VOLUME 09 - NUMBER 05 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1973

ing as if paralyzed by her mi xture of hazards of translation back! ) than the constitute some sort of a total statement beauty and mastery. And the orgiastic crowd. His last three films celebrate (as Renoir 'S THE RULES OF THE GAME is dances before the God of Love (or Lust) heroes who , far from untainted by their sometimes thought to be) , it WOUld , I are vividly orchestrated (albeit handi- societies (rather than by themselves suspect , be as abundant in con tradictory capped , on its shrunken scale , by its alone), achieve a certain integrity. The destinies as Vidor' s episodes . If Vidor has archaic attachment to silent-era tableau- first rides out beyond the barbed wire , often been puritanically dismissive of piles of caressing couples and waving the second ricochets th ro ugh a variety films w hich I admire , it is perhaps be- arms). In the climax , Solomon ' s smaller of temptations to achieve a mature ro- cause transcendental or common-sense force dooms a larger army by burnishing manticism (perhaps socially responsible , sy mpathies have required or enabled him its shields until the sun dazzle lures the perhaps more pri vate ), and the third , to adapt to co ntrary truths , in an alm ost charging cavalry into a hastily dug cre- identifying himself with his people , Blake an way . A \" negati ve capabili- vasse . Thus the genre 's de rigeur miracle sacrifices his happiness to its destiny. ty \" -disc iplined , however brutally , by is rematerialized into the result of human Each man has his own path-his own star. Hollywood and the public-asserted itself effort, which , neither orthodox nor athe- against his moral affirmations, not des- istic , also divinizes the deployment of None of these periods excludes pow- troying them , but advancing, enriching, human intelligence and effort. Insofar as erful undercurrents and impulses trium- broadening them . transcendentalism accommodates other phant in the others . And Vidor's more moral systems as developments towards personal themes have interacted with a As we have intimated , OUR DAILY BREAD itself, Vidor prefers to acknowledge the sometimes profound , sometimes merely occupies an infinitely fascinating position valid aspects of, and the liberating inter- professional or playful , response to a somewhere between a co llective fa rm stices within , what one might describe as varie ty of genres , cycle s, themes , and story , an anarcho-syndicalist populism , a preliminary ethical codes. collaborators, not to mention Hollywood 's \" verti cal \" corporatism as fa vo red by cer- constantly evolving collective iconog- tain right-wing thinkers, and New Deal 'Envoi raphy . Without denying the existence of eclecticism . Although Vidor is sometimes the Puritan strain to whic h Frenc h critics supposed to have \" gone it alone \" in his Since our notes concern only eight- have rightly pointed , we have empha- social consciousness, the American cin- teen of Vidor's fifty-four major pictures, sized that Vidor's transcendentalism was with his earlier films particularly under- at least as open to that pragmatism which ema of the Thirties and Forties was more represented , a general survey of his looms so large in the American climate , extensively a cinema of social problems career would seem hazardous. But per- and which affected Vidor's sense of what than many historians, using documentary haps it's useful to propose four main was reasonably possible, both for himself pieties as their yardstick , have recalled periods, at least within our ambit. as a Hollywood artist , and for his charac- (o n this point I would agree wi th Le wis • Between THE BIG PARADE and OUR DAILY ters in their situations . Jacobs , Positif, and The Velvet Light BREAD (and intermittently thereafter), his Trap , whatever divergencies mig ht arise dominant note is of an affirmative moral Transcendentalism and pragmatism about the interpretation and evaluation of optimism , and a desire to indicate ways alike are notably undogmatic and adap- indivi dual films , or about how freely and in which, whatever his worldly success , tive creeds, particularly when combined in w hich ways audiences were prepared the ordinary individual can transcend his with an indivi dualism whereby each man to think from the individual story to the social conte xt, without losing his sense must follow his own moral destiny. Each general case .) Later , Vidor , without re- of belonging to family or nation as wider of these creeds has its \" carnivorous \" and jecting social preoccupations, also ab- moral community. its \" herbivoro us \" forms ; its reformist. stained from the motley pieties whic h • After OUR DAILY BREAD , Vidor 's attempt responsible aspects and its laissez-faire enabled almost everybody to cash in on to escape Hollywood 's tightening grip , his ones; its moral uses and its abuses. Since all the confusions between the New Deal emphasis switches to a rediscovery of a Vidor believes that each man must work and a plus c; a change optimism . And sense of moral achievement within an his own destiny as he is placed , he must although I can 't claim to have carried out existing personal situation and an exist- inevitably give seemingly contradictory the thorough research which ought to ing social conte xt which is generally en- answers , so that , like Whitman , he \" con- justify such a claim , I suspect that Vidor, dorsed , albeit conscious parado x is tains multitudes.\" But where Vidor ac- in abstaining from these pieties , touched sometimes converted into a low-key en- cepts popular equivocations or assump- on many themes and attitudes which oth- thusiasm . tions , it is usually in an attempt to push erwise we re slurred over. One can often • After conflicts over AN AMERICAN RO- things to the point of a spiritual crisis. learn more, faster, from one's spiritual MANCE, the emphasis shifts to a criticism And , ambivalent as the ans wers may be , antagonists than from allies who agree of the social order and its widespread this puts him among Hollywood 's serious with one a little too quickly . personal cynicism (THE FOUNTAINHEAD ) artists-serious in terms of exploring the combines a bleak view of contemporary contradictions of felt experiences, not of In their January 1966 issue (No . 66), society with a somewhat desperate re- providing cut-and-dried moralities-and Positif lists Vidor as one of Goldwater's version to an inspirationalist mode. distinct from the ruck of monotonous supporters (admittedly in the same list by • Vidor's last two films allow a mellowed , artists like Hawks and nonartists like inc lusion in wh ich Ford seems to have or chastened , transcendentalism to postwar Walsh . been hurt ). In reviewing WAR AND PEACE reach their natural conclusion by tracing in No . 39 , May 1961 , a Positifist raises the individual 's development within con- The tensions among vitalism , elitism , the issue of Vidor's incipient Fascism , te xts as \" un-American \" as barbed-wired anarchism, social concerns, and a gen- which I have not raised here . Before America had become . In a Positif inter- eral audience consensus (as opposed to dism issing it out of hand as absolutely view he observed that over the years his a Hollywood consensus) are quite likely unthinkable, we should remember how hopes had shifted from all the individuals to result in shifting answers , and Vidor ' s many worthwhile arists have in fact in the crowd to individuals who \" are work , as a whole , is enriched by them . moved in some such direction : Carlyle worth more \" (or \" deserve more\" -the Only superficially chameleonic , its con- (not without influence on Emerson), tradictions provoke responses of a kind Pound, Shaw, Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, which must go beyond intellectual drill Henry Williamson . But if there are only and require intuiti ve response to the in- indefinite boundaries among later popu- definables of style , gesture and tone , and lism , McCarthyism . Goldwaterism and the incommensurables of differing con- Agnewism , the boundaries are equally te xts . Even if he had had the opportunity indefinite among the party as vanguard to produce the one work which would of the proletariat, the bureaucracy as FILM COMMENT 49

oligarchy , and a party secretary as Dicta- mittently carnivorous pragmatism asserts character by society is concerned) tor. Even democracy may be a tyranny itself rather more nakedly than in Emer- to its minorities . And while Vidor is clearly son 's smoothly idyllic prose, but largely Losey. of the right rather than the left, the line because one can see Vidor's attempt to between right- and left-wing anarcho-in- adapt Emersonian principles to a radical- To Emerson 's, Whitman 's, and Vidor's dividualism is no clearer than that be- ly changing America . If Vidor is the tween Socialism in one country and Na- humbler artist , it is because he must expansionist \" optimism of the intelli- tional Socialism , or between Labor and contend with two sorts of moral equivo- Liberal center. Most people 's political cations-those which underlie transcen- gence, optimism of the will ,\" one may opinions, far from remaining within one dentalism, and those which underlie the political quadrant, would form a kind of often brutal pragmatism of two kinds of prefer Franju 's interpretation of a left- amorphous mass moving in different di- consensus: the audience and the Hol- rections simultaneously across several of lywood-which , as Vidor was never tired wing slogan : \" pessimism of the intelli- the usual boundaries, sending out of insisting , were not at all the same pseudopods and then retracti ng them , things . But it is precisely this conflict gence , optimism of the will. \" Critical as seeing no farther than a few particular which brings out the contradictions that issues or crises-especially when per- turn entertainment, or conformist art, into the preceding exploration of Vidor's films sonal temperaments are as regularly at something whose subversive impulse, issue as the y are in art . whether or not it is finally contained , is has been , it isn 't, I hope , merely histori- not altogether obliterated, and that make Forsyth Hardy (in conversation) in- it all the more profound . Thus NORTHWEST cal , or nostalgic , or an attempt to disen- terestingly initiated a comparison be- PASSAGE leaves one with a worse con- tween John Grierson , with his mixture of science than DRUM S ALONG THE MOHAWK . tangle and so eradicate a bracing ambi- bureaucratic paternalism and individual DUEL IN THE SUN leaves one uneasy about responsibility, and the impulse behind America where GILDA reduces its poten- va lence . OUR DAILY BREAD . In Grierson the Scots tial criticism of capitalism to a thing about Puritan , one can perhaps see a compli- a gang of crooks . RUBY GENTRY is radical- There are seeds of ecological con- catedly complementary figure to the ly critical while GIANT leaves one as drow- dare-to-be-a-Daniel, one-plus-one ethos sily complacent as a good dinner, brandy sciousness in MAN WITHOUT A STAR . Vidor , of OUR DAILY BREAD , and the emphasis on and cigars. pragmatically effective (rather than dem- at least, never forgot the dangers of the ocratically scrupulous) leadership which In a sense , Vidor is a latter-day Whit- appears elsewhere. My own feeling is that man whose faith in nature, man , dust bowl. THE FOUNTAINHEAD , even in its John McAdam , in his notes on THE FOUN- progress, and America can with increas- TAINHEAD , indicates Vidor ' s position well ing difficulty sustain unhappier and more wrongward-facing way , protests against enough, with individualism itself under- complex terms . One could play the quo- mining the implicit movement towards tation-as-subtitle game. For Vidor's the collusion of big business, intellectual any political fortification of the individu- thrice-repeated image of a naked new- alist's ascendancy. The overall move- born babe, \" There was a child went fashion , mass media control , and an apa- ment is of withdrawal , rather than ad- forth .. .. \" For OUR DAILY BREAD , \" fiber of vance. Obviously , involvement in , or manly wheat\" (or, from Emerson , \" the thetic ci tizenry . There , and in THE CITADEL, disengagement from , partly Populist des- running river and the rustling corn\"). For potisms (Prohibition , McCarthyism) might NORTHWEST PASSAGE , \" I will sing a song Vidor celebrates direct action . If the Ayn coexist with sympathy, antipathy, or of companionship ,\" or \"A March in the apathy towards civil rights issues as for- Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Un- Rand film inspired some loony left-winger mulated through the Sixties. The difficul- known .\" For DUEL IN THE SUN. \" The wildest ties are indicated in Stevens's GIANT, to blow up London ' s Centre Point ,' with- when tycoon Rock Hudson rolls up his and the bloodiest is over, and all is sleeves to dispute , in a man-to-man fash- peace .\" For THE FOUNTAINHEAD , \" The dal- out hurting anybody, except a few guard ion , the diner proprietor's civil right to liance of the eagles .\" For MAN WITHOUT deny a Negro his civil right to be free from A STAR , \" 0 powerful fallen Western dogs provided by a commercial security discrimi nation . Vidor 's special antiracism star.... \" For here the New World has might complicate that matter even further become the Old , a criss-cross of barbed company , I might well feel a certain re- for him . His elitism concludes in with- wire . drawal because, though he has de- freshment of the spirit. And the thorough- spaired of the crOWd , his love of freedom As Vidor-Dempsey rides away from remains; and if (to borrow Frank Lloyd America there dawns the era of pseudo- ly constructive destruction of THE CITADEL Wright's contrast) genius must repudiate overmuch concern for the \" mob- aliberal mild conservatism la George is the highest form of terrorism. There 's ocracy,\" it also resigns control over any- thing but itself and its own works. Vidor Stevens, to be rapidly succeeded by the more in that 1937 script that matters , seems to me to have observed this logic tormented liberalism of Elia Kazan , until with a scrupulousness, and a discipline, he too cedes to Penn , Peckinpah , Siegel , now, in 1973, than in all Peckinpah 's and an absence of inhumanity (a longside et aI., in whom the issue of law-and-order a certain ferocity), which deserves intel- vs . violence looms ominously large , as equivocal angst over the \" problem \" of lectual and artistic respect. even in Kubrick. It seems as if mainly stony ground remained to receive the w hether violence is nasty or \" ever\" His affinities with Frank Lloyd Wright seeds of serious social criticism scat- return us to the transcendental theme. tered by such films as MIDNIGHT COWBOY, justified . The violence of accepted ambi- For Emerson 's Essays comprise an ad- PETULlA, UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE , and mirable commentary on Vidor's work .' KLUTE . How one regrets the cut-and- valence and surmounted tragedy that And Vidor's work constantly returns the thrust a freer Hollywood might have al- compliment, precisely because an inter- lowed between Vidor and Kazan (whose flows throughout Vidor's work , in THE affinities we have observed earlier), a less flaccid Stevens, a more topical Wyler, CHAMP as in RUBY GENTRY, makes Mar- and (particularly where the formation of cuse 's own idealism look thoroughly one- 'Consider the following observations, chosen al- most at rand o m from an apparently infinite supp ly : THE CROWO : \" Our strength grows out of our weakness ... A great man is always ready to be little ... 0 poet! ... though thou shouldst walk the world over, th ou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.\" NORTHWEST PASSAG E: \" Life wears to me a vision- ary face . Hardest, roughest action is visionary also . It is but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams .\" THE FOUNTAINHEAO: \" And truly it deserves some- thing Godlike in him who has cas t off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a task-master . High be his heart , faithful his wil l, c lear his sight , that he may in good earnest be doctr ine , society , law to himself , that a simp le purpose may be as strong as iron necessity is to others .. . Th e sinews and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous desponding whimperers . .. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state , but we see that most natures are insolvent; cannot satisfy their own wants , have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force. \" MAN WITHOUT A STA R: \" We aim at a petty end , quite aside from the public good, but our act arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a line with the pole of the world ,\" WAR AND PEACE : \" There is no virt ue which is final ; all are initial. The vi rtue s of society are the vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discove ry that we c ast away our virtues , or what we have always esteemed such , into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices. \" SOLOMON AND SHEBA: \" High er natures overpow- er lower ones by affecti ng them with a certai n sleep. The facult ies are locked up, and offer no resistance . Perhaps that is the universal law .\" ' A tall office-block unrented since being built eight years ago , but still making a nice profit through property speculation ; at the heart of London 's West End . It has become a common symbol in political rhetoric . 50 SEPTEMBER 1973

