusting his TV instincts for so long that maybe he doesn't see the
ugliness in this.
There were great pop songs in 1963, and many of them are on the
soundtrack, but they're not used in a way that sticks with you. When a
new song starts, you may perk up for a second or two, but Garry
Marshall doesn't bring out anything of what was energizing in the
songs. He makes them overfamiliar —he uses them to evoke the period,
to blend in and disappear (like the gags). What Marshall creates is a
ruckus for a synthetic community (which is what a TV audience is).

The movie might be said to be for a synthetic community and about

one, too. Matt Dillon has a charming, easy, corny naturalism here. (It's
a relief after seeing him straining so hard to act in Rumble Fish. ) He's
—
almost too open-faced and graceful he's so ingratiating he's like an
Irish Robby Benson, though he doesn't seem meant to be Irish. His
family looks vaguely Italian (and his father says grace over breakfast),
but nobody in this — except maybe Irving Metzman as hairy, itchy
movie
Big Sid at the gin-rummy table— meant to have a
is background. definite
The moviemakers must have wanted to take advantage of the ripe pos-
sibilities in a Long Island Jewish club (the crowded pink stucco El Fla-

mingo is based on the old El Patio, where Neal Marshall worked as a kid),
but they didn't want to limit their "universal" theme. Though the Brodys
and most of the other people at the club are Jewish caricatures circa
Larry Peerce's Goodbye, Columbus, some of the younger generation,
such as the golden-hind Carla, are almost ostentatiously gentile. In this
movie, people's names don't provide much clue to their backgrounds.
(Garry Marshall, who is Italian, must like the name Brody: it was the
heroine's name in his only previous movie as a director, the 1982 Young
Doctors in Love.) As Brody's brassy, bored wife, Jessica Walter is so

310
overtly snobbish it's like a form of innocence, and she's rather winning.

But Richard Crenna's crooked, soft-in-the-gut Brody is the film's one

major character, Brody's flesh seems to be expanding because he wants
to fill a larger space. This man who feels alive only when he's selling
himself —who blooms with a little worship — is probably the best screen
role Crenna has ever had, and in scenes such as his encounter with
Jeffrey's trimlittle father he's smooth in a seasoned, scummy way that

makes you laugh. Garry Marshall has an affection for this scoundrel. He
ought to. A director who can give us ethnic humor without ethnics has
certainly learned how to cut a few corners.
January 28, 1985

SCHOOLBOYS

i. ^3hn Schlesinger's hour-long 1983 TV film An Englishman

Abroad, starring Alan Bates as Guy Burgess in Moscow, is probably the
best hour of television I've ever seen. (It was first shown here late in
1984.) Though it was clear that what made it memorable was the script,
by Alan Bennett, and Bates' entering into the squirmy soul of a traitor
who's in exile from everything he cares about, Schlesinger directed it so
simply that I was really cranked up for his new movie. The Falcon and
the Snowman, which is another tale of traitors —
ours this time. The
story of Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee seemed a natural anyway;
when it was reported in had everything bravado, black
the press, it —
humor, and a kind of ail-American kinkiness. Boyce and Lee, parochial-
school pupils in one of the best-heeled communities in Southern Califor-
—
nia Palos Verdes Peninsula, on Santa Monica Bay were altar boys —
together; they became close friends on the high-school football squad,
and developed a common interest in falconry. The intelligent Boyce, who
couldn't get along with his father (an F.B.I, man turned security special-

s'
ist in the aerospace industry), idealized earlier centuries and thought he
would like to go back about hundred years. He entered a seminary
five

to prepare for the priesthood, and then, questioning his faith, left, and
went to a secular college. Lee, the adopted son of a Second World War
hero who became a doctor, dealt in pot in high school and, after gradua-
tion, began to push cocaine and heroin; by the time July, 1974 that — —
Boyce decided to knock off college for a year or so and took a clerical
job that his father arranged for him in a company under contract to the
C.I.A., Lee (who had stopped growing in the fifth grade, when he was
five feet two) was on probation, with legal problems hanging over him

—and a junkie.
Clean-cut and quiet, Chris Boyce did well in his job, and after a few
months he was (at the age of twenty-one) given top-secret clearance and
sent to work in the Black Vault, a communications center for surveil-
lance satellites that the C.LA, denied the existence of. He was shocked
to discover the extent of C.LA. manipulations of the internal affairs of
allies, like Australia (where the Agency was maneuvering to discredit
the Labour Prime Minister). And, for a mixture of motives, including
revenge on the C.LA. for its crimes, he decided to sell some of this
information to the Soviet Union. It was like a secret (and lucrative) form
of protest. He saved key documents that were supposed to be shredded,
and in April, 1975, his coked-up buddy Lee, acting as courier, presented
himself at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City and established relations
with the K.G.B. Out on bail, still dealing dope, and with all kinds of
charges against him, Lee kept slipping back and forth over the border.
These two casual, sloppy spies delivered documents to the Russians for
two years, until January of 1977, when the Mexican police arrested Lee
for causing a disturbance outside the Soviet Embassy. Boyce, who had
quit his job and gone back to college with plans to become a lawyer, was
picked up ten days later. (The code name that he used in his espionage
activitieswas Falcon.)
The story of Boyce, who when he was out with his falcons dreamt
that he was a Renaissance prince, and of the wastrel Lee, who had a
genuine talent for cabinetwork but was discouraged by the Palos Verdes
teachers from doing anything that smacked of manual labor, is a gor-
geous sick comedy. (And it didn't end when the two were sent to max-
—
imum-security prisons Boyce for forty years, Lee for life. Boyce es-
caped and robbed a few banks, and he might have stayed free if he hadn't
started to fly falcons again.) At first, I gave the Schlesinger movie the
benefit of the doubt, and kept waiting for it to get to the good stuff. He
does get to some of it, but only glancingly; he pretty much throws the

gia
story away. We don't see the boys' weekends together flying falcons,
and we don't get a sense of their relationship. (Schlesinger may think
—
that if he shows a thing once such as Boyce greeting Lee warmly he —
has done his duty and established what we need to know.) And maybe
because the movie is based on a factual account (Robert Lindsey's The
Falcon and the Snowman), Schlesinger doesn't bother to make it credi-
ble that the coolheaded Boyce would be in partnership with the strung-
out, hysterical Lee. The director seems hardly interested in the absurdist
aspects of the case, such as Lee's living high, giving parties in his
parents' house, and boasting of his exploits as a spy. The script, by
Steven Zaillian, is disjointed; it never takes hold of anything, and Schles-
inger doesn't, either.
The sumptuousness of Schlesinger's style is impressive. A falcon
vaults across the sky onto its prey; the shot has a perfect cruel zing to
it. There's something lordly (and a little bored) in this director's com-
mand of the medium. While he gives you the feeling that he knows what
he's doing, he has no staying power. He doesn't develop the idea of the
elitist parents, with their rigid, out-of-date thinking and their lackadaisi-
cal —
permissiveness he falls back on such staples as closeups of Boyce's
mother (Joyce Van Patten) that suggest she's some sort of inept, piggy
monster, an emblem of America's grotesque shallowness. He tosses in
spy complications that you can't quite follow. He lays on shot after shot
of jetting falcons without ever indicating what this (rather horrible)
chivalric sport means to the two deeply reactionary kids.
"It's not so much what they did as why that interests me," Schles-
inger says in the publicity material. "Without condoning their actions,
—
we explore what was going on in their heads and in the world around
—
them in the early seventies." But if we don't get a clear idea of what
happened how can we perceive the why of it? Schlesinger seems to think
he's exploring the boys' thoughts when he flashes reminders of the
Vietnam era: Martin Luther King, Nixon, Agnew, the Kennedys, John
—
Lennon the whole bloody mess. He's busy making a countercultural
statement and a work of art when if he had just told the story straight
it might have really been those things —
it might have meant something.

Maybe the more deeply Schlesinger understands the material he's work-
ing with, the simpler he is. (Hence the lucidity of An Englishman
Abroad.) And when the material is alien to him he goes for art and
political thunder. So in The Falcon and the Snowman he explicitly
makes the point that Chris Boyce's actions weren't the traitorous ones
— the C.LA.'s were. The movie isn't really interested in either the what
—
or the why of the Boyce and Lee case Schlesinger wants to shock the

313
hell out of us by justifying Boyce's actions. But we've had so many movie
directors shooting off at us that all the flash and denunciation have lost
their impact. (They've become modern conventions.) We keep trying to
get into the boys' characters, and neither the writer nor the director
gives us much help. All they supply of Boyce's motives is a multiple-
choice test. We're to take our pick of (a) loss of faith in God, (b) not
getting along with Dad, (c) the cynical, circus atmosphere in the Black
Vault, and so on.
In the early scenes, Timothy Hutton brings some excitement to the
underwritten role of Chris Boyce. The conscientiousness and the physi-
cal timidity of Button's earlier performances seem to have been burned
out of him. At twenty-three, he's no longer the sensitive stripling of
—
Ordinary People; he has a new physical stature he's turning into a
strikingly good-looking man, with a sexual presence, like a young War-
ren Beatty. This young actor is ready to take off into uncharted realms,
and he makes you respond to the secret Chris Boyce, the freak hidden
inside the proper manners, the good clothes, the young prince. (As an
innocent-faced altar boy, Chris had a sly little trick: he dragged his feet
on the carpeting and worked up enough electricity to administer shocks
on the chin from the platter as people received the host.) But by the time
Boyce is making speeches about how the C.I.A. preys on weaker govern-
ments, you've almost forgotten the foxy intensity he had in the first half,
and how furtive and gleaming his eyes were when he talked to his father
and his father's friends who were his bosses at work. In those scenes,
Button's Chris Boyce takes the center of the picture, because he's too
smart and too cagey and dishonest to show those people what he thinks.
He plays along with them while doing tiny double takes with his eyes
for the amusement of another side of himself. Schlesinger probably has
no idea why the boys did it, but Hutton does have an idea, and the flickers
of subversive life inside his clean-cut, regular-featured handsomeness
suggest possibilities that we want to see explored. This Boyce is secretly
out for kicks, and then some. (Boyce named his favorite falcon 'Tawkes"
— for Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.)
—
That's what we expect the movie to be about that's where the drama
is. But it isn't developed. And the last part of the picture —
which is when
it really goes bad — has Schlesinger doing his ritual song and dance:
showing us how we are really the guilty ones. At the very end, we get
the sanctimony of David Bowie singing "This Is Not America."
Sean Penn's whiny Daulton Lee, with a thick head of hair that's like
a homemade wig, and dark glasses and a measly, pencil-line mustache,
is like Rupert Pupkin's little brother. It's an embarrassment —
the kind

314
of fanatic actor's performance that's obvious and empty in a way that's
bound to be compared admiringly to De Niro's run of bum work. Sean
Penn earned the praise he received for Fast Times ct Ridgemont High
and Bad Boys and Racing with the Moon, but he's a self-conscious
catastrophe here, complete right down to the choked voice he sounds —
as if his lungs had collapsed. Daulton Lee is supposed to be a braggart
and a hustler, but all Penn's energy goes into the impersonation he has —
nothing left for his big scenes, and they're lifeless. (You get the impres-
sion that Penn thinks the only part of character creation that's authentic
is the groping; he abdicates half the actor's job the projecting and —
shaping. A good actor takes on a different character —he doesn't dissolve
into it. Here, you feel as if the artist had disappeared, and you were left
watching a twerp playing a twerp.) Partly because of the blubbering and
flailing about that Sean Penn does, the two principal K.G.B. men —Alex
(David Suchet), who is Lee's regular contact, and the senior official (Boris
Leskin) —seem to be the only ones who know what they're doing, the
only sane and responsible people in the movie. (They're far from this
levelheaded in Lindsey's account.) Suchet, who spent ten years with the
Royal Shakespeare Company and is appearing now as Freud in a BBC
series on cable, has wide, dark eyes and the suavity of an actor who
never wastes a motion; he modulates his soft-edged voice ever so slightly
to suggest Alex's bafflement in his dealings with the strutting, shouting
Lee, who at one point tries to talk the Russians into a heroin deal. And
Dorian Harewood, as one of Boyce's co-workers in the Black Vault,
livens up the scenes he's in. The goddessy young Lori Singer is cast as
Boyce's girlfriend, but has nothing to do except get in bed with him; she
appears to be in the picture for the sole purpose of letting us know that
the boys aren't homosexual.
Schlesinger is no slouch when it comes to directing actors. He casts
Pat Hingle as Chris Boyce's father, who's still an F.B.L man at heart.
It's a role Hingle has played dozens of times —he's a pop-culture joke in

this role —but I doubt if he has ever done it as well. And Schlesinger
always has some dynamic activity going (even if it's off-key or confusing
or there's something missing and things don't add up right). He has
many of the attributes of a first-rate director. There's one he's missing.
If you think back to his calamities, such as The Day of the Locust and
Marathon Man, you can see that they fail for the same reason The
Falcon and the Snowman does. It's his failure to be involved on the
simplest level. It's his detachment from the events and the people, from
the plain facts of a story.

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 D

Jl friend of mine said that she liked the book Birdy, by William
Wharton pseudonym), which was published in the late seventies, be-
(a
—
cause Birdy "wasn't a metaphor for anything he was simply a kid who
wanted to fly like a bird," and I can see how someone might take the
novel literally, all the terrific bird lore in it. But the movie
because of
version, directed by Alan Parker, and updated from the Depression and
the Second World War to the sixties and Vietnam by the adapters, Sandy
Kroopf and Jack Behr, is all metaphor. Part satire, part Christ myth, it's
like The Little Prince rewritten by Kurt Vonnegut. The central charac-

ters are two boys from the drab working-class suburbs of Philadelphia.
Al (Nicolas Cage), a high-school athlete, has come back from Vietnam a
sergeant with battle stripes on his uniform, a steel jaw, and a mutilated
face wrapped in bandages. He has been summoned to the psychiatric
section of a military hospital to see if he can help his friend Birdy
(Matthew Modine), who was wounded and missing in action, and now
squats naked on the floor. Crumpled like a broken bird, and with his head
slightly twisted, Modine peers up at the window high in his cell, as if he
wanted to fly up and away, but it's crossbarred and covered with wire.
The cell seems as tall as a Gothic cathedral, and the light streaming from
the window comes down from the sign of the cross onto the mute,
—
suffering boy he's a deformed Christ figure in a cloister-cage.
Al, bandaged and in pain, continues to visit Birdy, who doesn't
acknowledge his presence, and in flashbacks, through the two boys'
thoughts and fantasies, we see them in their high-school days, when they
caught and raised pigeons together and then, after Al's interest in birds
had waned and he was concentrating on sports and girls, Birdy kept
canaries in his room. In those days, birds were Birdy's hobby and pas-
sion. He could watch them fly, build winged contraptions, and create an
—
aviary-world of his own a world without the meanness of the corrupt
society. In his bird world, he could escape the heartlessness of his crazy
mother, the despondency of his school-janitor father, and the taunting
of the neighborhood kids, who him Weirdo. The two boys stayed
called
close, because Al didn't laugh at Birdy's dreams; they needed each other.
With Cage playing flesh to Modine's spirit, the movie is made in a process
that's like simultaneous translation. Everything that happens instantly
converts itself into vaguely abstract terms. The movie is about the purity
of madness, about male bonding, sadism, violation, and so on. And, with
the war-ravaged Al sitting on the hospital floor in that stream of light.

316
 —

holding the catatonic Birdy in his arms, it's one Pieta after another.
The movie takes itself inordinately seriously as a moral fable ex-
pressing eternal truths, and everything you're supposed to react to is

laid out for you. When the adolescent Birdy puts on wings he has made
and attempts to soar over a garbage dump, the bluntness of the meta-
phor is deadening. At times, every shot seems metaphoric. We have no

sooner seen Birdy's rhapsodic love of a golden-yellow canary, whose

feathers glow brighter than anything else in the movie, than we see a
cat sneaking upstairs to his room. The incidents we are shown and the
ones we hear about all relate to victimization: Birdy's mother kills the
two boys' pigeons; Al's father sells the '53 Ford the boys have put
together; the boys get a job with a dogcatcherwho grabs animals off the
streetsand rushes them straight to the slaughterhouse; and then there's
Vietnam.
Fooling around with the novel's time frame produces some odd
results. Though the physical details of the boys' lives in the sixties seem
accurate enough, what's missing —the pop culture of the sixties—makes
their adventures seem still to be happening in the quieter Depression
years. And the omnipresence of choppers in the boys' Vietnam recollec-
tions may make you wonder why Birdy didn't graduate from wanting to
fly to wanting to be a flyer, and why he expresses no interest in planes

or gliders. (He's in ecstasy when he's up in the shoot-the-chutes at the

beach, so his lack of expression when he's up in a helicopter seems a
glitch.) Most of all, the change in the period encourages the moviemak-
ers in their sense of mission. The movie has the tone of a requiem for
the two maimed boys, for Vietnam, for the human condition.
Alan Parker gives you surface realism, but he keeps you aware of
his accomplishment. He makes a great show of serving the material. He
keeps you standing back, watching him bring off emotional numbers full
of torment and pathos. His work here —with an elegant Peter Gabriel
score mated to —has a high-tech industrial
it finish, an impersonal sheen.
He achievessome fairly amazing swooping, flying-over-the-neighbor-
hood shots when we see things from Birdy's fantasy perspective. But if
ever there was a sequence that called for silence this dream of flying is
it. Gabriel's synthesized drum music is far too clever for Birdy's flight

— it outclasses Birdy, with his awe of wings and his sexual immaturity.

And Parker's assured approach gives the material a slickness that finally
locks a viewer out. (It may even be that Parker and his regular team
the cinematographer Michael Seresin, and the camera operator, the edi-
tor, the designer, and the production people —
have become too smooth
a unit.) I found myself watching the actors as actors not as Al and —

317
Birdy —and the visual effects as visual effects. I don't know that anyone
could have brought this material off. (Robert Altman stumbled with his
bird-boy story, the 1970 Brewster McCloud. ) It's material that should
be magical —straightforward yet elusive. It probably needed a director
who found the story lulling, tantalizing, its meanings hidden a director —
who would risk making us laugh at what he was doing. Parker's techno-
logical sophistication nails everything down. John Schlesinger wasn't
interested in boys who use birds to create their own worlds, and neither
is Parker. The movie feels morose and unrelieved, despite the efforts of
who make everything they can of the humorous rapport
the two actors,
between the adolescent boys.
Matthew Modine puts his whole body into character; he doesn't hold
anything back, and he has a clean style, unencumbered with actors'
tricks. When he grins (in the flashback scenes), his Huck Finn goofiness
helps to cauterize the pure-boy. Little Prince aspect of the role; he's as
"natural" as anybody could be who's posed as a contorted Christ figure.
Modine has remarkable control, and he's still young enough to be con-
vincing as a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Catholic angel. His is the
showier role —an actor playing a catatonic is almost certain to be intense
and riveting. Al is probably the more difficult role. He has to be muscular
and earthbound; he has to be a kid who's treated brutally by his vicious
old man (Sandy Baron, in a convincingly dark performance). And he also
has to spend a lot of time with his face half obscured by bandages while
he grieves over Birdy's silence. Al is supposed to be ordinary, except for
his friendship with Birdy, and ordinariness is one of those bad, literary
ideas that can destroy an actor. Nicolas Cage has some of the dopey
soulfulness that was so charming in his appearance as the Hollywood
High boy in Martha Coolidge's 1983 Valley Girl, but he can't infringe
—
on Modine' s terrain he has to be raw and girl-crazy and scared of his
father. He's fine in the flashback scenes, when he and Birdy are just kids
doing reckless teen-age things; the two boys have matching smiles, the
way best friends with shared secrets often do. They move together, as
if they were both hearing the same signals, the same music. Cage

doesn't quite sustain his hospital scenes, but he's at a terrible disadvan-
tage in them —he's the noisy supplicant, begging Birdy for a sign of
intelligent life.

Near the end, Al gets his sign, in a scene so misconceived that I can
hardly believe that it actually made it to the film's final cut. Talking to
the unresponsive Birdy, Al suddenly delivers an impassioned anti-war
statement. It's totally out of character, and you're groaning at the
moviemakers' intruding in this way when damned if Birdy doesn't react

318
against it, too. But he doesn't blame the writers or the director for it;

he blames Al, and, rousing himself from his stupor, he says, laughing,
"Al,sometimes you're so full of shit." This flip scene invalidates the two
hours of movie that preceded it. After all of Birdy's Christ-like, broken-
bird posturing, how can he suddenly turn up his nose at something
phony? It's not as if Birdy had come to his senses; it's as if Matthew
Modine had waked up, seen through the role he'd been straining to play,
and walked off the set.
February 11, 1985

PLAIN AND SIMPLE

1 In the new Peter Weir movie, Witness, an eight-year-old

Amish boy (Lukas Haas), on his first trip to a city, sees a murder taking
place in the men's room of Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street train station.
In order to protect the boy and his mother, Rachel, a widow (Kelly
McGillis), from the killers, John Book (Harrison Ford), the police captain
who's in charge of the investigation, tries to hide their identities, and,
with a bullet wound in his side, drives them back to their farm in Lancas-
ter County before he collapses. At that point, the film has already built
up the contrast between the devout, gentle Amish and the greedy, brutal
—
Philadelphians seen through the eyes of the child, who takes in every-
thing. In the days of silent pictures, the distinction between rural virtue
and big-city vice was a standard theme. The girl on the farm was stead-
fast; she represented true, undying love. The city girl was fast and
spoiled and selfish. This split between good farmers and bad urban
dwellers takes an extreme form in Witness. Last year's rural trilogy
{Country, Places in the Heart, and The River) prepared the way:
moviegoers have been softened to accept the idea that people who work
the land are uplifted by their labor. And Witness goes the trilogy one

319
 —

better by having its farming people part of a pacifist religious commu-

nity that retains an eighteenth-century way of life and stresses "plain-
ness." (The Amish reject buttons as decorative.) Also, in the past twenty
years we have been battered by so much evidence of crime in the cities

that moviegoers may be ready to believe that city people are, of neces-
sity, depraved. Witness seems to take its view of the Amish from a
quaint dreamland, a Brigadoon of tall golden wheat and shiny-clean
faces, and to take its squalid, hyped-up view of life in Philadelphia from
prolonged exposure to TV cop shows. Murder is treated as if it were a
modern, sin-city invention.
Though you can your bones that a solemn cross-cultural
feel in
romance is coming, the first section of the story moves along at an even
clip until John Book's collapse. There's even a bit of visual comedy in the

train station, when the little boy, in his black suit and broad black hat,
thinks he sees another member of the sect: he walks over to an elderly
Orthodox Jew, and the two look at each other in wordless rejection. But
the narrativeis becalmed during Book's recuperation at Rachel's farm,

because the screenwriters (Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley) haven't

provided him with any plan of action. When he rushes Rachel and the
boy back to safety among the Amish, it's because he has learned that
the killers are his superiors in the police department, who are involved
in a twenty-million-dollar narcotics deal. But once he knows that, his
mind seems go dead. During his stay among the Amish, he gets out
to
to a nearby town and phones the only cop he can trust his partner —
who wonders if they should go to a reporter or to the F.B.I. The sugges-
tion seems to fall into a void, and Book just waits for the killers to track
him down and show up at the farm. Maybe the movie is trying to tell us
that the whole American system is so rotten that Book has no recourse
— that there's no agency that isn't contaminated. Whatever the movie-
makers had in mind, the way the story is set up there's nothing for us
to look forward to but the arrival of the bad guys and the final fit of
violence.
While we wait. Witness is a compendium of scenes I had hoped
never to see again. There's the city person stranded in the sticks and
learning to milk a cow, and — oh, yes—having to get up at 4:30 a.m. to
do it. There's the scene with this city person sheepishly wearing clothes
countrywoman can't
that are too short and look funny on him, so that the
restrain herself from giggling. There's the barn-raising (out of Seven
Brides for Seven Brothers) and all the hearty fellowship that goes with
it. There's the natural woman who stands bare-breasted and proud; in

earlier American movies, the film frame used to cut her off at the bare

320
shoulders, but you got the idea. Witness also takes first prize in the
saying-grace department: a whole community of people bow their heads
over their vittles. It's like watching the Rockettes kick. We can't have
prayers in the public schools, but movies are making up for it.

Weir, an Australian filming in this country for the first time (Wit-
ness was shot in Pennsylvania), has succumbed to blandness. Book's
stay at the farm is like a vacation from the real world; the rural images
have a seductive lyricism that's linked to the little boy's dark, serious
eyes. He's a —
subdued child boyish only in his quiet curiosity and low-
key playfulness. —
Lukas Haas is a good little actor his shyness is lovely
— but the moviemakers' conception of the boy is so idealized it's as if
they'd never been driven nuts by the antics of a real, live child. This kid
never develops beyond our first view of him. He doesn't argue with his
mother, he doesn't complain, he doesn't make any noise. He's a miracle
—
of politeness and obedience a walking ad for fundamentalist or-
thodoxy. But Lukas Haas at least stays in his perfect character. As his
mother, Kelly McGillis is like a model in a TV commercial that re-
produces a seventeenth-century painting of a woman with a pitcher of
water or milk. She shifts uneasily between the heroic naturalness of Liv
Ullmann and the dimpled simpering of the young Esther Williams. She's
so dimply sweet that when she's happy she's like a wholesome, strapping
version of a Disney Mouseketeer.
The moviemakers try by introducing the sugges-
to balance things
tion that the sect is warned that her interest in
narrow-minded; Rachel is

John Book is causing talk among the Amish and could result in her being
"shunned." But the whole meaning of the movie is that her life and her
child's life are far better than anything the two could experience in the

outside world. And, of course, John Book comes to love Rachel and her
bonnet too much to want to expose her to the ugliness outside. (The
spoiled city woman is represented here by Patti LuPone, who plays
Book's divorcee sister —a tense urban type to the ultimate degree.) It's

suggested that the women in the community don't take part in the

decision-making, but never that there's anything basically repressive or

stultifying about living in this authoritarian society without music* or
dance, without phones or electricity, without the possibility of making
friends in the outside world. The picture isn't interested in what life in
such a closed-in community might actually be like for a woman or a child.
The farm country is used as a fantasyland for the audience to visit; it has
its allure, but you're ready to leave when Book goes —
you wouldn't want
*
When I wrote this, I forgot that the sect permitted some vocal music —the men sing after
the barn-raising.

321
 I

to live there and get up at 4:30 a.m. and work like a plow horse. Witness
uses the Amish simply as a way to refurbish an old plot. And as soon as
you see Rachel's galumphing Amish suitor (Alexander Godunov), with his
dear, mischievous grin, you know that the film is going to avoid any real
and the risk of giving offense. The suitor is there so
collision of cultures,
that John Book can make the right, noble decision. He makes the decision
for both himself and Rachel. The implication is that, coming from the
world of violence and being a man who uses a gun i.e., a sinner he — —
knows that there's no possibility of true happiness out there.
The picture is like something dug up from the earliest days of
movies: it starts off, during the titles, with the wind blowing through the
wheat, and the actors often looked posed. Weir seems less interested in
the story than in giving the images a spiritual glow. (It's easy to imagine
this picture being a favorite at the White House.) It must be said that
Harrison Ford gives a workmanlike performance, tempered with
fine,

humor. The role doesn't allow him any chances for the kind of eerie
intensity he showed in his small part as a burned-out Vietnam veteran
in the 1977 Heroes, and he doesn't have the aura that he has as Han Solo

and as Indiana Jones, but he burrows into the role and gives it as much
honesty as it can hold. He's not an actor with a lot of depth, but he has

—
an unusual rapport with the audience he brings us right inside John
Book's thoughts and emotions. Granting him all that, I must also admit
that the only time I really warmed to him here was when he suddenly
broke out of character and, his face lighting up demoniacally, parodied
a TV commercial as he cried out, "Honey, that's great coffee!" (It's a
free-floating joke, like Jack Nicholson's "Here's Johnny" in The Shin-
ing. ) It's a measure of how sedate the movie is that you feel a twinge
(as if you were being naughty) when you laugh.
But my instincts tell me that this idyllic sedateness could be the
romanticism and its obviousness. Witness
film's ticket to success. In its
has got just about everything to be a Lost Horizon for the mid-eighties.
There's the charming, obedient child, and there's the widow whose eyes
flash as she challenges John Book to look at her nakedness. (And —
swear I didn't —
make this up a storm is raging on the night she flashes
him. It's the same storm that used to rage for Garbo when her passions
rose.) There's the implicit argument that a religious community pro-
duces a higher order of human being than a secular society. There's
—
something for just about everyone in this movie even the holistic-medi-
cine people. John Book's bullet wound is healed by folk remedies: Rachel
gives him herbal teas and applies poultices to the affected area. (I'm
disposed to have some trust in the eflficacy of these methods, but I still

322
wish that just once somebody movie who was treated with humble
in a

ancient remedies would kick Scenes like the one in which some
off.)

showoff kids try to provoke the Amish to fight can be discussed by

editorial writers and in schools. All those dug-up scenes are probably
just what is going to sell the movie. There's a little paradox here: Wit-
ness exalts people who aren't allowed to see movies — it says that they're
morally superior to moviegoers. It's so virtuous it's condemning itself.

