THE MOVIES

One of the first things the movies learned to do was to make people laugh. They did it well for a long time, at least until the late Forties, when the great hypnotic eye of television began to draw away the audiences, leaving the theaters filled largely with adolescents. Adolescents, as anybody who has ever raised one, or taught one, or been one knows, are incapable of free and unself-conscious laughter. Television superseded movies as the great comic entertainer, turning butchered versions of the great silent comedies into fodder for the very young, while serving up the great romantic comedies of the Thirties and Forties as nostalgia trips for adults on the Late Show. While television was developing its own comic styles and stars, movie comedy entered a period of decline, its normal level marked by the Doris Day Protects Her Virtue cycle.

Now, we are constantly being told, escapist entertainment has once again replaced social consciousness on the screen as we reach the middle of the Seventies. Do we dare hope for the reappearance of a genuine comic style in the movies, a style which will prove as fertile to the directors and actors of the Seventies as the style of the Thirties was to the talents of Grant and Hepburn and Cukor and Hawks? Depression and World War II lay outside the walls of theaters in the Thirties and Forties, making the dark womb of the theater all the warmer. Recession and detente produce anxieties that are inescapable, and perhaps the catharsis of the disaster film or the costume parties of the nostalgia vehicles are the only release from this world which is too much within us.

A case in point: The Prisoner of Second Avenue is a comedy about the recession. It doesn’t work. Its author, Neil Simon, has become a millionaire by writing plays about urban Angst, plays that run for years on Broadway before they are served up at dinner theaters. Simon has never made the transition from stage to screen work for him, perhaps because all of his plays are about people trapped in rooms within cities. The camera opens up possibilities for the characters that they don’t have when they’re trapped on the other side of the footlights, but his comedy depends on his characters not having these possibilities. Prisoner is about Mel (Jack Lemmon), who loses the job he has held for 22 years, and has a nervous breakdown from sitting around the apartment while his wife Edna (Anne Bancroft) goes out to work. The problem is not that the film’s subject is unsuitable for comedy, for the audience’s laughter at Mel’s plight is sympathetic and liberating rather than mocking. Mel’s paranoia -the ultimate paranoid fantasy that the whole Human Race has united in a conspiracy to deprive him of his job -is that of an urban Everyman. We laugh at it because we recognize and fear it in ourselves, and because we see it, and ourselves, as absurd. Nor is it merely that the psychological resolution is too pat: Mel is “cured” when he comes to an understanding about his relationship to his more successful brother at the same time the brother comes to an understanding about his relationship to Mel, the family’s favorite child. Nor even that the film’s morality (something like “The City is a jungle and we must be tigers”) is shabby. Mel bumps into stranger on the street, thinks his pocket has been picked, pursues and tackles the man and takes a wallet, which, of course, he later discovers really does belong to the stranger. Mel and Edna decide to keep the money on the grounds that since they too have recently been robbed, they’re just getting back a bit of what The City has taken from them, and because the experience of fighting back against even an imagined wrong has been therapeutic for Mel.

The film fails because its producer-director, Melvin Frank, is unable to decide what he wants us to think and feel about Mel’s plight: is it comic or pathetic or both? And if both, how do we correlate comedy and pathos? Simon’s script is laden with wisecracks and one-liners and the standard situation jokes about apartment life: the noisy neighbors, the elevators that break down leaving Edna to climb fourteen flights with the groceries, and so on. Frank fights the comedy with a melancholy Marvin Hamlisch score, but every time the blues theme enters, Simon’s script scares it away with a gag.

Frank is also the wrong man, apparently, to direct such high-voltage performers as Jack Lemmon and Ann Bancroft. Time has given Lemmon’s face marks of experience and fatigue and defeat which contrast sharply with the naivete, energy, and enthusiasm of his usual comic style. Lemmon has aged, but his comic persona has not, so in Mel’s attack on an obstreperous upstairs neighbor, we see Lemmon as an aging Ensign Pulver, recapitulating his assault on the captain’s palm tree. Frank’s muddled direction never pulls Lemmon as comic actor into focus with Mel as victim.

Anne Bancroft is a sexy woman: Her almost placid sensuality coexists remarkably with her tense, shrewd, and calculating manner. If she were not so intelligent she would be merely one of the screen’s great beauties. But the dualism of her personality makes her overcharge practically every role she is cast in. Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate was the part which best expressed this duality. She was all wrong as Jennie Churchill in Young Winston not because she was miscast, but because the script gave her no room to be what she was playing: the beauty that destroys and creates. Like Lemmon, she is never in repose; her face remains open and alert and expectant. We can’t believe her as the Edna who has stayed home and kept house for Mel all these years, so the transformation from hausfrau to career woman, the role reversal which is central to the plot, is no transformation at all.