dimensional. It 's more germane (because outside capitalism 's liberal image . OUR been a painful one . And my concern is more generalized) than much of Norman Mailer , a writer in whose admirable quali- DAILY BREAD and Godard ' s ONE PLUS ONE not to capture him for the left, or make ties Hollywood has shown little interest. OUR DAILY BREAD is more modern than are an odd , but complementary pair; the him out as a left-winger without knowing EASY RIDER because the latter is scarcely interested in grass roots communities, lessons of their mutual criticisms can, it. The history of populism did not go that and concerns itself mainly with the thoroughly regressive theme of two cow- after all , be learned . \" As long as the left way ; and even if it had , he might not have boys riding West-to-East and failing to cross the last frontier in their minds with merely reacts to events, exposing and gone with it. Ye t the vitalism , which lies LSD in New Orleans ' Boot Hill. disrupting the 'system ' without offering as deep within his movies as their polit ics , In The Agony of the American Left, Christopher Lasch observes that their anything to take its place , it suffers end- seems to me to have an heir. Still young \" very marginality predisposes radical students to cultivate a radicalism of alien- less defeats and frustrations out of which and frail , its fate in doubt, it lies , as my ation , of nihilistic gestures, of hysterical militancy .\" And it is in \" the emergence grows, not a consciousness of alterna- quotations from Lasch have indicated , on of a dissident liberalism , which found at least a temporary home in the McCarthy tives , but a rising demand for more and the left, with its hope of eventual \" parallel movement,\" that Vidor's particular con- cern with the interrelationship of individu- more militant tactics. The worst features institutions \" tentatively linked by grass- alism , community, and independent radi- cal alternatives becomes relevant once of the Old Left then begin to reappear roots pressure- and work-groups with im- more. Lasch emphasizes the connection between progressivism and Big Business in the New: dogmatism , an obsession with mediate civic action . Whatever reserves utilitarianism , so that , \" even when they originated in humanitarian impulses, pro- factional purity, vilification of opponents, he might maintain, it might be here that gressive ideas led not to a philosophy of liberation but to a blueprint for control.\" hysterical gestures of alienation , the cult the yo ung Vidor , today, would find some The remark throws additional light on Vidor's lack of enthusiasm for Jess's of violence. themes as close to his heart as other s hopes for Pearl in DUEL IN THE SUN . And \" agrarianism gradually parted company \" What are needed-and there is a he has celebrated . As government-and with reform ,\" so that \" By the mid-twenties both socialism and populism had petered growing awareness of this among those the whole repressi ve apparatus con- out, leaving a political vacuum that has not yet been filled-certainly not by the who are talking about a new party-are demned in THE FOUNT AINHEAD-grows 'new radicalism ' of the sixties.\" The cor- porations (Eisenhower's \" military-indus- institutions that would parallel existing more remote as a structure , and more trial complex\" ) now dominate democra- cy, with the result that \" The liberal values structures of gove rnment (city councils , intricately tyrannical , it is here that a little of self-reliance , se xual self-discipline , ambition , acquisition , and accomplish- for instance ) and , without any recognized hope of widening effective freedoms lies . ment , while often admirable in them- selves , have come to be embodied in a authority or immediate hope of imple- This left-w ing impulse is egalitarian so as social order resting on imperialism , eli- tism , racism and inhuman acts of tech- menting their decisions, undertake the to be co-operative , not co-operative so nological destruction. They have there- fore lost their capacity to serve as a guide social planning of which the existing in- as to be egalitarian . It cares as little about to any but individual conduct. ... The United States is a society in which capi- stitutions are incapable.... The dissi- money as Roark , and it is co-operative talism itself, by solving the problem of capital accumulation, has created the dent moveme nts ranging from the Mc- because , without community and famil y, material conditions for a humane and democratic socialism , but in which the Carthy and Kennedy campaigns to the few men can be more than skeletons of consciousness of alternatives to capital- ism , once so pervasive , has almost faded mil itants of the student and black left themsel ves. from memory. \" have revealed wide areas of discontent It 's not because Vidor 's themes criss- Vidor, precisely because of the not only with the old political leadership cross these that I believe him to be , once curiously central position alluded to in THE BIG PARADE , often strives after a syn- but with the general quality of American again , a topical director. It 's because of thesis , and so makes certain contra- dictions clear. If he has earned an iII-de- life. The immediate constituency for a the sharpness and sensitivity with which served reputation as the opposite of an intellectual, it's precisely because his radical movement , it is clear , lies in the he traces all the feelings involved in any fidelity to his instincts and his principles led him to criticize the social-cum-per- professions , in sections of suburbia , in individual's conflicting loyalties, in a sonal monstrosities of RUBY GENTRY , and to appeal-subtly, constantly, and power- the ghetto and above all in the university , complex and anomic society (sometimes fully-to alternatives and ambivalences which more than any other institution has promising, sometimes cruel), and with become a center of radicalism . which he relates them to individual integ- \" In other words the left has to begin rity , to communal generosities , and to an to function not as a protest movement or epic sense of society as a potentially tllird party but as an alternative political expanding freedom-it's because of th is system , drawing on the abilities of people that I think he is not just a topical director, who realize that their talents are often but a great one. 11111111 wasted in their present jobs . It has to generate analysis and plans for action in KING VIDOR (1894- ) which people of varying commitments to KEY: Archive Prints for Research Only: radical ism can take part . - LOC Library of Congress . Rental Prints: AUD Macmillan Audio Brandon Films ; One thinks of John as the clown in COU Cousino Visual Exc hange Service ; FNC Films Incorporated ; IDE Ideal Pic- THE CROWD , of Sam bound for college in tures ; TWF Trans-World Fi lms ; TWY Twyan Films ; UAS United Artists 16; UNI STREET SCENE , of Manson in THE CITADEL Universal 16; WHO Wholesome Film Center; WIL Willoughby-Peerless. and Roark in THE FOUNTAINHEAD , of the 1946 Duel in the Sun AUD , IDE , TWF , TWY , WIL , LOC ; 1947 On Our Merry Way ; relationship between Boake and Ruby , of 1949 The Fountainhead FNC , UAS , WHO , WIL; Beyond the Forest UAS; 1951 so many Vidor heroes seeking , in one way Lightning Strikes Twice; 1952 Japanese War Bride LOC; Ruby Gentry; 1955 Man or another , to find worthy allies in the task Without a Star COU , UNI , LOC ; 1956 War and Peace FNC , LOC ; 1959 Solomon and of building America freely, and too rarely Sheba UAS , LOC ; 1964 Truth and Illu- sion. succeeding . What better counterinflu- A complete King Vidor film listing is ence to the Left's obsession with purity printed in the previous issue, FILM COMMENT volume 9 number 4, July- than Vidor's transcendentalist tolerance August 1973. of contrary temperaments and styles, to its tense intellectuality than his accep- tance of instinct and emotion even in excess and change, to its self-imposed alienation from its unenlightened kith and kin and mates than his sense of emancipation as a tragic tending , to its mixture of dogmatism and inaction than his blend of sensitivity and initiative? Vidor's evolution from a personal vi- tality through social optimism to a with- drawn and reflective elitism must have FILM COMMENT 51