1< flood Simple has no sense of what we normally think of as

"reality," and it has no connections with "experience." It's not a great
exercise in style, either. It derives from pop sources — from movies such
as Diabolique and grubby B pictures and hardboiled steamy fiction such
as that of James M. Cain. It's so derivative that it isn't a thriller — it's

a crude, ghoulish comedy on thriller themes. The director, Joel Coen,

who wrote the screenplay with his brother Ethan, who was the producer,
is inventive and comes to highly composed camera
amusing when it

setups or burying someone But he doesn't seem to know what to

alive.

do with the actors; they give their words too much deliberation and
weight, and they always look primed for the camera. So they come
across as amateurs.
The movie is set in a familiar, cartoon version of Texas, where Julian
Marty (Dan Hedaya), a swarthy middle-aged Easterner with a wrestler's
crouch, owns a roadhouse, the Neon Boot, and thinks he owns his young
wife, Abby (Frances McDormand). When she leaves him and goes off
—
with one of the bartenders tall, well-built Ray (John Getz) Marty —
hires Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), a sweaty, good-ol'-boy private detective,
to follow the pair, and after Visser, grinning with malign satisfaction,
shows him pictures of the two cuckolding him in a series of positions (it's
like a porny slide show) he makes a deal with Visser to kill them. The
plot is about how the detective takes Marty's money and double-crosses
him. The one real novelty in the conception is that the audience has a
God's-eye view of who is doing what to whom, while the characters have
a blinkered view and, misinterpreting what they see, sometimes take
totally inexpedient action. Blood Simple gets almost all its limited
charge from sticking to this device, which gives the movie the pattern
of farce — it works best when someone misinterprets who the enemy is

323
but has the right response anyway. (It's likea bedroom farce, except
that the people sneaking into each other's homes have vicious rather
than amorous intentions.)
Early in the movie, Marty and his only friend, a German shepherd
named Opal, who's like his shadow, sneak into Ray's apartment, and
Marty makes a grab for Abby. She breaks free by kicking him hard in
the groin, and we know at once that Blood Simple is an art movie,
— —
because Marty moves front to the camera to throw up. It's a splatter-
movie art movie. Marty throws up again and again, and he's a mighty
good bleeder, too. One liquid or another is always splashing out of him.
And there are film noir in-jokes: there's a whirring, growling ceiling fan
in just about every room in the movie. At one point, Coen cuts from
Marty, in his office at the roadhouse, looking up at his fan to Abby, at

Ray's place, looking up at his fan. The cut should come across as funnier
—
than it does these moviemakers don't always have their comedy timing
worked out. And often you can't tell if something is a gag or just a goof.
When Abby, practically overnight, turns out to be living in a magnificent
loft with huge arched windows, you may do a double take she didn't —
seem to be that chic a girl. Is it a gag when bullets are fired into a wall
of her loft and the holes might have been made by cannonballs? I don't
know, and it doesn't seem to matter. Blood Simple isn't much of a
movie; it's thin —a rain-on-the-windshield picture that doesn't develop
enough suspense until about the last ten minutes, when the action is so
grisly that it has a kick.
At moments, the awkwardness of the line readings is reminiscent
of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, but Blood Simple
doesn't have the genuine creepiness of the Romero film. And though the
dialogue is much sharper and smarter than Romero's dialogue, the ac-
tors talk so slowly it's as if the script were written in cement on Holly-

—
wood Boulevard. The picture is overcalculated pulpy yet art-conscious.
Ithas the look of film noir, but it lacks the hypnotic feel, the heat and
the dreaminess of effective noir. Even when the material leads us to
anticipate something nasty, it often doesn't pay off. When Ray goes to
see Marty and tries to collect the two weeks' pay that's due him, they
talk together while we look out the window that's between them: there's
a huge, blazing incinerator behind the Neon Boot, and a couple of people
are tossing large objects into it. In a movie as uninhabited as this one,
if a gigantic prop like the incinerator isn't
going to be used for body
disposal, surely whatever
used for has to be comic? Coen sets up
it is

an inferno and then, except for a bloody jacket being thrown into it,
nothing comes of it, one way or the other. Nothing comes of Opal, the

324
 —

German shepherd, either; she disappears, and nobody seems to notice

not even Marty. (This happened in Rocky and Silkwood, too. Sometimes
I get the feeling that The New Yorker's Current Cinema is turning into

The Lost Dogs Department.)

Joel Coen may flub the point of some of the scenes, and toss in inane
closeups of a bludgeoning weapon to show us that it's a piggy bank, but
he knows how to place the characters and the props in the film frame in
a way that makes the audience feel knowing and in on the joke. The film's
technique is spelled out for the audience to recognize. Coen's style is

deadpan and klutzy, and he uses the klutziness as his trump card. It's
how he gets his laughs. The audience responds (as it did at Halloween)
to the crudeness of the hyperbole, and enjoys not having to take things
seriously. The cinematographer, Barry Sonnenfeld, works in ghouls'
—
colors thick, dirty greens, magentas, and sulfurous yellows. The film
looks grimy and lurid; it seems to take its visual cues from the neon signs
in the bar and a string of fish putrefying in Marty's office. What's at

work here is a visually sophisticated form of gross-out humor.

Dan Hedaya's performance as Marty the gusher is almost wrecked
by too much lip curling between words, but Hedaya develops a funny
— —
presence he's like a primate version of Michel Piccoli and his acting
seems to get better when Marty is twitchy and writhing and only semi-
conscious. As Visser, the cackling obscenity, M. Emmet Walsh is the
only colorful performer. He lays on the loathsomeness, but he gives it
—
a little twirl a sportiness. The Coens wrote the role with him in mind
(they didn't have anything in mind when they wrote Abby and Ray), and
when Walsh is onscreen in his straw cattleman's hat and his bulging
yellow suit the muggy atmosphere is like congealed sweat. Visser drives
a VW —
bug; he is a bug, a rotting one he draws flies. Most of what's
—
framed by the camera is of no interest it's barely animate, except for
Walsh. His broad buffoonery helps to ground the picture, to keep it
jaundiced and low-down. (At one point, when Abby and Ray are in bed
together and Visser takes a flashbulb snap of them, the director appar-
ently can't resist having the screen turn white, as if they'd been nuked.
The effect nukes the tawdry genre Coen is working in.)
Film students looking at old movies seem to find it exciting when a
cheap B thriller or an exploitation picture has art qualities, and they
often make draggy, empty short films that aren't interested in anything
but imitating those pictures and their "great shots." (The student direc-
tors of those shorts never know what to do with the actors —there's
nothing for them to express.) Blood Simple is that kind of student film
on a larger scale. It isn't really about anything except making a commer-

325
cial narrative movie outside the industry. The Coens, who live in New

York (Joel graduated from N.Y.U. film school), raised their million-and-a-
half budget from private investors, most of them in Minneapolis, where
the boys grew up. In interviews, the brothers (Joel was twenty-nine
when he made the film and Ethan only twenty-six) are quick and bright;
they sound as if they'd popped out of a Tom Stoppard play. But I don't
quite understand the press's enthusiasm for these two young, well-
educated Americans, the sons of college-professor parents, who want to
make the most commercial kind of Hollywood movies but to do it more
economically and with more freedom outside the industry. What's the
glory of making films outside the industry if they're Hollywood films at
—
heart, or, worse than that Hollywood by-product? Joel and Ethan Coen
may be entrepreneurial heroes, but they're not moviemaker heroes.
—
Blood Simple has no openness it doesn't breathe.
The reviewers who hail the film as a great debut and rank the Coens
with Welles, Spielberg, Hitchcock, and Sergio Leone may be transported
by seeing so many tricks and flourishes from sources they're familiar
with. But the reason the camera whoop-de-do is so noticeable is that
there's nothing else going on. The movie doesn't even seem meant to
have any rhythmic flow; the Coens just want us to respond to a bunch
of "touches" on routine themes. (These art touches are their jokes.)
Blood Simple comes on as self-mocking, but it has no self to mock.
Nobody in the moviemaking team or in the audience is committed to
anything; nothing is being risked except the million and a half.
February 25, 1985

GOLDEN KIMONOS

friend of mine says that when you go to a Kon Ichikawa film

'you laugh at things, and you know that Ichikawa is sophisticated

326
 —

enough to make you laugh, but you don't know why you're laughing."
I agree. I've just seen Ichikawa's 1983 The Makioka Sisters, which
opened in New York for a week's run and will open nationally in April,

and although I can't quite account for my response, I think it's the most
—
pleasurable movie I've seen in several months probably since Stop
Making Sense, back in November. The last hour (the picture runs two
—
hours and twenty minutes) is particularly elating it gives you a vitaliz-
ing mix of emotions. work of a painter who has perfect
It's like the
control of what color he gives you. At almost seventy, Ichikawa his —
more than seventy movies include The Key (Odd Obsession), Fires on
the Plain, An Actor's Revenge, Tokyo Olympiad —
is a deadpan sophis-

ticate, with a film technique so masterly that he pulls you into the worlds
he creates. There doesn't seem to be a narrative in The Makioka Sisters,
yet you don't feel as if anything is missing. At first, you're like an
eavesdropper on a fascinating world that you're ignorant about. But
then you find that you're not just watching this film —you're coasting on
its rhythms, and gliding past the precipitous spots. Ichikawa celebrates
the delicate beauty of the Makioka sisters, and at the same time makes
you feel that there's something amusingly perverse in their poise and
their politesse. And he plays near-subliminal tricks. You catch things out
of the corner of your eye and you're not quite sure how to take them.
The Junichiro Tanizaki novel on which the film is based was written
during the Second World War and published in 1948, under the title A
Light Snowfall (and it has been filmed twice before under this title

in 1950, by Yutaka Abe, and in 1959, by Koji Shima), but it has become
known here as The Makioka Sisters. The women are the four heiresses
of an aristocratic Osaka family. Their mother died long ago, and their
father, who was one of the big three of Japan's shipbuilders, followed.
Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi), the eldest of the sisters, lives in the family's
large, ancestral home in Osaka and controls the shrinking fortunes of
the two unmarried younger girls. The film is set in 1938, and the tradi-
tions in which these women were raised are slipping away, along with
their money. Tsuruko and the next oldest, Sachiko (Yoshiko Sakuma),
have married men who took the Makioka name, but its prestige has been
tarnished by the behavior of the youngest of the sisters, Taeko (Yuko
Kotegawa), who caused a scandal five years earlier, when she ran off
with a jeweller's son and tried to get married, though the Makioka
family's strict code of behavior required that Yukiko (Sayuri Yo-
shinaga), the next to youngest, had to be married first. The scandal was
augmented, because the newspaper got things wrong wrote that —
Yukiko had eloped, and then, when Tsuruko's husband complained about

327
Leaud and Marina Vlady and many others because he was; the camera
seemed to look right into their essence. In First Name: Carmen, the
camera looks at the performers with the eyes of an apathetic stranger.
Godard uses a number of alienation devices. The crime scenes aren't
led up to: we're suddenly thrust into the scramble of the bank heist,
which is staged like a brawl in a Western; it's a theatre-of-the-absurd
heist that negates any element of suspense or excitement. Or Godard
will give who are at a distance, and they'll be
us voice-overs of people
delivering tangential remarks that relate to the director's past concerns
— remarks that are like family jokes. Or he'll interrupt the dialogue
track and leave us watching Carmen and Joseph moving their lips while
we hear the sound of the sea. Right after the bank holdup, he sends
Carmen and Joseph (tied together at the wrist) to a men's washroom and
keeps the image of Carmen sitting on the urinal totally sanitized, except
that a slob of a man is standing at the washbasins eating something like
jelly out of a container with his fingers —slurping it greedily, disgust-
But we don't need to be alienated from this movie Godard
ingly. — (as he
works now) can't help alienating us. We need to be drawn in.
His dissociation techniques heremay be similar to the ones in his
earlier movies, but they're not used to wake you up. They're his way of
brushing the narrative aside. (It's no more than a few familiar signposts
of the femme-fatale genre anyway.) From the way this movie is put
together, we can guess that though Godard is resigned to having to tell

some sort of story, he feels it's an imposition on him —an irritation, or

worse. And he displaces the sensuality that people expect from a Carmen
movie onto images that have no specific relation to her story. Part of the
picture is set in the seaside town of Trouville, where Carmen and Joseph
use Uncle Jean's empty apartment (in a lackadaisical reminder of Last
Tango in Paris), and, throughout the film, shots of the waves breaking
against the rocks are intercut with Carmen and Joseph's travails; there
are also intercut images of the Paris traffic at dusk and of two Metro

trains crossing over a canal at night, and frequent views of the string
quartet that is practicing and (sometimes) performing the Beethoven we
hear on the soundtrack. (Actually, we're hearing recordings by several
—
different groups, and a ringer the actress Myriem Roussel, who has a
—
small part is put among the musicians to give the music a whimsical
tie to the story.) The movement of the sea and the flow of traffic have

a sense of mystery, and the musicians are photographed glowingly,

serenely. These cutaways are where the feelings are, and the scenes that
we might expect to be voluptuous and hot are perfunctory, and some-
times depressive, sometimes coy. Initially, at least, a viewer may be

228
charmed by the mournful, unkempt Uncle Jean (who fumbles with his
slide rule the way Godard in public appearances sometimes fools around
with his pocket calculator), but we never get to know Carmen or Joseph,
and their nudity has an impersonal chill, a vapid "frankness." When
Carmen stands, wearing only a red T-shirt, next to the seated Joseph,
his eyes are on a direct level with her pubic area —
and so are the eyes
of the audience. Godard may be playing a few games here, but the point
of the scene is that Carmen is so contemptuously indifferent to Joseph
that she doesn't care if she tortures him or not. This is what makes the
poor lug impotent: he's alone with a half-naked girl who treats him as
if he were part of the furniture. And the director treats both of them as
part of the furniture. Godard might almost be taking a weird sort of
revenge on the supple, pretty girl with a puffy lower lip and free, tangled
hair. He might be saying, "I'm not entranced by you. You don't drive me
crazy."
—
The women in his sixties movies did drive him crazy that's part of
what gives those movies their lyrical zing. The 1965 Pierrot le Fou —
—
which was his real Carmen had such a poisonous masochistic charge
that the hero wrapped dynamite around his head and blew himself sky
high. And that, metaphorically, must be what Godard felt his relation-
ship to moviemaking was. From the way this new film is made, it appears
that Godard feels hurt on some deep level and he thinks the movies did
it to him —and he's not going to let himself get hurt again. He won't
throw himself into this project. He gives the story a fiat, dry treatment
and entertains himself with Beethoven and the rolling surf and with a
—
limited palette soft, somber tones and subdued golden ones that sug- —
gests the classics (but not of movies).
The surf has too close a relationship to the ineluctable-fate aphor-
isms: it's used meaningfully (the pull of the sea, the power of woman),

—
and so there's a redundancy here, and if I may be forgiven an old- —
wave banality. (After dunking us in the wet over and over, the film
actually has Joseph explain his passion for Carmen to the girl who's
playing viola in the string quartet by telling her that he is driven toward
Carmen by a force "like the tide.") In this context, even simple shots of
ships passing each other are banalized. Some of the images, though, are
redemptively beautiful: the nocturnal views of cars gliding out of Paris,
the moving white line of the surf at night —
an abstraction with no senti-
ments attached. And Godard keeps all his sets of images in motion: he's
the rare case of an artist whose command of his medium becomes more
assured as his interests dry up. Working with Raoul Coutard as cinema-
tographer, he gives you the feeling that he can do almost anything and

229
scale —you don't want to leave The richit, either. colors, the darkness,
the low-key lighting—they're intoxicating. When Tsuruko decides to
make the move, and her husband falls to his knees to thank her, it has
the emotional effect of a great love scene. But the film's finest moment
comes at the very end. It's a variation of Joel McCrea's death scene in

Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, when the old marshal falls out of
the film frame. Yukiko is going off to be married; she boards the train
in soft vanishing snow, and we meant far more to
realize that she
Sachiko's husband than a casual flirtation. We see him alone, getting
—
drunk, and he looks terrible he's all broken up. Then images of the four
sisters among the cherry blossoms are held on the screen in slow motion
that's like a succession of stills. At last there's only Yukiko's head in the

center of the screen, and the head of her disconsolate brother-in-law

passes across the screen behind her and out of her life.

The horrible thing about Peckinpah's recent death was that he was
the most unfulfilled of great directors. Like Peckinpah, Ichikawa has had
more than his share of trouble with production executives, but he has
weathered it, and there's a triumphant simplicity about his work here.
This venerable director is doing what so many younger directors have
claimed to be doing: he's making visual music. The themes are worked
out in shades of pearl and ivory for the interiors and bursts of color
outside —
cherry and maple and red-veined burgundy. He's making a
movie that we understand musically, and he's doing it without turning
the actors into zombies, and without losing his sense of how corruption
and beauty and humor are all rolled up together.

Jliilan Bridges' film version of Rebecca West's first novel, The

Return of the Soldier, which she began writing in the winter of 1915-16
and published in 1918, when she was twenty-five, creates a special liter-
ary universe. It gives you the feeling that you sometimes get when you
read an "advanced" novel of the twenties, with a "daring," "modern"
way of looking at things, and are touched and charmed by its stream-
lined Victorianism. Set in 1916, the movie is like a piece of intellectual
history. It re-creates an era when Freudianism was new, and when an
author might apply it to characters' lives in a spirit of heroic revelation.

The conflict is: Should the shell-shocked, amnesiac Captain Chris Baldry
(Alan Bates), who has forgotten the last twenty years of his life, be

330
allowed to remain in his boyish state of happiness, or should he be forced
to confront the truth? (It's thesame theme that O'Neill wrestled with
in The Iceman Cometh: Are people strong enough to live with "the
truth"?) Chris was unconsciously discontented, the Freudian-minded
doctor from London suggests, and that is why he has blotted out all
knowledge of the years of his maturity and his marriage to the beautiful
Kitty (Julie Christie). He has regressed to the time of his greatest joy,
when he was young and in love with Margaret (Glenda Jackson), an
innkeeper's daughter.
Although it takes a few minutes to yield to this movie —to enter this
past and to enjoy the psychological and sexual dilemmas that Rebecca
West posed — ^Julie Christie brings you into it, by making you laugh.
Kitty sits in her elegantly decorated manor house, in its immaculate
grounds, and when the drab, middle-aged Margaret, in an ugly, practical
raincoat, comes to tell her that Chris is in a hospital, Kitty won't believe
her. She is so offended that this grubby creature could presume to bring
her news of her husband that she rings for a servant to throw the woman
out. Kitty's vanity and self-centeredness are outrageous and uncon-
cealed, and her snobbery is so mean-spirited that she's funny. And she's
so possessive that her husband's having forgotten her existence seems
like crazy justice. Julie Christie is wonderful to watch; she's a ravishing

camera subject who knows how to turn her beauty against herself. With
her body caressed by soft silks, she still manages to divorce Kitty's
beauty from sexuality. She makes you feel that Kitty is ornamental
through and through, that there's no passion in her, or generosity,
either. Kitty uses her beauty as a blindfold. She's petulant and ineduca-
ble, and so her inability to understand how Chris can prefer the dowdy

creature whom she finds physically nauseating is a source of comedy.

Kitty has lived up to her understanding of what a wife should be, and
she wants this messy inconvenience of her husband's amnesia cleared
away.
As the shabby, gentle Margaret, Glenda Jackson has a marvellous
leanness to her acting. She's completely in character, though it's the sort
of simple, good-woman role that, reading the book, one might think
—
unplayable and she might be the last actress to come to mind. When
she and Chris walk together, you can feel the bond between them, and
when she sits on the ground watching him stretched out next to her, you
feel she has given him the gift of untroubled sleep. Miscast, Jackson can
scratch on one's nerves; she can even seem to be scratching on her own
nerves. But she takes Rebecca West's literary conception of an instinc-
tual, loving woman and gets right down to the nub of the character, and

331
 —

she does it with an ease that's fairly astounding. (Her leanness is particu-
larly fine in her scenes withFrank Finlay, who plays Margaret's putter-
ing-in-the-garden husband.) Hugh Whitemore, who adapted the novel,
has written other roles Glenda Jackson has scored in (the play and film
Stevie, the six-part "Elizabeth R" on television); here, he takes much of
the dialogue from the novel, and the novelist's dialogue is essential,
because of the film's literary ambience. The novel has a narrator
Chris's cousin and childhood playmate Jenny. Whitemore uses Jenny
(Ann-Margret) merely as the mediator between Kitty and Margaret. It's
—
a colorless, thankless role the unselfish Jenny adores Chris, but knows
that the contest is between the two other women. At one point, Kitty,
moving across a room, kicks a little dog out of her way; a moment later,
Jenny leans over and pets it. That's her function all the way through
she soothes ruffled feelings. What Ann-Margret is doing here as an
English spinster is a little puzzling (it has to do with the mysteries of
getting a film financed), but her bone structure has an aristocratic qual-
ity and she acquits herself with likable dignity.
Alan Bates has a gift for letting us see that the character he plays
is being acted upon. As Chris, he has to carry the burden of being loved

by Kitty and Jenny, and he carries it rather heavily which makes it —

work. When Chris comes home from the hospital, he tells Kitty and
Jenny, "If I do not see Margaret Allington, I shall die." That's a period-
novel line, and Bates wouldn't get away with statements like this if it
weren't for the weight he gives them and a piteousness that you don't
laugh off. Amnesiac war heroes have been a subject for parody for
several decades (the 1942 Random Harvest was the last straw), but
Bates has an aura of middle-aged bewilderment that saves him. He's not
playing simply a shell-shocked man of the First World War era he's —
giving an authentic performance as a shell-shocked romantic hero of
that era. And when Kitty, under duress, permits Chris to see Margaret
— certain that he'll be appalled at the sight of her frumpiness —Bates
brings off the scene in which Chris runs to Margaret and embraces her
and doesn't even notice that she looks sallow and ordinary; they walk
together with immediate intimacy and understanding.
In the novel, Jenny goes out in the woods to find Chris and Margaret
and sees them "englobed in peace as in a crystal sphere." That's how
they are in the movie, too. And the phrase might describe the whole
movie. Alan Bridges' storytelling methods aren't much more than a
thoughtful application of television technique, but the feeling of enclo-
sure in time and space is just what this story needs. As Rebecca West
—
conceived it and she was writing during the First World War it is —

332
partly about women's attitudes toward the fighting. The title refers not
just to Chris's return to the manor but to what Margaret and Jenny fear
—that if his memory is restored he will have to return to the trenches.
(This possibility doesn't faze Kitty in the slightest.)
The middle-aged Chris, who's in love in a young man's way, is, in
effect, experiencing a second childhood. As Bates plays him, he might
seem perfectly happy if it weren't for the blankness in his gray eyes. His
eyes tell us that he's lost —that he's not fully there. And Jenny and
Margaret recognize that he can't be fully a man without his memories
of pain. (In the novel, part of that pain was his slaving in business all
those —now forgotten—years to pay for Kitty's tastes, her redecoration
of the house, and the upkeep on the grounds; in the movie, he seems to
have done nothing, except go to board meetings and ride horses and play
—
golf perhaps so that the film can score a point against his class.)
The movie's simplified psychology is amusingly fragrant, and melo-
dramatic. Ian Holm is on hand, as the lively, gnomish London doctor who
parcels out the meaning and significance of Chris's shell shock. The film
(it was made in 1982, but is showing in New York for the first time) is

a "civilized entertainment" — a curiosity. It's neither great nor exciting,

and much of what makes it enjoyable is what we usually think of as

peripheral: the moderne decor in the manor house which the production
designer, Luciana Arrighi, has come up with; the jewels and clinging
silks that the costume designer, Shirley Russell, has put on Julie Chris-
tie; the toylike automobiles; Kitty having her thick dark-blond hair

brushed, or piling it up in wonderful loose, Pre-Raphaelite coils; even an

—
outre witch's hat that Ann-Margret wears it's black, with spidery red
embroidery running around the crown. And the contrast between the
details of Baldry Court and the little row house where Margaret lives is
like a visual essay on class determination of taste. But the acting saves
the conception from preciousness. (The acting is so good that Bridges
and Whitemore might have dispensed with the flashbacks to Chris and
Margaret's youthful ardor; seeing them together now tells us about
their past, and it's more stirring.) The movie isn't essentially different
from the Masterpiece Theatre adaptations of famous novels, but it
doesn't have all that drawn-out tiresomeness, and since it's based on a
little-known and minor novel, it has some freshness to it. And the novel's
dated modernity may give us pause. It has only been a few decades since
Freud and Victoria walked arm in arm: in this material, Chris's return
to reality doesn't mean learning what his repressed feelings are and
—
freeing himself from a dead marriage it means going back to being a
proper husband and a good soldier.

333
 I
he Mean Season
starts out huffing and puffing about oppor-
tunistic journalism. There are sizable indications that it's going to be
about the press's responsibility for building up people like Son of Sam,
for giving killers the notoriety that can impel them to commit a series
of atrocities. So when it turns out to be nothing more than an inept
thriller about a Miami reporter (Kurt Russell) who gets hot tips from a
serial murderer about where to look for fresh corpses, the audience can't
help laughing contemptuously. Besides, the picture has a bottomless
source of hilarity: the reporter's schoolteacher girlfriend, who screams
helplessly in emergencies, is played by the six-footer Mariel Heming-
way, who could just haul off and whack whoever was terrorizing her.
When she isn't screaming, she's lecturing the reporter, trying to get him
to quit in the middle of the case; when the murderer phones, she proceeds
to lecture him. No wonder he decides to go after her; the surprise is that
the reporter doesn't encourage him. This girl has a serious case of
preposterousness, plus she is a large pain.
The director, Phillip Borsos, and the cinematographer, Frank Tidy,
sustain a lively, stormy gothic atmosphere. And there's nothing the
matter with most of the cast that a good script wouldn't cure. The script
that Borsos is working with is based on John Katzenbach's In the Heat
of the Summer, and is Leon Piedmont, a pseudonym for a
credited to
couple of fellows (and some helpers on the set). Using a pseudonym may

be the smartest thing these writers did. At the beginning, when the
reporter's account of the murder of a teen-age girl comes out, the killer
calls and tells him that it's only the first —
that before he's done he's
going to kill three women and two men, and "You're going to be my
conduit to the public." The reaction of the reporter's Mephistopheles, his
editor (Richard Masur), is "This is the one you've been waiting for.
Fabulous." And a little "Our illustrious pub-
later he says insidiously,
lisher thinks you may be entering Pulitzer territory." That's the level of
the melodrama here. Those are high points, compared with what follows.
Audience morale sinks audibly when the reporter and the schoolteacher
start playing scare pranks on each other while the Lalo Schifrin score
works on us so our hearts will pound when the reporter approaches his
girl in her shower, or when she hides in the back seat of his car and puts

a hand the size of Bigfoot's print on his shoulder.