The Prisoner of Second Avenue will probably move rapidly from the movie theaters to the television screen. It is obviously designed to do so, for its frames are composed for easy reduction from wide screen to small one, and it has, to use the terms of the local movie review board, no sex or violence, and its language is limited to the milder expletives which even the White House didn’t bother to delete.

But Simon notwithstanding, there are major comic talents at work in the movies today such as Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, and Richard Lester. Lester has trouble finding himself: he keeps wanting his comedy to be relevant, so he bombs more often than he succeeds. When he gives free rein to real talent like that of the Beatles in Hard Day’s Night and Help! or the cast of thousands in The Three Musketeers, and forgets that he ought to say something, he creates films that are near classics. Allen may be the most intelligent and gifted comedian since Buster Keaton, but he has taken a long time to develop his films into something other than visualizations of his stand-up-comic routines. Mel Brooks comes closest to producing pure escapist comedy in the mode of the Marx Brothers or W.C. Fields. Young Frankenstein is the tightest and most slickly finished of his films. It doesn’t have the wild energy, the sheer loony something-to-offend-everyone vulgarity of The Producers or Blazing Saddles, and its comic framework, a lampoon of horror films, tempts Brooks into some obvious gags that have been stale since Abbott and Costello met Frankenstein in 1948. But it’s still great fun, particularly for horror movie fans, who will recognize the conventions, the costumes, the sets, the sparking and flaring laboratory machinery, and all of the other borrowings from the genre, down to the murky and expressionistic black-and-white cinematography. Brooks’ humor is that of an eternal child, as his excessive fondness for having his characters use children’s naughty words for excrement demonstrates. (The bean-eating scene in Blazing Saddles is another case in point.) Gene Wilder is his perfect hero, the perpetual innocent who looks as if he has to stop occasionally and remind himself that he’s a grownup. As the mad scientist, Wilder is a Walter Mitty who has found his fantasies come true and beginning to turn on him. With the aid of pop-eyed Marty Feldman, an Igor with a peripatetic hump, and a nubile assistant played by Teri Garr, Wilder’s Frankenstein creates a monster who is a lurching hulk with the soul of a junior executive (we last see him reading the Wall Street Journal). Peter Boyle’s monster is, of course, loveable, whether suffering in silence while a blind man (Gene Hackman in a wonderful cameo role) ladles soup into his lap, or clomping his way through a white-tie-and-tails rendition of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” to prove to an audience that Frankenstein’s experiment has produced a “sophisticated” creature. The rest of the cast includes Madeline Kahn as Wilder’s “look but don’t touch” fiancee, Cloris Leachman with her marvelous face frozen into that of a Teutonic battle-axe, and Kenneth Mars as a Prussian officer with a recalcitrant artificial arm.

If there is a style for the comedy of the Seventies, it would seem to be the kind of eclectic, allusive, movie-for-people-who-love-movies style that Brooks and Allen and Lester have evolved – Lester in taking off on the costume drama in The Three Musketeers, Allen in taking off on science fiction in Sleeper or the Bogart cult in Play It Again, Sam, and Brooks in taking off on the western and the horror film. Sometimes this mode produces comedies that are amusing but hollow at the core, like the recent attempts at retreading the sophisticated comedy of the thirties by turning George Segal and Glenda Jacksoninto the mold of Clark Gable andClaudette Colbert, or Ryan O’Nealand Barbra Streisand into JamesStewart and Jean Arthur. A Touch of Class and What’s Up, Doc? are funny,but they leave us longing for the realthing: It Happened One Night, orHoliday, or Bringing Up Baby. Thegenuine innocence of slapstick comedy springs eternal, while the veins ofsophisticated comedy seem to haverun dry.



D-Rated Movies

David Brudnoy

Abdication: Why (maybe) Sweden’s Queen Christina vacated her throne in 1654 to find happiness as a Catholic lusting after a Vatican Cardinal. Liv Ullman and Peter Finch, back from that “Lost Horizon” hokum, meander through a tiresome lot of philosophical and sexual chatter leading nowhere. The real reason the Protestant Swede left home? She couldn’t stand the weather in Stockholm.