{f'WW caCl)Cl)ID IDllJIDID ilPillliW The Poseidon Adventure by Lawrence Shaffer The good dumb film is easy to recognize : you perilous journey through the biological systems of can 't take your eyes off it, your ears wish they could , the human body and , as a result , its structural and your mind keeps condescending . And , even concern with scale and perspective , POSEIDON adds visually , you can 't take your eyes off it not because a plausibility altogether missing in the other film 's of any profound reverberational quality of the papier mache mock-ups of the lymphatic system , images (a quality that rules out such a possible lungs , etc. The POSEIDON 'S voyage is through the candidate as MCCABE AND MRS . MILLER ) but because marvelously detailed inner organs of its own anato- of simple retinal satisfaction. The images are sensa- my, or, rather, through the disembowelment of those tional , meaning not that they are \" special effects \" organs by water and fire. The landscape through but smelling salts for the senses : that 's the way a which the characters struggle is just as inhuman speeding car looks and feels on the roller coaster as , fatally , FANTASTIC VOYAG E'S was , but it is never streets of San Francisco ; that 's the way the body unreal. It is alien but always recognizable. jerks when shot; that 's the way trains jump tracks ; or that's the way a guy 's foot slowly stops doing Andrew Sarris begrudgingly has admitted that a little turn on the ice when some baddies approach . although the film is somewhat of a toss-up between Classics of the genre include THE WILD BUNCH (which Disney and Dante it does finally land on the Dante unlike STRAW DOGS is not a comment on violence (heads) side. Of course Dante does better with his but is violence ; a film should not mean but be , nightmare than PO SEIDON with its, but in its own Stanley Kramer) , THE TRAIN, THE FRENCH CONNEC- terms POSEIDON comes respectably close . The film 's TION , and BULLITT. POINT BLANK would be a perfect name tourists (Ern est Borgnine, Shelley Winters, specimen if it weren 't so elliptical. With all these , Carol Lynley, Roddy McDowall , Stella Stevens, Jack consciousness may not be raised but it is energized , Albertson) are given a guided tour they never bar- through being allowed participation in how things gained for and we can never forget. Their guide, work . The good dumb film is , above all , kinesthetic. a power-of-positive-th inking reverend played with If THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE happens to transcend his usual utter suspension of disbelief by Gene its element a bit because of the ingenuity of its Hackman , immolates himself along the way (guides, metaphor, what keeps it dumb is the thinness of typically , do not reach the promised land) so that that metaphor. The good dumb film takes its medium the others can ultimately emerge into the air (as literally, working only on the surface of the screen , Dante does) \" saved ,\" not only in body but , through where , nevertheless , it busies itself quite effectively. suffering and the exemplum of Hackman 's fortitude and self-sacrifice , in spirit as well . And since the There is no doubt POSEIDON is a dumb film , and marvelous conceit of the film is that a tidal wave considerable evidence that it's a bad dumb film . Its turns the ship upside down , we even have the catalyst is a fortuitous tidal wave of Japanese crea- parallel between Dante 's emergence only by means ture-film proportions ; its ship of fools-an outra- of his descent to the bottom-most pit-he comes geously sentimentalized Jewish couple, a health out the other end-and POSEIDON 'S geography faddist Mr. Peepers, a Neanderthal cop and the w hereb y the way down is the way up . Furthermore, prostitute wife he once kept off the streets until she'd the way in which Dante 's physical-sensory \" adven- marry him , etc ., etc.-are , at least initially, pure insult ture \" is always calibrated in moral terms is paralleled with no visual compensations ; and it has a riches by the way the logistics of the survivors ' progress of embarrassment in the \" acting ,\" or , rather , the is constantly correlated with crises of fortitude , telegraphy department, notably the ever-bathetic self-control, and determination . The physical laby- Red Buttons. But to put the film in the same boat rinth of the ship 's innards becomes a kind of spiritual with SHIP OF FOOLS or , say , FANTASTIC VOYAG E (with labyrinth , a test of character. Not that the film isn 't both of which it shares certain trappings) is to miss far more gripping as a physical obstacle course than its distinction. Though it starts out like the former , as a moral one . But a rough coexistence between it quickly adds the all-important crucible of disaster. the two realms is attempted and partially implement- The characters are put under pressure, they are ed , which is no mean accomplishment for a dumb forced to do something. To VOYAGE 'S comparably film . The survivors do not merely survive but even come to seem worth surviving , something which 52 SEPTEMBER 1973

didn't appear possible on the basis of the opening After the tidal wave has struck , the film proceeds on the most scrupulous \" What if . . .\" level. The ship sequences. is overturned by degrees, so that we can observe The billboard SHIP OF FOOLS vein in which POSEI- the full kinesthetic range of ballroom pleasure seekers progressively losing their balance and their DON begins is excusable , then, in the light of later bearings, some making the sliding transition from events. If the characters weren 't initially silly, how floor to ceiling while others are left dangling from could calamity dignify them? Nevertheless they tabletops eventually to fall to their deaths on the needn 't have been so idiotic, and the pre-disaster ceiling . The physics of the scene is truly impressive . scenes are almost enough of a disaster in them- (The only response possible to the uncustomary selves to sink the POSEIDON before it has had a spectacle of man at the mercy of physics is \" Oh chance to legitimately capsize. The one possible my god ,\" a common response to POSEIDON which exception is Hackman 's reverend , who is concerned the \" discriminating\" should , first, not repress, and , less with God-in-the-sky than God-within-man , and second , trust when they assess the impact of what for whom the world is a kind of Robert Browning they are seeing .) Graduated with equal skill is the gymnasium where moral fiber can toughen itself. physics of human emotion , beginning with surprise Even in the early scenes when he is only talking at the first jolt, then progressing to disbelief and a good game, one knows that Hackman will be able horror as the situation worsens , and , finally , with to put his body where his sermon is, that any time the last turn of the screw , ending with catatonic he comes close to sounding too evangelistic he will shock . be rescued by \"right action. \" For Hackman the physical tribulations of life are a welcome challenge At this point in the film Hackman assumes the to the soul. Later on , instead of mounting such a burden of the stubborn life force, the necessary notion rhetorically, he will fashion , like some masterly combatant to the inanimate forces of fire , water, demiurge , an escape route through the awesome gravity, pressurization , etc ., inexorably set in motion complexities of the ship 's levels and compartments. to suffocate , incinerate, crush . His view of things, flatly laid out earlier in an impromptu sermon and Some sea-disaster films like LIFEBOAT and ABAN- in a conversation with a more traditionally minded DON SHIP locate their microcosms conveniently and colleague (Arthur O'Connell), is that God helps quite artificially within a lifeboat. Others like A NIGHT those who help themselves . He also has something TO REMEMBER disperse their dangers on deck where to say about the individual \" not counting ,\" or things still look all right and , anyway , escape by counting only as a \" link between past and present ,\" jumping is always possible . POSEIDON is unique in but here POSEIDON gets in over its metaphysical the way it depicts not the sea but the ship 's own head . Certainly the film is very concerned with the structures and mechanisms as the ultir:nate night- survival of certain \" name\" individuals to the exclu- mare . Its victims simply want to get outside! In this sion of hundreds of anonymous extras-though to sense POSEIDON is reminiscent of such technological do Hackman credit he tries to save them , too. horror films as METROPOLIS , where the enclosures that man creates for his \" needs \" become death POSEIDON maintains this conflict between Hack- traps . For all its moralizing there is no doubt that man 's activism and the deathly passivity of others. POSEIDON ' S true subject is its mise-en-scene of O'Connell 's objections are those of a good , though shafts, bulkheads, valves , ladders, catwalks, and according to the film 's dialectic, misguided , man. companionways , just as THE TRAIN ' S true subject is The film assumes a more Manichean stance on not the lofty conflict between Lancaster's warm activism vs . passivity-and in terms of the traditional humanism and Scofield 's cold-blooded aestheti- relig ious position of fatalistic acceptance of God 's cism but the operational workings of trains. POSEI- will , a rather courageous stance-in the cataclysmic DON properly begins , then , not with its characters ballroom scene. Things have now gone beyond the but with its first sharp awareness of the ship . Our stage of leisurely debate on a sunny deck . Amidst attention is focused indirectly yet brutally through the dead , the dying , and the somnambulistic , the the awesomeness of the approaching tidal wave , darkly glowering ship 's purser, nursing and injured seen in all its horror only because of what it is-from arm and looking like the fallen Satan , gathers the the captain 's perspective-about to do to the ship . majority around him , periodically bellowing \" Stay where you are! Keep your positions! \" whenever POSEIDON has been given an award for \" special anyone might be tempted to follow Hackman. \" Help visual effects .\" But, just as there is sometimes a fine is on the way ,\" he insists. \" Help from where?\" line in the film between Disney and Dante , so is there Hackman counters . \" The captain is dead .\" It is sometimes a fine line in films between \" visual ef- amusing to think that in the dumb POSEIDON ADVEN- fects \" and \" cinematic values .\" The point about the TURE , writer Stirling Silliphant and director Ronald Inferno is that the human mind has done its worst. Neame have consciously smuggled in some \"God is dead \" theology . The concept of hell is fully realized through the poet's images . So , too , with POSEIDON 'S so-called At any rate , Hackman 's religiosity is purely exis- visual effects. \" Exciting visual effects\" suggests tential. A crew member whose chest has been window dressing , certainly an insult to Dante if it crushed gets instead of a prayer a handkerchief to were applied to him and , I think , an insult to POSEI- staunch the blood . \" God wants winners, not qUit- DON . The tidal wave, however it was \" gotten up ,\" ters ,\" Hackman insists. Obviously the film is struc- does not have the effect of being appliqued to the tured as an exemplum of this credo (though we must film but is just as organic to the film 's vision as the ship 's viscera. FILM COMMENT 53

'/ I I 4 •• I ; THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE . both photos : 20th Century-Fox THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE. From left : Stella Stevens , Ernest Borgnine, Jack Albertson , Shelley Winters , Red Buttons, Carol Lynley, Pamela Sue Martin . 54 SEPTEMBER 1973

hopefully assume that by \" winners \" Hackman route is long , arduous , and , most discouraging , means \" tryers \" or \" attempters \" ). Hackman 's rever- ence is only for present not recent life . A body blind . It is almost impossible to figure means in floating upright is unceremoniously pushed aside . A boiler room full of dead bodies is simply a space relation to end . The need for a total molelike for the living to pass through (circle of the dead). The dead , either literally or as deadening holds on the reorientation of the senses is realized early on when survivors' feelings and imaginations hindering their survival , are obstacles like any other, to be sur- Roddy McDowall , stranded on a platform , is about mounted . Hackman 's one indulgence of personal mourning is for Mrs. Rosen (Shelley Winters) , who , to be helped down when Hackman , descendant of after all , has died of heart failure only from the effort of saving his life. Otherwise, he can only see the those who discovered the wheel , realizes that the dead as demoralizing the living . The dying , however, and the about-to-die-through-being-misled receive first step toward survival is to climb up and join him . Hackman's most solicitous attention (in one sepulchrally lit scene, other survivors, like shades From this point on the look of the film is always from limbo, are being led the wrong way by the ship 's doctor, and Hackman tires vainly to save them , too) . identical with its content (a seeming tautology that In the initially Disney-like but later truly infernal ballroom scene, in which , symbolically enough , many films manage to refute): a steadily dwindling Hackman unceremoniously uses a large Christmas tree as a ladder, he looks back sorrowfully on the band of survivors running the gauntlet of the ship 's drowing multitudes who too late have decided to follow him . But once he closes the door against the scarred and battered entrails. No diversions, cut- rising waters and the screams of the drowning , it is time again to turn to the living . aways, secondary considerations, irrelevancies, The film is not always as antisentimental as Hack- marking time. Simply that the shafts, valves, lad- man , lingering over Mr. Rosen 's (Jack Albertson 's) mourning for Mrs. Rosen (and Carol Lynley's for ders , catwalks , etc ., that had once serviced and her dead brother) and melodramatizing Rogo 's (Er- nest Borgnine 's) reaction to his wife 's death . But supported are now treacherous booby traps , the the problem of survival is so acute that Rosen and Rogo are caught up in it almost immediately after lethally undependable other side of the moon and losses that, for the moment, had made personal survival seem pointless. As the rescuers ' blowtorch yet the only conceivable route to safety. The shifts slowly lets in the first daylight in the film since the opening scenes, Rogo does look back a final time from compartment to compartment, level to level , at the inferno he has somehow gotten through , but though the effect is partially to commemorate the horizontal progression to vertical , death by fire to dead the commemoration works more to emphasize the miraculous second life awarded the si x survi- death by water, surviving to dying seem to occur vors . The coda to this ultimate in survival films is succinct. The rescuers ask the survivors if anyone in an inevitable sequence . Periodically , a shot of the else is with them. No . The survivors ask the rescuers if anyone else has been saved . No. But then what ship's submerged smokestacks funneling explo- does it mean that these particular si x , doubtless no more worthy than many of the others and definitely sions like heavy artillery reminds us that in addition less worthy than the ineffable Hackman , have sur- vived when all the others haven 't? Is it that at least to the tenuous situation within the ship the entire some individuals have survived to provide \" a link between past and future ,\" and it's not important enterprise is hanging on a thread (as if foreign which? organisms in a body had not only the native habitat No matter. The ethos of the film may be fuzzy but never its mise-en-scene. If POSEIDON had been to contend with but the general fate of the host). clumsy or hokey in execution , it could not have cashed in on the deep human fears that-having The film would be merely gruesome if it did not achieved that scrupulousness of execution-it is able to take advantage of. Again , the elemental fears tap the basic human hope in the face of death , that of water and fire are greatly intensified by the fact that the characters are locked in , unable to maneu- of grace under pressure. Assuming one has some ver freely . Furthermore, they are locked in far be- neath any potential exit point so that the escape breathing time, the only possibility of thwarting death by violence is not to lose your head . The film makes you realize-perhaps better than any other- that nothing is quite so difficult. If Hackman could have managed to make it through the film , the only fitting reward at the end of the maze would have been B. F. Skinner with the largest food pellets ever seen . Other escape films have featured ingenious protagonists, calmly working their way out of prisons or concentration camps , but none so resolutely exerting his reason under such panicky conditions. Hackman manages the impossible feat of holding off death by totally controlling his fear of it . He is the one surrogate we could have wished for to lead us out of the quicksand of this most graphic of all elemental nightmare films (excepting , then , psycho- pathic nightmare films like CALIGARI or sociological ones like THE WRONG MAN) . Which is not to say that Hackman is some adolescent fantasy figure like Flynn or Wayne, only someone somewhat more resilient , resourceful , and c<;lUrageous than our- selves (like one 's counselor at camp) . Where Flynn and Wayne have an a priori braggadocio unrelated to plot specifics, Hackman 's virtues are identical with his problem solving . Hackman never seems sure of the outcome , as Flynn and Wayne do , because , for one thing , he never thinks of the outcome, only the steps along the way. The same goes for the film , and if in its loving attention to the journey rather than the destination its meta- physics becomes shaky , its physics stays all the sharper for it. 11111111 FILM COMMENT 55