The only real point of interest in the movie is Richard Jordan, who
has often been the only real point of interest in his movies, but is more

334
spectacularly so this time, in the role of a sociopathic killer. Jordan has
put on some heft, and it takes him out of the romantic-juvenile class. The
fleshinessmakes his smoothly handsome baby face more imposing, and
with the pampered quality he has, and the big, deep voice, he has finally
become weird. Jordan has a Brando-like look about him now. And it's
entertaining to see an actor who likes hamming it up, who enjoys the
flash of playing an insanely clever villain. (Kurt Russell plays his role
professionally and acts in a believable manner, but it's a fake-serious
part that might have been helped by a little ham and histrionics.)
In movies of the early thirties, reporter heroes used to talk about
quitting and writing a novel. The audience understood why: they all
wanted to be Mariel's grandpa. Now, when the reporter hero talks of
being burned out and of wanting to quit and go to work on a small-town
paper in Colorado, he just seems to be mouthing the words of a phony
screenwriter who's trying to put over the notion that a small-town paper
means purity and moral regeneration. You can see the reason for it: if
the reporter said he was quitting to write a script or to go to work for
Time or People, there'd be whistles and catcalls. It's getting very hard
for an American hero to tell us how he's going to renew himself. Her-
oines have their troubles, too. Though it's great to have collarbones and
shoulders like Mariel's, it's not so great if you're in a role that obliges
you to shrink and cower. The screenwriters ought to be photographed
saying her lines and doing the screaming and trying to hide behind Kurt
Russell.
March 11, 1985

CHARMER

D
ful,
ia Farrow seems just naturally stylized. Weightlessly beauti-

and with a considerable acting technique that she draws upon with-

335
 —

out 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 and her husband is unemployed; he fritters away his days with
1935,
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 Ceciha 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 Leon'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 glori-
ous 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 epoque Paris in
a little blue sailor dress, my sweet face framed by a flat, disk-shaped hat

336
with two ribbons dangling mischievously past my bangs." Woody
Allen's parodies and fantasies are inseparable; their unstable union is his
comic subject.
In ThePurple 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. (If
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 enough to talk her out of it, and Sis is practical enough
practical
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 sur-
vive 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 Cairo and invited him in

for a "madcap" weekend Manhattan — can't go on with the story,

in in

which he is supposed to Haynes (Karen Akers), a slinky,

fall for Kitty
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
McDaniel 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

337
Charles Starrett and David Manners) takes off 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 Ed-
ward 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
Vallee, singing 'The Whiffenpoof Song."
Much of the comedy is in the shifts and transactions of the charac-
ters 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 Terms 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 naive 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 premiere
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

338
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 advises him as if she were the editor of
trivia,

Photoplay. And he up her adulation.

laps
The movie has been thought out with such graceful intelligence that
its seem minor. Cecilia's trip into the black-and-white world at the
flaws
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
dish ware in cheap and cheerful primary colors, of yellow oilcloth on
kitchen tables and red-and-white plaids and checkerboard patterns wher-
ever 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 CeciUa's husband, Danny
Aiello is too heavy and loutish. Probably he was selected for the incon-
gruity of this big vulgarian's being married to the slight, fine-drawn
Cecilia (and her supporting him), but we don't have a clue to why she
married him or why he married Woody Allen has too much taste to
her.
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 suitcase, 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

339
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 accounted
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 resil-
ience and individuality. (She's the only beauty to have survived Diane
Arbus's camera.) But though —he doesn't
Woody Allen isn't like Chaplin
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

terms 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.

i>he I English comedy A Private Function is like an Ealing

Studios comedy of the late-forties, early-fifties period as it might have

340
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 joint debut 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 in-

volves the efforts of the local pillars of society —the proudly royalist
doctor (Denholm Elliott), the solicitor (John Normington), and the pudgy
accountant (Richard Griffiths) — to hold a subscription banquet celebrat-
ing 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, —
"unlicensed" pig. The three, however, have tried to drive out a lowly
newcomer mild-mannered chiropodist named Chilvers
to the town, a
(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 hus-
band'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 who bosses and bullies her husband is an
of steel
Lady Macbeth. Mrs. Chilvers gives piano lessons, and
inspired parody of
spends much of her time trying to keep her dotty old mother (Liz Smith)

341
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 need for the kidnapping, he says, in satisfaction,

will

"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 and the pig,
kill it, who chugging train and
snuffles like a
has an upset stomach in addition to normal piggy incontinence, uses the
Chilvers living quarters as a pen. Maggie Smith proves herself a sover-
eign 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
accountant, whose resemblance to the pig makes him seem rather en-
dearing —he's as dismayed as the tenderhearted Chilvers at the prospect
of the animal's being butchered. (Chilvers offers the suggestion that the
power-elite 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

342
 —

CODDLED

is David, the L.A. advertising whiz who's the protagonist of

Lost in America, Albert Brooks is only a slightly exaggerated specimen
of a large number of young businessmen and professional men
rising
the insecure successes, the swollen-headed worriers. He's the baby that
we see inside those prosperous professionals. David has a bland moon-
face surrounded by an aureole of tight, dark curls; it's as if he wore his
brains on the outside. He looks soft; he isn't fat, though —he's just too
well fed. If he were a contented man —say, a musician in a symphony
orchestra who picked up extra income from the recording companies
he might be a likable dumpling. But David is an obsessive careerist who
agonizes over every detail of his life. On the night before he expects to
be made vice-president of the ad agency, he lies awake wondering
whether he and his wife, Linda (Julie Hagerty), the personnel director
of a department store, have done the right thing in putting down a
deposit on a four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar house. He still har-
bors the dream of dropping out— of taking to the road, like the heroes
of Easy Rider. He's torturing himself with anxieties, and he keeps
waking the exhausted Linda to tell her his misgivings and be comforted
by her reassurances.
David has got himself so keyed up for the vice-presidency and has
put so much energy into worrying about whether he's picking the right
house, the right Mercedes, and the right boat to go with the job that
when he is finally in the boss's office and is offered a different kind of
promotion (a big new account that involves a transfer to New York) he
doesn't have the flexibility to deal with it. He becomes unhinged; he's like
an outraged infant. He howls, he rants. If he can't have the title he
wants, he doesn't want anything. His explosion comes in waves: he
quiets down for a second or two, and then his nasal whine starts up
again. By the time the scene is over, he has insulted the boss and been
fired from his hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job, and he's in a state of

343
shock that's also a state of exaltation, of triumph. He rushes over to his
demands that she quit, too, and wants to celebrate this
wife's store,
moment of liberation by having sex right this minute on her desk in her
glass-enclosed office.

Lost in America is a satirical comedy about upper-middle-class

infantilism and obnoxiousness — everything that Albert Brooks' David
incarnates. Brooks, who directed the film and co-wrote the script (with
Monica Johnson, who also worked on his two earlier pictures, the 1979
Real Life and the 1981 Modern Romance), has developed a cool, bal-
anced attitude toward himself as performer. The self-absorbed, ingrown
David is quite different from the characters that Albert Brooks has
played in other directors' movies. Brooks was Cybill Shepherd's officious
political co-worker in Taxi Driver; he was the unromantic bridegroom

who collapsed on his wedding night in Private Benjamin; he was the

—
driver in the prologue to Twilight Zone The Movie; and he was close
to inspired as the symphony conductor's manager in the 1984 Unfaith-
fully Yours. He's a remarkable comic actor —remarkable enough, per-
haps, to delude people into thinking he's just playing himself in Lost in
America. It's true that the camera often seems to be staring at David,
revealing his innermost weakness. (He's always sorry for himself.) And
Albert Brooks may have conceived this character because he saw the
possibilities for this kind of maddening twerp in himself, but David is a
fully created obsessive fool. He's a highly verbal jerk who half knows
he's behaving like a jerk but can't stop himself —he's a self-conscious,
pesky toddler at loose in the world. But though he's tiresome to every-
body in the movie he isn't tiresome to us. David's lines have been sharp-
ened to a fatuous —he keeps us laughing at him. And Lost in
fine edge
America doesn't dawdle; pleasantly snappy—
it's makes comic it its

points and moves on.

Julie Hagerty is an ideal choice for David's mate: you listen to
Hagerty's Linda and you know why she puts up with him. Her little-girl
breathiness tells you. And the dim stress and panic of her gaze suggest
that somewhere in her past she has been frightened and David is the
Teddy bear she clutches. (These two are endlessly apologizing to each
other; they do it so automatically they might be apologizing in their
sleep.) Linda is bleakly pretty; she's gaunt and hollow-eyed and wispy
—she seems to be disappearing. David's aggressiveness and his near-
loony dependence on her don't faze her. Life fazes her. She's bored to
depression by being cooped up in her office in the department store; she's
depressed by her whole conformist existence. But she's too timid and
worn down to come right out and express her resentment. Curly-headed

344
David, who's crazy about her —kissing her and complimenting her ritu-

ally (if nothing else occupies his mind) —never guesses at her feelings.
When these two sell off their property, buy a luxury motor home, and,
with the security of a nest egg of roughly a hundred and forty-five
thousand, set out to find themselves and get in touch with the real
America, the picture has the promising overtones of a Preston Sturges
comedy.
The movie makes a honey of a transition —a cut from the farewell
party that David and Linda's friends give them to a shot of David looking
minuscule behind the wheel of the disproportionately large motor home
as they leave L.A. The best visual joke in the picture is simply the
recurring image of these two people who think themselves dropouts and
Easy Riders as they move across the country encased in their thirty-foot
Winnebago. Along the way. Brooks has a couple of sustained showpiece
scenes where he plays off someone who can't quite believe that this guy
is actually saying what he's saying. After the meek Linda blows their

nest egg at the Desert Inn Casino, in Las Vegas, David goes to see the
pit boss (well played by Garry Marshall, the director of The Flamingo
—
Kid) and, using his advertising-man skills and here he's flexible tries —
to persuade this smart, tough fellow to give back the money. The most
ingenious of David's gambits is that returning Linda's losses can be
good for business —that the casino can thus be publicized as a casino
with heart, one that periodically plays Santa Claus to losers. Spritzing
one proposal after another, as if he'd been hired to prepare a campaign,
David beams at the pit boss, he cajoles him; he doesn't grovel, but you
know he would if he thought it would have any effect. And his adversary
is amused by the thought processes. (In a Preston
agility of David's
Sturges comedy, the pit boss might have gone loco and actually adopted
the Christmas-casino idea.) David also has an interview scene with an
employment agent (Art Frankel) in a desolate small town in Arizona;
when David tells the agent how much he was earning, the old guy is

infatuated with the numbers and can't resist tweaking him by repeating
the amount over and over.
David and Linda's experiences in the real America turn out to be a
two-week vacation, and the movie has a nice, quick wrapup. In terms of
David's character, the end says all that needs to be said. And probably
there's no way for Brooks to develop the plot any further, because he
sees David as hopeless —as upper-middle-class in every soft fibre of his
anxious, coddled being. But the movie needs another turnaround, be-
cause although the ending is right for David, it isn't right for Linda.

Once she's away from her hated job, she becomes prettier and more

345
bouncy. She is perhaps even too adorable at times, but not glaringly.
(Julie Hagerty may look like the old-fashioned girl that suitors would
bring nosegays to, but she's a gifted, sexy comedienne.) Linda's losing
the money seems to free the movie, to open it, and she herself relaxes
a bit. David becomes more compulsive than ever. His worst terror has
been realized, and his mind never shuts down. He tries to hold his anger
in, but when he's looking out over Hoover Dam he can't help yelling

about the money, and once again the joke is in the disproportion between
him and the physical setting. David keeps going over what has hap-
pened. He picks at it; he bleeds. But Linda, having done the unthinkable,
is able for the first time to laugh at him. And there's the suggestion that
her blowing the money wasn't a totally subconscious protest: in her tiny,
touching voice, she maneuvered David away from his plan that they go
to the Silver Bell Chapel to renew their marriage vows, and got him to
take her to the Desert Inn. Afterward, her only explanation to David is

"I held things in for so long I felt like I was going to burst." By talking
her into quitting her job, David has unloosed something in her that
Brooks and his co-writer don't quite know what to do with.
The movie is so good that it needs to flower; it's like a Sturges idea
that runs dry. But it's still a nifty, original comedy. The performances
in the along-the-road vignettes are like a series of small presents to the
audience. If the movie seems slight, that may be because we're essen-
tially following just the one story —
David's. It would be great if Albert
Brooks could get to the point of showing the interaction of a group of
—
these contemporary monomaniacs which is essentially what Sturges
did (though Sturges didn't rip the characters from inside himself).
Brooks is on to something: satirizing the upper middle class from within,
he shows the nagging terror along with the complacency. If he could pit

a David against a few other people as driven and talkative as he is — if

a David had to fight for screen time and space with people every bit as
competitive —there's no telling what comedy heights Brooks could scale.

JlSilost of The Breakfast Club takes place in the library of a

suburban Chicago high school where, for various infractions of the
rules, five students are serving a 7 A.M.-4 p.m. Saturday detention. Each
of the five is a different type, and together they form a cross-section of

346
the student body. They are a champion wrestler (Emilio Estevez), a
popular redhead "princess" (Molly Ringwald), a grind (Anthony Michael
Hall), a glowering rebel-delinquent (Judd Nelson), who wears an earring,
and a shy, skittish weirdo (Ally Sheedy). They walk in not liking each
other and with their defenses in place. But they're like the homosexuals
who gathered at the party in The Boys in the Band and played the
"truth game." In the course of the day, under the prodding of the rebel
and the mellowing effect of the marijuana he provides, they peel off
layers of self-protection, confess their problems with their parents, and,
after much shedding of tears, are stripped down to their true selves.
When the doors are opened, they walk out transformed. They know who
they are; they know who the others are. The Breakfast Club is A Cho-

rus Line without the dancing. It's The Exterminating Angel as a

sitcom. This is a very wet movie (and a very white movie), but it is a
and has been widely praised for its seriousness. "It's the
box-office hit,
kind of mature teenage film I enjoy seeing" is one of the quotes used in
the advertising.
The writer-director John Hughes, who made his directing debut just
last year, with the uneven but light and peppy Sixteen Candles, has
gone the group-therapy route this time and has also fallen back on the
standard device for appealing to teen audiences, the device of Rebel
Without a Cause and Splendor in the Grass: blaming adults for the
kids' misery. Each kid in turn tells the group of the horrors of home: the
wrestler's father pushes him to compete, the princess is given things but
not affection, the brainy grind is pressured to be a straight-A student,
the (secretly sensitive) rebel is beaten and burned by his brute of a
father, the — —
shy girl the basket case has parents who ignore her. It's
she who puts her finger on the source of all their troubles. "It's unavoid-
able," she says. "When you grow up, your heart dies." During the
confessions, faraway synthesizer-organ sounds come toward you. And,
as if the truths being uncovered in the library weren't enough, in the

basement the janitor (John Kapelos) is doing a truth-telling number on

the dean (Paul Gleason) who is proctoring the detention. The dean's
heart is dead, all right —he hates the students. He's a bureaucrat who's
in the school system strictly for the money. He tells the rebel that he's
not going to let anyone endanger his thirty-one thousand a year.
Young audiences have always been suckers for this kind of flattery.
They love hearing kids swap stories about how rotten their parents are,
and no doubt they like to see all this viciousness loaded on the school
official. The budding neuroses that made these kids antagonistic to one

another are cured by their coming to see their parents and teachers as

347
 —

the common enemy. Watching as each kid bared his psyche,I had the

hopeful thought that maybe this script was something John Hughes had
written several years earlier (long before Sixteen Candles). I would like

to believe that, because he has another picture coming out in a few

months. He does have talent, but in The Breakfast Club it's tucked in

around the edges of his schematic plot.

Hughes' production unit is based in Chicago, and that seems to be

good for his ear. When the kids are just killing time and being funny
when they're not being challenged by the rebel's probing —the dialogue
has an easy, buggy rhythm. (There are stray bits of oddball parody when
you can't tell exactly what is being parodied.) But the scenes involving
the snotty, callous dean ring false right from the start, and though Paul
Gleason seems miscast, maybe anybody playing this villain would seem
miscast. Judd Nelson's role as the catalyst-rebel —the working-class kid
who's good with his hands (he loves shop), and is also a hipster, and
fearless — is a dud, too. And Nelson seem to have a speck of
doesn't
spontaneity. After his early scenes, he becomes too self-pitying, and he's
given to tilting up his head and pointing his nostrils at the camera.
The four other leading performers fare a lot better. As the straight-
arrow jock, Estevez (who was the kid in Repo Man) isn't particularly
— —
enjoyable he's a little heavy on sincerity but he does a creditably
simple job, especially in his long monologue about his father's always
telling him to ''win, win." Molly Ringwald's role isn't as fresh or festive
as her birthday-girl part in Sixteen Candles, but she slips into the
well-heeled Miss Popularity languor without any unnecessary fuss. And
Anthony Michael Hall, whose teeth are still in the braces he wore in the
gleeful role of Geek in Sixteen Candles, delivers a thoughtful, nuanced
performance. He's the pale, tall, thin boy who is an ace at book learning
— he excels in math and is active in the Physics Club but is a fright- —
ened, virtuous dork away from his books. The fine-featured Hall takes
this traditional namby-pamby good-boy role and fills it out with fresh
—
emotion. (He's prodigious he comes close to flooding a role the way
Debra Winger does.)
But the only performance that has a comic kick to it is Ally Sheedy's.
She's a flip-out, a girl who hides in her clothes and thinks she's being a
loner and a mysterious recluse. Bundled up in black shawls and layers
of cloth, she's like a junior Madwoman of Chaillot; with her forehead
hidden under her dark hair, and her chin held down, she's furtive yet
bold.Her minx's face is a tiny triangle in the darkness. When she moves,
she darts, and when you see her eyes they dart, too, and flash they're —
the eyes of someone who's secretly grinning. Crazy sounds come out of

348
her, —
and she does eccentric things like drawing a picture of a winter
scene and shaking her dandruff on it for snow. She's a marvellous comic
sprite, a bag-lady Puck. And then John Hughes makes his soggiest

mistake: the princess takes her in hand, scrubs all the black eye makeup
off her, gets her out of her witches' wrappings, and brushes her hair
back and puts a ribbon in it, and she comes forth looking broad-faced and
dull. But she's supposed to be beautiful, and she captures the jock's
heart.
The picture opens with an epigraph from David Bowie's "Changes":
"And these children that you spit on/as they try to change their world/
are immune to your consultations. /They're quite aware of what they're
going through." And the picture closes on the group leaving the school
with all their new understanding, and the now smiling rebel flinging his
fist straight up in the air, in a gesture of defiance, solidarity, triumph.

But all that this encounter-session movie actually does is strip a group
of high-school kids down to their most banal longings to be accepted and
liked. Its real emblem is that dreary, retro ribbon.

April 8, 1985

PASSION

ili (Nick Mancuso) and Blue (Peter Coyote), the two central
characters in Heartbreakers, are inseparable friends, and it's easy to
perceive their longtime affection for each other. It's in the half looks they
exchange; it's in the way they move down the street together, and in the
things they take for granted. The movie is about what's underneath their
buddy relationship: their competitiveness, their jealousy of each other,
their resentments — all the unresolved feelings that go into making them
rivals. Women are their battlefield. The darkly handsome Eli takes over
his father's business (a women' s-apparel factory), and he lives in a

349
swank little house, drives a neat car, and isn't short of funds, so maybe
there's a natural balance in the fact that the women he likes are at-
tracted to Blue, a driven, unsuccessful painter, always broke.
Bobby Roth wrote and directed this low-budget feature (his fourth),
and it was photographed on locations in his home town, Los Angeles, by
the Berlin-born cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, whose wide-ranging
credits include seventeen Fassbinder films. When Eli and Blue are hang-
ing out at places like Fatburger or the gym The Sports Connection, they
fit right Both in their mid-thirties, they're like hip American versions
in.

of the menin Bertrand Blier's Get Out Your Handkerchiefs; they're

attractive to women and they have no trouble making out, but women
mystify them. At the beginning of the movie. Blue realizes that Cyd
(Kathryn Harrold), who has been living with him for five years in a loft
—
with few of the amenities it doesn't even have a real bed is "slipping —
away" from him. She wants something more substantial than his idea
of an artist's life; she complains that when he's painting he forgets all
about her. Blue is sick at the thought of losing her, and he expresses his
anxieties to EH. But all he says to Cyd is "If you're not happy, leave,"
and despite her feelings for him she takes up with the attentive, depend-
able Chuck King (Max Gail), an abstractionist who sells and isn't as
passionately involved in hiswork as Blue. (The paintings in this movie
seem exactly right: King's patterned canvases look like Blue's descrip-
tion of them as wallpaper. If Blue were more generous, he might call
them agreeable, workmanlike wallpaper.) Cyd's leaving Blue precipi-
tates the events of the movie. Desperate to win her back, he tries to pull
his life together. He quits his crummy job at a printshop —he tells the
boss he can't stand printing porno stuff anymore. And then he talks a
gallery owner into giving him a show by capitalizing on his (somewhat
embarrassed) attraction to fetishes: he produces a series of high-camp
—
Pop paintings porny pinups that feature a dominatrix. Candy (the late
Carol Wayne), decked out in a wig, high heels, garter belts, merry
widows, and leather.
Meanwhile, Eli, who is shorter and more muscular than Blue, and
looks younger and healthier, loses his father, takes on heavier business
responsibilities, and, after years of doing well with women but feeling
empty because they don't mean more him than casual sex, spots the
to
girl he thinks is the girl. Liliane (played by Carole Laure, the willowy
French-Canadian actress who was the pivotal figure in the Blier film) is

an assistant at the gallery where Blue is to have his show, but her
principal occupation appears to be doing calisthenics, aerobics, and
dance movements. (The results seem worth every bit of the compulsive

350
effort.) When working out, she's wigghng Hke an exotic
Liliane isn't
temptress, with her long dark hair sheathing her snaky body. Carole
Laure suggests a haunted, feverish sensuality, and she gets by with all
of Liliane's sultry squirminess, even when the editing doesn't protect her
and she's seen rolling her eyes like a latter-day Tondelayo (the sexy
savage of White Cargo who drove men wild with lust). The key differ-
ence between Liliane and Tondelayo is that Liliane fancies herself a
feminist. Her idea of controlling her life is to have sex with Eli in his car
but refuse to go to bed with him; she's like a soulful dominatrix, and she
keeps him spinning.
Roth doesn't quite sustain the Eli-and-Blue parallel-lives construc-
tion; —
he seems more involved with Blue maybe because he dealt with
a character in Eli's situation in his film The Boss' Son. And there could
be another reason. In photographs. Roth looks like a cross between
Coyote's Blue and Mancuso's Eli, and in an interview with the Times he
said that the two characters "were actually two sides of myself the —
political artist side and the businessman-Jewish-son side —
and they were
based on composites of all my male friends." But he must have identified
much more strongly with the artist side; the film couldn't be so full of
tension and temperament if he hadn't. Roth has an intuitive feeling for
movement —movement that appears natural yet is heightened. The pic-
ture doesn't look as if it had been photographed in separate shots; the
movement seems fluid, continuous. There's always something going on
between Mancuso and Coyote; they're a good team, even though Man-
—
cuso on his own is a dark, polite blank Heathcliff out to lunch. He
suggests a generic businessman-son, with no specifics and little person-
ality —^just a faint disaffection. (Eli is smooth-faced and withdrawn even
in the hospital scene where his dying father —played by George Morfo-
gen, who's a fine physical matchup —expresses contempt for him.)
Sometimes the characters open their mouths and what comes out
isn't —
dialogue it doesn't deepen the scene or move it along. And some-
times the characters simply don't have enough to say, and the scenes feel
muffled or hollow, as if the director wasn't quite sure what he was
—
getting at as if he was hoping for a revelation. (Roth may need to work
with a writer.) Heartbreakers engages a viewer, but it doesn't hold
together in the memory, because it's all moods and moments, and much
—
of the emotion swirling about is inchoate for example, Liliane's weep-
ing after sex, and even in the wonderful scene where Eli asks Blue to
dance with Liliane so he can watch and torment himself. It's a mood-
poem movie. (At times, it's like a more realistic Alan Rudolph film; at
other times it's a little like one of Cassavetes' drunken-buddy pictures.)

351
And the mood is basically set by Peter Coyote. He's more open to the
camera than anyone else; his face and body say more. Mancuso's hand-
someness is like a mask, but Coyote, who often looks ravaged, meets the
other actors more than halfway. The women's attraction to him is con-
vincing; their subsequent anger, disappointment, and depression are
convincing, too.
Blue wants women around when he takes a break from his
to be
work; he doesn't want to be bothered when he's working. He expects the
women he likes to be far more independent than they are he is sur- —
prised to discover that he can't deal with them on his terms without
hurting them. (The saddest is Candy, the hooker-model with the whips,
who's a sweet, maternal pussycat.) The movie catches the confusion in
the relations of the sexes without sentimentalizing that confusion.
(Blue's name is the film's most sentimental touch, and it can be partly
explained by the fact that his paintings are actually the work of the artist
Robert Blue.) What binds the two guys is their bewilderment about
women. They seem to blame each other for a good measure of their
emotional frustration (and their rage erupts when they play racquet-
ball).

The women in this movie are all likable, yet they're screwed-up and,
from the men's point of view, utterly impossible. The women don't want
the guys to be overprotective or to treat them as helpless, yet they
expect to be taken care of. The men don't know which signals to follow,
and the women don't know which signals they're sending out, because
their feelings are contradictory. They want to be respected as modern,
independent women, and they want to be cuddled like little girls. Court-
ing Liliane, Eli keeps trying to tune in to whatever frequency she's
operating on, but he never finds it. Blue can't believe that Cyd, who

acknowledges that she loves him, will stay on with Chuck King. There's
nothing dirty or spiteful or anti-woman in Roth's approach; it simply
recognizes how insane all this is.

Heartbreakers deals with sex in a matter-of-fact way and in an

—
American idiom in our body language, with our shorthand, and in our
lofts and apartments. The characters are frazzled in ways we recognize.
Coyote's Blue looks like the kind of guy who has tended his boyishness
over the years; he has the not-quite-grownup American look an an- —
guished boyishness. And when his sold-out show and his unaccustomed
solvency don't bring Cyd back, his face takes on new expressions of
uncertainty and pain. Blue's capacity for unconcealed suffering is what
makes him Roth's hero. At the opening of the movie, when Blue is afraid
he's losing Cyd, he goes to Eli's place to talk to him, and Eli and his date

35a
(Jamie Rose), who are giddy and charged up and just about to have sex,
forget about and take him out to comfort him. He really cares about
it

Cyd, and that's more emotionally involving for them than the flirty
relationship they were engaged in.
It's Blue's depth of emotion —
what Eli calls his "passion" that Eli —
can never forgive him for. It's what, in the framework of this movie,
distinguishes the artist from the businessman. There's an undeniable
element of fanciness in the conception, and I wish the movie weren't
awed by Blue. Are his glossy pinups an expression of his passion? Or of
something lesser —a callow obsession, perhaps, or even a way of taking
revenge on Cyd? There's an element of revenge in Blue's becoming
—
successful he's showing her what she passed up. (Generally, the kind
of close relationship between men that Heartbreakers is about doesn't
last after one of them marries, and might suggest that Blue isn't
this

as serious about Cyd as he wants to believe he is.) Roth doesn't go deep

enough, but he succeeds in using the two men as a way into the Ameri-
can culture of sex, circa the mid-eighties, and he captures something of
West Coast bohemianism. He characterizes everyone; people who nod at
Eli or Blue in a breakfast spot turn up again, and you begin to get a sense
of them as the regularsin the places Eli and Blue go to. Blue has no

illusionsabout the kind of gallery he's showing at; it's the hot gallery
of the moment, run by a dealer (James Laurenson) who takes sixty per
cent.But this dealer knows what he's up to, and he's as happy as a baby
boy when he puts over an unknown like Blue. He prances in triumph, and
sings "For I Am a Pirate King." Roth uses time-lapse photography as
a comic device to show us the gallery filling up for the opening of Blue's
show. When things are in full swing. Blue's old boss from the printshop
comes over to congratulate him and to twit him, too, about his having
been fed up with porno stuif; it's a fine small exchange.
If the movie is a little unformed, that's because Roth is attempting
to be truthful to his own experience and the lives of those around him.
He's trying to express lives in flux. This is the sort of attempt that
usually turns into an unreleasable picture, a straining-for-seriousness
embarrassment. But Roth has his wits about him, and Peter Coyote
rings true whether he's drunkenly razzing Chuck King or sobbing in a
crowded diner. Heartbreakers becomes more involving as it goes on,
and when it's over, you feel you've seen something (even if you're not
quite sure what).

353
 l lesperately Seeking Susan is a mutant of some sort, an at-
tempt at screwball charm that can make your jaw fall open and stay
down until the rest of your head joins it. (A friend of mine says that this
picture is for people who grow up on rotoscope animation and prefer it
to the real thing.) The director, Susan Seidelman, pulps her actors; she
wipes them out and turns them into cardboard. All their responsiveness
is cut off —there's nothing going on in them. No subtext nothing. This—
flatness must be part of what the admirers of the film (it's being widely
praised) think is new. Seidelman doesn't show any interest in drawing

us into the action, either. This can make the movie seem very postmod-
ern. Set in the punk world, it's a mistaken-identity fantasy about doe-
eyed Roberta (Rosanna Arquette), a suburban housewife in New Jersey
who becomes fixated on a drifter named Susan (played by the rock star
Madonna). Susan's lover communicates with her through the personals
columns, and Roberta, imagining that Susan's life is full of the passion
that's missing from her own, goes to lower Manhattan and tails her. And
the picture chases after Roberta, who's meant to be adorably dopey. But
with scenes that have no pulse or rhythm, and dialogue that makes you
cringe, dopey is all that Rosanna Arquette can manage.