Airport 1975: A disaster a day keeps the pilots at play. An endless clinker with everyone from Moses (Charlton Heston) to the “Exorcist” girl (Linda Blair), cross-eyed Karen Black, Helen Reddy as a warbling nun, Sid Caesar, Myrna Loy as a lush, and Gloria Swanson as Gloria Swan-son, plus everybody’s favorite -the Boeing 747, with a big hole in its cockpit.



Earthquake: No. 38 of the current crop of disaster films, full of outrageous special effects and a cast of zillions. Plus an added delight -the destruction of Los Angeles. Serves ’em right, too. The acting is as heavy as the falling building, but the falling buildings are the real stars.



The Godfather Part II: Surpasses the original by a mile, with Al Pacino as the young Don and Robert DeNiro in flashback as the original Godfather-the Brando role of the first movie. Over three hours long, but worth every minute; probably the best cinematic examination of syndicate crime.

Amarcord: Fellini’s magnificent reminiscence of his 1930’s boyhood-lusty, loving, wry, a tender ramble through the four seasons and the many conditions of humankind. No sloppy sentimentality, no holds barred and lacking the excesses of his most recent film, “Roma.” A joy throughout.

The Klansman: Richard Burton as friend-of-the-blacks in a tone which, seemingly, has written the book on bigotry. Klansman tries to supress every conceivable outrage against Negroes into two hours. It is too ponderous to take seriously.



Lacombe, Lucien: An absolute triumph from Louis Malle. The story of a young French peasant who becomes a collaborator in 1944, finds happiness doing the Nazi dirty work and more happiness with a Jewish girl, then . .. Beautifully done, un-preachy, powerfully communicating its message by example, subtly, brilliantly.



Lenny: Dustin Hoffman as the liberals’ scourge, Lenny Bruce, here transformed into a liberal saint. Somewhere deep inside there’s an important message: Don’t stifle your eccentrics; let ’em be. But the film buries Lenny under the weight of its own reverance, showing us only a fifth of the Lenny who skewered every convention, who made fun of everybody and everything, who rewrote the book on bad taste. Hoffman is superb, and so is Valerie Perrine as his wife Honey. Some of the material is well transposed directly from Bruce’s routines, though much of it is too chopped up to retain its power. “Lenny” is only a part of the real Bruce, and that not the least attractive, though it’s grim enough.

The Little Prince: Antoine de Sainte Exupery’s joy-filled tale of an adult’s awareness of reality as seen through the eyes of a child. Here, unfortunately, it is transformed into a musical so bombastic that the poor tyke is buried beneath it. What are little prince’s made of? Sugar and spice and everything treacly. One saving grace: Bob Fosse as the snake undulating, vamping, hissing his way right into your heart. The rest goes to your stomach like too much candy.

The Man With the Golden Gun: Roger Moore once more as 007. James Bond is now after both Scaramanga, fastest gun on earth -who comes complete with his own island and a midget valet -and a device to solve the energy crisis. Bond’s girls include the oriental Chu Me and the Occidental Mary Goodnight. Tepid Bond, with Moore taking on the appearance by now of a plaster cast of himself.

The Night Porter: Tender is the sado-masochistic night. Liliana Cav-ani’s bizarre film of a Grand Guignol hotel of kinky sex, complete with hot and cold running ex-Nazis and the most ugly sex scenes of any commercial film in memory. With Dirk Bogarde magnificent as the former SS death camp guard. The film is terrifying, draining, nauseating.

Scenes From a Marriage: Ingmar Bergman’s investigation of a modern alliance gone sour, distilled from a lengthy six-part TV series into a jarring movie starring Liv Ullman. Claustrophobic photography, sophisticated and chilling dialogue, a phenomenally fine work. Not for those whose marriages are on the rock.

The Trial of Billy Jack: Installment No. 3 in the profitable exploitation saga of the modern saint, half-breed Billy, and his lady friend and her sanctimonious freedom school. Husband-wife team Delores Taylor and Tom Laughlin milk every drop of pathos from this ludicrous adventure of our idiotic hero.

A Woman Under the Influence: The finest American film of 1974. John Cassavetes’ unnerving, devastating examination of a wife distraught beyond repair. With Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands.

Young Frankenstein: Mel Brooks’s latest mad comedy, starringGene Wilder as the Frankenstein’sgrandson trying it again. The ultimate send-oflf of the enduring old classic, with enough ’in’jokes to keep thefilm history buff happy, and enoughbroad humor for everyone. And muchfun with seven-foot monster’s proportionally large whatsit.