~Wr:mill~ID ~ID~lli~ UPilILID Such Good Friends & Up the Sandbox by Elliott Sirkin The movie is never better than the book , unless is incontrovertible : namely , that it would be absurd the book was The Love Machine. But assuming the to deny the exceptional force and-sometimes-hu- book was any good at all , then the movie , if it's manity of the new women 's no ve ls , the books in been put together with the right kind of care and w hich women authors let go and say things that insight , can at least be as intense as the book and women either didn 't want to or weren 't allowed to maybe , for a moment or two , more so. Books aren 't say before, stating their grievances, arguing their as visceral as movies. In movies , there are live roles, and just generally kicking up a fuss . Not emotions streaming out of real people ; in books , surprisingly, the women 's novels are the new books there are intuited feelings , mutually assigned by that most excite the current moviemakers. But-in reader and author. That's w hy when a movie of a case anyone hasn 't noticed- so far their record with novel has the proper dramatic pressures on hand , them has been one of almost sheer disaster. The you always feel an electrification of the w hole intri- crummy adaptation of the prestigious women's cate tangle of emotions and memories and images no ve l is on the way to becoming its own genre , a that are the residue of a novel. Admittedly , most bit like the STRAWBERRY STATEMENT-GETTING deeply felt fiction doesn 't have to worry about such STRAIGHT campus-revolt youthcult monstrosities of major-league competition from its filmed incarna- three years ago . I wouldn 't think of complaining tions, the majority of book-movies being too shape- about Frank Perry's driving the final nails into the lessl y gawky or ponderously inert even to sustain coffin of Sue Kaufman 's already cadaverous Diary simple empathy, let alone send out any shock waves. of a Mad Housewife. But when talented books like Yet the exceptions have always existed . And , unless Lois Gould 's Such Good Friends and Anne Richard- the Ken Russells of the world take over the movie son Roiphe 's Up the Sandbox are demolished , industry , they ' ll most likel y continue to do so. somebody ought to kick: too much of value has been incinerated in the wreckage. Certainly , American fiction in the last few yea rs has come forth with any number of prospective Worst things first. Of course , Lois Gould 's Such candidates for movie intensification-books that Good Friends is a woman 's novel , through and pound wi th the shock and conviction and hope that through. But it isn't exclusively a woman 's novel . have marked the era . Though the merits of this rush Springing as it does from a network of powerful of new works can-and should and most probably wil l-be argued indefinitely, one thing about them left : Dyan Cannon and Ken Ho ward in SUCH GOOD FRIENDS . rig ht · Barbra Stre isand i n UP THE SANDBOX. ,\" 56 SEPTEMBER 1973

social observations that are almost as relevant to caricatures of garment-center primitivism . That's the pathetic condition of educated middle-class how barren and off-center the movie's place sense urban males as they are to that of educated middle- is. For instance , Timmy Spector-the ambitious class urban females , the book speaks to many blond prince in the \" ex pensive Cavalry twill pants \" obsessions that transcend sexual caste . In scene -becomes fat, sissyish James Coco, wearing the after scene, Julie Messinger-the clever, unhappy, gaudiest clothes in the Sunday Time s magazine and thirtyish heroine-rages with a horrible consumer behaving like Don Rickles at a group therapy ses- culture malaria: she 's a pitiful hostage of American sion , screaming charmless insults and , in one par- beauty standards, permanently despondent over her ticularly revolting sex scene , wiggling out of his early years as an ugly duckling , incurably self-hate- corset like a desperate third banana. ful. Yet her multiply unfaithful husband and his careerist best friend Timmy Spector emerge as A comparably burlesque-ridden simple-mind- being just as muoh the warped slaves of materialist edness runs through the entire characterization of conditioning as she does . Everybody in the book , the movie's New Class New Yorkers. Apparently, whether woman or man , is obsessed with looking Preminger and May believe that the same sort of the best, having the best , being the best; and in heavy artillery Elaine May used in her old bour- one way or another, everybody fails and everybody geois-blasting sketches with Mike Nichols is enough suffers for it. Julie \" blooms \" late, but she still re- to distill the complex tastes and mores of literate mains convinced of her \" ugliness\"; her ego has third-generation professionals . But if that 's really been smashed beyond rehabilitation . Whatever self- what they think-and I'm pretty sure it is-then just esteem she has, she must draw from knowing that how wrong they are to think so is made painfully her husband is a conventionally handsome man ; clear in a scene wholly of their own devising , in when Richard berates or rejects her, she's defense- which the Messingers' friends gather to donate less: her only option is to sink deeper into self-hatred blood . For five description-defying minutes, media and baffled regret. The book-which takes the form hot-shots, pin-striped lawyers, and sharp cosmop- of Julie's recollections concerning her husband 's olites behave like a congress of cretins. The women shockingly unexpected death and her simultaneous trade insults on roughly the level of \" Honey, your discovery of his infidelities with her closest friends- nose job is a mess ,\" the men resemble deflated records this amplified disgust with an almost embar- water toys , and , as a special bonus , there 's a leath- rassing intensity. It's a chronicle of humiliations, ery divorcee running around , hustling prospective self-abasements, terrible secrets. But because the dates with all the tact of the world 's most decrepit agonies are all recaptured with a stinging concre- Sadie Hawkins Day contestant. This circus is by no teness, and because Lois Gould gives Julie the kind means unique: it simply magnifies the rest of the of ironic survival urge that prevents self-hatred from movie . In one sequence after another , the gl ittering becoming self-pity , the book is finally one of those pretensions that both cause and reinforce the char- reading experiences that leave you feeling as if acters' misery are reduced to the naked appetites you ' ve just crawled out of a meat-grinder, and loved of a gang of inhumanly slobbish imbeciles. every minute of it. Even the Rouben Ter-Artunian decor is consis- To say that Otto Preminger's and Elaine May's tently stripped down and gross. Instead of repro- 1971 film adaptation misses this impact totally is to ducing the resonantly contrasting imagery of Man- let the two of them off dirt cheap. The experience hattan , the art direction boils every place down to of the SUCH GOOD FRIENDS movie leaves you feeling the same kind of antiseptic blatancy, so that the as if you 've been dog-paddling through a tank of decaying hospital and the prosperous co-ops and dirty rubber cement for weeks on end with no the intimate restaurants all come out looking like chance of escape. It's a grisly bust, a virtual parody caricatures of rooms in a modernistic Broadway of Lois Gould 's insights. For starters, nothing on musical , bright and streamlined and utterly unten- the screen-dialogue, direction , or acting-betrays anted. All that's missing are the corrugated paper more than the faintest sensitivity to the wretchedly walls. The photography and the staging further sophisticated milieu of the classy Ivy League wrecks orchestrate the general phoniness and incredible Lois Gould catches so perfectly . This is anything lack of convincing detail. abut negligible shortcoming . The nuanced accura- For some people, Preminger's films exonerate themselves, and even merit praise, on the basis of cy of the book 's panorama of subtle competition their supposed visual prowess . Be that as it might , and rampant insecurity and discreet materialism is his mise-en-scene is as responsible as anything else the suction device that first gets you interested in for the bizarrely deformed texture of this movie. Half the novel-the proof that the author knows what the time , the actors are just lined up in front of the she 's talking about. And , in a strange way , after a camera and left standing there, reciting their lines while the little details of ritualized infighting and or scratching or staring distractedly into the lights. status rivalry almost become the novel-the symbols This technique is especially hard on the rank ama- and the tangible results of the characters' obses- teurs in the cast , like Jennifer O' Neill and Ken sions. Howard , who have no idea of what to do with themselves when they ' re not speaking (not that they But Prem inger and May are like blind tourists in have much idea of what to do with themselves when unfamiliar territory : they don 't seem to know the first they are speaking). But it achieves heights of gen- thing about where they are. From the way they go uinely divine ludicrousness when , at the end of the about reconstructing Julie Messinger's surround- film , Dyan Cannon , as Julie, huddles timidly at the ings, you 'd swear she was living among the crudest FILM COMMENT 57