—
The movie doesn't have a story ^just a story line. A klunk on the
noggin turns Roberta into an amnesiac, she gets a job as a night-club
magician's assistant, is pursued by a killer who thinks she's Susan, falls
in love with the projectionist at the Bleecker Street Cinema, who also
thinks she's Susan,is put in jail as a prostitute, and on and on. How did

Leora Barish) ever get produced? Nobody comes through

this script (by
in the movie except Madonna, who comes through as Madonna (she

moves regally, an indolent, trampy goddess), and the cinematographer,

Edward Lachman, whose lighting gives the East Village shops and
streets a funky prettiness — like an Expressionist painting of neon
squalor and lollipops. Lachman and Seidelman and the production de-
up a sense of visual activity, but the transac-
signer, Santo Loquasto, stir
tions between the people on the screen are stupefying (and often in
woozy slow-motion, like a rock video going poetic).
When you come out of Desperately Seeking Susan, you don't want
to know who the director is —
you want to know who the perpetrator is.
Susan Seidelman made a name with her first feature, the 1982 Smith-
ereens, a moralistic view of a skinny young groupie (Susan Berman)
whose tacky efforts to be part of the downtown, punk-rock scene were
fun to watch until the picture started using her as a bad example. The
movie didn't just set her up as a victim of false ideals; it also delivered

354
the homiletic message that if you're not kind to other people you'll be
left alone.The images got grubbier and grubbier as the selfish groupie
was finally utterly humiliated and was on her bedraggled way to being
a hooker and a junkie. Smithereens is one of those dismally naive mov-
ies that make you pay for every smile or chuckle you had at the start,
but it was brought in for only eighty thousand dollars (it was shot in 16
mm.), and Susan Seidelman, an N.Y.U. film-school graduate, was taken
up as a public heroine. And now Desperately Seeking Susan, which cost
five million dollars, is being treated as a fulfillment of the (dim) promise
of Smithereens.
Madonna's role as Susan is a continuation of the selfish
Essentially,
bad example, but at least this picture is, technically speaking, a comedy,
and so the character doesn't have to pay for her narcissism. And Ma-
donna doesn't look as if she's about to, even if the script called for it. She
has dumbfounding aplomb. In the scenes in which she's in New Jersey,
vamping Roberta's square husband, who's in the hot-tub business, she
luxuriates in suburban materialism as if she'd discovered the pleasures
of imperial Rome. The film has its myth structure: Roberta is the good
girl who gets mixed up with Susan the bad girl and is liberated. But its
only promising moments are in the possibilities for a reversal —when
Madonna suggests that suburban comfort might be just the ticket for
a girl who's been hustling for her keep.
An example of the moviemaking technique here: Susan goes into
one of her old, nocturnal haunts and runs into an acquaintance —the
cigarette girl —who is presented to us in a shot that starts with her legs
and travels up her body; we're appraising her flesh, like a roue. Susan
says something to her, and moves on; the other girl is of no further
consequence.
To quote Bernardo Bertolucci, who was quoting the Brazilian
Glauber Rocha, "A film director is the man who finds the money to make
a movie." That basic definition holds for women, too, and Susan Seidel-
—
man has met it twice. She has also been lucky: the audiences at Desper-
ately Seeking Susan seem willing to accept her amateurishness as a
confirmation of the happy, new-wave innocence of the movie. ("See,"
Seidelman is saying, "I'm just as dopey as my heroine.") But actors
ought to be cautious: what she does to Rosanna Arquette could happen
to anybody.
April 22, 1985

355
 —

THE MUDDLE AGES

romance
t I here's
set in
some enticement in the idea of Ladyhawke, a medieval
and around the walled city of Aquila, which is ruled by
an evil bishop (John Wood). This tyrant secretly lusts after the match-
lessly beautiful golden-haired Princess Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer), and
when he discovers that she and his captain of the guard, the noble
Navarre (Rutger Hauer), are in love, he reverts to sorcery and puts a
curse on the couple to frustrate them forever. Each sunrise, Isabeau
turns into a hawk; each sundown, Navarre turns into a black wolf. The
movie is about the banished Navarre's attempt to fight his way back into
Aquila to take vengeance, and how the spell is eventually broken, with
the assistance of a boy thief called Phillipe the Mouse (Matthew Brode-
rick), the only person who has ever escaped from the bishop's dungeons,

and a swillbelly priest (Leo McKern), who was once the lovers' confessor.
There's also some lure in the settings. Aquila, with its immense fortress,
has been synthesized out of three castles, dating back to the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries (with portions going back even further), that were
part of Luchino Visconti's estates in the mountains north of Parma
inherited holdings that Visconti worked to restore. And the crumbling
abbey on a mountain peak, where the priest lives alone, is actually Rocca
Calascio, a castle built in the Dark Ages; it was more than four hundred
years old when Richard the Lion-Hearted, on his way home from the
Crusades, was imprisoned there. This is no little back-lot B picture. The
interior of the bishop's Greco-Roman cathedral was built full scale on
—
Cinecitta Studios' Teatro 5 the largest sound stage in Europe. A huge
amount of effort was put into training hawks and wolves (and a mala-
mute dog for some doubling), and the accoutrements have their own
grandeur: Rutger Hauer sports black armor and a black visor with
V-shaped stripes which makes his head look like a hood ornament for a
medieval Rolls-Royce, and he sits on a round-rumped black charger
whose hooves shake the earth.

356
 Just about everything connected with Ladyhawke is big except the
storytelling instinct of its director, Richard Donner. It's a mild and
dreary movie. Donner he—also made The Omen, Superman, Inside
—
Moves, and The Toy doesn't build the scenes. There's no development;
he just shuffles along, and frequently the audience seems to be a few plot
devices ahead of him, numbly waiting for him to catch up. If there's one
thing a movie about magical transformations needs, it's quick-witted-
ness. When, just before dawn, Isabeau (the name sounds like a transsex-
ual Isabelle) falls from the tower of the mountaintop abbey, we expect
the first rays of the savior sun to hit her dramatically —we expect her
to turn into a hawk with a whoosh, like a parachute opening. But we have
to wait too long, and the metamorphosis, when it comes, is drab and
blurry. At almost every point in the movie where we might expect a little
ping of surprise or mystery, Donner lets us down, and the cumulative
disappointment can make what should be a glorious tale of enchantment
seem depressing. Even the explanation of the vile bishop's curse on the
lovers is a fizzle: it comes too late, after you've figured most of it out for
yourself. And the climactic event (lifted from Mark Twain's A Connecti-
cut Yankee in King Arthur's Court) has no dazzle or thrill. We wait
for the big surprise to be sprung, and it's passed over so casually it
hardly seems to have happened. There's a blah at the center of this
movie.
Though the outdoor scenes have a good smoky clutter that gives
you a medieval feeling of enchanted forests and murderous innkeepers,
the picture has a tinted, muddied-up look. And, inexplicably, Michelle
Pfeiffer, who, with her pale, almond-shaped eyes and her amazing porce-
lain cheekbones, has the beauty that the story calls for, is too often
shrouded in shadows and darkness; you have to strain to see her. Pfeiffer
hasn't yet had a role to give meaning or tenderness to her beauty; she's
a bit remote (and not just visually), but she's lithe and graceful, and she
moves fast. Compared with, say, Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Fontaine in
Ivanhoe, she's a whirlwind, and though she doesn't affect us emotion-
ally, as Taylor did, her modern physical freedom is in key with the

mythological world of man into wolf, woman into hawk. Yet neither the
—
director nor the screenwriters Edward Khmara, Michael Thomas, and
—
Tom Mankiewicz do much with the theme of sensual deprivation. There
is only one scene when we actually feel that Isabeau (by night) and

Navarre (by day) are longing for each other: it comes in an instant of
sunrise when they touch hands just before she turns into a hawk, and
as she flies off he, though he is already in human form, lets out a wolflike
—
howl of anguish. (It's the best scene they have the only one that stirs

357
the imagination.) But casting John Wood as the bishop cancels out the
libidinous nature of thepunishment inflicted on the lovers. Wood's bean
pole of a bishop doesn't have the physical presence of a major villain.
Thin-lipped and dry-mouthed, he speed-freaks through his lines, turning
them into tongue twisters. Consumed with passion for Isabeau? Not this
fellow. His only lust is for enunciation.
A strapping blue-eyed platinum blond, Rutger Hauer looks like the
actor Adolf Hitler would have wanted to star in the movie of his life. This
Dutch Siegfried (the hero in Soldier of Orange, the leader of the angry
replicants in Blade Runner) has rid himself of his accent, and he gives
—
a solid performance too solid, maybe, and heavy-spirited. His Navarre
is short on youthful dash, and we don't get much chance to cheer for him,

because the director often cheats in the action sequences. When Navarre
has no weapon except the short arrow that he has pulled out of his breast
and he's up against knights with broadswords, the camera angles jump
about and suddenly his enemies are vanquished, without our seeing how.
We feel —almost subliminally—gypped. And the clumsiness in the con-
struction of the script makes him seem obstinate and a little thick in the
head. His quest is simply to kill the bishop, though if he does he and

Isabeau can never be united. The priest has a plan to break the spell, but
it requires Navarre to wait a day before entering Aquila. He insists on

pushing ahead, and the priest has to conspire with Isabeau and Phillipe
to delay him.
If Navarre doesn't quite click as a hero, it's essentially because the
character we're meant to identify with is Matthew Broderick's Phillipe
(that's how Philippe is spelled in the credits), who is like a contemporary
American adolescent placed in the Middle Ages. It's a basic convention:
Bob Hope used to be himself in the midst of costume pictures, and, of
course, Twain's Connecticut Yankee brought his modern consciousness
to King Arthur's court. But Ladyhawke isn't a comedy, and so the
device doesn't feel integral. You may suspect that this kid is there for
insurance —that he's meant to represent the young ticket buyers who
(the producers are afraid) might not want to be in the thirteenth century
without one of their own on hand. Phillipe made too endearing; he falls
is

into the category of impish lad. And Broderick, who has had considerable
experience playing young Neil Simon characters on the stage and the
screen, gives his "clever" lines urban inflections that sometimes turn the
movie into a skit about a little Jewish wise guy and Aryan giants. The
effect is something like putting, say, a boy Woody Allen at Robert Tay-
lor's elbow in Ivanhoe.
Phillipe talks to God, like a standup comic with Him for an audience.

358
(And since the sound mix is poor, Phillipe's voice seems to be coming
from an empty room in another country.) Yet even when the lines are
irritating, Broderick isn't. Yearning and wistfulness may come to him

too easily, but when he isn't chattering to God —when he's interacting
with the other performers —he's a happy, ingenious actor. He knows
how to play scared and make it funny. He has a touch of the giddy
uninhibitedness of the great clowns —
you can see the character carried
away by his thoughts, the way you sometimes could with Bert Lahr or
Joe E. Brown. Put up on the screen for comic relief, Broderick has more
of a fairy-tale quality than anyone else, and he gives this limp movie with
its disco-medieval score its only traces of inspiration.
The question may be raised of what accounts for the quotes in the
ads: "Fabulous!" and "Don't Walk, Run!" and "Enchanted, enthralling,
marvelous," "A rousing, old-fashioned adventure," and "It makes you
drunk on films again." The answer may be that even in a period of
drought people in the press and on TV are looking for something to
—
praise they don't want to be soreheads. And Ladyhawke doesn't look
pop or junky or crude, and God knows it isn't "challenging." So it doesn't
scare them off. Its limpness makes it respectable.
May 13, 1985

TIDAL

'hen Sergio Leone's epic Once Upon a Time in America

opened here in June, 1984, in a studio-hacked-down version (cut from
three hours and forty-seven minutes to two hours and fifteen minutes),
it seemed so incoherently bad that I didn't see how the full-length film

could be anything but longer. A few weeks later, though, the studio
people let me look at it, and I was amazed at the difference. I don't
believe I've ever seen a worse case of mutilation. In the full version, the

359
plot, which spans almost a half century, was still somewhat shaky, but
Robert De Niro's performance as the Jewish gangster, Noodles, took
hold, and the picture had a dreamy obsessiveness. I was excited about
it and expected to review it a few weeks later, when it was to be released.

But the opening was postponed, the weeks stretched into months, and
by the time the full (or reasonably complete) epic showed at the New
York Film Festival and began slipping into a few theatres, other films
were making a more urgent claim.
There's a special reason it lacked urgency: like the rest of Sergio
Leone's work. Once Upon a Time in America has no immediacy, no
present tense. And being in many ways a culmination of his career it's
probably the least anchored of his films. Leone, who grew up in the
Italian studio world (his father, Vincenzo Leone, was a pioneer director),
isn't interested in observing the actual world — it probably seems too
small and confining. He's involved in his childhood fixations about mov-
ies —stories enlarged, simplified, mythicized. (He only makes epics.)
There's no irony in the title: he uproots American Westerns and gang-

ster picturesand turns them into fairy tales and fantasies. In this movie,
a Jewish deli on the Lower East Side in 1921 is on a street as broad as
Park Avenue and has a storeroom the size of a football field. Leone
doesn't care about the fact that it was the crowded, constricting build-
ings that drove the kids into the streets. He directs as if he had all the
time in the world, and he has no interest in making his characters lifelike;

he inflates their gestures and slows down their actions — every lick of the
lips is important.
After we've seen conventional gangster pictures, the characters
may become enlarged in our memories because of what they do and how
the actors look as they're doing it. Leone doesn't bother to develop the
characters —to him, they're mythic as soon as he puts them on the
screen. And movie, though he gives almost an hour to the child-
in this

hood years of his gang of six Jewish boys (and a couple of girls), the
camera solemnizes and celebrates these kids of ten and twelve and
fourteen from the start. It's like watching the flamboyant childhood of
the gods. In a sense, what Leone gives us is predigested reveries; it's
—
escapism at a further remove a dream-begotten dream, but a feverish
one, intensified by sadism, irrational passions, vengeance, and operatic
savagery. (In the genre he created, the spaghetti Western, the protago-
nist didn't wait for his enemies to draw; he shot first.) Leone has found
the right metaphor here: the movie begins and ends in an opium den,
where Noodles puffs on a pipe while episodes of his life of killings and
rapes and massacres drift by and a telephone rings somewhere in the

360
 —

past. The action is set in 1921, 1933, and 1968—but not in that order.

In its full length, the movie has a tidal pull back toward the earliest
memories, and an elegiac tone. Partly, I think, this is the result of De
Niro's measured performance. He makes you feel the weight of Noodles'
early experiences and his disappointment in himself. He makes you feel

that Noodles never forgets the past, and it's his all-encompassing guilt

that holds the film's different sections together. De Niro was offered his
choice of the two leading roles — Max, the go-getter, the tricky, hothead
boss of the group, and the watchful, indecisive Noodles, the loser, who
spends the years from 1921 to 1933 in prison. I respect De Niro's deci-
sion, because he may have thought that the passive Noodles, whose
urges explode in bursts of aggression against women, would be a reach,
would test him. But I think he made a mistake in terms of what was best
for the movie, which, despite its hypnotic bravura, lacks the force at its

center that a somewhere-between-twenty-one-and-forty-five-million-dol-

lar epic (depending on who is asked) needs. James Woods, who plays
Max, dominated the short version; he actually provided its brighter
moments, and it's a sad thing when you go to a movie and look forward
to seeing James Woods, whose specialty is acting feral. In the full
version, De Niro gives the film its dimensions. He keeps a tiny flame alive
in his eyes,and his performance builds, but Leone doesn't provide what
seems essential: a collision between Noodles and Max or, at least, some —
development of the psychosexual tensions that are hinted at. (When
Noodles and Max are young teen-agers and are murderously beaten by
a rival gang, Noodles lies writhing and Max crawls toward him it's like —
Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck at the end of Duel in the Sun. ) The
film's theme is the betrayal of the immigrants' dream of America; Max
— —
ever greedy for more money, more power represents the betrayer.
By leaving the two men's competition and love-hate as just an undercur-
rent, the film chokes off its dramatic core. And Noodles often seems to
be contemplating his life instead of living it. He's at his most assured
—
he comes into his own when Noodles is about sixty; there's something
old about him from the start. (No one is less likely to be called Noodles.)
Leone wants the characters to be as big as the characters he saw
on the screen when he was a child, and he tries to produce that effect
with looming closeups and heroic gestures; the key thing for his actors
is to have the right look. Yet, despite his having breathed and talked

this movie for almost ten years before he started production, he made
some flagrant mistakes when he got down to the casting. After you've
seen his Once Upon a Time in the West, you can't get the icono-
graphic faces (Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jason Robards, Woody

361
 —

Strode, Claudia Cardinale, Jack Elam, and all the others) out of your
mind. But it's almost impossible to visualize all of the five adult gang
members America, even right after you've seen the movie. Worse,
in

they don't have the basic movie-gangster characteristic: they don't em-
anate danger. And although Deborah, the dancer-actress that Noodles
loves all his hfe, is marvellously vivid in her young girlhood, when
she's played by Jennifer Connelly (who's so clear-eyed she walks away
with the twenties passages), the role of the adult Deborah is taken
over by Elizabeth McGovern, who's classically miscast. McGovern's
hairstyle is ferocious, she's unflatteringly photographed, and she
moves like a woman who has never got used to being tall. She looks
dispirited, and the flair she shows in her comedy roles isn't visible
she's so bad you feel sorry for her. (She's also the victim of a glitch in
the film's time scheme: Deborah goes off to Hollywood in 1933, and
then we learn in 1968 that she's now a big star.) McGovern's inability
to live up to the idea that she's De Niro's great love weakens the film's
showpiece romantic sequence, set in a vast Art Deco oceanfront res-
taurant on Long Island —a restaurant that is closed for the season but
that Noodles has rented for the evening, with a full staff and a dance
orchestra. The scene is meant to reveal Noodles' yearning nature; it's
clear that Leone was thinking about Gatsby and lost dreams.
The other actresses fare much better. Tuesday Weld is in peak form
as a nympho moll who becomes Max's girl. She isn't doing that anomic
acting that made her tedious in films like Play It As It Lays and Who'll
Stop the Rain; she looks great, and she has a gleam of perversity. She
brings the film some snap and humor, and Woods has his best scene
when he's elated at showing the other guys how little she means to him
— it may be the best scene he has ever played. And, as a young woman

that Noodles takes up with, Darlanne Fleugel is Art Deco incarnate;

streamlined and blond, she wears her sleek thirties gowns with spectacu-
lar ease. Her performance is simple and in beautiful control, and De Niro
has a relaxed elegance around her. The film could have used much more
—
of her; she sets off its architectural motifs its arches and scallop
shapes.
Unlike Westerns, where everything is even literally out in the open,
gangster movies have a special appeal: we want to know more about the
concealed lives of these hidden outlaws, and how they work. (That was
part of the excitement of the Godfather pictures —the fullness of the
crime-family details.) Leone doesn't have enough interest in the real
world to make the gang's dealings with bigger mobs and its union tie-ins
even halfway intelligible. That's a real disappointment. You can't figure

362
out the logistics of the crimes; you don't know what's going on. What's
probably going on is that Leone, with his dislocated myths, is like Noo-
dles —
amid the poppy fumes he's running old movies in his head. There's
nothing in the movie to differentiate Jewish crime from Italian crime or
any other kind. Leone's vision of Jewish gangsters is a joke. As a friend
of mine put it, "it wasn't just that you never had the feeling that they
—
were Jewish you never had the feeling that they were anything."
The movie isn't really about America or about Jewish gangsters.
But you can see why Leone was drawn to the subject: it was to create
his widescreen dreamland view of the Lower East Side. That setting,
filmed partly on a Brooklyn street near the waterfront, with the Wil-
liamsburg Bridge in the background, partly in Montreal, and partly on
constructed sets in Rome, made it possible for him to transmute the
Lower East Side settings of American gangster films to give the genre —
a richer, more luxuriant visual texture. It's typical of Leone's grandilo-
quent style that the opium den, in the back room of a Chinese theatre,
is sumptuous and large. And the Long Island restaurant that we see is

impossibly lyrical and grand (the building is actually the Excelsior Hotel
in Venice); it has to be archetypal for Leone, and it has to have an aura.

Even though some of what he shows you defies common sense, visually
he justifies his lust for the largest scale imaginable. He uses deep focus
to draw details from the backgrounds into your awareness. The film is
drenched in atmosphere, and you see more and more in the wide frames.
You see howlers, too. One of my favorites is the gang's storing its booty
Grand Central in the twenties and
of a million dollars in a locker in
Noodles' going to retrieve But I imagine that if anybody
it in the thirties.

had explained to Leone that those lockers were cleared every seventy-
two hours he'd have brushed the fact aside as mere realism.
Just about all the incidents (including the palatial rented restaurant
and the loot in the locker) echo scenes in Hollywood's gangster movies.
There's the heart-tugger: the youngest and littlest member of the gang
is the first to be killed. There's the black-humor gag: Max drives a hearse
to pick up Noodles at the penitentiary gates, with a hooker who's ready
and waiting stowed in a coffin. About all that's missing is that Noodles,
being Jewish, doesn't have a boyhood friend who becomes a priest.
Leone reworks the old scenes and embroiders on them. Our group of
gangsters meet Tuesday Weld (and Noodles rapes her) in the course of
an out-of-town robbery, when they're wearing hankies over their faces;
when they encounter her again in New York, they reintroduce them-
selves by tying their hankies on their faces. (The fellows ask her to guess
which one raped her, and they unzip.)

363
 Double-entendres in the movies used to be labored; here it's as if the
atmosphere around Holly —where she works, what she does—were so
porny that she couldn't talk except in double-entendres. She's like a
dirty-minded teen-age seductress, and what she says has an element of
surprise even for her; her talk is so sexy it gives her ideas and drives
her eyebrows up. De Palma's affection for funkiness makes Melanie
Griffith's performance possible, and in scenes such as Holly's barging
into the middle of traffic trying to hail a taxi De Palma gets a fresh visual
quality, too. Most of the film's best moments have to do with actors and
actors' lives; there's a sisters-under-the-skin moment when Holly Body
meets a "serious" actress who's looking for a job, and tries to be helpful,
neither of them realizing that they're not in the same line of work. (It's
like the wonderful fluke encounters in early De Palma films, such as Hi,
Mom!)
But the big, showy scenes recall Vertigo and Rear Window so
obviously that the movie is like an assault on the people who have put
De Palma down for being derivative. This time, he's just about spiting
himself and giving them reasons not to like him. And these big scenes
have no special point, other than their resemblance to Hitchcock's
work. Crude, real fears were addressed in De Palma's earlier films.
Phantom of the Paradise made everything you'd heard about the rock
industry as a gigantic casting couch come true, Carrie was about the
dread of menstruation. Dressed to Kill was about your qualms that
sexual pleasure would get you into trouble, Blow Out was about your
apprehensions that you were a coward and would fail those who
counted on you, and so on. But Body Double has no subject other than
the plot contraption that De Palma and his co-writer, Robert J. Avrech,
thought up —unless there are a lot of claustrophobes in the audience.
The only thing that's new here in terms of getting at deeper fears is

the dirt flung onto (living) people in graves, and that isn't particularly
well worked out.
Body Double is not, to put it mildly, a spirited piece of moviemak-
ing. It features (on a character called "the Indian") the worst makeup
job of recent times. And the score (by Pino Donaggio) seems to have been
ladled over the images. (The thought of what some of the scenes might
have been like without it is a little frightening.) There's a key difference
between this picture and good De Palma. In Carrie, when the camera
moves languorously around teen-age girls in a high-school locker room
there's a buzz between the camera and what it's filming. But here De
Palma and his cinematographer, Stephen H. Burum, get away from the
out-of-work actors' low-rent apartments and the litter of pizza rinds very

264
quickly. De Palma saves the languorous camera for the sleek, expensive
settings, such as the Beverly Hills shopping mall called the Rodeo Collec-
tion, and there's not only no comic buzz —the camera seems wowed,
impressed. The voyeuristic sequences, with Wasson peeping through a
telescope, aren't particularly erotic; De Palma shows more sexual feel-
ing for the swank buildings and real r.-tate.
November 12, 1984

THREE CHEERS

10.
~^top Making Sense makes wonderful sense. A concert film by
the New York new-wave rock band Talking Heads, it was shot during
three performances at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in December,
1983, and the footage has been put together without interviews and with
very few cutaways. The director, Jonathan Demme, offers us a continu-
ous rock experience that keeps building, becoming ever more intense and
euphoric. This has not been a year when American movies overflowed
with happiness; there was some in Splash, and there's quite a lot in All
of Me — especially in its last, dancing minutes. Stop Making Sense is the
only current movie that's a dose of happiness from beginning to end. The
lead singer, David Byrne, designed the stage lighting and the elegantly
plain performance-art environments (three screens used for back-lit slide
no glitter, no sleaze. The musicians aren't trying to
projections); there's
show us how hot they are; the women in the group aren't there to show
us some skin. Seeing the movie is like going to an austere orgy which —
turns out to be just what you wanted.
Clean-shaven, with short hair slicked back, and wearing white
sneakers and a light-colored suit, with his shirt buttoned right up to his
Adam's apple, the gaunt David Byrne, who founded the group, comes
on alone (with his acoustic guitar and a tape player) for the first number.

265
 —

they're interludes —a parody of a coffee commercial, pseudo-Kurt Weill

songs. And I liked the casual effrontery of Almodovar's presenting the
young-faced grandmother — it gives the movie an Off-Off Broadway in-

formality. The picture comes closest to true dadaist slapstick in the

scenes featuring a blood-spattered pet lizard named Dinero (Money) who
is the only witness to a killing; it's suggested that Dinero might give the
killer away.
When the slum apartment buildings are seen from the outside, their
checkerboard patterns fill the screen. The buildings are like squared-off
anthills —they're dizzying backdrops to the scenes shot in the streets. No
doubt was economy that dictated the size of the rooms in these bug-
it

houses, yet when you see the people crowded inside them with their big
beds and chests and chairs you feel they've been made fools of deliber- —
ately, perversely. Almodovar —
and this is his link to Brecht and Weill
makes these breeding grounds of vice seem macabre and frolicsome. But
he's much more flip than they were. Gloria's impulses go every which
way, and you'll probably never see a woozier treatment of the break-
down of the family and the decay of the society. What Have I Done to
Deserve This! is like a comic-strip version of The Threepenny Opera. Its

not adding up is, maybe, what's tickling about it.

m
Academy Award
I
he Swiss picture Dangerous Moves, which took the 1984
for Best Foreign-Language Film, is loosely based on
the celebrated Karpov-Korchnoi chess games. It's about a world-cham-
pionship match held in Geneva between the longtime titleholder, Lieb-
skind (Michel Piccoli), a courtly and cagey gray-bearded Russian Jew

from the Soviet Union, and his former pupil, the challenger, Fromm
(Alexander Arbatt), a young Lithuanian who defected from the Soviet
Union and now lives in France. I was eager to see how the filmmakers
— the writer-director Richard Dembo and the cinematographer Raoul
—
Coutard would handle the intellectual gamesmanship of chess. Well,
they don't. The winner or loser of each day's proceedings is determined
by what happens in the players' lives in the days between the games, or
by the tricks that they and their aides use to spook the opposition during
the games themselves. The movie shows the efforts of Liebskind's ear-
nest, attentive wife (Leslie Caron) to keep him calm, because his heart
is bad, but he's seething with all kinds of rage, sparked by the Soviet

366
officials' refusal to let the only cardiologist he trusts accompany him to

Switzerland. (The doctor's sons are in Israel, and the officials feared he
might try to join them.) And the movie shows the anxieties of the high-
strung, somewhat paranoid Fromm, who doesn't know what's happen-
ing to his wife (Liv Ullmann), back in Moscow. Both contestants are
being manipulated by the Soviet bureaucracy.
Dembo might say that if he didn't present these psychological
stresses and maneuvers there'd be nothing to photograph. But why pick
chess if you're going to negate what's fascinating about it —the mental
concentration it requires? By showing us two grand masters who are at
the mercy of their emotions,Dembo banalizes chess and turns the movie
into anti-Soviet psychodrama. And though the film proceeds systemati-
cally, game by game, we're not told how many games must be won, so

we don't have any peg for suspense or excitement.