far-left end of a shot after her husband 's death , while charge the character with some of the horrid pathos most of the supporting cast stands in two staggered of a man whose emotional conditioning won 't let horizontal rows behind her. All you can think is , Poor him be satisfied with practically everything . Oyan-first she finds out her husband has misused her, then he drops dead, and now she has to worry Also, through some unaccountably miraculous about whether or not she 's going to fall off the process, there 's a brief, almost unconscious mo- screen . ment when Elaine May and Oyan Cannon (and probably Preminger as well) suddenly combine to The real problem , though , is what's done with express the true essence of Julie Messinger- Julie herself. If the film could give its main character though it's only a moment. This is the scene in which just some of the dimension, some of the sharpness one of Richard 's friends (Ken Howard) apprises and anguish, some of the turbulent personal history Julie of Richard's involvement with the friend 's that Lois Gould gives her, then perhaps the movie young fiancee. When Howard poutingly asks what might be able to soar at least occasionally-or, at a man can do for revenge if he can 't beat the shit any rate , show some flicker of potential. As it hap- out of his rival, Oyan Cannon stares at him for a pens, Preminger and May do seem to understand second, and then hisses in retort, \" You can beat their heroine a little better than they do her world. the shit out of his wife .\" The sentence is nowhere But their understanding doesn 't go far enough , and in the book. But its compound of nimble-mind- it's much too coarsely handled to be very good. edness and helpless rage are precisely what Julie Admittedly, the fact that Lois Gould submerges so Messinger is all about-the bright woman who much of Julie 's self-analysis in elliptical shreds of knows she 's been stamped on, but can 't quite be- memory would make adaptation a difficult challenge Iieve she deserves any better. for any filmmakers, no matter how expert. And yet, really inventive people would be sure to find better Otherwise, there 's nothing in what Preminger and solutions than May's and Preminger's. Their basic May have done that makes me think Lois Gould strategy is to make one garish diagram of each of could have been too pleased with the fate of her Julie's character-defining past traumas and then material on the screen . By now, it's scarcely a secret just drop it on the plot, hoping for the best. that most of what happens to Julie happened first to her author. What did Lois Gould think when she Oyan Cannon doesn't help in any of this. Her saw the agony of her past turned into this raunchy looks, as always , are marvelously contemporary , but premental circus that would make an installment of she plays Julie Messinger as a mousy, lethargic \" Little Annie Fanny\" seem the zenith of brilliant drudge, without fervor or brains or compulsion or insight by comparison? She couldn 't have just gall-in short, without any of the features that enliven shrugged it off as one more round of having the the character and complicate her suffering. Her shit beaten out of her. brazenly inapposite performance may not be any worse than what the movie deserves. Still , just In all probability , Anne Richardson Roiphe had because Elaine May makes Julie so dumb that she less to bemoan at Irvin Kershner's adaption of Up the doesn 't know what the word \"comatose\" means Sandbox. On the whole , the movie is reasonably isn 't sufficient reason for Oyan Cannon to behave kind to the intentions and concerns of her second as though she were the one in a coma. Even in novel , and some of it is smoothly done . It isn't vulgar the scenes that are transcribed directly from the or trashy. Yet ultimately it really is pretty much of book, she delivers the scathing rejoinders with such a failure and pretty much of a garbling of the book's vapidly whimsical dullness that they come out spirit; and rather strangely, one of the most salient sounding like dizzy, sincerely stupid questions . Is shortcomings that repeatedly prevents the movie it possible that Oyan Cannon doesn 't understand from realizing its possibilities is the overwhelming the woman she 's playing at all? that she thinks that extent to which it's permeated by what 's missing if a woman isn 't one of those sexy sticks of dynamite in SUCH GOOD FRIENDS . This movie responds ... and she always plays for Mike Frankovitch , then she responds . .. and responds with everything it's got must be a downtrodden , boring creep? In an inter- to the details of realistic behavior and environment. view in Show magazine , she confided that she felt Which is to be expected , of course , considering that , Julie's problem was that she let herself get too fat, like few other domestic filmmakers, Irvin Kershner therefore causing her husband to philander. From has a profound instinct for the jumbled networks the sad showing she makes in the role, it's obvious of psychological gesture and random physical fact she must have meant what she said. and lopsided emotion that generate ordinary human experience. At times, just about every visual detail For the record , it has to be conceded that a few in the movie is perfect. The ugly purplish light in things do manage to come off amidst all the film 's a huge midtown hotel lobby bears down on you with nonsense. Among the male characters, Timmy the familiar vaguely depressing force. The faces at Spector becomes a horny buffoon; but Richard a suburban anniversary celebration mimic the faces Messinger, as played by Laurence Luckinbill , pre- in reels of home movies-your own and everyone serves some of the original character's divided tem- else 's. The foyer of an Upper West Side apartment perament. Luckinbill's cleverness blurs the harsh house rattles with eerie decaying grandeur and is outline of the screenplay's typically strident inter- hung with strange morning shadows. (Anyone who pretation . And because the writing is at least on the thinks this breed of documentary sharpness is a right track when it stresses Richard 's self-disap- pointment, the actor has a few good chances to 58 SEPTEMBER 1973

simple matter of choosing the right locations and This evaporation of the novel 's aura of wonder casting the proper extras should take a look at the does more than simply replace eccentricity with on-location shots in SUCH GOOD FRIENDS . With verism . The rhapsodic gauziness is necessary for Preminger, real places become denatured , texture- thematic reinforcement, because the point that sat- less facsimiles of themselves ; with Kershner, the urates almost every page of the book is that Mar- physical likeness is exquisite .) garet paSSionately loves her life-that having a \" man to protect\" her \" and create children with\" is what Kershner also knows how to shape scenes so she cares about most, and that because she has that the people inside them can come out looking both , she 's happy . Unquestionably, the novel is as erratic, awkward , impulsive and flappable as addressed to the state of the modern woman . But, people in life. His movies-the good ones , anyway , unl ike most current investigat ions of the subject , it like LOVING and THE LUCK OF GINGER COFFEy-are able concludes that some women can be gratifi ed-and to present characters whose motives seem to vibrate even thrilled-within the context of the \" traditional \" partly beneath the surface somewhere, whose woman 's role . Therefore , the all-encompassing lyri- responses always have a bit of the smoke of ambi- cism of Margaret's thoughts and their perpetual guity curling around them . I suppose that, above roseate afterglow testifies to the truthfulness of her all , Kershner's people are spontaneous. Unlike the contentment. At one point, Margaret herself pract i- characters in most movies and plays , they have the cally comes out and announces that her happiness capacity to be surprised , both by what the people beautifies what she sees and what she shows us. around them do and what they do themselves. When she 's with her husband on dark streets, she Admittedly , in UP THE SANDBO X, the relationships and notes, she's impressed by the benevolent charm of encounters are nowhere near as adroitly modulated her surroundings; but when she's alone, \" it's dif- as they 've been in other Kershner films , and the ferent\"; she sees \" only the ugly faces and they seem disheveled accents of daily life only grasp the movie menacing .\" intermittently. But the direction doesn't seem to be what's to blame for the deficiencies. The chief What happens in the mo vie is that the ugly faces , problem is that there 's way too much fake , unplay- in one form or another, stage an invasion and all able dialogue in Paul Zindel 's mechanical script- but take over. The sparkl ing look and the bouncing and , more seriously , that , in the pivotal roles , Barbra pace that might express some of Margaret's exulta- Streisand and David Selby are far from ideal. Not tion just aren ' t in Kershner's repertory; as a conse- to be blunt about it or anything , but Streisand and quence , what should be delightfully airy and pastel Selby are about as equipped to work with Kershner 's becomes unpleasantly sober and raw . If the imagery difficult fle xible methods as Sally Struthers, Ann- and the tempo conSistently suggest anything , it's Margret , and Bianca Jagger would be to play The estrangement and discomfort-New York as seen Three Sisters. through the disgruntled eyes of the standard local neurotic , battered by routine metropolitan chaos . If they create believable effects , why are True, the Margaret of Zindel ' s screenplay isn 't sup- Kershner's leading gifts such a liability in this movie? posed to be as at home in her world as the Margaret Largely because the greatest charm of Up the of the book . But when the world is Kershne r' s she Sandbo x as a novel lies in its daffy, world-defying appears almost alienated , which doesn 't seem to romanticism. Anne Roiphe dedicates at least half be what Zindel wants-and certainly isn 't what Anne of the book to the berserk slapstick daydreams of Roiphe wants either. its heroine-narrator-Margaret Reynolds , a lovable mother and young wife. But even the chapters that The director's touch suits the daydreaming pas- are rooted squarely in true circumstances sound sages even less . In the novel , the fantasies are a decidedly visionary and a little other-worldly . As it form of com ic therapy that give Margaret a chance would have to be , the secret behind these romantic to invert herself and become the heroine of a series transformations is in the author 's language , in Mar- of glamorously aggressive imaginary ad ventures . garet's coils of madly lilting words. Bewitched by Most of these sequences of hallucinatory freedom- the beauty of the cadences , pedestrian data is made and especially the ones involving a team of militant to seem extraordinary, if not downright dazzling and terrorists and a jungle expedition-bristle w ith ex- exotic. Anne ROiphe 's specialty is magical e xuber- actly the sort of sunny lunacy and cartwheeling brio ance, which-to put it mildly-is where she and that American movie farce has traditionally thrived Kershner part company. One artist recreates the on . They mi x DUCK SOUP with Preston Sturges, world from eye level ; the other woos it from into xi- BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS with BEAT THE DEVIL. cated heights. So , no matter how faithfully Kershner And enjoyable as their flights of pi x ilated make- may follow the book's actions, his versions of the believe may be, they also do their bit to support inspiring scenes all seem to have their faces pushed the heroine's declarations of satisfaction . The in . To take just one example : When the movie strong element of the ridiculous spinning through Margaret is blamed by her professor-husband for them indicates that Margaret can 't even imagine a defaced manuscript, the screen fumes with petty herself leading a life other than her own without egotism and mashed nerves. But when Anne laughing at herself. ROiphe 's character remembers the same disagree- ment, any bad feeling is neutralized by the bright But with Kershner, the anarchy and giddiness unmasochistic verve with which the quarrel is de- strangle on his naturalistic stuffing , and everything scribed. falls flat-lethally so . All his fantasy sequences are terrible , but the real prizewinner among them is his FILM COMMENT 59

rendition of the jungle sequence, where the literal- of Anne ROiphe , and of Margaret Reynolds , and of mindedness corsets the joke till it disappears. To Up the Sandbox. You 'd think Zindel would know construct the novel 's rain forest, Anne Roiphe sim- enough not to tamper with it. But tamper he does , ply reshuffles every addled cliche of ooga-booga to truly offensive ends . He portrays the mother as co mic-strip Africanism she can dig up . All that would a horrible low-comedy virago , militantly regurgitat- seem necessary to get it on film would be some ing backward pieties about \" femininity\" and race ingenuity, a few pop-art backdrops, and a couple that would seem to indicate she must have stayed of witty black actors. But Kershner, dismayingly loyal indoors for the last five years wearing iron contact to the facts , actually goes on location to Kenya for lenses and asphalt earplugs . If it weren 't for the his version , and casts authentic native tribespeople relative restraint with which Kershner has Jane in the supporting roles . Take away that crazy Jewish Hoffman play the role, she could probably make broad with the big snout, and the stills would prob- beautiful music with the psychotic termagent at the ably fit perfectly into a grammar-school geography center of Zindel 's Effect of Gamma Rays play . Os- te xt about Pim-w ee the Jungle Boy -only not as tensibly, the reason for making the mother into such funny . All in all , the mo vie 's daydreams are hope- a monster is to give the movie 's Margaret a living lessly opaque. They depart so little from the rest symbol for the outdated notions of \" respectable \" of the film and are so clumsily introduced that they behavior that-despite her basic conven- barely seem to represent alternatives to Margaret 's tionality-she rejects . If that's so , the methods far daily situation , facetious or otherwise. exceed the aims. I wouldn 't want to gi ve the impression that all As far as Barbra Streisand goes , she 's pretty the movie's biggest flubs link up with the direction. awful when she has to be soft and meditative- Paul Zindel 's writing is similarly misguided-onl y, which , unfortunately, is most of the time. (Though unlike Kershner's, Zindel 's isn 't the work of a gifted she 's rather good in the final con versations with her artist defeated by uncongenial material. Most of it husband regarding their feelings about her third is just clodhopping playwright-turned-screenwriter pregnancy .) In the few intervals where Kershner and journeyman stuff-so stagey that you can almost Zindel allow Streisand to desert all pretense of hear the act curtains dropping and the pauses for impersonating another woman and free her to be the laughs. Zindel 's amateurism , always a trifle herself, she's fine; colorful and agreeably batty and nerve-racking , becomes an out-and-out assault all the other things her boosters say about her. When whenever the screenplay tries to dramatize Mar- Streisand gets her engine racing , she sounds like garet's occasional periods of self-questioning . Nat- gelatin paper being shredded in an electric fan . One urally , an adaptation of Up the Sandbo x would have tailor-made scene , in which she bleats out a long to italicize the sides of con ventional womanhood indignant monologue in an elevator , may be the about which Margaret has reservations ; if it didn 't, most endearing display of comic brashness record- a fatal absence of dramatic friction would obviously ed on film since Harlow in her heyday. But, as for open up. But Zindel 's idea of how to go about Barbra Streisand 's proud admission to an inter- embodying his main character's personal conflicts viewer that she thinks this performance is a mile- aren 't a drop more resourceful or persuasively inci- stone in her career because it successfully catches si ve than Elaine May 's. So , once again , weird distor- the spirit of a shy WASP housewife-just about all tions pose ludicrousl y as subtle tensions . To show I can say is I' m glad that at least one of the fantasies Margaret's attacks of misgiving and confusion , Zin- connected with the film is funny . del hurls her into a noisy battery of thoughtless male supremacists (w ho sound like talking Playboy edito- If I've beaten up on these two movies with some- rials ) and quarreling peers (who sound like they ' re thing bordering on blood lust, it's not bec ause I'm doing responsive readings from Good Housekeep- out to prove that Hollywood actresses shouldn 't talk ing and Ms). too much about their characterizations. I'm not joking when I say that I believe that the bond that These odd literalizations, needless to say, don 't ex ists between an author and a reader is something much honor Anne Roiphe 's supremely tactful style sacred . And that-as I said at the beginning of this of debate. But compared to Zindel 's infuriatingly piece-mov ies , if they ' re entrusted to people with insensate portrait of Margaret's conservative sensibility and resources, can strengthen that bond mother, they shine with discretion . By now , to devot- and make it glow. UP THE SANDBO X, directed by ed readers of Anne Roiphe 's fiction and essays , Mrs . Robert Altman , or SUCH GOOD FRIENDS , directed by Roiphe 's mother is a familiar presence : a proper Alan Pakula, might have been major film adapta- suburban grande dame who regularly shows up in tions . But as they ' ve turned out , in the hands of her daughter's adolescent memories, murmuring the people who actually did bring them to the dolefully prescriptive ad vice about women \" saving \" screen , they make you wish that more authors would their virginity for their husbands and cozening male follow Theodore Dreiser's blighted example and weakness. She's plainly the inspiration behind Mar- take the movie studios to court-if only as a matter garet 's mother; and , in Up the Sandbo x -as every- of principle. The filmmakers have made their where else-Anne Roiphe approaches her in the heroines walk the plank ; the authors shouldn 't be same gentle, good-humored way she approaches afraid to do the same to the filmmakers . The audi- most of the rest of the world . ence can only mutter and hiss and laugh in disbelief. More than anything , this unpatronizing tolerance, 11111111 sweeping out in many directions , is the lifeblood 60 SEPTEMBER 1973

A Publication Associated with The American Film Institute. Edited by Ernest Parmentier. •• Vol. XV, 1972/No. 6 FRENZY Richard Blaney . . . . . . .. JON FINCH BRITISH (1972). AN ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRODUCTION for UNIVERSAL Inspector Oxford . . . . ALEC McCOWEN PICTURES. Produced and Directed by ALFRED HI:rCHCOCK. Screenplay: Bob Rusk . . .. . . . . BARRY FOSTER ANTHONY SHAFFER ; Based on the Novel GOODBYE PICCADfLL Y. FARE· Brenda Blaney . BARBARA LEIGH·HUNT WELL LEICESTER SQUARE by ARTHUR LA BERN. Photography: G IL Babs Milligan . . . . .. ANNA MASSEY TAYLOR. SpeCia l Photographic Effects: ALBERT WHITLOCK. Music Composed Mrs. Oxford . , . . VIVIEN MERCHANT and Conducted by RON GOODW IN. Ed ito r: JOHN JYM PSON. Production Hetty Porter . . .. BILLIE WHITELAW Designer: SYDNEY CAIN . Art Direction: ROBERT LAING. Set Decorations: Felix Forsythe .. BERNARD CRIBBINS S IMON WAKEFIELD. Sound: PETER HANDFORD , GORDON K. McCALLUM Johnny Porter . . . . . .. CLIVE SWIFT and RUSTY COPPLEMAN. Wardrobe: DULCIE MIDWINTER. Makeup: HARRY Sergeant Spearman .. MICHAEL BATES FRAMPTON . Hai rsty les: PAT McDERMOTT. Assoc. Producer: WILLIAM HILL. Production Manager: BRIAN BURGESS. Asst. to Mr. Hitchcock: PEGGY and ROBERTSON. Asst. Director: COLIN M. BREWER. Location scenes filmed in Monica Barling : JEAN MARSH. Bob's London ; In teri ors a t Pinewood Studios. Technicolor. I 16 Mins. [R J. Mother: RITA WEBB. Hall Porter: JIMMY GARDNER. Porter's Wife: ELSIE RAN- Synopsis DOLPH. Mrs. Davison: MADGE RYAN. Mr. Salt: GEORGE TOVEY. Pub Custom- As a Parliament official lectures on pollution, the nude body of a ers : NOEL JOHNSON and GERALD SIM. woman floats down the Thames - the striped tie knotted around her Sir George: JOHN BOXER. Barmaid: JUNE ELLIS. Barman: BUNNY MAY . Hospital neck indicating she is the latest victim of London's notorious necktie Patient: ROBERT KEEGAN. Man in Bowler strangler. Nearby, an embittered and down-and-out former RAF pilot Hat on Waterfront: ALFRED HITCHCOCK. named Richard Blaney indignantly quits his bartender job when the pub owner accuses him of cadging drinks. Storming off, Blaney pauses to chat with his friend Bob Rusk, a Covent Garden fruit and vegetable dealer, and then drops in at the matrimonial agency run by his ex-wife Brenda. Unable to curb his angry frustration, Blaney lashes out at the patiently enduring woman with such fury that his invectives carry to the outer office of secretary Monica Barling. The next day, Rusk shows up at Brenda's office; having had dealings with him before, Brenda bluntly states she is unable to accommodate his \"peculiar\" tastes in women and would prefer he took his business elsewhere. Instead of leaving, Rusk forces the terrified woman into a chair, rapes her while she recites the 93rd psalm, and then strangles her with his necktie. Because Blaney later returns to the locked office, and is spotted from the street by Monica Barling, a warrant for his arrest is issued by Scotland Yard's Inspector Oxford. Blaney learns of his predica- ment while staying at a hotel with Babs Milligan, a co-worker at the pub. Upon reading his description in a morning paper, Blaney flees with Babs and takes refuge with a war buddy named Johnny Porter. Babs, on the FOSTER and LEIGH-HUNT other hand, makes the terrible mistake of accepting a night's shelter from RUSK . Shortly ?f. _ _ .. - h~r;np\" Babs int\" h;~ flat, Rusk Whp\",l- -\" . ~ notato sack ann 1 ~- J . ' . .- - \"pp\"etable truck. FILMFACTS SPEAKS FOR ITSELF- Send for free sample issue/brochure FILMFACTS Box 213. Village Station New York. New York 10014

BOOKS it points to a more serious deficiency in It is too easy to assume that this kind of the book as a reference work . In his THE HISTORY OF WORLD CINEMA introduction , Robinson encourages the escapism was the response to a massive BY DAVID ROBINSON reader to flesh out this \" skeleton chart\" Stein and Day, New York, 1973; hard- of history with the readings listed in the public demand. Rather it must be seen cover, $12 .50 ; 440 pages ; illustrations , bibliography . Yet the bibliography is terri- appendixes , indexes. bly thin and lists only books. Thus D. B. as the outcome of the general interests Thomas's fine monograph on Kinemacol- REVIEWED BY or, The First Colour Motion Pictures, is of the big capitalist organizations which MARSHALL DEUTELBAUM not listed. Worse yet, any reader curious about Humphrey Jennings-whom Rob- ultimately controlled the cinema . In a It is never quite the right time to draft inson praises with a quote from Lindsay a history of the movies. Tastes and atti- Anderson as \" the only real poet the Brit- period of constant and violent political tudes change, old films are rediscovered , ish cinema has yet produced \" -will not and new ones-coldly called \" new prod- find the issue of Film Quarterly devoted and economic upheaval, the cinema uct\" by the industry-appear with to him (Winter , 1961-62) listed in the numbing rapidity. So a history can only bibliography either. fulfilled its periodic function as the opiate hope to catch up to a certain extent. Thus Robinson wisely offers The History of I raise this matter only to point out how of the masses. World Cinema as \" an outline of film histo- the lack of articles in the bibliography ry-a skeleton chart, with a few land- makes Robinson 's history too opaque. While this bias towards SOCially con- marks dotted in , on which the reader can Film history is always in the midst of being plot his own experiences of cinema.\" And written , and rewritten , in various journals scious realism is useful for speaking , say , with brisk, workmanlike efficiency, he so that no single book , including this one, moves through the high po ints of the film can offer the last word. I would gladly of the British documentary tradition or the from Lumiene 's predecessors to the cine- trade Robinson 's si xty pages of filmogra- matic events of the early Seventies. There phies for Si xty pages of bibliography that recent development of third-world films, is little to fault in the general trends and would fairly indicate the richness of film personalities that Robinson cites, though cr iticism and film history. it is much too narrow a viewpoint from every reader will probably feel that one of his favorite directors or films has been As far as Robinson 's outline of film which to write a history of world cinema. slighted . As appendixes to the historical history goes , it is pretty much what one survey, Robinson adds a brief \" Note on would expect. Robinson seems to have Besides, socially conscious realism may Animated Film ,\" an equally brief bibliog- settled , here, on repeating received his- raphy , and a si xty page list of filmogra- tory rather than re-e xamining what has be as much of an \" opiate \" for intellec- phies for over four hundred directors. been said already about the past. His discussion of the introduction of sound, tuals as escapist entertainment is for the Considering how many names, dates, for example, blames the static quality of and titles Robinson must keep straight, the movies of the time on the need to masses . In any event, a hierarchy of films there are relatively few factual errors. keep the camera stationary , as well as Some, however, are worth mention be- on the crude recording techniques then based upon their philosophical content fore I turn to a consideration of his work available . Wh ile these facts are true , it as history. Robinson indicates that many would have been better for him to add only points up how we still lack a critical of the four hundred filmographies are that filmmakers were relatively slow to complete . Unfortunately, several of these discern the difference between talk and vocabulary for dealing with the structure are not. The one for Tod Browning omits dialogue which also contributed to the many titles , while Louis Malle 's does not films ' static quality. Moreover, as the first of individual motion pictures. include SPIRITS OF THE DEAD ( HISTOIRES ten minutes of THE LIGHTS OF NEW YORK EXTRAORDINAIRES) even though the epi- demonstrate, sound temporarily de- With such a vocabulary it may become sodes directed by Vadim and Fellin i ap- stroyed the delicate patterns of narrative pear in their respective filmograph ies. In structure developed in the late silents . possible to write a balanced history of the addition , Robinson 's entry for George Pal Information pours from the film in a tor- lists his death as 1964 . Happily , Pal is rent and one can only wonder how many movies without setting up entertainment alive and at work on his latest project, reels would have been necessary in a DOC SAVAGE : THE ARCH ENEMY OF EVIL. silent film to cover the same background films as a straw man . In the meantime , material . Other errors, like the spelling of there 's room on the reference shelf for \" Caldos,\" for Benito Perez Gald6s- Elsewhere , Robinson constructs his whose novel Bunuel adapted for TRIS- history upon a familiar distinction be- The History of World Cinema so long as TANA-seem more like matters that should tween serious films and entertainment have been caught in proofreading. Thus , movies . As has been fashionable ever there are other works nearby to check for example, Robinson states that Caval- since those writing about the film first canti 's RIEN QUE LES HEURES (1926) was strove to establish a claim for motion it against l IIIIIII! \"clearly influenced by Mayer and Rutt- pictures as a serious art form , Robinson mann 's BERLIN ,\" even though elsewhere spurns the entertainment movie in order CANNES JOURNAL continued from page 6 Robinson notes that BERLIN was made in to assert that serious films are at least 1927. Another gaffe involves the early socially conscious. The following quote a lot more conventions than they met- two-color additive process, Kinemacolor, illustrates the process. unlike , say , Jean-Marie Straub , who in his which Robinson describes as having em- HISTORY LESSON mainly seemed to be ployed red and blue filters, rather than Even taking into account the 'social ' repeating the procedures of OTHON-even red and green ones. subjects attempted by Warners, the though the intransigence of each, com- American c inema in the thirties was char- bined with certain technical problems, While this last detail may seem minor, acterized by the bland, optimistic, essen- often resulted in stretches of pure non- tially unreal and reactionary virtues its communication . films , overtly or more subtly, preached. I wish that I could offer something reasoned and coherent about Teinosuke Kinugasa 's very communicative A PAGE OF MADNEss-the best by far of the thirty- three features I saw at Cannes this year- but after only one screening on the Marche, I'm afraid I can 't do much more than point and goggle. Made in Japan in 1926-before Kinugasa had a chance to see THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI , THE LAST LAUGH , or LA ROUE , and in many respects more sophisticated and audacious than all three-this dazzling work was ap- parently considered a lost film for several decades before the director, now a sep- tuagenarian , recently found a copy that was stashed away in his garden store- house. An expressionistic ode to insanity, boldly articulated in swirling movements , pounding rhythms and remarkably graphic compositions , A PAGE OF MADNESS surfaced in London several months ago , to considerable acc.laim and attention (see, for example, the useful comments in John Gillet's \" Japanese Notebook \" in the Winter 1972-73 Sight and Sound), but for reasons that continue to elude me, 62 SEPTEMBER 1973