At first, Fromm's tempestuousness and the way he angers Lieb-
skind, by arriving late for the sessions without the slightest show of
contrition, puts an expectant mood; the handsome, blond Arbatt,
us in

who resembles Nureyev, and is, in fact, a Russian defector (an actor who
found asylum in France), gives some promise of fireworks to come.
Instead, we get poor Liv, who has been sent from Moscow to Geneva to

upset her husband, staring at him watery-eyed as she delivers lines like
"They destroyed me so that I would destroy you." Even Piccoli, who
gives a cunning, authoritative performance, has no chance to wing past
the pedantry of the conception. Each time he smokes a cigarette or
scratches his fingers nervously, Dembo all but clangs a fire bell. Yes, we
see that Liebskind is feeling old and mortal, that he's feeling his powers
slip away. But is there nothing specific to the guy, or to his wife, who
serves him with standard devotion? After a while, we're not even wait-
ing to see who will win —we're just waiting to see how soon Liebskind's
heart will give out.
Only two images stayed with me: the wonderful greenish water as
Liebskind's boat crosses the lake from his bungalow to the exhibition
hall where the games are played, and the surprise slapstick moment
when the hypnotist that Liebskind's aides have planted in the audience
to distract Fromm and the mime that Fromm's aides have planted to
distract Liebskind file out of the hall at the same time and their eyes
meet. Dangerous Moves didn't need to cave in on itself so lugubriously.

A chess movie might be high comedy if all kinds of irrationality broke

loose in the players' lives and then they sat down to their matches with
their minds clicking like computers (but better).

367
 m James Bond series has had its bummers, but nothing be-
Ihe
fore in the class of A View to a Kill. You go to a Bond picture expecting
some style or, at least, some flash, some lift; you don't expect the dumb
police-car crashes you get here. You do see some ingenious daredevil
feats, but they're crowded together and, the way they're set up, they
don't give you the irresponsible, giddy tingle you're hoping for. The
movie is set mostly in Chantilly, Paris, and San Francisco, and it's full
of bodies and vehicles diving, exploding, going up in flames. Christopher
Walken is the chief villain; the ultra-blond psychopathic product of a
Nazi doctor's experiments, he mows people down casually, his expres-
sion jaded. And the director, John Glen, stages the slaughter scenes so
apathetically that the picture itself seems dissociated. (I don't think I've
ever seen another movie in which race horses were mistreated and the
director failed to work up any indignation. If Glen has any emotions
about what he puts on the screen, he keeps them to himself.)
All that keeps A View to a Kill going is that it needs to reach a
certain heft to fit into the series. As the villainess, Grace Jones, of the
flat-top haircutand the stylized look of African sculpture, is indifferently
good-humored the way Jane Russell used to be, and much too flaccid, and
as the blond heroine Tanya Roberts (who has a disconcerting resem-
—
blance to Isabelle Adjani) is totally lacking in intensity she goes from
one life-threatening situation to another looking vaguely put out. About
the most that can be said for Roger Moore, in his seventh go-round as
Bond, is that he keeps his nose to the grindstone, permitting himself no
expression except a faint bemusement. It used to be that we could count

on Bond to deliver a few zingers, but this time the script (by Richard
Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson) barely manages a little facetiousness.
The film does come up with one visual zinger: in the small role of Jenny
Flex, a stunning young model named Alison Doody comes up with a
curvy walk that's like sex on wheels.

—adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel, and set and

Hick in

around Miami— shows director and star Burt Reynolds at a low ebb.
its

Whether he's ill or just drained, the fun has gone out of his acting; he

368
 —

seems unsure of himself, and his voice is hoarse and on the verge of
fading away. He tries to make his general depressiveness work in terms
of the character, but Stick — an ethical tough guy with refined tastes
this

—has no consistency, and the film cursed with the philosophical

is in-

sights that came to him during the seven years he just spent in the

slammer. Stick has its lowest point in a scene with a cruelly suave gang
leader who lives in an apartment that looks like Presley's Graceland.
Wanting to impress Stick, this gangster prepares to punish the young
owner of a bodega who hasn't paid enough protection money. The grocer
sits in helpless terror as the gangster, using a pair of tongs, takes a
scorpion from a tank and places it on his arm. Slowly, it crawls toward
his face: Will Stick find a way to save him or will he be stung? There is

a cut, and we never find out.

The picture also has a high point. An actor named Dar Robinson
—
he's famous as a stuntman plays an albino killer with a sinister half
smile and blurry yellow eyes. He's always on the verge of doing some-
thing memorably baroque, and finally he does he falls off the balcony —
of a high building, and while plunging to his death he keeps firing his
revolver all the long way down. Except for that, the only thing that
makes Stick worth mention is that George Segal, in the broadly written
role of a cigar-chomping millionaire who likes to pal around with hoods,
is rip-roaringly manic. Some of his old joy in acting comes out, and each
time he appears he gives the movie a shot of energy. As he plays the
part, the millionaire is carried away by the pure ecstasy of being rich.
June 3, 1985

EXTREMES

which
t is
I he first thing that charmed
set in the English countryside in the
me about The Shooting Party,
autumn of 1913, was the

369
swiftness and wit with which we are introduced to the characters, A
large number of landed gentry, aristocrats, servants, gamekeepers,
beaters, and loaders have gathered at the Nettleby estate for a three-day
shoot, and the camera, flitting like a butterfly, hovers over a couple of
people talking about someone else, whirls over to that person in conver-
sation, and from there to whoever is being talked about, and so on. This
Alan Bridges film isn't merely based on Isabel Colegate's 1980 novel; it's
a film of the novel, a transcription in the literal sense
— "the arrange-
ment of a composition for a medium other than that for which it was
originally written." It's a novel acted out for us. But by devices such as
those hovering, whirling introductions, and by the quality of the perform-
ances, and the economy and fleeting elegance of the whole produc-
tion, Alan Bridges carries the Masterpiece Theatre approach to the level

of art.
The novel is highly compressed: it's a set of variations on the end-
of-an-era theme, with dozens of characters in less than two hundred
pages. Colegate sets them up, one by one, in a few sentences deft, —
sneaky details of their —
backgrounds and then lets them speak for them-
selves. The dialogue is sly and pithy. At times, it's reminiscent of Oscar
Wilde, and the adapter, Julian Bond, hasn't tried to improve on it. Whole
scenes have the Colegate verbal rhythms intact, and a viewer can bask
in the beautiful bounce and precision of the dialogue, which is spoken by

the kind of cast you assemble when you fantasize about who should be
in the movie of a novel you've just read. It's a dream of a cast.

James Mason is the aging baronet Nettleby, the host, whose wife
(Dorothy Tutin), we are given to understand, used to be a gregarious
creature, always on the go. Now she's content to bicker with the head
gardener, keep an eye on her grandchildren, and play a killer game of
bridge. Nettleby is the central figure —the embodiment of the values
that are already frayed and will disintegrate in the war to come. And
James Mason, movie (he died last July, at seventy-five), goes
in his final

out in glorious style. His Nettleby is a supremely civilized man; he sees

other people for what they are, but he also sees the reasons for it. He
speaks harsh words to only one person, the cold fish Lord Hartlip (Ed-
ward Fox), whom he reprimands for "not shooting like a gentleman,"
and he does so in a tone of pained regret. Mason uses a mild, aging man's
voice in this role, and his querulous, cracked inflections make us smile.

His face and, especially, that plangent voice are so deeply familiar that
when we see him in a role that does him justice there's something like
an outpouring of love from the audience to the man on the screen.
Mason validates our feelings: he uses his own physical deterioration

370
for the role, yet he never turns into a grand old man or indulges in a
quaver that isn't a funny, integral part of the country squire who's
conscious that he's ineffectual— that he's losing his grip. In a scene
midway, Nettleby, who breeds game birds on the estate so that he can
provide his guests with these splendid shooting sprees, is confronted by
a protester, played by John Gielgud,who marches into the middle of the
shoot carrying a placard that says"Thou Shalt Not Kill," and the old
—
squire and the old zealot each, in his own way, disaffected converse. —
The scene is right out of the novel, but Mason and Gielgud are like
soft-shoe artists; they bring suavity to their teamwork, with Mason
matching his melancholy warble to Gielgud's melodious whine. They're
even more hilarious than Gielgud and Ralph Richardson were on the
stage in No Man 's Land, because that was just two great actors spar-
ring; here the two can tease each other from inside the characters
they're playing. They're so amused they're almost laughing they're in —
actors' heaven. And when, toward the close of the film. Mason has a
scene that's overladen with the possibilities of pathos and grandeur it's —
a scene with Gordon Jackson as a poacher whose cussedness the squire
—
has come to respect he pulls back; he underplays, magically. No one
could accuse James Mason of not acting like a gentleman.
Bridges, whose 1982 film The Return of the Soldier opened here in

February, has a special gift for these evocations of a world seen in a bell
jar,and now, with Geoffrey Reeve as producer and Fred Tammes as
cinematographer, he has refined his techniques. A late bloomer (he was
born in 1927), Bridges goes beyond being and literary. He sharp-
pictorial

ens the novel's wry observations on the Edwardian era and at the same
time infuses a sensuous sweetness into the material. The film isn't Chek-
hovian, exactly (though Mason is); it's more like a distillation of what's
alluring about the Masterpiece Theatre productions —wonderful actors,
given the chance to speak a celebrated writer's lines. And it's brought
off with a sovereign ease. On TV, a novel like The Shooting Party would
be a six-part series, full of longueurs, and shorteurs, too. Here, after
we've met the key members of the party, the movie puts us (as the novel
does) among actions and conversations going on simultaneously. And as
the events become more intense Bridges picks up the pace and tightens
the film's emotional hold on us. Many of his performers are veterans of
the prestigious series shows with which he has long been associated, but
actresses such as Cheryl Campbell (who was Vera Brittain in "Testa-
ment of Youth") and Judi Bowker (who was in "The Glittering Prizes")
make a stronger impression in their brief screen time than they do in
—
their much longer stints on TV maybe because the pictorial setups are

371
held so long on TV that we tire of them, and the images don't stay with
us. As Lady Aline, the flighty, adulterous wife of Edward Fox's Lord
Hartlip, who disgraces himself in the shoot, Cheryl Campbell is at one
moment a pert-faced, nosy gossip, and at the next a tantalizing sensual-
ist being caressed by her own long, wavy blond hair. It's a quicksilver

performance that recalls Joan Greenwood at her most seductive. And

Judi Bowker as the guileless Lady Olivia, the wife of thickheaded Lord
Lilburn (Robert Hardy), looks at the camera with a direct gaze that
makes her seem infinitely beautiful. When the tall, slim young barrister
Lionel Stephens (Rupert Frazer) declares his love for her, you think. Of
course — how could he look into her clear eyes and not imagine depths
of mystery?
The movie has a few misdirected elements. One is a small subplot
involving a love letter that Stephens writes to Olivia and then tears up
and tosses from which it's retrieved by a young
into a wastebasket,
footman, who and gives it to the servant girl he's courting.
copies it

(She's a prosaic soul and disapproves of it as tosh.) Somehow, this epi-

sode comes through confusingly. And there's also some fuzziness about
the identity of several of the characters. Though it doesn't really matter
which of the assembled people are related to the Nettlebys, we don't
know that at first, and I kept wondering which of them were the Nettle-
bys' children. It turns out that they have only a son, who is a diplomat
and is out of the country, and that his wife, Ida (Sarah Badel), is the
mother of all four grandchildren, including the flirtatious nineteen-year-
old Cicely (Rebecca Saire) and the ten-year-old Osbert (Nicholas Pietrek),
who has a pet mallard named Elfrida Beetle. We and several of the —
—
guests and servants fear for Elfrida when she's loose on the grounds
on the third day; that's the day the shooters, having dispatched hundreds
of pheasants, rabbits, and woodcocks, go after ducks.
Does it seem arch or frivolous that the characters fuss over a little

boy's possible loss of a pet duck in a movie that's ostensibly about the
Twilight of the Empire? Actually, it's Elfrida and all the other singulari-
ties that form an aristocracy reduced to playing games of
this vision of
death. Yes, we can see that the advancing line of beaters and the line
of shooters with their loaders behind them are like lines of soldiers, and
we recognize that these expensively got-up people, who regard their
and the British Empire as the
class as the flowering of the social order,
best there has ever been, are on the edge of oblivion. Once again, a
shooting party is being used as a symbol for the greater violence to
come. But Colegate's tone is lightly self-mocking. (The moviemakers
didn't find a way to adapt one of the elements that link with the Gielgud

372
character and round out Colegate's conception. She sees the pheasants
as fed and protected from predators, then cast forth from their Eden and
"forced to take to the air reluctantly —heavy birds, a flight of more than
a few feet exhausts them —
forced up and out to meet a burst of noise
and a quick death in that bright air.")
What keeps the picture from abstractness and overfamiliarity is
that it's full of the English affection for gentle lunacy. Gordon Jackson
plays the poacher as Colegate described him: "His conversational man-
ner had always tended towards the histrionic." Aline Hartlip, who sees
herself as passion's plaything, also manages to cadge some money from
her hostess. The wide-eyed Olivia, never having had a romantic thought
about Lionel Stephens, responds to his avowal of love —and the news he
brings that their souls knew each other before —with the sudden discov-
ery that, yes, she loves him, too.
The movie is about the tight fit of the jacket worn by the Hungarian
count (Joris Stuyck) and the way Nettleby refers —fondly—to the im-
mensely rich Sir Reuben Hergesheimer (Aharon Ipale) as "the Israel-
ite." It's about the traditions, loyalties, and idiosyncrasies that bind a
social order. It's about the ceremonies of dressing for dinner and becom-
ing part of the procession to go into the dining room and being seated
at the table, where conversation is a form of theatre. Most of all, it's

about how, given the chance, actors can take us beyond what we read
in Edward Fox, a master of twisted psyches and gnarled vocal
a book.
tones, can make us feel the loneliness inside the miserable, arrogant
Hartlip, who has nothing to be proud of except his reputation as the best
shot in England —a reputation that Lionel Stephens, without giving the
matter much thought, challenges. And Dorothy Tutin wraps the role of
Lady Minnie Nettleby around her like a dowdy old sweater. (I enjoyed
even the unplanned things, like the way Robert Hardy's fatuous Lord
Lilburn recalls Nigel Bruce as the stocky, expostulating Dr. Watson, and
the way Gielgud from some angles is a ringer for I. B. Singer.)
The Shooting Party isn't likely to appeal to the teen-agers at the
shopping mall. What would they make of the characters' allusions to
Ruskin and to George Meredith's The Egoist, which have been retained
from the novel, or of a remark (Julian Bond's addition) that Lady Minnie
—
makes to Lady Aline "I've always thought your men more Ibsenite
than Chekhovian"? (I'm not sure I know what to make of that, either.)
There's probably no more preciously literate scene in movies than the
explanation of how Elfrida Beetle got her name, but the scene is con-
sciously, whimsically silly. This is one of the rare movies that can be said
to be for an educated audience without that being a putdown.

373
 1,\ambo: First Blood Part II explodes your previous conception
of "overwrought" — it's like a tank sitting on your lap firing at you.
Jump-cutting from one would-be high point to another, Rambo is to the
action film what Flashdance was to the musical, with one to-be-cherished
difference: audiences are laughing at it. More specifically, they're laugh-

ing at its star and progenitor, Sylvester Stallone, who comes across as
a humanoid Christ figure with brown leather skin and symmetrical scars.
Rambo has been programmed with (a) homoeroticism, (b) self-pity, (c) self-
righteousness, (d) sweat, and (e) an insatiable need to be crucified over

and over. He has a sour pout on his face, and he's given to deep, enig-
matic utterances, such as 'To survive a war you have to become war."
According to Rambo, we didn't lose the war in Vietnam the United —
States soldiers weren't allowed to win it. And when it ended, our govern-
ment made a deal to pay war reparations of four and a half billion dollars
to North Vietnam for the return of our captured men, then reneged on
the deal and tried to forget all about the prisoners of war.* Rambo goes
in and brings a bunch of survivors out. Of course, he has his moments
of pleasure: he has bits of his flesh sliced off by a sadistic, Nazi-like
Russian (Steven Berkoff ), he's spread-eagled on an electrified rack by
torturers who think they can make him talk, he's branded in the face
with a red-hot knife, he's immersed in pig glop while hanging crucifixion
style. And, boy-oh-boy, what this killer Christ does to those Commies! He

—
shoots them with his bow and arrows arrows with explosive points that
send them up in fireballs.
The jungle greenery is very lustrous; the cinematographer. Jack
Cardiff, gets something of the effect in color that Josef von Sternberg
got in black-and-white in a studio-made jungle in his 1953 Anatahan —
it's as if each leaf had been oiled and buffed. And with the bare-chested
Stallone slipping through these leaves the effect mighty odd: you're
is

supposed to be intoxicated by his lumpy muscles. The way he's photo-

— —
graphed, he's huge our national palooka and the small Vietnamese in
their ill-fitting uniforms don't look as if they had a muscle (or a brain)
among them. They just stand around stupidly, waiting to be blown up;
you may want to yell at them "Take cover!" But who could be heard
above the soundtrack alerting you to watch for the next killing, and the
audience's catcalls and the giggly cheers for Rambo's Zen marksman-
ship and his gorgeous fireballs? (The film reaches climax when two boats
*There is some factual basis for this: in 1973, President Nixon promised President Pham
Van Dong $3.25 billion in U.S. economic aid, but Ck)ngress refused to grant the money.

374
crash in flames.) The director, George P. Cosmatos, gives this near-
—
psychotic material a mixture of Catholic iconography and Soldier of
—
Fortune pulp a veneer of professionalism, but the looniness is always
there. Rambo's old Green Beret colonel calls him "a pure fighting ma-
chine," yet, like Rocky, Rambo always has to have bigger guys in his
— —
movies real bruisers, like the Russian giant here to beat him up. We
mustn't forget that his namesake is Arthur {A Season in Hell) Rimbaud:
trying to explain Rambo to a corrupt official, the colonel says, "What you
choose to call hell, he calls home."
What Sylvester Stallone chooses to call a movie is a wired-up version
of the narcissistic jingoism of the John Wayne-Second World War pic-
Vietnam
tures. Its comic-strip patriotism exploits the pent-up rage of the
vets who feel that their country mistreated them after the war, and it
preys on the suffering of the families who don't know what happened to
their missing-in-action sons or brothers, fathers or husbands. A Syl-
vester Stallone hit movie has the same basic appeal as professional
wrestling or demolition derbies: audiences hoot at it and get a little

charged up at the same time.

David Morrell, whose novel First Blood was the basis of the first
Rambo picture, has written the novelization of this sequel, from the
screenplay by Stallone and James Cameron. It's a love letter to Rambo's
weaponry —his nasty serrated knife and his bow and exploding arrows.
In the author's note at the front of the book, Morrell tells us who
"created" the weapons and where we should write to order them. I can
hardly wait for my set to arrive.
June 17, 1985

RIPENESS

i If John Huston's name were not on Prizzi's Honor, I'd have

thought a fresh new talent had burst on the scene, and he'd certainly be

375
the hottest new The picture has a daring comic
director in Hollywood.
—
tone it revels voluptuously in the murderous finagling of the members
of a Brooklyn Mafia family, and rejoices in their scams. It's like The
Godfather acted out by The Munsters, with passionate, lyrical arias
from Italian operas pointing up their low-grade sentimentality. The 1982
novel, by Richard Condon, is a lively, painless read. His riffs about the
corruption of American business and politics have a rote paranoia they —
—
have no sting but the characters are entertainingly skewed, and the
story moves along and keeps you smiling. The movie does something
more. When it's over, you may think of slight resemblances to Beat the
Devil and The Maltese Falcon, but its tone is riper. The behavior on the
screen is bizarrely immoral, but it has the juice of everyday family
craziness in it. And the zest that goes into the Prizzis' greediest swindles
is somehow invigorating. You'd think this movie the work of a young
director because of the elation you feel while it's on, and afterward, too.

Even The Man Who Would Be King didn't have the springiness that this
has. The only thing about Prizzi's Honor that suggests a veteran direc-
tor, or even hints at Huston's age (he's seventy-eight), is the assurance
of his control. He directed this movie (his fortieth) on pure instinct — on
the sum of everything he knows. It's as if his satirical spirit had become
—
irrepressible the devil in him made him do it.
Huston has a cast of devil's helpers, who have been coached in the
jerky rhythms and combative dialect of Sicilian Brooklynese by the ac-
tress-playwright Julie Bovasso. She played John Travolta's mother in
Saturday Night Fever and its sequel, and that's who they talk like. They
sound like truculent trolls. As Charley Partanna, the enforcer (i.e., hit
man) for the brotherhood. Jack Nicholson has added a facial effect: his
upper lip and curls under, which thickens Charley's speech.
puffs out
(When he's fully in character, he's frog-faced and fishy-eyed, like a
blown-up Elisha Cook, Jr.) Charley is a loyal and dedicated company
man, but he's not too sharp; he's like a hardhat who's only good at his
—
trade he needs to be cranked up to think. And Nicholson's performance
is a virtuoso set of variations on your basic double take and traditional

slow burns. At times, Charley is like Jackie Gleason's vain Ralph Kram-
den in "The Honeymooners": he seems to want to waddle and shake
more rolls of flesh than he's got. (Like Kramden, he wants to occupy a
bigger space in the world.) Then he'll go limp and lacklustre, like Art
Carney's Ed Norton. Nicholson's Charley plugs the "Honeymooners"
kind of ordinariness into this Mafia world. And when he falls for a West
Coast girl —a Polish blonde, Irene (Kathleen Turner), whom he meets at
the Prizzi wedding that opens the movie —he's like a man conked out by

376
 —

a truckload of Stardust. He's gaga. But Nicholson doesn't overdo his

blurred expressions or his uncomprehending stare; he's a witty actor
who keeps you eager for what he'll do next. There are reasons for
audiences' good will toward him: he'll do anything for the role he's
playing, and he has a just about infallible instinct for how far he can take
the audience with him.
Charley's essential average-guyness is the movie's touchstone: this
is a baroque comedy about people who behave in ordinary ways in
grotesque circumstances. The Condon book is a takeoff on The Godfa-
ther, and Huston follows it right down to putting a spin on the details
(like the quick glimpse of the wedding couple, so you can see that the
bridegroom is shorter than the bride), but the parody isn't too broad
not even with Nicholson's inflated upper lip complementing Brando's

pushed-out lower lip. which Charley, the romantic clod, is

(In a scene in
told that he is to be the next head of the family, Nicholson produces a
—
small, eye-rolling flourish: for an instant a passing shade of thought
he sees himself as Brando, the don.)
The title is, of course, satiric. The movie is about what the Prizzis
do in the name of honor. Old Don Corrado Prizzi (William Hickey) is a
shrunken little man, ghouly and wormy, with tiny, shocking bright eyes.
These slitted, almost closed eyes are so alive they jump out at you.
(They're like the director's eyes —they're the soul of the movie.) At
eighty-four, this slippery master chiseller snoozes most of the time, but
he still runs the mob, and he's plotting his "monument" a banking —
maneuver that should net the family some seventy million dollars.
Hickey, an esteemed New York acting coach, actually in his fifties, has
always had a special energy, and his mock seriousness here is just what
the mummified old don needs. Don Corrado can barely walk anymore (he
shuffles), but he lives to rook people, and Hickey makes you feel the
mean joy he takes in it. When the don wants to say something, he doesn't
—
speak, exactly he is so much into his own rhythms that he singsongs
his remarks. But age hasn't softened him. And an old don has an advan-
tage that other oldsters don't have: when this little geezer gives orders
to the members of his family, they obey.
Don Corrado's two sons are big men. The firstborn, Dominic (Lee
Richardson), who's in his sixties, runs the dirty side of the operations;
the younger, better-educated, and slicker Eduardo (Robert Loggia),
who's in his fifties, handles the "legitimate" investments and mingles
with financial leaders and high-ranking men in government. Richardson
and Loggia play their roles just tilted enough for you to register what
it's like for men Dominic's and Eduardo's ages to be dominated

377
 —by
still their father: it keeps all their childhood tensions going.
The member of the family who is closest in spirit to the tricky old
don is his granddaughter Maerose (Anjelica Huston), whose eyes are
never at rest, either. Dominic, Maerose's rigid-minded father, has made
her a family outcast, because some years earlier, when she and Charley
were engaged and got into a scrap, she took off in a drunken rage and
had an affair. She has been exiled to Manhattan, where she works as an
interior decorator, but she's as busy plotting as the don himself. As
Anjelica Huston plays her, the raven-haired Maerose is a Borgia prin-
cess, a high-fashion Vampira who moves like a swooping bird and talks
in a honking Brooklynese that comes out of the corner of her twisted
mouth. Anjelica Huston seems to have grown into her bold features:
—
she's a flinty beauty here she has the imperiousness of a Maria Callas
or a Silvana Mangano. And, with that Brooklyn cabbie's diction, and
Maerose's fixation on vengeance against her father, Anjelica Huston is
an inspired comedienne, especially when she parodies penitence and
sidles into a room dolorously, her head hanging on her shoulder. The
stunning Maerose loves scandalizing the family, and comes to the wed-
— —
ding the bride is her younger sister in a scarlet-banded, one-shoul-
dered black gown. Maerose has more in her face than anyone else has;
she has irony and the strangeness of what's hidden. She's like a bomb
ticking away in the background of the movie.
By contrast, Kathleen Turner's ravishingly pretty Irene seems pal-
lid. Turner has built up a lot of audience good will, too, and she has her

moments: Irene's intonations are hilariously ritualized when, after par-

ticipating in a kidnap and a murder, she chirps "See you at dinner" to
Charley and pecks him like a suburban housewife as he drives off with
the kidnap victim. But her role doesn't really develop, and it suffers
from an omission: Irene needs a scene to show the shift in her from the
woman who's playing Charley for a sap —the woman who smiles to
herself when she's got him hooked —and the woman who warms to the
adoration of such a big man in the Mafia. (Charley is the kind of ro-
mantic who, after they've declared their love for each other, in a
swank Mexican restaurant in L.A., takes note of what the orchestra is

playing and says, "This isgonna be our song.") And Turner is at a

disadvantage: Irene isn't from Brooklyn and doesn't have the chance to
talk in the clan's comic lingo.
The central group is completed by Charley's father, Angelo "Pop"
Partanna (John Randolph), who is the Prizzis' consigliere and Don Cor-
rado's closest friend. As Condon described Pop, his "sweetness and
amiable good cheer about murder and corruption were legendary in the

378
environment," and that's how Randolph plays him. He's always beam-
ing, and when he looks at Charley, the hit man, the crinkles around his
eyes radiate all over his face: there never was a father who took greater
pleasure in his son. When the two are together, we see the father-son
relationship in its ideal form. These two confide in each other the way
fathers and sons do in storybooks for boys. I don't think Randolph has
ever done anything this mellow before: Pop is overflowing with happi-
ness, and when, toward the end, the kidnap and killing (which are tied
in with the banking maneuver) cause unforeseen troubles, the childlike
anxiety in his face suggests a perturbed saint.
It's impossible to say who's happier — Pop, who dotes on his son, or
Don Corrado, who has always had his own way. Or the audience. I found
myself laughing all the way through. Though some people don't respond

to the movie at all, laughter seems to bubble up in most of us. Probably

that's because characters like Pop and the don are only slightly warped
versions of other doting parents, other tyrants. It's the context of Mafia
connivery that makes their happiness, like Charley's romanticism, seem
blissfully silly. (Being a mobster appears to produce the same result as
a lobotomy: some vital connection in the brain is severed.)
Huston has made a character comedy out of Condon's prankish
satire of American corruption. He has been so confident and free that
he has included moviemaking jokes, like the use of obvious stock shots
of planes whipping back and forth across the country to represent Char-
ley and Irene carrying on their coast-to-coast romance. The characters
come equipped with certain eccentricities of the "environment," such as
the habit —apparently developed among people who make inordinate
amounts of money — of saying "a dollar" when they mean a thousand
dollars. When they refer to seven hundred and twenty dollars, they're
actually talking about heavy cash. Except for the failure to round out
Irene's character, the script, by Condon and, later, Janet Roach (who
worked on the structuring of the scenes), is a beauty, and the Alex North
score, with its lush, parodistic use of Puccini, and some Rossini, a little
Verdi, and a dash of Donizetti, too, actively contributes to the whirling
texture of the scenes. Even the musical jokes that you're not quite
conscious of work on you, and the music seems to bring out the lustre
of Andrzej Bartkowiak's cinematography. Everything in this picture
works with everything else which — is to say that John Huston has it all

in the palm of his big, bony hand.

You can feel a prickly excitement in the theatre. It's the kind of
excitement that makes you say, "God, I love movies" — or, at least, "God,
I love this movie."

379
 —

1. It's a different kind of love that Satyajit Ray's Ghare-Baire,

or The Home and the World, brings out, but it's love all right. Adapted
from a novel that Rabindranath Tagore wrote in 1912 (Ray prepared a
script for it in the forties, long before he made Fatherhis first film,

Panchali), it deals with a great modern subject that has come up in

Ray's work over and over: the emancipation of women, and what it does
to them and to the men who love them. This is central to Ghare-Baire,
which is the story of the emergence of a young wife from the seclusion
and ignorance of purdah into the complexities of becoming more fully
— —
human or, at least, adult and having choices. The core situation is
—
much like the one in James Joyce's play Exiles the husband, in his
pride, wanting the wife to be free to be faithful—but that's only the
film's starting point.
Victor Banerjee (the Dr. Aziz of A Passage to India) is Nikhil, a
maharajah in Bengal with a Western education and liberal views. His
wife, Bimala (Swatilekha Chatterjee), is conventional in her beliefs, and
is content to live in the women's quarters of his palace and be visible to

no man except him. But he loves her and is proud of her, and wants her
to be a modern woman, able to move in the world. She first saw him at
their wedding: how will he ever know whether she really loves him if she
—
doesn't have the opportunity to choose him to prefer him to other men?
For ten years, Bimala is taught by an English governess and encouraged
to think for herself and develop her creativity. At last, in 1907, Nikhil
persuades her to take the momentous walk with him down the corridor
that leads from the women's apartment to the main rooms of the palace.
There, in the drawing room, he introduces her to his friend the hand-
some, fiery radical Sandip (Soumitra Chatterjee, the Apu of The World
ofApu, and a principal actor in eleven other Ray films). And then the
refined, uncoercive Nikhil watches passively —helplessly—as she
becomes enthralled by Sandip's cocksure masculinity and his revolution-
ary rhetoric.
The movie is about the destruction of the marriage, and the riots and
bloodshed caused by Sandip's terrorist supporters. It's a large theme
—
a double tragedy, in the home and in the world presented in a formal
style that owes almost nothing to the conventions of American or West-
ern European films. The screen frame is almost square, and the scenes
— —
most of them inside the rooms of the palace are in deep, glowing
colors. The main characters talk, and the camera just stays on them and

380
waits until they finish, yet these conversations develop a heart-swelling
intensity. In a sense, the method is like that of amateur moviemakers
who think that all they need to do is put actors in a room and photograph
them reading their lines as if they were on a stage. The difference is that
Satyajit Ray, who has been making movies for thirty years, didn't start
with this simplicity —he achieved it. —the intimacy of his
His approach
focussing on the actors in their setting —may be influenced by Ozu or
late Dreyer, but it isn't remotely austere or ascetic. India takes care
of that.
When you're inside the palace, there's a lot of India outside the
windows. The home and the world are interpenetrating metaphors. The
interiors seem to be lighted through stained-glass windows, and the
colors, the fabrics, the way the actors move — everything is erotic, am-
biguous, in the process of being transformed. The richness of the per-
formances —those of Victor Banerjee and Swatilekha Chatterjee par- in

ticular —and the colors and textures of the interiors are an electric like

field.The conversations in golden light and shadows have their own kind
of voltage. You watch these graceful people in draped garments in their
lethargic, patterned decor, and everything in the country seems draped,
hanging, defeated —
and hectic, too.
The story takes place during the chaotic aftermath of Lord Curzon's
partition of Bengal into Muslim and Hindu states, when the nationalist
movement that Sandip is part of is trying to impose a boycott against
all foreign goods (by claiming that imports are at the root of Indian
poverty). Yet Bimala is —becoming free—by imbib-
becoming educated
ing English traditions. When this Indian woman sings, English, the in
—
song that she has been taught by her governess 'Tell me the tales that
to me were so dear. Long long ago, long long ago" —the confusion of
cultures is insanely poignant.
Bimala is girlish and coquettish in the early scenes in the women's
quarters, and part of the fascination of the movie is that Swatilekha
Chatterjee grows with her role, and becomes more absorbing the longer
you see her. She's not a mere ingenue; she's a full-bodied, rounded
beauty, and her Bimala has an earthy, sensual presence. But Bimala
and Nikhil obviously have no children, and we don't see them in passion-
ate embraces, either. Nikhil's love for her seems more spiritual than
physical.
For much of their ten-year marriage, each time Nikhil suggests that
Bimala leave purdah behind she looks down, smiling defensively. It isn't
her compulsion; it's his. She doesn't want to come out of the women's
quarters — all incense and silks, Arabian Nights cushions and English

381
bric-a-brac. — —
The rooms are stuffed surfeited with treasures; Bimala
seems to emerge from inside a jewel. Maybe it's because the drive isn't
hers that she's so overwhelmed by Sandip's fervor, and so easily taken
in. Nikhil could guide her —
could explain what the boycott is doing to the
poor in the area. But he wants her to wise up by herself; he wants her
to jump over the giant hurdle of growing up in ignorance, and see
through the political line of a messiah like Sandip. He tells her to use her
—
"woman's intuition" surely the last thing she should trust in making
a choice between his passive principles and Sandip's ruthless magne-
tism. This gracious, recessive maharajah (with zero carnality) is the inno-
cent one.
Nikhil seems almost to will the destruction of his marriage. We
never get inside his kindness, his virtue, his high-mindedness — or his
weakness. Yet seem a defect in the film but, rather, part of
this doesn't
its richness and its mystery. Toward the end, Bimala, who was wheedled

into independence by her husband, becomes desperate to express that

—
independence recklessly, heedlessly. When it comes to truthfulness
about women's lives, this great Indian moviemaker Satyajit Ray shames
the American and European directors of both sexes.
July 1, 1985

382
IIBBI

Abbott, Diahnne, 46 Almendros, Nestor, 37

Abe, Yutaka, 327 Almodovar, Pedro, 364-66
Aberdein, Keith, 244 Alonso, Maria Conchita, 157, 158
Abraham, F. Murray, 101, 102, 249, 253 Alterio, Hector, 126, 127
Abril, Victoria, 46, 47 Altman, Robert, 217, 268, 289, 318;
Absence of Malice, 78 dir., McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 30,
Actor's Revenge, An, 327 268; Come Back to the 5 & Dime
Adams, Maud, 4 Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, 108;
Addy, Wesley, 210 M*A*S*H, 211; Nashville, 268;
Adjani, Isabelle, 368 The Long Goodbye, 268; Popeye,
Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, 284; Brewster McCloud, 318
The, 217-20 Amadeus, 249-53
Against All Odds, 145-47, 158 "Amazing Grace," 110
Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 199 Ambassadors, The, 206
Aiello, Danny, 339 Ameche, Don, 12, 13
Akers, Karen, 337 American Gigolo, 68
Albert, Eddie, 231 American Graffiti, 98
Albert, Edward, 277 Amritraj, Vijay, 5
Alcott, John, 73, 148 analog, 282
Aldrich, Robert, 212 Anatahan, 374
Alexander, Jane, 115 Anderson, Judith, 197
Algiers, 47 Anderson, Loni, 129
Alice Adams, 281, 337 Andrews, Anthony, 198, 201
Alien, 188 Animal Actors of Hollywood, 225
All Night Long, 217, 233 Animal House, see National
All of Me, 220-24, 265 Lampoon 's Animal House
"All of Me" (song), 224 Ann-Margret, 332, 333
All That Jazz, 35, 92 Anna Karenina, 89
Allen, Karen, 306, 307 Annis, Francesca, 285, 286
Allen, Woody, 23-27, 122-25, 174, Antonioni, Michelangelo, 32; dir.,
335-40, 358; dir., Zelig, 23-27; Blow-Up, 32; L'Avventura, 126-27
Broadway Danny Rose, 122-25; A Antonutti, Omero, 126, 127
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, "Anything Goes," 176
123; The Purple Rose of Cairo, Apocalypse Now, 119, 278
335-40 Arau, Alfonso, 164

383
Arbatt, Alexander, 366, 367 Barkin, Ellen, 44, 217, 218
Arbus, Diane, 124, 340 Barocco, 48
Arkansas Adios, 219 Baron, Sandy, 123, 124, 318
Arlen, Alice, 109 Bartkowiak, Andrzej, 42, 379
Armstrong, Gillian, 290-93; dir., Mrs. Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 155
Soffel, 290-93; My Brilliant Basileus Quartet, 125-27
Career, 292, 302; Starstruck, 292 Basinger, Kim, 169, 170
Arquette, Rosanna, 354, 355 Baskin, Elya, 156
Arrighi, Luciana, 333 Baskin, Norton, 56, 57
Arthur, 12, 153, 305 Bataan, 116
As You Like It, 259 Bates, Alan, 311, 330, 332
Ashcroft, Peggy, 300, 301, 303 "Battle Hymn of the Republic, The,"
Assante, Armand, 153-54 64
Astaire, Fred, 2, 294 Battle of Algiers, The, 74, 278
"A-Team, The," 217 Bauer, Steven, 101, 103
Atkine, Feodor, 37-38 Baxter, Charles, 199
Atkins, Eileen, 115 Beach, Scott, 63
Austin, Michael, 148, 151 Beat the Devil, 376
Avrech, Robert J., 264 Beatty, Warren, 170, 240, 314; dir..
Avventura, L', 126-27 Reds, 24; Heaven Can Wait (1978)
Awful Truth, The, 222 (co-dir.), 170
Axton, Hoyt, 79, 81, 187 Beau Mariage, Le, 37
Aykroyd, Dan, 12, 13-14, 19, 192, Beck, Julian, 298
193 Beckett, Samuel, 15, 36, 100, 262
Bedelia, Bonnie, 79, 81-82, 83
Bacon, Kevin, 139, 140 Bedi, Kabir, 5
Bacri, Jean-Pierre, 134 Beecham, Sir Thomas, 154
Bad Boys, 315 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 227, 228,
Bad News Bears, The, 16 229
Badel, Sarah, 372 Behr, Jack, 316
Badham, John, 35; dir., Saturday Beineix, Jean-Jacques, 45-49; dir.,
Night Fever, 35, 36, 376; Dracula The Moon in the Gutter, 45-49;
(1979), 217 Diva, 45, 46
Bailey, John, 204 Bellamy, Ralph, 12
Baker, Blanche, 175 Bellocchio, Marco, 137
Baker, Carroll, 92 Bellow, Saul, 24
Baker, Ian, 161 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 227
Baker, Joe Don, 172 Belson, Jordan, 63, 64
Baker, Josephine, 294 Belushi, John, 122, 143
Bahnt, Eszter, 261 Benedek, Barbara, 68
Ballard, Carroll, 97-100;dir.. The Benjamin, Richard, 151-53; dir..
Black Stallion, 63, 97, 98, 99; Racing with the Moon, 151-53,
Never Cry Wolf, 97-100; Beyond 315; City Heat, 288
This Winter's Wheat, 98; Harvest, Bennett, Alan, 311, 341
98; Pigs, 98; The Perils of Bennett, Constance, 221
Priscilla, 98; Rodeo, 98 Bennett, Harve, 196
Ballhaus, Michael, 350 Bennett, Tony, 123
Balzac, Honore de, 89 Benny, Jack, 2, 112
Bancroft, Anne, 112 Benson, Robby, 310
Band, The, 69 Benton, Jerome, 215
Band Wagon, The, 36 Benton, Robert, 246-49; dir.,
Banerjee, Victor, 300, 301-302, 380, Kramer vs. Kramer, 97, 174, 248,
381 249; Places in the Heart, 246-49,
Bankhead, Tallulah, 338 319; The Late Show, 248
Barbarosa, 30 Berenger, Tom, 69, 70
Barish, Leora, 354 Bergman, Alan and Marilyn, 86

384
Bergman, Ingmar, 195 Border, The, 120
Berkeley, Busby, 297 Borges, Jorge Luis, 18
Berkoff, Steven, 4-5, 374 Bom Yesterday, 84
Berlin, Irving, 294 Borsos, Phillip, 27-31, 334-35; dir..
Berman, Susan, 354 The Grey Fox, 27-31; The Mean
Bernard, Jason, 222 Season, 334-35
Berri, Claude, 133 Borzage, Frank, 307
Berridge, Elizabeth, 252 Bosch, Hieronymus, 188, 253
Bertolucci, Bernardo, 355; dir.. Last Bosco, Philip, 204
Tango in Paris, 228 Boss' Son, The, 351
"Best Things in Life Are Free, The," Bostonians, The, 206-11
81 Bounty, The, 184-86
Betrayal, 14-15 Bovasso, Julie, 36, 376
Bettelheim, Bruno, 24 Bowie, David, 314, 349
Beuys, Joseph, 266 Bowker, Judi, 371, 372
Beverly Hills Cop, 287-88 Boyce, Christopher, 311-15
Bey, Turhan, 104 Boyd, Russell, 273, 292
Beyond the Fringe, 341 Boyer, Charles, 55
Beyond This Winter's Wheat, 98 Boys in the Band, The, 347
Biddle, Ed, 290-93 Brando, Marlon, 47, 149, 335, 377
Biddle, Jack, 290-93 Breakfast Club, The, 346-49
Big Chill, The, 68-71 Breaking Away, 309
Billy Budd, 273 Breathless (1959), 227
Birdy, 316-19 Brecht, Bertolt, 366
Bishop, Troy, 97 Brest, Martin, 287-88
Bisset, Jacqueline, 198, 200 Brewster McCloud, 318
Bixby, Jerome, 20 Brice, Fanny, 294
Bizet, Georges, 227, 253-54, 255, 256 Brickman, Paul, 39-41; dir.. Risky
Bizet's Carmen, 226, 253-57 Business, 39-41, 122
Black Stallion, The, 63, 97, 98, 99 "Brideshead Revisited," 201
Blade Runner, 141, 358 Bridges, Alan, 330-33, 369-73; dir..
Blake, William, 84, 191 The Return of the Soldier,
Blame It on Rio, 132-33 330-33, 371; The Shooting Party,
Blazing Saddles, 146 369-73
Blier, Bertrand, 137, 328, 350; dir.. Bridges, Beau, 57, 80, 81
Going Places, 49, 137; Get Out Bridges, Jeff, 145, 146, 147, 306, 307
Your Handkerchiefs, 328, 350 Brief Encounter, 280
Blithedale Romance, The, 207 Brigadoon, 139
Blood Simple, 323-26 Brimley, Wilford, 172, 235
Bloodbrothers, 201 Bristowe, Tania, 242
Bloodhounds of Broadway, 123 Broadway Danny Rose, 122-25
Bloom, Claire, 77 Broderick, Matthew, 356, 358, 359
Blow Out, 264 Brodsky, Joseph, 155
B low-Up, 32 Bronco Billy, 238
Blue, Robert, 352 Bronson, Charles, 238, 361
Blues Brothers, The, 12, 193 Bronze Horseman, The, 250
Body Double, 263-65 Brook, Peter, 237; dir., Marat/Sade,
Body Heat, 3, 40, 202 252
Bohan, Marc, 45 Brooks, Albert, 19, 154, 343-46; dir..
Bologna, Joseph, 132, 133 Lost in America, 343-46; Real
Bolt, Robert, 184 Life, 344; Modem Romance, 344
Bonaffe, Jacques, 227 Brooks, James L., 93-97; dir.. Terms
Bond, Julian, 370, 373 of Endearment, 93-97, 246, 338
Bond, Sudie, 109 Brooks, Mel, 111, 112, 287; dir..
Bonnie and Clyde, 225, 248, 249 Young Frankenstein, 2, 287;
Book of Daniel, The, 42 Blazing Saddles, 146

385
Brosse, Simon de la, 38 Carmen Jones, 227
Brothers, Dr. Joyce, 129 Carmichael, Hoagy, 65
Brothers Karamazov, The, 89 Carney, Art, 376
Brown, Joe E., 171, 359 Caron, Leslie, 366
Brown, Reb, 117 Carpenter, John, 232, 306-308; dir.,
Brubaker, 217 Escape from New York, 232;
Bruce, Lenny, 11 Halloween, 240, 307; Starman,
Bruce, Nigel, 373 306-308
Bryne, Barbara, 210 Carpenter, Teresa, 91
Brynner, Yul, 38 Carpi, Fabio, 125-27
Bubbles, John W., 296 Carradine, John, 298
Buck and Bubbles, 294, 296 Carradine, Keith, 289-90
Buddy Holly Story, The, 98 CarHe (1976), 264
Bujold, Genevieve, 239, 289 Carriere, Jean-Claude, 237
Burgess, Guy, 311 Cartwright, Veronica, 66
Bum!, 74 Casper, the Friendly Ghost, 193
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 147-48, 149 Cassavetes, John, 233, 351
Burroughs, Jackie, 29, 30 Cassidy, Joanna, 72, 77-78, 167
Burum, Steven H., 119-20, 264 Gates, Phoebe, 188, 189
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Catherine Wheel, The, 34
Kid, 177 Cats, 242
Byrne, David, 265-67 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 22
Century Magazine, The, 206
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The (1919), "Changes," 349
21 Chant ofJimmie Blacksmith, The,
Caesar, Adolph, 271-72 243
Cage, Nicolas, 151, 152, 153, 295, Chaplin, Charlie, 25, 125, 129, 159,
297, 316, 318 294, 340
Cagney, James, 103 Chapman, Michael, 3, 222
Cain, James M., 323 Chariots of Fire, 148, 150, 169, 278,
Caine, Michael, 83, 84-85, 132, 133 279
Caldwell, Zoe, 337, 338 Charles, John, 244
Callas, Maria, 378 "Charlie's Angels," 224
Calloway, Cab, 294 Chatterjee, Soumitra, 380
Cameron, James, 375 Chatterjee, Swatilekha, 380, 381
Campbell, Cheryl, 371, 372 "Cheers "123
Campbell, Stewart, 282 Chekhov, Anton, 26, 50, 371, 373
Candidate, The, 16 Cher, 108
Candy, John, 141, 142-43 China Syndrome, The, 109
Cannes Film Festival, 47, 260 Chinatown, 145
Cannon, Dyan, 170 Chong, Rae Dawn, 289
Capetanos, Leon, 157 Choose Me, 288-90
Capra, Frank, 187, 188, 306; dir., Chorus Line, A, 35, 347
Pocketful of Miracles, 123; It's a Christie, Julie, 331, 333
Wonderful Life, 187, 306; It Cimino, Leonardo, 284
Happened One Night, 306, 307; Cinecitta, 356
Meet John Doe, 306; Lost Horizon Circle Jerks, The, 213
322
(1937), Citizen Kane, 24, 179, 216
Capshaw, Kate, 176, 178, 231, 232, Citizens Band (Handle with Care),
234 39
Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian, City Heat, 288
184 Clark, Matt, 219
Caravaggio, 42 Clarke, John, 60
Cardiff, Jack, 374 Clayburgh, Jill, 108
Cardinale, Claudia, 52, 362 Clementi, Pierre, 52
Carmen, 253 Clennon, David, 280

386
Close, Glenn, 69, 71, 169, 170, 171 Coutard, Raoul, 229, 230, 366
Close Encounters of the Third Cowley, Graeme, 245
Kind, 182 Cox, Alex, 211-13; dir., Repo Man,
Cobb, Randall (Tex), 117, 119 211-13, 262, 348
Cocteau, Jean, 210 Cox, Paul, 59-60
Coen, Ethan, 323, 325, 326 Coyote, Peter, 56, 57, 349, 351, 352,
Coen, Joel, 323-26 353
Cohan, George M., 171 Crenna, Richard, 308, 311
Cohen, Alexander, 339 Cria!, 127
Colbert, Claudette, 307 Cristofer, Michael, 279-80
Colegate, Isabel, 370, 372-73 Cronenweth, Jordan, 267
Coles, Honi, 296 Crosby, Bing, 5, 177
Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle, 91 Cross Creek, 55-59
Collier, Constance, 338 Crothers, Scatman, 20
Collins, Joan, 147 Crouse, Lindsay, 43, 45, 161, 162,
Colon, Miriam, 102 247
Colon, Richard, 6 Cruikshank, Sally, 21
Columbus, Chris, 189 Cruise, Tom, 39, 122
Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Cruising, 103
Dean, Jimmy Dean, 108 Cundey, Dean, 164
Comes a Horseman, 29 Cuny, Alain, 126
Comfort and Joy, 268-71 Curtin, Valerie, 153
Coming Home, 167
Condon, Richard, 376, 377, 378, 379 Dallesandro, Joe, 295, 298
Connecticut Yankee in King Dangerous Moves, 366-67
Arthur's Court, A, 357 Daniel, 41-45, 87
Connelly, Jennifer, 362 Daniels, Jeff, 95, 336, 338
Connery, Sean, 170 Daniels, Stan, 129
Conti, Bill, 63 Dano, Royal, 62
Cook, Elisha, Jr., 376 Dante, Joe, 18, 20-22, 187-92, 232;
Cook, Peter, 305, 341 dir.. Twilight Zone — The Movie
CooHdge, Martha, 318 18-23, 188, 232;
(co-dir.),
Cooper, Gary, 61, 236 Gremlins, 187-92; The Howling,
Cooper, Gordon (Gordo), 65, 233 232
Cooper, Trudy, 65 Dark As the Grave Wherein My
Coppola, Francis, 29, 46, 47, 48, 177, Friend Is Laid, 200
230, 293-98; dir.. One from the Darling, 92
Heart, 46, 47, 230, 296; The "Darling, The," 26
Outsiders, 47, 296; The Davenport, Nigel, 150
Godfather, 53, 101, 177, 339, 362, David, Eleanor, 268
376, 377; The Godfather, Part H, Davies, Rachel, 342
74, 101, 103, 177, 298, 339, 362; Davillier, Charles, 255
Rumble Fish, 104, 120, 296, 310; Davis, Bette, 111, 185
Apocalypse Now, 119, 278; The Davis, Ed, 221
Cotton Club, 293-98 Davis, Judy, 300, 302-303
Corelli, Franco, 278 Day, Doris, 132
Corman, Roger, 80 Day, Morris, 215
Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 51, 255 Day of the Locust, The, 315
Cosmatos, George P., 374-75 Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, 2
Costa-Gavras, 77 Dead of Night, 22
Gotten, Joseph, 194 Deal of the Century, 39
Cotton Club, The, 293-98 Dean, James, 214
"Cotton-Eyed Joe," 247 "Death and Life of Dith Pran, The,"
Country, 234-37, 319 274
Coup de Foudre, see Entre Nous Death in Venice, 126, 226
Courtenay, Tom, 113, 114-15 "Death of a Playmate," 91

387
Deer Hunter, The, 53, 111 Domingo, Placido, 254, 256
Delacorta (pseud., Daniel Odier), 45 Don Giovanni, 253
De Laurentiis, Dino, 184 Donaggio, Pino, 264
"Delirious," 213 Donaldson, Roger, 184-86; dir.. The
Delon, Alain, 51, 237 Bounty, 184-86; Sma^h Palace,
Demarest, William, 12 184, 242
Dembo, Richard, 366-67 Donatello, 124
Demme, Jonathan, 165-69, 265-67; Donen, Stanley, 132-33; dir.. Blame
dir.. Citizens Band (Handle with It on Rio, 132-33; Seven Brides
Care), 39; Swing Shift, 165-69; for Seven Brothers, 320; Singin'
Stop Making Sense, 265-67, 327 in the Rain (co-dir.), 338
De Mornay, Rebecca, 39, 40 Donizetti, Gaetano, 379
Demy, Jacques, 85, 166, 288; dir.. Donner, Richard, 356-59; dir..
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 85; Superman, 8, 10, 225, 357;
The Model Shop, 166; Lola, Ladyhawke, 356-59; The Omen,
288—89 357; Inside Moves, 357; The Toy,
De Niro, Robert, 103, 279, 280, 281, 357
298, 315, 360, 361, 362 "Don't Rain on My Parade," 89
Dennehy, Brian, 98 Doody, Alison, 368
De Palma, Brian, 100-106, 233, Dore, Gustave, 255
263-65; dir., Scarface (1983), Dornaker, Jane, 63
100-106; The Fury, 233; Body Dos Passos, John, 295
Double, 263-65; Obsession, 263; Douglas, Michael, 164
Hi, Mom!, 264; Phantom of the Dourif Brad, 286
,

Paradise, 264; Carne (1976), 264; Dowd, Nancy, 167

Dressed to Kill, 264; Blow Out, Downhill Racer, 16
264 Dracula (1979), 217
Depardieu, Gerard, 45, 47, 48-49 Draughtsman's Contract, The,
Dern, Bruce, 81 31-34
Derricks, Cleavant, 157 Dreamscape, 231-34
De Santis, PasquaHno, 226, 254 Dressed to Kill, 264
Deschanel, Caleb, 63, 170 Dresser, The, 113-16, 200
Deschanel, Mary Jo, 64 Dreyer, Carl, 381
De Sica, Vittorio, 26 Drimmer, John, 162
Desperately Seeking Susan, 354-55 Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox,
Detmers, Maruschka, 226 The, 166
De Vito, Danny, 164-65 Duel in the Sun, 361
Devo, 1 Duellists, The, 30
Diabolique, 323 Dullea, Keir, 64
Diamond, Selma, 20 Dumbo, 180
Di Cicco, Bobby, 140 Dundas, Jennie, 290
DiCillo, Tom, 262 Dune, 282-87
Dickens, Charles, 82, 89, 125, 284 Dunne, Irene, 93, 222
Dietrich, Marlene, 219 Durning, Charles, 112
Dillon, Matt, 308, 310 Dusenberry, Phil, 170
Diner, 202, 309 Duvall, Robert, 64, 171-72
Dior, Christian, 45
Dirty Harry, 240 Ealing Studios, 60, 340, 342
Dirty Pictures from the Prom, Earrings of Madame de . . . , The,
218-19 55
Diva, 45, 46 East West Players, 161
Doctorow, E. L., 42, 43 Eastwood, Alison, 239
Dog Day Afternoon, 203 Eastwood, Clint, 120-21, 238, 239,
Dogs of War, The, 119 240, 288; dir.. Sudden Impact,
Dolce Vita, La, 105, 161 120-21, 240; Bronco Billy, 238;
Dombasle, Arielle, 37 Honkytonk Man, 238

388
Easy Rider, 308, 343 Falling in Love, 279-81
Ebsen, Buddy, 140 Fame, 35, 139
Echevarria, Rocky, see Bauer, Steven Farnsworth, Richard, 27, 29, 172
Edson, Richard, 261 Farrow, Mia, 24, 26-27, 123-24, 217,
Educating Rita, 83-85 335-36, 337, 340
Edwards, Annie Jo, 337 Farrow, Stephanie, 337
Edwards, Anthony, 80 Fassbinder, R. W., 350
Edwards, Blake, 304-306; dir.. Pink Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 315
Panther pictures, 154, 305; Micki Faust, 36
& Maude, 304-306; The Man Who Fellini, Federico, 161, 298; dir.. La
Loved Women (1983), 305; The Dolce Vita, 105, 161
Party, 305 Ferrer, Jose, 111, 284
Egoist, The, 373 Ferzetti, Gabriele, 126-27
Eisenstein, Sergei, 217 Fiddler on the Roof, 44
Elam, Jack, 362 Fiedler, Leslie, 41
Elcar, Dana, 223 Field, Connie, 167
El Cojo, Enrique, 256 Field, Sally, 246, 247-48
Electric Horseman, The, 157 Fields, W. C, 364
Elephant Man, The, 100, 282 Figueroa, Gabriel, 199
Elizabeth of Toro, 224 FUm Comment, 46, 47, 295
"Elizabeth R," 332 Finlay, Frank, 332
Elizondo, Hector, 308, 309 Finlayson, Jon, 60
Ellington, Duke, 294 Finnegan, John, 172
Elliott, Denholm, 12-13, 341 Finney, Albert, 113-14, 115, 198,
Elliott, Stephen, 288 200
Elmer the Great, 171 Fires on the Plain, 327
Emmanuelle, 232 First Blood (novel), 375
End to Innocence, An, 41 First Blood, 116
Enforcer, The, 240 First Name: Carmen, 226-30
Englishman Abroad, An (TV), 311, Fisk, Jack, 91; dir.. Raggedy Man,
313 91, 204
Eno, Brian, 285 Fitzgerald, Barry, 190
Enriquez, Rene, 74 Flamingo Kid, The, 308-11, 345
Enter the Dragon, 232 Flash Gordon (1980), 225
EntreNous, 133-39 Flashdance, 6-7, 35, 169, 171, 374
Ephron, Nora, 109 Fleugel, Darlanne, 362
Equus, 250, 252 Fonda, Henry, 12, 291, 361
Eraserhead, 100, 282 Fonda, Jane, 77, 167, 234, 247
Erendira, 182-83 Fontaine, Joan, 357
Escape from New York, 232 Footloose, 139-41, 169, 220
Esham, Faith, 254, 256 "For I Am a Pirate King," 353
Estevez, Emilio, 212, 347, 348 For Your Eyes Only, 4
Estienne, Marie-Helene, 237 Ford, Harrison, 164, 176, 319, 322
E.T The Extra-Terrestrial, 57, 163, Ford, John, 62, 241; dir.. The Grapes
182, 188 of Wrath, 234
Evans, Art, 273 Forman, Milog, 249-53; dir..
Evans, Bruce A., 307 Ragtime, 87; Amadeu^, 249-53
Every Man for Himself, 230 Forque, Veronica, 365
Excalibur, 114 Forster, E. M., 299, 300-301, 302,
Exiles, 380 303
Expresso Bongo, 125 Forsyth, Bill, 268-71; dir.. Comfort
Exterminating Angel, The, 347 and Joy, 268-71; Local Hero, 268,
269, 270; Gregory's Girl, 269;
Fairbanks, Douglas, Sr., 179, 215 That Sinking Feeling, 269
Falcon and the Snowman, The, Forte, Nick Apollo, 123
311-15 48 Hrs., 72, 78, 287