For 1973 .... for further information write: r Warner Bros. Inc. G&'FRY Non -Theatrical Division 4000 Warner Blvd . Burban k, Caln. 91505 or telephone (2 13) 843 -6000 When writing to advertisers please mention FILM COMMENT

If ,\"u·re 'hinling CP-I6••. the international press ignored the film- thinkCamera tlart. less than a dozen people showed up for the screening-for the sake of staying to The CP-1616mm sound Camera the bitter end of Frankenheimer's dread- \"On-the-spot\" coverage for TV News fully IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT, which was shown an hour earlier. Chacun son gout. 11111111 and Documentary Film Makers. BERLIN JOURNAL continued from page 2 Whether you're shooting a crowd scene, a person-to-person interview, fast moving might call the \" New Wave Wild Palms action news while it's happening or a syndrome. \" Ever since Agnes Varda carefully planned assignment for made LA POINTE COURTE in 1955, French television or documentary, directo rs have been fascinated with your job is easier with the all- Faulknerian experiments in parallel plots . new CP-16 Single System/ Resnais experimented with the notion in Double System Sound Camera. MURIEL but Ri ve tte has taken it all the way . Made of lightweight magnesium (weighs only The film begins with three plots, three 9 lbs., including motor pairs of characters. There are two out- and battery). It combines siders : Jean-Pierre Leaud , an unem- maximum portability with ployed you ng man who makes a living comfortable hand-holding balance. pretending to be deaf-and-dumb; and Ju- liet Berto, a small-time whore who steals Designed and Manufactured by: on the side. Then there are the two the- ater groups , one directed by Michel Lons- ~~~~~G dale , the other by Pierre Baillot. Finally, there are the two \" absent\" members of Crystal ControUed DC Motor Built-In Lightweight the cast, Pierre and Igor. Igor is the hus- Incorporates high efficiency, low Battery Operation. band of Bulle Ogier, and he has been miss- power use, high torque, solid state NiCad rechargeable battery will ing for si x months when the film begins . integrated circuitry and high run at least ten 400 foot magazines Bulle blames Pierre for Igor's disappear- accuracy. per charge. No heavy external ance , although we neve r find out why . In power packs or entangling cables. any case neither man ever appears in the film . PARTIAL LIST OF SATISFIED CAMERA MART CUSTOMERS: In his wanderings around Paris , Leaud WCVB TV - Boston WTEN TV - Albany, NY NET TV -NY comes across a piece of paper with the NBCTV-NY WPRl TV - Prov., R.I. UPI-NY introduction to Balzac 's Histoire des 13 CBS TV-NY KYW TV - Phil., Pa. Boston University typed on it, and becomes convinced that WABC TV - NY (Local News) WKRC TV - Cinn., Ohio Jersey City State there exists in Paris a similar group of WRAL TV - Raleigh, N.C. WCKT TV - Miami, Fla. College, N.J. thirteen people, a secret revolutionary cabal. He determines to discover some- -------------------------------For more information fill in the coupon below or phone. how the identity of the thirteen . THE CAMERA MART INC The plots begin to converge when Berto steals some letters belonging to 456 W. 55th ST., NEW YORK, N. Y. 10019 • (212) 757·6977 Jacques Don io l-Valcrosse, one of her pickups. These letters implicate thirteen RENTALS 0 SALES 0 SERVICE people and, although she doesn 't under- stand the letters ' meaning , she starts Yes, I would like all the facts on the new CP-16 Camera. making the rounds of these thirteen with Name ________________________________________ blackmail on her mind . She first tries Fran c;oise Fabien , a lawyer and a friend Company ___________________________________ of Lonsdale 's. We gradually realize that there is , or was , such a group of thirteen : Address _____________________________________ founded by Pierre , now almost totally dormant, its aims shrouded in mystery . ____C_ity________S_ta_te ______T_el._______________ __J Meanwhile, \" The Thirteen \" succumb , not to Berto 's blackma il or Leaud's pry- ing , but to internecine warfare . Bulle , distraught at Igor's continued absence, decides to send some compromising letters to the newspapers in an attempt to \" expose \" Pie rre ; but Fab ien and Lons- dale manage to hush it all up. Bulle 's distress is so great that she gives up her (bankrupt) boutique in Les Hailes and retires to Normandie . And there , sudden- ly, she gets a call from Igor-he is back. She sets off to join him in Paris . But Lonsdale tells us that he has \" good rea- son \" to believe that the call could not possibly have been from Igor. We never find out the truth , for the film ends here. The final image is of Leaud , reduced to a 64 SEPTEMBER 1973

'1\\ MAJOR FILM BYA MAJOR ARTIST\" \"lIT adds years to yo ur life ,' the On the surface, it is a lyrical romantic yo ung men from Calcutta in comedy about four educated young men from Calcutta driving together for a few Satyajit Ray's' D ays and Nights in the days in the country, their interrelations, Forest' say of the country quiet , and it's and what happens to them in the forest, easy to believe. R ay's images are so emo- w hich is both actual and metaphorical. tionally saturated that they become sus- pended in time and, in some cases, fi xed ••• forever. Satyajit Ray's films can give rise to a more complex feeling of happiness in No artist has done more than Satyajit Ray me than the work of any other director. I to make us reevaluate the commonplace. think it must be because our involvement And only one or two other film artists of with his characters is so direct that we are his generation-he's just past fifty-can caught up in a blend of the fully accessible make a masterpiece that is so lucid and so and the inexplicable, the redolent, the inexhaustibly rich. At one point, the four mysterious. We accept the resolutions he yo ung blades and the two women sit in a effects not merely as resolutions of the circle on picnic blankets and playa mem- stories but as truths of human experience. ory game that might be called Let Us Yet it isn't only a matter of thinkin g, Now Praise Famous Men; it's a pity that Yes, this is the way it is. What we assent to is only a component of the pattern of James Agee didn't live to see the films of associations in his films; to tell the stories does not begin to suggest what the film s Satyajit Ray,which fulfill Agee's dreams.\" call to mind or why they' re so moving. There is always a residue of feeling that -PAULINE KAEL isn't resolved. Two yo ung men sprawled on a porch after a hot journey, a drunken THE NEW YORKER g roup doing the Twist in the dark on a MARCH 17, 1973 country road, Sharmila Tagore's face lit by a cigarette lighter, her undulating walk in a sari-the images are suffused with feeling and become overwhelmingly, sometimes unbearably beautiful. The emotions that are imminent may never develop , but we're left with the sense of a limitless ye t perhaps harmonious natural drama that the characters are part of. There are always larger, deeper associa- tions impending; we recognize the pres- ence of the mythic in the ordinary. And it's the mythic we're left with after the ordinary has been (temporarily) resolved . ••• For rental information about DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE FOREST (1970) and other Satyajit Ray films: TAGORE (1960); CHARULATA-THE LONELY WIFE (1964); NAYAK-THE HERO (1966) and a free descriptive catalog featuring over 250 classic foreign and American films, write to:

sort of ve getable yo ga existence, cease- Paris . Melodrama in a realistic setting . has one taut dramatic sequence-in which Sterling Hayden , as an alcoholic lessly counting from one to thirteen . Feu illade did it , and now Ri vette has done writer , drowns himself-that is a smashing set-piece, just possibly the best single I ha ve used ac tor names here rather it. Cinema will never be the same , and scene Altman has ever directed . than cha racter names not only because , neither will I. 11111111 Besides all its obvious entertainment wi th suc h a complex plot , it seerped easi- L.A. JOURNAL continued from page 2 values , THE LONG GOODBYE is an interest- er to follow, but more importantly be- ing essay on contemporary Hollywood, a witty , wistful evocation of an abandoned cause Ri ve tte does not belie ve in scripts had been delayed during management carnival town with a million memories of any more -at all-and had each actor in shakeups at Fo x, but at screenings this faded glory . Almost everyone we see is th e film inven t his own character and spring , the studio was very pleased by trying to act like a movie star-a Bogart d ialogue ; th en, together, actors and the reactions. Jay Cocks praised the film shamus , a Cagney gangster , an Elisha direc tor worked out w ho was to me et in Time , and other critics were reported Cook gunsel . Even the gateman in Malibu whom and where. The project was a to be equally enthusiastic . But it was sold practices his Jimmy Stewart imitation . game . a crosswo rd puzzle , a modern as a routine Western , and during the first None of them is in the movie business , equi valen t of comm edia del/ 'arle played engagements in the West and the Mid- but they are all victims of Hollywood . This agai nst Balzac 's sto ry of the thirteen . This west , no one came. Now ex hibitors in film is full of invention , and there should may explain why th e film 's main se- New York and Los Angeles are reluctant be an audience capable of responding quences-in which the ca mera is simply to book it all during the busy summer to its exuberance. plunked down in front of the actors- season . It wi ll be lucky to squeak into an come across wi th a richness and density out-of-the-way theater on the bottom half KID BLUE ought to be even more ac- rarely seen in the cinema . Although (o r of a double bill. These are two of the best cessible to the shadowy \"youth audi- because? ) the plot is so enigmatic , the American movies of the yea r, and the ence .\" It stars Dennis Hopper playing a actua l scenes have a sense of height- directors are understandably depressed character very close to the image he ened reality that makes them unforgetta- by the situation. projects offscreen: a stoned cowboy who ble . can 't abide by the rules of capitalist soci- Straight priva te eye movies-eve n a ety, a dumb but endearingly waggish Instead of locking his actors into pre- corrupt , deri vati ve hack job like SHAMUS- rebel. Set around the turn of the century , conce ive d notions o f character , Ri ve tte can still make some money , but THE LONG when Dime Bo x, Te xas has opened its encourages his actors to create and de- GOODBYE , a savage sendup of the genre , first factory-for manufacturing ashtrays velop their characters. It's a technique can 't fill theaters for a week . It offends -and a dropout minister is building a that resembles certain species of modern Raymond Chandler devotees , and it cer- flying machine right outside town , KID painting , in w hich the paint itself-the ra w tainly doesn 't present the Marlowe that BLUE is one of the revisionist Westerns material-becomes the subject of the Chandler conceived ; but on its own terms that sets out to imagine the real West in work . Here , the actors (w ho are , after all , the film is sl y, imaginative , startling , and transition . the ra w material too ) become the subject often hilarious-an original . Essentially There 's nothing solemn or preachy of the film . The difference lies in the fact comic in tone , it goes beyond parody , for about the movie (except for a slightly strained portrait of some drunken Indi- that Ri vette always has w hat he calls \" the it has disturbing moments of v iolence that ans); it's a breezy, cheerful comic study of an outlaw who wants to go straight but canvas-scenario \" against which his freeze the laughter. Elliott Gould 's Philip has trouble adjusting to the work ethic. What makes the film delightful is the actors must evolve , impro vise , create . Marlo we, a casual , easygoing schlemiel perception with which Edwin Shrake 's script draws the relationships-for ex- The result is a dia lectical experience who can be casually brutal , pro vokes an ample, the convoluted relationship of the outlaw hero and a serious factory worker conditioned by the director. It is he w ho uneasy , uncertain response ; he isn 't who wants to emUlate the ancient Greeks. The characters have crazy quirks that chooses the actors . And the actors he Chandler's chivalrous detective hero. distinguish them from the characters we 're used to seeing in Westerns ; they 're has chosen all seem to participate in his THE LONG GOODBYE is meant to explode rounded , bizarre, human-and the per- formances by Hopper, Warren Oates , own anguished , paranoid wo rld . the Forties myth of the priva te eye 's code Ben Johnson, Lee Purcell , Janice Rule , Jack Starrett are wonderfully expressive. I, too , entered this world-a world dif- of honor and nobility. It shouldn 't be Perhaps one problem in promoting ferent from my own , but now a part of shocking at this point ; but in the middle these movies is that they can't be easily categorized . If THE LONG GOODBYE were it. Every thing today looks different from of the nostalgia boom , people may not a brutal melodrama or a simple private eye spoof, the studio would know how the way it looke d two days ago . This is be read y to relinquish their old idols . to advertise it ; but it falls somewhere in between. Similarly , KID BLUE is neither a w hat I mean by calling OUT ONE/SPECTRE Surrounding Marlowe is a gallery of ec- straight action Western for the Clint East- wood-John Wayne market nor a cute, a mind-blowi ng experience : the film has centric , compelling minor charac- anachronistic romp like CAT BALLOU or BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID . trul y altered my perception . But instead ters-Nina va n Pallandt as a lovely Euro- Although it 's comic , it 's a funky realistic Western with emoti nal resonance. Seil- of taking me \" out of this wo rld \" (my pean wo man of m y stery , a loony ing these movies requires some imagina- tion ; their individual qualities will be wo rld ) , it took me right smack into it , but ps yc hiatrist, a sweet-natured yo ung cub slighted in a factory-style ad campaign. into part of it I was only diml y aware of. gangster, a pompous , sadistic gangster By the same token , watching these Always there , right beneath the epidermis played-with great relish and conviction of the everyday. Anguish on the boule- -by the director Mark Rydell. (One vards , anxiety in the cafes. Terror in a wishes he wo uld give up directing and repeated shot of the Ring Road around return to acting fulltime .) The mov ie also L - I - QNOWLOCATEDINLARGER ~~,,' QUARTERS Cinema NEWADDRESS 10 West 13th Street (off Fifth Avenue) hours: 10:30-6:30 (Thurs. till 7:30), closed Sun. & Mon. phone: 212/989-8519 CINEMABILIA 66 SEPTEMBER 1973