389
Fosse, Bob, 91-92; dir.. All That Ghare-Baire, see Home and the
Jazz, 35, 92; Star 80, 91-92, 204 World, The
Foul Play, 192 Ghostbusters, 192-94
Four Feathers, The, 67 Gibson, Mel, 184, 185-86, 290, 291
Four Musketeers, The, 9 Gideon, Raynold, 307
I^th Man, The, 194-96 Gielgud, John, 12, 305, 371, 372, 373
Fox, Edward, 113, 370, 372, 373 Gilbert, Lewis, 83-85; dir.,
Fox, Huckleberry, 97 Moonraker, 4; Educating Rita,
Fox, James, 151, 300, 303 83-85
Frances, 234 Gleason, Jackie, 376
Francis, Freddie, 285 Gleason, Paul, 347, 348
Frankel, Art, 345 Glen, John, 3-5, 368; dir., Octopussy,
Frankenstein (1931), 161 3-5; For Your Eyes Only, 4; A
Franklin, Aretha, 69 View to a Kill, 368
Frantz, Chris, 266 Glenn, Annie, 64-65
Franz, Dennis, 263 Glenn, John, 64-65
Fraser, George MacDonald, 4 Glenn, Scott, 65-66
Frazer, Rupert, 372 "Glittering Prizes, The," 371
French, Leslie, 53 Glover, Danny, 246, 247
French Provincial, 48 Go-Between, The, 33
Frey, Sami, 259 Godard, Jean-Luc, 212, 226-30, 267;
Friedman, Bruce Jay, 129, 142 dir., Weekend, 212, 227; First
Friedman, Ken, 79, 80, 83 Name: Carmen, 226-30;
Frohman, Clayton, 73 Breathless (1959), 227; Pierrot le
Front Page, The, 73 Fou, 229, 230; Numero Deux, 230;
Fugard, Athol, 277 Every Man for Himself, 230
Fuller, Charles, 271, 272, 273 Godfather, The, 53, 101, 177, 339,
Fuller, Samuel, 181, 230 362, 376, 377
Funny Girl, 89 Godfather, Part //, The, 74, 101,
Fury, The, 233 103, 177, 298, 339, 362
Godunov, Alexander, 322
Gabin, Jean, 47, 48, 78 Going Places, 49, 137
Gable, Clark, 307 Goldblum, Jeff, 63, 69-70, 217, 218,
Gabriel, Peter, 317 219-20
Gades, Antonio, 256 Golden Bowl, The, 206
Gago, Jenny, 74 Goldfinger, 146
Gail, Max, 350 Goldman, Bo, 167-68, 310
Gale, Bob, 164, 212 Goldsmith, Jerry, 76
Galligan, Zach, 187, 189 Gone with
the Wind, 50
Gallo, Guy, 198, 199 Goodbye, Columbus, 310
Gangster as Tragic Hero, The, 105 Goodbye Pork Pie, 244
Ganz, Lowell, 142 Goodis, David, 45
Garbo, Greta, 111, 289, 322 Goya, 255
Garcia-Marquez, Gabriel, 131, 182-83 Graham, Ronny, 111
Garrison, Ellen, 24 Grant, Gary, 93, 221, 222, 223, 304
Garson, Greer, 94 Grapes of Wrath, The, 234
Gauguin, Paul, 245 Gravity 's Rainbow, 232
Gayle, Jackie, 123 Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid,
Gaynor, Janet, 337 The, 63
Gayton, Joe, 118 Great Train Robbery, The (1903),
Gelbart, Larry, 133 28, 29-30
Gere, Richard, 294, 295, 296, 297 Greenaway, Peter, 31-34
Gerzso, Gunther, 199 Greenwood, Joan, 372
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, 328, Greer, Jane, 145, 146
350 Greggory, Pascal, 38
Getz, John, 323 Gregory's Girl, 269

390
Gremlins, 187-92 Hardy, Jonathan, 60
Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 54 Hardy, Robert, 372, 373
Grey Fox, The, 27-31 Harewood, Dorian, 147, 315
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Harlow, Jean, 110
Lord of the Apes, 147-51 Harris, Barbara, 84
Grier, David Alan, 273 Harris, David, 273
Griffin, Merv, 129 Harris, Ed, 64, 72, 165, 247
Griffith, Melanie, 263, 264 Harris, Timothy, 12
Griffiths, Richard, 341 Harrison, Cathryn, 113
Grissom, Betty, 66-67 Harrison, Jerry, 266
Grissom, Gus, 66-67 Harrison, Rex, 153, 154
Grodin, Charles, 128, 129, 140 Harrold, Kathryn, 350
Grogan, Claire, 269 Harry & Tonto, 158
Grosbard, Ulu, 279-81 Harvest, 98
Grusin, Dave, 281 Harvey, Laurence, 125
Guerra, Ruy, 182-83 Harwood, Ronald, 113, 114
Guerra, Tonino, 256 Hauer, Rutger, 356, 358
Guillermin, John, 224-26; dir., Havers, Nigel, 300
Sheena, 224-26; King Kong Hawkins, Screamin' Jay, 262
(1976), 225, 234 Hawks, Howard, 62, 102; dir.. Only
Guinness, Alec, 300, 301 Angels Have Wings, 62; Scarface
Gunga Din, 176, 177, 179 (1932), 100-101, 102, 103, 104
Gunty, Morty, 123 Hawn, Goldie, 165, 166-67, 168
Guys and Dolls, 123 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 207, 208
Gwynne, Fred, 298 Hayward, Susan, 216
Gyenes, Magda, 154 Heart Like a Wheel, 79-83
Heartbreakers, 349-53
Haacke, James, 112 Heartland, 236
Haas, Lukas, 319, 321 Heaven Can Wait (1978), 170
"Habanera," 227 Hecht, Ben, 102
Hackett, Buddy, 123 Hedaya, Dan, 323, 325
Hackett, Joan, 59 Hefner, Hugh, 91
Hackford, Taylor, 145-47; dir.. An Heifetz, Jascha, 2
Officer and a Gentleman, 6, 95, "Heigh-Ho," 191
146, 169; Against All Odds, Helm, Levon, 65
14&-47, 158 Hemingway, Mariel, 91, 92, 334, 335
Hackman, Gene, 72, 73, 76-77, 116, Hendrix, Jimi, 213
117-18, 119 Henry, Justin, 174
Hagerty, Julie, 343, 344, 346 Hepburn, Katharine, 29, 86, 110, 281
Halevy, Genevieve, 254 Herbert, Frank, 282, 283, 284, 286
Halevy, Ludovic, 254 Heroes, 322
Hall, Anthony Michael, 173, 174, 347, Herrmann, Edward, 291, 337, 338
348 Hershey, Barbara, 62, 172
Hall, Jon, 104 Herzog, Werner, 199
Hallelujah Chorus, the, 63 Heston, Charlton, 149
Halloween, 240, 307 Hi, Mom!, 264
Hamilton, Margaret, 190 Hickey, William, 377
Hammond, John, 58 Higgins, Anthony, 31
Handle with Care, see Citizens Hill, Dana, 57, 58
Band Hill, George Roy, 257-60; dir., The
Hanks, Tom, 141, 142, 143 World According to Garp, 22;
Hannah, Daryl, 141-42, 144, 202, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
205 Kid, 177; Slaughterhouse-Five,
"Happy Days," 309 253; The Little Drummer Girl,
Hard Day's Night, A, 216 257-60
Hard Times, 72 Hill, Steven, 90

391
Hill, Walter, 72; dir.. Hard Times, Hurt, William, 69, 70, 71
72; 48 Hrs., 72, 78, 287; The Long Hustler, The, 152
Riders, 120; The Warriors, 233 Huston, Anjelica, 378
"Hill Street Blues," 74 Huston, John, 198-201, 375-79; dir.,
Arthur, 128-30; dir.. The
Hiller, Under the Volcano, 198-201;
Lonely Guy, 128-30, 140; Prizzi's Honor, 375-79; Beat the
Romantic Comedy, 129, 168; Devil, 376; The Maltese Falcon,
Making Love, 129 376; The Man Who Would Be
Hines, Gregory, 295, 296, 297-98 King, 376
Hines, Maurice, 295, 296, 298 Hutton, Betty, 178
Hingle, Pat, 315 Hutton, Timothy, 37, 42, 43, 162-63,
Hirsch, Paul, 140 314
Hitchcock, Alfred, 36, 264, 326; dir., Huyck, Willard, 177
Rebecca, 111; Rear Window, 188,
264; Vertigo, 264 "I Put a Spell on You," 262
Hoffman, Alice, 281 / Wanna Hold Your Hand, 164
Hogarth, William, 32 / Want to Live!, 216
Holliday, Judy, 84 Ibsen, Henrik, 140, 373
Holliday, Polly, 187, 190-91 Iceman, 160-63
Holm, Ian, 15, 150, 333 Iceman Cometh, The, 331
Home and the World, The Ichikawa, Kon, 326-30; dir., The
(Ghare-Baire), 380-82 Makioka Sisters, 326-30; The Key
Home Box Office (HBO), 16, 281 327; Fires on
(Odd Obsession),
"Honeymooners, The," 376 the Plain, 327; An Actor's
Honkytonk Man, 238 Revenge, 327; Tokyo Olympiad, 327
Hope, Bob, 5, 177, 358 ril Cry Tomorrow, 216
Hopkins, Anthony, 184, 185, 186 '"111 Wind," 296
Hopper, Edward, 288 Immediate Experience, The, 41
Home, Lena, 294 In and Out Book, The, 249
Horton, Edward Everett, 338 In the Heat of the Night, 271
Hoskins, Bob, 298 In the Heat of the Summer, 334
Hough, Richard, 184 Independence Day, 281-82
How I Won the War, 9 Indiana Jones and the Temple of
Howard, Ron, 141-45; dir., Splash, Doom, 175-82, 234
141-45, 157, 163, 265; Night Shift, Industrial Light & Magic, 179-80
142, 143 Inside Moves, 357
Howe, Irving, 24 Inside the Third Reich (TV), 195
Howling, The, 232 Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
Hudson, Ernie, 193 The, (1956), 187
Hudson, Hugh, 147-51; dir., Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, (1978), 63, 70, 217
Lord of the Apes, 147-51; Ipale, Aharon, 373
Chariots of Fire, 148, 150, 169, Irons, Jeremy, 237
278, 279 Irving, Amy, 88, 90, 304, 305
Hudson, Rock, 132 It Happened One Night, 306, 307
Hudson, Toni, 58 "It's a Good Life," 20
Hughes, Eric, 146 It'sa Wonderful Life, 187, 306
Hughes, Finola, 35 Ivanhoe, 357
Hughes, John, 173-75, 346-49; dir.. "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo," 296
Sixteen Candles, 173-75, 347, 348; Ivey, Judith, 128
The Breakfast Club, 346-49 Ivory, James, 206-11
Hughes, Wendy, 59-60
Hulce, Tom, 249, 251, 253 Jackson, Glenda, 331-32
Hunt, Linda, 210, 286-87 Jackson, Gordon, 371, 373
Hunter, John, 28 "Jacob's Ladder," 57
Huppert, Isabelle, 138, 135, 137 Jagger, Mick, 214, 215

392
James, Henry, 206-209, 210, 211 The White Dawn, 63; Invasion of
Jarmusch, Jim, 260-63 the Body Snatchers (1978), 63, 70,
Jaws, 22, 182 217; The Wanderers, 63
Jerk, The, 2, 3 Kaye, Norman, 59-60
Jewison, Norman, 271-74; dir.. Keane, Walter, 189
Fiddler on the Roof, 44; A Keaton, Buster, 179, 222, 337, 340;
Soldier's Story, 271-74; In the dir., Sherlock Jr., 337, 340
Heat of the Night, 271 K.dton, Diane, 27, 200, 257, 258, 259,
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 209 260, 290, 291-92
Job, Enrico, 254 Keaton, Michael, 143
Joffe, Roland, 274-79; dir.. The Kehoe, Jack, 204
Killing Fields, 270, 274-79 Kelley, DeForest, 197
Johnson, Alan, 111-12 Kelley, William, 320
Johnson, Arnold, 152 Kelly, David Patrick, 231, 233
Johnson, George Clayton, 20 Kelly, Gene, 338
Johnson, Kelly, 242 Kemper, Victor J., 129
Johnson, Lamont, 173 Kennedy, Edgar, 154
Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 63, 65 Kennedy, Jo, 292
Johnson, Michelle, 132-33 Kennedy, William, 295
Johnson, Monica, 344 Kerr, E. Katherine, 109
Johnson, Van, 337, 338 Kerr-McGee, 106, 107, 109, 110
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year Key, The (Odd Obsession), 327,
2000, 137 329
Jones, Grace, 368 Khmara, Edward, 357
Jones, Janet, 309 "Kick the Can," 20
Jones, Jeffrey, 253 Kidder, Margot, 289
Jones, Jennifer, 361 Kieser, Jan, 288
Jonson, Ben, 34 Killing Fields, The, 270, 274-79
Jordan, Richard, 334-35 King, Betty R., 94
Jordan, Will, 123 King Kong (1976), 225, 234
Joseph II, Emperor, 252, 253 King of Comedy, The, 123
Jourdan, Louis, 4 King of the Gypsies, 204
"Joy to the World," 69 Kinski, Klaus, 217, 258, 259
Joyce, James, 380 Kinski, Nastassia/Nastassja, 45, 46,
Joyride, 232 47, 155
Jules and Jim, 183 Kishi, Keiko, 327
Kiss Me Deadly, 212
Kaa, Wi Kuki, 243 Kiss of Death, 233
Kaczmarek, Jane, 280 Klane, Robert, 153
Kafka, Franz, 26, 70, 158 Kline, Kevin, 69, 70
Kahn, Michael, 179, 279 Kline, Richard, 222
Kalitta, Connie, 80, 81 Kloves, Steven, 152
Kane, Carol, 152 Knebel, Levi L., 236
Kapelos, John, 347 Koenekamp, Fred J., 219
Kaplan, Jonathan, 79-83 Korda, Alexander, 98
Karina, Anna, 227 Kotcheff, Ted, 116-20; dir..
Karlen, John, 153 Uncommon Valor, 116-20; First
Karras, Alex, 146 Blood, 116; North Dallas Forty,
Kasdan, Lawrence, 68-71; dir.. Body 145
Heat, 3, 40, 202; The Big Chill, Kotegawa, Yuko, 327
68-71 Kotero, Patty Apollonia, 213
Katz, Gloria, 177 Kovacs, Laszlo, 193
Katzenbach, John, 334 Krabbe, Jeroen, 194-95, 196
Kaufman, Philip, 61-68; dir., The Kramer vs. Kramer, 97, 174, 248,
Right Stuff, 61-68, 233; The Great 249
Northfield, Minnesota Raid, 63; Krige, AHce, 150

393
Kroopf, Sandy, 316 Leaves of Grass, 299
Kubrick, Stanley, 195; dir., 2001: A le Carre, John, 258
Space Odyssey, 65; Lolita, 195, Lee, Andrew Daulton, 311-15
196; The Shining, 322 Leeson, Michael, 16
"Kugelmass Episode, The," 23, 336, Legrand, Michel, 85, 86
338 Le Henry, Alain, 134
Kurosawa, Akira, 244; dir,, Leibman, Ron, 57
Rashomon, 161, 204; Throne of Leonard, Elmore, 368
Blood, 244 Leone, Sergio, 240, 244, 326, 359-64;
Kurtz, Swoosie, 145, 147 dir., Once Upon a Time in the
Kurys, Diane, 133-39 West, 244, 361; Once Upon a
Time in America, 359-64
LaBelle, Patti, 273 Leone, Vincenzo, 360
Lacey, Ronald, 219 Leopard, The, 50-55
Lachman, Edward, 354 Leskin, Boris, 315
Lady Eve, The, 12, 222 Lester, Richard, 7-12; dir..
Lady Sings the Blues, 216 Superman III,7-12, 225;
Ladyhawke, 356-59 Superman II, 225; How I Won
8,
Lahr, Bert, 359 the War, 9; Petulia, 9; The Three
Lahti, Christine, 166, 167 Musketeers, 9; The Four
Lake, Veronica, 40 Musketeers, 9; A Hard Day's
Lamarr, Hedy, 47 Night, 216
Lambert, Anne Louise, 33 Levinson, Barry, 153, 169-73; dir.,
Lambert, Christopher, 149, 150 The Natural, 169-73; Diner, 202,
Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di, 50, 309
51 Levy, Eugene, 143, 144
Lampreave, Chus, 365 LibGi*3,CG 214
Lancaster, Burt, 50, 51, 53 Libertini' Richard, 154, 221, 222, 224
Landis, John, 12-14, 18, 19-20; dir., Licht, Jeremy, 21
Trading Places, 12-14, 192; Life, 61, 64, 166
National Lampoon 's Animal Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter,
House, 12; The Blues Brothers, The, 167
12, 193; Twilight Zone— The Movie Life ofEmile Zola, The, 250
(co-dir.), 18-23, 344 Light Snowfall, A (novel), 329
Lane, Diane, 295, 297 Light Snowfall, A (1950), 327
Lange, Jessica, 234, 235, 236 Light Snowfall, A (1959), 327
Langlet, Amanda, 38 Lim, Kwan Hi, 119
Lardner, Ring, 171 Lindsey, Robert, 313, 315
Lasser, Louise, 124 Lipscomb, Dennis, 273
La^t Tango in Paris, 228 Lithgow, John, 22-23, 96-97, 139,
Last Year in Marienbad, 32 140, 217, 220
Late Show, The, 248 Little Caesar, 101, 103
Lau, Alice, 119 Little Drummer Girl, The, 257-60
Laughton, Charles, 43 "Little House on the Prairie," 171
Laure, Carole, 328, 350-51 Little Miss Marker, 123
Laurel, Stan, 24 Little Prince, The, 316
Laurenson, James, 353 "Little Red Corvette," 213
"Laveme and Shirley," 309 Little Richard, 214
Lawrence, Bruno, 242, 243-44 Littman, Lynne, 146
Lawrence, D. H., 88 Lloyd, Christopher, 111, 197, 218
Lawrence, Steve, 129 Local Hero, 268, 269, 270
Leachman, Cloris, 29, 287 Locke, Sondra, 121
Lean, David, 184, 299-304; dir.. Brief Loggia, Robert, 101, 102, 377
Encounter, 280; A Passage to Lola, 288-89
India, 299-304, 380 Lolita, 195, 196
Leaud, Jean-Pierre, 227-28 Lombard, Carole, 112

394
Lone, John, 161, 162-63 Mackie, Bob, 36
Lonely Guy, The, 128-30, 140 MacLachlan, Janet, 239
Lonely Guy's Book of Life, The, 129 MacLachlan, Kyle, 285
Lonely Hearts, 59-60 McLaglen, Victor, 339
Long Goodbye, The, 268 MacLaine, Shirley, 84, 94, 95, 96
Long Riders, The, 120 McMillan, Kenneth, 204-205, 284
Loquasto, Santo, 354 McMurtry, Larry, 94, 97
Loren, Sophia, 158 Mad, 63
Lorre, Peter, 259 Madame Bovary, 336
Losey, Joseph, 32, 33; dir.. The Madame X, 173
Go-Between, 33; The Servant, 303 Madigan, Amy, 247
Lost Horizon (1937), 322 Madonna, 354, 355
Lost in America, 343-46 Madsden, Virginia, 284
Loughery, David, 232 Magic Flute, The, 252
Louis, Morris, 98 Magnani, Anna, 111
"Love Boat, The," 132 Magnoli, Albert, 213-17
Lovers and Other Strangers, 81 Mahogany, 217
Lowry, Malcolm, 198-99, 200, 201 Maibaum, Richard, 4, 368
Lubitsch, Ernst, 89, 111; To Be
dir.. Making Love, 129
or Not To Be (1942), 111; The Makioka Sisters, The, 326-30
Shop Around the Comer, 281 Malamud, Bernard, 171
Lucas, George, 177, 179, 180; dir., Malet, Pierre, 126
American Graffiti, 98; Star Wars, Malkovich, John, 247, 276, 277
217 Maltese Falcon, The, 376
Lucasfilm, 177 Man Who Loved Women, The
Luce, Henry, 61, 62 (1983), 305
Luke, Keye, 187, 191 Man Who Would Be King, The, 376
Lumbly, Carl, 219 Man with Two Brains, The, 1-3, 222
Lumet, Sidney, 41-45; dir., Daniel, Manchurian Candidate, The, 231
41-45, 87; Prince of the City, 42; Mancuso, Nick, 349, 351, 352
The Verdict, 42; Dog Day Mandel, Babaloo, 142
Afternoon, 202; The Wiz, 217; Mandel, Loring, 258
Equus, 250, 252 Mandel, Robert, 281-82
LuPone, Patti, 321 Mangano, Silvano, 378
Lurie, John, 261 Mankiewicz, Tom, 357
Lynch, David, 100, 282-87; dir., Mann, Michael, 146
Eraserhead, 100, 282; The Manners, David, 338
Elephant Man, 100, 282; Ehine, Mantegna, Andrea, 161
282-87 Marat/Sade, 252
Lynn, Loretta, 33 Marathon Man, 315
Marchand, Guy, 134, 136
McAlpine, Don, 159 Marchand, Nancy, 210
Macbeth, 242, 244 "Marching Through Georgia," 244
McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 30, 270 Marsh, Reginald, 288
McCain, Frances Lee, 190 Marshall, Garry, 308-11, 345; dir.,
McCarthy, Kevin, 21 The Flamingo Kid, 308-11, 345;
McCrea, Joel, 330 Young Doctors in Love, 310
McDaniel, Hattie, 337 Marshall, Neal, 309-10
McDormand, Frances, 323 Martin, Steve, 1-2, 3, 122, 128-30,
MacDowell, Andie, 150 174, 220, 222-23, 224, 304, 337
McDowell, Malcolm, 57 Martinez, Juan, 365
McGill, Everett, 286 Marx, Harpo, 3, 124, 158, 251
McGillis, Kelly, 319, 321 Marx Brothers, the, 112
McGovem, Elizabeth, 152, 153, 362 "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," 94
McKee, Lonette, 295, 296, 298 "Mary Tyler Moore Show, The," 93
McKem, Leo, 356 M*A*S*H, 217

395
Mason, James, 195, 370-71 Mrs. Soffel, 290-93
Masterpiece Theatre, 333, 370, 371 Mr. Mom, 174
Mastrantonio, Mary Elizabeth, 102 Model Shop, The, 166
Masur, Richard, 73, 334 Modem Romance, 344
Matheson, Richard, 20, 21, 22 Modine, Matthew, 290, 316, 318, 319
Matheson, Tim, 112 Moffat, Donald, 63
Matthau, Walter, 15, 16, 18 Monica, Corbett, 123
Matthews, Carmen, 44 Monkees, The, 212
Maura, Carmen, 364, 365 Monnet, Gabriel, 46
Mayer, Louis B., 171 Montez, Maria, 104
Mazursky, Paul, 135, 155-60, 173; "Mood Indigo," 295
dir.. An Unmarried Woman, 108, Moon in the Gutter, The, 45-49
135; Moscow on the Hudson, Moonraker, 4
155-60; Harry & Tonto, 158; Moore, Demi, 132
Tempest, 173 Moore, Dudley, 153, 154-55, 200,
Me Two, 221 304, 305, 306, 341
Mean Season, The, 334-35 Moore, Roger, 4, 5, 368
Mean Streets, 201, 204 Moranis, Rick, 193
Meatballs, 192 Moreau, Jeanne, 183
Meehan, Thomas, HI Moreland, Mantan, 11
Meet John Doe, 306 Morelli, Rina, 51
Meilhac, Henri, 254 Moreno, Rita, 47
Meiselas, Susan, 73 Morfogen, George, 351
Melnick, Mark, 120 "Mork and Mindy," 309
Melville, Herman, 26, 163 Moroder, Giorgio, 6, 101
Member of the Wedding, The (1983, Morrell, David, 375
TV), 58 Morrison, Jim, 263
Menges, Chris, 270, 274, 278 Morrissey, Paul, 262
Merchant, Ismail, 209 Morrow, Vic, 19-20
Meredith, George, 373 Morton, Rob (pseud.), 167
Merimee, Prosper, 227, 254 Moscow on the Hudson, 155-60
Meyer, David and Tony, 5 Mowat, Farley, 98
Meyer, Nicholas, 197-98 Mowbray, Malcolm, 340-42
Mezzogiorno, Vittorio, 46 Mozart, Constanze, 252
M-G-M, 110 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 249-53
Micki & Maude, 304-306 Mozart and Salieri, 250
Middlemarch, 89 MTV, 211, 267
Midler, Bette, 178 Muldowney, Jack, 79-80
Midnight Express, 284 Muldowney, Shirley, 79-83
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Muller, Robby, 212-13
A, 123 Muni, Paul, 100-101, 103
Mieville, Anne-Marie, 227 Murphy, Eddie, 12, 13, 14, 122, 192,
Mifune, Toshiro, 161, 244 287, 288
Migenes-Johnson, Julia, 254, 255 Murphy, Geoif, 240-46; dir., Utu,
Milius, John, 119 240-46; Goodbye Pork Pie, 244
Miller, Dick, 190 Murray, Bill, 122, 192, 193-94
Miller, George, 18, 22-23; dir., Musante, Tony, 204
—
Twilight Zone The Movie Muti, Ornella, 237
(co-dir.), 18-23; The Road My Brilliant Career, 292, 302
Warrior, 22 My Dinner with Andre, 122
Miller, Jonathan, 341 My Favorite Wife, 222
Milton, Joyce, 41, 44
Miner, Bill, 27-31 Narita, Hiro, 99
"Minnie the Moocher," 295 Nashville, 268
Miou-Miou, 134, 137 National Enquirer, 308
Miracle in Milan, 26 National Lampoon's Animal
Missing, 11 House, 12

396
Natural, The, 169-73 Officer and a Gentleman, An, 6, 95,
"Natural Woman, A," 69 146, 169
Nava, Gregory, 130-32 "Oh, What a Beautiful Momin'," 56
Nelson, Craig T., 109, 277 Ghana, Claudia, 183
Nelson, Judd, 347, 348 G'Herlihy, Gavan, 10
Nesmith, Michael, 212 Ojeda, Manuel, 164
Nest, The, 127 "Old MacDonald Had a Farm," 244
Never Cry Wolf, 97-100 Oldfield, Mike, 278
New, Nancy, 210 Omen, The, 357
"New Show, The," 142 On Golden Pond, 246
New York Film Festival, 68, 234, "Once in a Lifetime," 267
260, 360 Once Upon a Time in America,
New York, New York, 47, 166, 167, 359-64
219 Once Upon a Time in the West,
New York Post, 240 244, 360
New York Times, The, 107, 258, 274, OndfiCek, Miroslav, 109, 252
276, 336, 351 One from the Heart, 46, 47, 230,
New Yorker, The, 325, 336 296
Newhart, Bob, 273 One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Newman, David, 11, 225, 249 182
Newman, Leslie, 11 One Wild Moment, 133
Newman, Paul, 170; dir.. The O'Neill, Eugene, 331
Shadow Box (TV), 279-80 Only Angels Have Wings, 62
Newman, Randy, 171, 172 Ophuls, Max, 55
Ngor, Haing S., 275 Orchestra Wives, 296
Nicaragua, 73 Ordinary People, 40, 97, 314
Nicholas Brothers, the, 294, 296 Orton, Joe, 341
Nichols, Mike, 106-11; dir., Othello, 114
Silkwood, 106-11, 325 O'Toole, Annette, 10
Nicholson, Jack, 94, 96, 170, 322, Our Winning Season, 232
37&-77 Out of the Past, 145
Night of the Living Dead, 232, 324 Outsiders, The, 47, 296
Night of the Shooting Stars, The, Ozu, Yasujiro, 381
127
Night Shift, 142, 143 Pacino, Al, 100, 102-103, 104, 106
"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," 22 Padre Padrone, 127
Nimitz, Chester, 119 Page, Geraldine, 201, 204
Nimoy, Leonard, 196-98 Paich, Marty, 285
Nine to Five, 192 Palin, Michael, 341
mi, 140, 164, 177 Papas, Irene, 182, 183
"1999," 213 Parker, Alan, 31&-19; dir.. Fame, 35,
No Man's Land, 371 139; Shoot the Moon, 58, 200;
"No Matter What Happens," 86 Midnight Express, 284; Birdy,
"No Wonder," 87 316-19
Nolte, Nick, 71, 72-73, 75, 78, 287 Parker, Debi, 119
Norma Rae, 57 Party, The, 305
Normington, John, 341 Passage to India, A, 299-304, 380
Norte, El, 130-32 Paterson, Bill, 268, 269, 271, 277,
North, Alex, 200, 379 342
North Dallas Forty, 145 Pather Panchali, 98, 380
Numero Deux, 230 Patinkin, Mandy, 43, 44, 87, 90
Nureyev, Rudolf, 126, 367 Patrick, Vincent, 201
Nyswaner, Ron, 168, 290 Pauline at the Beach, 37-39
Paull, Lawrence G., 164
Obsession, 263 Pearce, Richard, 234-37; dir..
Octopussy, 3-5 Country, 234-37, 319; Heartland,
Odd Obsession, see Key, The 236; Threshold, 236

397
Peck, Gregory, 248, 361 Postman Always Rings Twice, The
Peckinpah, Sam, 72, 78, 330; dir.. (1981), 234
Straw Dogs, 72; The Wild Bunch, Potter, Madeleine, 210
164; Ride the High Country, 330 Potts, Annie, 193
Peerce, Larry, 310 Pran, Dith, 274-79
Pendergrass, Teddy, 288 Presley, Elvis, 369
Penn, Christopher, 139-40 Pretty Poison, 225
Penn, Sean, 151-52, 153, 314-15 Price, Richard, 201
Pennies from Heaven, 2, 337 Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson), 213,
Penny Serenade, 93 214, 215, 216, 217
People, 69, 335 Prince of the City, 42
Perelman, S. J., 177 Private Benjamin, 166, 167, 344
Perils of Priscilla, The, 98 Private Function, A, 340-42
Perkins, Maxwell, 57 Prizzi 's Honor, 375-79
Persoff, Nehemiah, 87, 90 Prochnow, Jiirgen, 285
Peters, Bernadette, 337 Proser, Chip, 162
Peters, Charlie, 133 Proust, Marcel, 237, 254
Petrie, Daniel, Jr., 287 Pryor, Richard, 7, 8, 11-12, 123, 215,
Petulia 9 217
Pfeiffer' Michelle, 101, 102, 356, 357 "Psycho Killer," 266
Phantom of the Paradise, 264 Public Enemy, The, 101, 103
Philip, John Van Ness, 210 Puccini, Giacomo, 278, 379
Phillips, Sian, 286 Pull My Daisy, 261
367
Piccoli, Michel, 325, 366, Puri, Amrish, 176
"Piece of Sky, A," 86 Purple Rain, 213-17
Piedmont, Leon (pseud.), 334 Purple Rain (album), 213, 215
Pierrot le Fou, 229, 230 Purple Rose of Cairo, The, 335-40
Pietrek, Nicholas, 372 Pursuit ofD. B. Cooper, The, 72, 73
Pigs, 98 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 250-51
Pinchot, Bronson, 288 Puttnam, David, 277-79
Pink Panther pictures, The, 154, Pynchon, Thomas, 219
305
Pinon, Dominique, 46 Quaid, Dennis, 65, 231, 232, 233
Pinter, Harold, 14-15 Quan, Ke Huy, 176, 181
Pitchford, Dean, 139 "Que Pasa, U.S.A.?," 103
Place, Mary Kay, 69, 70 Quinlan, Kathleen, 21, 281
Places in the Heart, 246-49, 319
Play It As It Lays, 362 Racing with the Moon, 151-53, 315
Playboy, 91, 92 Radosh, Ronald, 41, 44
Plummer, Amanda, 42, 43 Raft, George, 103, 298
Plummer, Christopher, 231, 233, 234 Raggedy Man, 91, 204
Pocketful of Miracles, 123 Raging Bull, 103
Poe, Edgar Allan, 34, 237 Ragtime (novel), 25
Poitier, Sidney, 273 Ragtime, 87
Police, The, 284 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 4, 116, 163,
Pollack, Sydney, 70, 222; dir., 176, 177, 179, 182, 217
Tootsie, 16, 70, 193, 222, 234; Raimondi, Ruggero, 254, 256
Absence of Malice, 78; They Shoot Rambo: First Blood Part H, 374-75
Horses, Don't They?, 81; The Ramis, Harold, 192
Electric Horseman, 157 Rand, Sally, 66
Pom-Pom Girls, The, 232 Randolph, John, 378, 379
Pontecorvo, Gillo, 74; dir.. The Battle Random Harvest, 110, 332
of Algiers, 74, 278; Bum!, 74 Rashomon, 161, 204
Pope of Greenwich Village, The, Rattigan, Terrence, 15
201-206 Rauch, Earl Mac, 217, 218-19, 220
Popeye, 284 Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan, 55-59

398
Ray, Satyajit, 301, 380-82; dir. Right Stuff, The, 61-68, 233
Father Panchali, 98, 380; The Riley, Jack, 111
Home and the World (Ghare- Riley, Larry, 273
Baire), 380-82; The World of Rimbaud, Arthur, 375
Apu, 380 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 250
Reading, Bertice, 46 Ringwald, Molly, 173, 174, 347, 348
Real Life, 344 Risky Business, 39-41, 122
Rear Window, 188, 264 Ritchie, Michael, 15-18, 159; dir., The
Rebecca, 111 Survivors, 15-18, 159; Smile, 16;
Rebel Without a Cause, 140, 347 Downhill Racer, 16; The
Redford, Robert, 169-70, 171, 240; Candidate, 16; The Bad News
dir.. Ordinary People, 40, 97, 314 Bears, 16; Semi-Tough, 16
Redgrave, Michael, 22 Ritt, Martin, 55-59; dir., Cross
Redgrave, Vanessa, 167, 209 Creek, 55-59; Norma Rae, 56
Reds, 24 Riva, J. Michael, 219
Reed, Jerry, 16, 18 River, The (1984), 319
Reed, Pamela, 65 Roach, Janet, 379
Reeve, Christopher, 8, 10, 11, 39, Road series (Crosby and Hope), The,
210 5, 177
Reeve, Geoffrey, 371 Road to Morocco, The, 180
Reggiani, Serge, 52 Road Warrior, The, 22
Reiner, Carl, 1-3, 220-24; dir.. The Robards, Jason, 361
Man with Two Brains, 1-3, 222; Roberts, Eric, 91, 202, 203-204
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, 2; The Roberts, Tanya, 222, 368
Jerk, 2, 3; All of Me, 220-24, 265 Robertson, CHff, 263
Reinhold, Judge, 189, 288 Robeson, Paul, 43
Reinking, Ann, 304, 305 Robinson, Bill, 294
Reisz, Karel, 72; dir.. Who'll Stop Robinson, Bruce, 275
the Rain, 362 Robinson, Dar, 369
Reitman, Ivan, 192-94; dir., Robinson, Edward G.; 103
Ghostbusters, 192-94; Stripes, Robinson, Phil Alden, 221
192, 193; Meatballs, 192 Robson, Wayne, 31
Remar, James, 295 Rocha, Glauber, 355
Remembrances of Things Past, 237 Rockolf, Al, 275, 276, 277
Remsen, Bert, 247 Rocky, 6, 35, 36, 169, 325
Renoir, Jean, 85 Rocky H, 6, 35, 169
Repo Man, 211-13, 262, 348 Rocky HI, 6, 35, 169
Requiem, 252 Rodeo, 98
Return of the Jedi, 9 Rodgers, Ilona, 242
Return of the Secaucv^ 7, 70, 71 Rogers, Ginger, 110-11, 178
Return of the Soldier, The, 330-33, Rohmer, Eric, 34, 37-39; dir.,
371 Pauline at the Beach, 37-39; Le
Reve, Gerard, 195 Beau Mariage, 37
Rey, Alejandro, 157, 158 Rolling Stones, The, 69
Reynolds, Burt, 153, 238, 288, Rollins, Howard E., Jr., 272, 273
368-69; dir.. Stick, 368-69 Romancing the Stone, 163-65
Reynolds, Jonathan, 305 Romantic Comedy, 129, 168
Rhodes, Cynthia, 36 Romeo and Juliet (1968), 226
Rich and Famous, 89 Romero, George A., 232, 324
Richardson, Henry Hobson, 292 Room at the Top, 114
Richardson, Lee, 377 Room Service, 112
Richardson, Ralph, 149-50, 371 Roque, Tex, 79, 81
Richter, W. D. (Rick), 217-20 Rose, Jamie, 353
Ride the High Country, 330 Rosenberg, Harold, 41
Riesner, Dean, 307 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 41, 44
Rif, Vladimir, 155 Rosenberg, Stuart, 201-206; dir.. The

399
Rosenberg, Stuart (cont'd.): Sands, Julian, 277
Pope of Greenwich Village, Santana, Arnaldo, 102
201-206; Brubaker, 217 Saraband, 253
Rosenberg File, The, 41, 44 Sarandon, Chris, 203
Rosenthal, Jack, 89 Sarandon, Susan, 289
Rosette, 38 Saturday Evening Post, 177-78, 235
Rosher, Charles, 282 Saturday Night Fever, 35, 36, 376
Rosi, Francesco, 226, 253-57; dir.. Sayles, John, 70, 71
Three Brothers, 226; Bizet's Scarface (1932), 100-101, 102, 103, 104
Carmen, 226, 253-57 Scarface (1983), 100-106
Ross, Annie, 8 Scarfiotti, Ferdinando, 104
Ross, Diana, 218-19 Scarwid, Diana, 110
Ross, Herbert, 139-41; dir.. Pennies Schanberg, Sydney, 274-79
from Heaven, 2, 337; The Schepisi, Fred, 160-63; dir.,
Turning Point, 89; Footloose, Barbarosa, 30; Iceman, 160-63; The
139-41, 169, 220 Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 243
Rossi, Leo, 80 Schepps, Shawn, 152
Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio, 153, 379 Schifrin, Lalo, 334
Rota, Nino, 54 Schlesinger, John, 92, 311-15, 318;
Roth, Bobby, 349-53; dir., dir.. Darling, 92; The Falcon and
Heartbreakers, 349-53; The Boss' the Snowman, 311-15; An
Son, 351 Englishman Abroad (TV), 311,
Roth, Lillian, 216 313; The Day of the Locust, 315;
Rotunno, Giuseppe, 54 Marathon Man, 315
Rourke, Mickey, 202-203, 204 Schlondorff, Volker, 237
Roussel, Myriem, 228 Schmidt, Harvey, 249
Royal Hunt of the Sun, The, 250 Schoeffling, Michael, 173
Ruben, Joseph, 231-34; dir., Scorsese, Martin, 47, 48, 166, 202,
Dreamscape, 231-34; The 203; dir.. New York, New York,
Sister-in-Law, 232; The Pom-Pom 47, 166, 167, 219; Raging Bull,
Girls, 232; Joyride, 232; Our 103; The King of Comedy, 123;
Winning Season, 232 Mean Streets, 201, 204; Taxi
Rubinek, Saul, 147 Driver, 344
Rudolph, Alan, 288-90, 351; dir., Scott, Donovan, 225
Choose Me, 288-90; Welcome to Scott, Randolph, 9
LA 288 Scott, Ridley, 30, 188; dir., The
Rumble Fish, 104, 120, 296, 310 Duellists, 30; Blade Runner, 141,
Runyon, Damon, 122-23 358; Alien, 188
Rush, Deborah, 337 SCTV, 142, 143
Rush, Richard, 11 Sea Gull, The, 127
Ruskin, John, 373 Season in Hell, A, 375
Russell, Chuck, 232 Seems Like Old Times, 166
Russell, Jane, 368 Segal, George, 369
Russell, Ken, 252 Seger, Bob, 39
Russell, Kurt, 107, 108, 110, 165, Seidelman, Susan, 354-55; dir.,

168, 334, 335 Desperately Seeking Susan,

Russell, Shirley, 333 354-55; Smithereens, 354, 355
Russell, Willy, 84 Selleck, Tom, 70, 164
Sellers, Peter, 154, 301, 305
Sabu, 180 Semi-Tough, 16
"St. Elsewhere," 272 Semple, Lorenzo, Jr., 225
Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 110 Sennett, Mack, 102
Saire, Rebecca, 372 Seresin, Michael, 317
Sakuma, Yoshiko, 327 Serling, Rod, 18, 19, 20
Salieri, Antonio, 249-53 Servant, The, 303
Salkind, Alexander and Ilya, 11 Seven Brides for SevQn Brothers, 320
Sandino, Augusto Cesar, 74 Seventh Heaven, 307

400
 A

Shadow Box, The, 279-80 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
Shaffer, Anthony, 250 191
Shaffer, Peter, 249, 250, 251 "Soap," 94
Shakespeare, WiUiam, 115, 241, 242, Soeteman, Gerard, 195
244, 305 Soffel, Kate, 290-93
Shampoo, 77 Soldier of Fortune, 375
Shatner, Wilham, 197 Soldier of Orange, 194, 358
Shaw, George Bernard, 40, 259 Soldier's Play, A, 271
Shawn, Wallace, 122, 210 Soldier's Story, A, 211-1
Sheedy, Ally, 347, 348-49 Sommer, Josef, 109
Sheena, 224-26 Song of the South, 20
Shelton, Ron, 73, 77 Song to Remember, A, 250
Shepard, Alan, 65 Sonnenfeld, Barry, 325
Shepard, Sam, 61, 62, 66, 235, 236 Sontag, Susan, 24
Shepherd, Cybill, 344 Soutendijk, Renee, 195
Sherlock Jr., 337, 340 Southern, Terry, 73
Shima, Koji, 327 Spacehunter, 173
Shining, The, 322 Spacek, Sissy, 37, 91
Shoot the Moon, 58, 200 Spain, 255
Shooting Party, The, 369-73 Sparkle, 296
Shop Around the Comer, The, 281 Speaking in Tongues, 267
Shull, Richard B., 143, 154 Spencer, Scott, 263
Siegel, Don, 240; dir., The Invasion Spetters, 195
of the Body Snatchers (1956), 187; Spielberg, Steven, 18, 19, 20, 22, 164,
Dirty Harry, 240 175-82, 188, 190, 326; dir.. Raiders
Silkwood, Karen, 106-10 of the Lost Ark, 4, 116, 163, 176,
Silkwood, 106-11, 325 177, 179, 182, 217; Twilight Zone
Silver, Ron, 109 —The Movie (co-dir.), 18-23; Jaws,
Silvia Gutierrez, Zaide, 130 22, 182;E.T The Extra-
Simon, Frangois, 125 Terrestnal, 57, 163, 182, 188;
Simon, Neil, 129, 358 1941, 140, 164, 177; Indiana Jones
Sinatra, Frank, 205, 307 and the Temple of Doom, 175-82,
Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 85, 86, 87, 234; Close Encounters of the
88, 89, 373 Third Kind, 182
Singer, Lori, 139, 140, 315 Splash, 141-45, 157, 163, 265
Singin in the Rain, 338
'
Splendor in the Grass, 347
Sister-in-Law, The, 232 Splet, Alan, 100
Sixteen Candles, 173-75, 347, 348 Spottiswoode, Roger, 71-78; dir..
Skelton, Red, 1 Under Fire, 71-78, 119; Terror
Skipworth, Alison, 338 Train, 72; The Pursuit ofD. B.
Slaughterhouse-Five, 253 Cooper, 72, 73
Sleuth, 250 Springsteen, Bruce, 215
Slight Case of Murder, A, 123 Stack, Robert, 117
Slither, 217 Stallone, Sylvester, 34-37, 116, 374,
Smash Palace, 184, 242 375; dir.. Rocky II, 6, 35, 169;
Smeaton, Bruce, 161 Rocky III, 6, 35, 169; Staying
Smile, 16 Alive, 34-37, 169
Smilin' Through, 173 Stanley, Kim, 62
Smith, C. Aubrey, 150 Stanton, Harry Dean, 212
Smith, Charles Martin, 98-99 Stanwyck, Barbara, 107
Smith, Lewis, 218 Star 80, 91-92, 204
Smith, Liz, 341, 342 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,
Smith, Madolyn, 222, 224 197-98
Smith, Maggie, 341, 342 Star Trek III: The Search for
Smith, Paul L., 284 Spock, 196-98
Smithereens, 354, 355 Star Wars, 217
Snider, Paul, 91, 92 Star Wars trilogy, 177

401
Stark, Cecillia, 262 Tagore, Rabindranath, 380
Starman, 306-308 "Take Me to the River," 267
Starrett, Charles, 338 Talking Heads, 265-67
Starstruck, 292 Tammes, Fred, 371
"Stayin' Alive," 36 Tandy, Jessica, 210
Staying Alive, 34-37, 169 Tangerine Dream, 39, 278
Steel Helmet, The, 181 Tanizaki, Junichiro, 327, 329
Steenburgen, Mary, 56, 57 Tanner, Alain, 137
Stella Dallas, 111 Tarzan of the Apes, 148
Stephenson, Pamela, 8 "Taxi," 16, 93, 197
Stern, Isaac, 125 Taxi Driver, 344
Stevie, 332 Taylor, Elizabeth, 357
Stewart, Bill, 76 Taylor, Robert, 358
Stick, 368-69 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilich, 153
Sting (Gordon Sumner), 284 Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, 153-54
Stokowski, Leopold, 154 Techine, Andre, 48; dir., French
Stone, Oliver, 100, 102, 103, 105 Provincial, 48; Barocco, 48
Stop Making Sense, 265-67, 327 Tempest, 173
Stoppa, Paolo, 52 Tender Mercies, 246, 280
Stoppard, Tom, 326 Tennant, Victoria, 221, 223-24
Stranger Than Paradise, 260-63 Terms of Endearment, 93-97, 246,
Stratten,, Dorothy, 91-92 338
Straus, Emile, 254 Terror Train, 72
Straw Dogs, 72 Testament, 146
Streep, Meryl, 106-107, 108, 110-11, "Testament of Youth," 371
170, 279, 280, 281 Tharp, Twyla, 34, 252-53
Streisand, Barbra, 85-91 That Sinking Feeling, 269
Stripes, 192, 193 They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, 81
Strode, Woody, 361-62 Thief 146
Stroker Ace, 153 Thief of Bagdad, The, 98, 180
Stunt Man, The, 11 Third Man, The, 194, 195, 196
Sturges, Preston, 12, 153, 154, 345, "This Is Not America," 314
346; dir.. The Lady Eve, 12, 222; "This Is One of Those Moments," 86
Unfaithfully Yours (1948), 153, Thomas, Anna, 130-32
154 Thomas, D. M., 250
Stuyck, Joris, 373 Thomas, Diane, 163
Suchet, David, 315 Thomas, Dylan, 83
Sudden Impact, 120-21, 240 Thomas, Michael, 357
Sullavan, Margaret, 281 Thomas, Trevor, 225
"Summer Wind," 205 Thomerson, Tim, 117
Sunday Times (London), 275 Thorin, Donald, 146, 214
Superman, 8, 10, 225, 357 Three Brothers, 226
Superman II, 8, 225 Three Musketeers, The (1973), 9
Superman 7-12, 225
III, Three Stooges, the, 202
Survivors, The, 15-18, 159 Threepenny Opera, The, 366
Suschitzky, Peter, 279 Threshold, 236
Suzman, Janet, 31 Throne of Blood, 244
Svoboda, Josef, 252 Tidy, Frank, 28, 30, 334
Swain, Jon, 275, 277 Tightrope, 238-40
Swan, The, 111 Tilly, Meg, 70-71
Swann in Love, 237 Time, 335
Swayze, Patrick, 119 Time, The, 215, 216
"Sweet Georgia Brown," 112 To Be or Not To Be (1942), 111
Swing Shift, 165-69 To Be or Not To Be (1983), 111-12
Sylvester, Harold, 117 To Kill a Mockingbird, 248
Sylvia Scarlett, 86 Tokyo Olympiad, 327

402
Tom Tom Club, The, 267 Van Patten, Joyce, 313
Tomlin, Lily, 221, 222, 223, 224 Variety, 160
Tomlinson, John, 253 Vaughn, Robert, 8, 9, 11
"Tomorrow Night," 86 Vazak, P. H., see Towne, Robert
Tootsie, 16, 70, 193, 222, 234 Verdi, Giuseppe, 54, 379
Topo, El, 164 Verdict, The, 42
Topper, 221-22 Verhoeven, Paul, 194-96; dir.. The
Torn, Rip, 57, 58 4th Man, 194-96; Soldier of
Toto, 285 Orange, 194, 358; Spetters, 195
Tourneur, Jacques, 145 Vernette, Tevaite, 186
Towne, Robert, 148, 150, 168, 170 Vertigo, 264
Towne, Roger, 170 Victory March, 137
Townsend, Robert, 273 View to a Kill, A, 368
Toy, The, 357 Vigard, Kristen, 18
Trading Places, 12-14, 192 Village Voice, 91
Tradition of the New, The, 41 Villalpando, David, 130
Trainor, Mary Ellen, 164 ViUiers, James, 200
Trash, 262 Vilmorin, Louise de, 55
Travolta, John, 35, 36, 263, 376 Visconti, Luchino, 50-55, 226, 356;
Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 38, 74, 77, dir.. The Leopard, 50-55; Death in
78 Venice, 126, 226
Truffaut, Frangois, 149; dir., The Vitold, Michel, 126, 127
Wild Child, 149; Jules and Jim, Vlady, Marina, 228
183 Volpone, 34, 342
Tucci, Maria, 44 Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr., 316
Tuggle, Richard, 238-40 von Sternberg, Josef, 214, 374; dir.,
Turandot, 278 Anatahan, 374
Turman, Glynn, 189 von Sydow, Max, 231, 233
Turner, Kathleen, 3, 163, 164, 165, Voyagis, Yorgo, 259
167, 376, 378
Turning Point, The, 89 Wagner, Richard, 153
Tutin, Dorothy, 370, 373 Waite, Ric, 120
Twain, Mark, 357, 358 Waits, Tom, 230, 288
"Twilight Zone, The," 18-23, 109 Walken, Christopher, 368
Twilight Zone— The Movie, 18-23, Wallace, Anzac, 241, 244
188, 232, 344 Wallace, Earl W., 320
2001: A Space Odyssey, 64 Walsh, M. Emmet, 204, 323, 325
Walter, Jessica, 310-11
Ullmann, Liv, 321, 367 Walter, Tracey, 212
Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The, 85 Walters, Julie, 83, 84
Uncommon Valor, 116-20 Wanderers, The, 63
Under Fire, 71-78, 119 War and Peace, 89
Under the Volcano, 198-201 "War of the Worlds, The," 218
Unfaithfully Yours (1948), 153, 154 Ward, Fred, 66, 67, 109, 117, 120, 166
Unfaithfully Yours (1984), 153-55, Ward, Rachel, 145, 146, 147
344 Warden, Jack, 77
Unmarried Woman, An, 108, 135 Warner, David, 3
Up in Smoke, 283 Warner Brothers, 184, 295-96
Urban Cowboy, 95, 222 Warren, Lesley Ann, 289
Used Cars, 164, 212 Warriors, The, 233
Utu, 240-46 Warshow, Robert, 41, 105
Washington, Denzel, 272
Vallee, Rudy, 338 Wass, Ted, 225
Valley Girl, 318 Wasson, Craig, 263, 265
Romolo, 52
Valli, Waters, Ethel, 294
Vangelis, 172, 186, 278 Waterston, Sam, 275, 276

403
Watkin, David, 90 Winger, Debra, 94-95, 107, 338, 348
Watson, Doc, 247 Wings of the Dove, The, 206
Wayborn, Kristina, 4 Wisconsin Death Trip, 30-31
Wayne, Carol, 350 Witliff, William D., 234
Wayne, John, 9, 117-18, 238, 239, Witness, 319-23
375 Witt, Alicia Roanne, 286
Weaver, Sigourney, 167, 193, 194 Wiz, The, 217
Webber, Timothy, 30 Wizard of Oz, The, 177
Weekend, 212, 227 Wolfe, Tom, 61, 62, 66, 67
Weil, Simone, 107 Wolfit, Donald, 114, 200
Weill, Kurt, 366 Wood, John, 337, 338, 356, 358
Weinberger, Ed, 129 Woodard, Alfre, 56, 58
Weingrod, Herschel, 12 Woodhouse, Barbara, 4
dir.. The
Weir, Peter, 74, 319-23; Woods, James, 145, 146, 361
Year of Living Dangerously, 74; World According to Garp, The, 22
Witness, 319-23 World ofApu, The, 380
Welcome to L.A., 288 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 197
Weld, Tuesday, 362, 363
Weller, Peter, 217 Yates, Cassie, 154
Welles, Orson, 35, 218, 326; dir.. Yates, Peter, 113-16; dir.. The
Citizen Kane, 24, 179, 216 Dresser, 113-16, 200; Breaking
Wells, Hubert, 225 Away, 309
Wertmiiller, Lina, 365 Yeager, Chuck, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66,
West, Lockwood, 113 67
West, Rebecca, 330, 331, 332 Year of Living Dangerously, The,
Weymouth, Tina, 266 74
Whale, James, 161 Yearling, The, 57, 59
Wharton, William (pseud.), 316 Yentl, 85-91
What Have I Done to Deserve This!, "Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy," 85, 86, 87,
364-66 88, 89
"When Doves Cry," 215 Yoshinaga, Sayuri, 327
When I Think of Russia, 155 Young, Burt, 204
"Whiffenpoof Song, The," 338 Young, Dalene, 58
White Cargo, 351 Young, Loretta, 337
White Dawn, The, 63 Young, Roland, 221, 222
White Heat, 106 Young, Sean, 286
Whitemore, Hugh, 332, 333 Young Doctors in Love, 310
Whitman, Walt, 299, 300 Young Frankenstein, 2, 286
Who'll Stop the Rain, 362 Yulin, Harris, 102
Widmark, Richard, 146, 233
Wiest, Dianne, 281, 282, 338 Zaillian, Steven, 313
Wild Bunch, The, 164 Zavattini, Cesare, 26
Wild Child, The, 149 Franco, 226, 254; dir.,
Zeffirelli,
Wilde, Oscar, 370 Romeo and Juliet (1968), 226
Williams, Clarence, HI, 216 Zelig, 23-27
Williams, Esther, 321 Zemeckis, Robert, 163-65, 212; dir.,
WiUiams, JoBeth, 69 Romancing the Stone, 163-65; /
WiUiams, John, 181 Wanna Hold Your Hand, 164;
Williams, Robin, 15, 16, 17, 18, 156, Used Cars, 164, 212
158, 159, 190, 304 Zieff, Howard, 153-55; dir..

Williamson, Nicol, 114 Unfaithfully Yours (1984),

Willis, Gordon, 338, 339 153-55, 344; Private Benjamin,
Wilson, Michael G., 4, 368 166, 167, 344; Slither, 217
Wilson, Scott, 65 Zoetrope Studios, 29

404
 "The title of this book is a deliberate break with my
sexually tinged titles of the past. It seemed time for
a change; this has not been a period for anything
like Grand Passions. I hope that State of the Art
will sound ominous and sweeping and just slightly
clinical. In the last few years, the term has been
applied to movies as the highest praise for their up-
to-the-minute special effects or their sound or ani-
mation; it has been used to celebrate just about all
the technological skills that go into a production.
But what I try to get at in this collection of reviews
from June 1983 to July 1985 is the state of the art
of moviemaking."
—from the Author's Note

12.1S 01ESfl-37a A DUTTON PAPERBACK ISBN: D-S25-Maiat-T