movies requires imagination. Some people can only respond to a movie if Directors in ACTION puts you they know in advance to e x pect a in the director's chair with \" drama\" or a \" comedy\"; any movie that mi xes styles loses them . Originality of any kind-even on a modest scale-must frighten and bewilder audiences. They • JOHN FORD, his cast and crew on Stagecoach don 't like the timeworn myths tampered with unless it's in a safe , harmless , mind- less spoof. • WILLIAM FRIEDKIN on It may be worth emphasizing , howev- The French Connection chase er, that these movies aren 't obscure or esoteric experimental films ; they 're • ORSON WELLES' cast and crew on Citizen Kane straight line narratives, with action and gags, likable characters to identify with. Although both are fresh and stimulating, • SAM PECKINPAH and other directors on the Western they are clearly in the mainstream of • KUBRICK, ALTMAN, SCHLESINGER, SI EGEL, and 7 other top directorson how they make movies commercial filmmaking-closer to THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE than to Godard or Resnais or Stan Brakhage. I could list ... and there's much, much more in words from the pros and several other recent commercial disas- 280 pictures that bring you on the set to watch the most excit- ters-BAD COMPAN Y, THE GREAT NORTH- ing filmmakers at work: Hitchcock on suspense; Mel Brooks FIELD MINNESOTA RAID , WHEN THE LEGENDS on comedy; Roger Corman on horror ; Newman, Lemmon, DIE , GUMSHOE , PULP , CISCO PIKE , BORN TO Cassavetes and others on the actor as director; ten young wIN-that, although too intimate or subtle directors on the making of their first feature. And that's or quirky to be box office blockbusters , just a preview! $9.95 cloth; $5.95 paper should have found a much larger audi- ence than they did find . Generally these movies have had Directors inACTION shoddy , totally misleading ad campaigns , Selections from Action, the Official Magazine of the Directors Guild of America and many of them were simply thrown Edited by Bob Thomas away . THE GREAT NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA - At your bookseller EIr TlBOBBS-MERRILL RAID , a comic , lyric Western with a Dick- ensian gallery of oddball characters , opened in drive-ins like JOE KIDD ; PULP turned up on the bottom half of double bills with SCORPIO . The insensitive reviews didn 't help much either, but the more of these movies that fail , the more difficult it becomes for any filmmaker with a per- sonal , eccentric touch to get inside a studio . The people who just want to re- make TRADER HORN or LITTLE MISS MARKER can find backing ; the filmmakers who try to sneak something new into formula movies have fewer and fewer opportu- nities. An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films The audience that would enjoy these by Donald Bogle offbeat movies is mainly , but not exclu- In \\\\0 'first' that's long overdue,\" * a black film historian shows how movie roles sively, a young audience-because most reflected the status of black Americans . From the turn-of-the-century blackface era of the movies are made by young direc- to the \\\\Ghetto Cinema\" of the '20s, through Beulah and Stepin Fetchit, to tors , or directors with a youthful sense Pinky , Sidney Poitier, Jim Brown, Diana of adventure and abandon . But are the Sands, Shaft and Superfly. young people who might appreciate \\\\Looks back with sympathy and admiration on the long parade of black performers these movies going to movies any more? struggling to 'make it' in American movies. .. .An excellent overview.\" - We know that the audience for foreign *Publishers We ekly Illustrated with photographs films has shrunk drastically over the last $12.50 decade. Obviously music has absorbed 625 Mod ison Avenue, N e w Yor k, N . Y. 10022 a large part of the potential movie audi- FILM COMMENT 67 ence , and maybe the new interest in drugs and religion has discouraged mo- viegoing too. The whole idea of \"enter- tainment \" is changing . Young people today play their movies in their heads , with a little help from their friends-and maybe a smoke or a snort; what's on screen probably pales by comparison . I don 't know the reasons for the diminish- ing movie audience . I just know that the audience for movies that need support no longer seems to exist. 11111111

BACK PAGE The Women's History Research Center announces the second ed ition of the ir Available Directory of Films By and About Women . exclusively This 75-page directory is organized by from topic and title and indexed by filmmaker. rbcfilms The cost is $3 to ind ividuals and $5 to institutions and groups. Contact Anne TheLast Bishop, Women 's History Research Center, 2325 Oak Street, Berkeley CA PictureShovv 94708.415 / 524-7772 . Ea&yRider The Third Annual Martin Luther King, Jr Researcher on American musical films Film Festival will be held on March 30 , needs help with his second book on 1974. The Festival will feature films which depict the experiences and strug- vocal dubbing. He has not been able to gles of ethnic minority groups in Ameri- ca. Applicants should submit their 16mm locate the following singers: films no later than October 1, 1973. There is an entrance fee of $5 . Certifi- Doroth y Eller Kay Lorraine cates and plaques will be awarded . Ap- Lorraine Ell iott D. Markas plications and inqu iries should be Virg inia Fl ohri Lynn Marti n mailed to Mrs Stephen Riddleberger, Pat Friday Bob Monet Festival Secretary, 57 Ardmore Road , Ben Gage Hohokus NJ 07423. 201 / 447-1261 . Anita Gordon Jam es Newill Eva Olivotti Projections is the name of a new publi- Gloria Grafton Carole Ric hards cation put out by the graduate students Gloria Gray of the Film Division of Columbia Univer- Betty Ru ssell sity. The magazine features critical writ- Betty Hiestand Helen Spann ings of the students and will appear Marjorie Lan e Trudy Steve ns twice a year. For further information Jeri Su llivan write Stefan Sharff, Film Division , Dodge Hall , Columbia Un iversity , New York NY If you know where these singers are 10027. 212 / 280-3996 . now, or have any confirmed information The 1973-74 Creative Artists Public Ser- vice Program will have applications on dubbing , please contact Miles available through September 30 , 1973 for art fellowships to individual artists Kreuger, The Institute of the American throughout New York State. The eligible fields include film , video and multi- Musical, Inc., 220 West 93rd Street, med ia. Fellowships will average $3 ,000 each . Applicants must be residents of New York NY 10025. 212 / SU7-1997 . New York and cannot be registered stu- TheKing dents. Completed applications and sam- The Washington National Student Film ples of work must be in by October 1, Festival , sponsored by the University of of MalVIn 1973. Contact Isabelle Fernandez, Maryland , will be on November 30 - De- Gardens CAPS, 250 West 57th Street, New York cember 1 . Entry blanks will be available NY 10019. 212 / 247-7701. from college film departments. Deadline ASafePiace is October 31 , 1973 . Winning films will Collector needs Cineaste vol 1, nos 1, 2; be shown on the PBS network and at I- vol2 no 2. Also Filmmakers ' Newsletter the AFI Theater in Washington DC . Z vol 1 (all issues). Have back issues of Prizes of $1 ,000 in cash and equipment both mags available. Contact G L to be awarded. For additional informa- w George, 685 West End Avenue, New tion contact Gene Weiss, Radio-TV-Film :E York NY 10025. Division, University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742 . 301 / 454-2541 . Heado:E () The Philadelphia Filmmakers Coopera- tive was recently founded in order to :E All of these feature help publicize and disseminate the work ..J of non-commercial filmmakers - espe- cially those in the Philadelphia l New Jer- u::: film s we r e made by sey area. The Cooperative plans to hold screenings, critiques and lectures as oC BBS Productions and well as renting and selling films. Inter- ested people and independent film- :;:; makers should contact John Pyros, Philadelphia Filmmakers Cooperative, c will be released Se p- 2002 St James Street, Philadelphia PA 19103 . 215 / 561-1311. Q) E tembe r 1, 1973 both Q) individually and as a UI l'O Q) series. For further in- Q. U...I formation and a free Q) brochure, contact us Monthly lists of scarce cinema This back page is open to all who wish ...:;U:;I soon. books & magazines sent to communicate news or information to airmail - $5 .00 yearly . our readers. Listing is free , all copy is Q) subject to editing , deadlines are two A. E. COX, 21 Cecil Road, Itchen, months in advance of issue date. Dead- > 50uthhampton 502 7HX, line for the January-February issue is 1 \"C ENGLAND. November 1973. Send to Film Comment, Box 686 Village Station , Brookline MA -l'O \" . .. all at most reasonable 02147 . 617 / 782-3323 . prices. \" o International Film Guide. Cl (be filmlC 933 North La Brea Avenue Los Angeles, Calif. 90038 (213) 874-5050 68 SEPTEMBER 1973

I~ A Series of Feature Classics The Chaplin Review City Lights (1931) M~dern Times (1936) AD\\)gs Life (19 18) The Great Dictat~r (1940) Sh\\)ulder Arms (19 18) The Pilgrim (1923) M~nsieur Verd~ux (1947) The Kid (1921) & The Idle Class (1921) Limelight (1952) AKing in NewY~rk (1957) The G~ld Rush (1925) & PayDay (1922) The Circus (1928) The 10 programs will only be offered as a complete series. For more information on how your organization can present this comprehensive series on Chaplin, contact: (be filml 933 North La Brea Ave.· Los Angeles, Ca. 90038· 213/ 874-5050 (Catalog available upon request) I~