FILM Screen Tests

In the past, critics have charged the USA Film Festival with catering primarily to dilettantes interested in hobnobbing with the stars, presenting conventional fluff that would open in Dallas shortly after Festival Week. While this year’s fare couldn’t be considered iconoclastic, there was certainly enough quality to keep all but the malcontents satisfied. In part it may have been the psychological advantage of knowing that we were finally seeing films, good or bad, that no one else in this area would see for a while, if at all. But it was also that the Festival succeeded in giving audiences a fair representation of the feature films currently being made in this country. The Short Film day, billed as “four hours of the best new USA short, animated, experimental, dramatic, and documentary films, ” was, unfortunately, less representative of the work being done in that format: With the exception of Will Vinton’s The Little Prince, there was little that was innovative or exciting. For its part, the well-intentioned Festival first, the Eyes of Texas, wasn’t quite what had been promised. Though the segments from non-theatrical releases were interesting, they were nearly all from Dallas, leaving one to wonder what had happened to the rest of the state.

The mood for the week of feature film screenings was set in the opening sequences of Love Me Tonight, the first film in the retrospective honoring the innovative American director Rouben Mamoulian. Starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald, the enchanting musical begins with a symphonic montage of Paris, a fitting metaphor for the next week of movie magic.



Now step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and let The Stuntman take you on a magical mystery tour. And if you’re not intoxicated with illusion at the conclusion, it’s only because things aren’t what they seem to be. What more can you expect from a movie? Or, in this case, from a movie within a movie?



On one level The Stuntman is an action adventure story about a fugitive, Cameron (Dallas-born Steve Railsback), who wanders onto a movie set while fleeing the local police. The maniacal but presumably brilliant director Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole) hires him to perform stunts for the leading man in a World War I action-adventure. Between jumping from buildings, falling through skylights, and dancing the Charleston on the wing of a biplane, Cameron falls in love with movie within the movie leading lady (Barbara Hershey).

By the film’s final scene, in which stunt-man Cameron is expected to plunge to a watery death in an exquisite Duesenberg, it appears that the director may be trying to film an actual death. Who knows? People aren’t who they appear to be; situations aren’t what they appear to be. And all of it appears to be orchestrated by O’Toole, who couldn’t have been cast more perfectly.



The nicest thing we can say about Lt. Colonel Bull Meechum (Robert Duvall) in The Ace is that he’d be a great guy to have on your side during a war. But the year is 1962, and Meechum can’t cope with peace. Played with an animalistic fury and power by Duvall at his best, Meechum is tough, arrogant, rowdy, crude, and inflexible. He tells his new squadron that he expects them to “Look on me as God. ” To his children he says, “You chew nails while other kids chew cotton candy. “

We spent most of the movie disliking the colonel intensely, yet there was something likable and even admirable about him at times -a corny sense of humor and a pursuit of excellence. The most important conflict in the film is between Meechum and his 18-year-old son, Ben (Michael O’Keefe), who refuses to be molded in his father’s image. Mocked, threatened, and bullied by a father who is incapable of showing affection, Ben is forced to struggle with his manhood and this love-hate relationship until the climactic scene where Meechum confesses his inner torments in a drunken stupor. As a witness to this moment of vulnerability, Ben finally understands his father and is free to shout “I love you. ” And this is where the film should have ended. Instead we must watch Ben achieve real manhood only after his father’s death; a weak postscript to an otherwise well-constructed film.

I n the middle of Foxes; we wanted to rush home, sit on our precocious 7-year-old daughter, and read her Peter Pan stories so she and we would never have to confront those dreaded teen-age years. Foxes is a frightening film for every parent with children under 18. It begins as a promising, intimate picture of four teen-age girls (Jodie Foster, Cherie Currie, Marilyn Kagan, and Kandice Stroh) searching for their identities. Their search takes them along a yellow brick road lined with drugs and booze instead of gumdrop trees. Boys are objects to be manipulated and taunted as the girls test their sexuality. Losing their virginity is a rile of passage into what they consider adulthood. Turning away from families that are either too fragmented to care or too old-fashioned to understand, the girls turn to each other for support and understanding. After all, who else would put up with them?

This film could have been great. The acting is fresh, the subject untapped. The scenes where the girls discuss their secret desires and private fears are candid and precious moments. But the promise of an honest and credible film fades behind the tinsel and glitter of Hollywood’s formula for a box office success, which this film will probably be. Director Andrian Lyne uses every gimmick imaginable in this portrait of adolescent wildness – car chases, an unruly party that gave work to a lot of extras, the death of one member of the group just when there is hope she won’t self-destruct. Despite what Lyne proclaimed at the USA Film Festival, this is not Rebel Without a Cause. But it is worth seeing and wondering how so many people survive their teen-age years.

Who says a documentary film can’t be as dramatic and entertaining as a feature film and at the same time more honest, realistic, and, yes, educational? That’s what you’ll get in Ira Wohl’s penetrating and heart-warming documentary feature Best Boy, about his own 51-year-old mentally retarded cousin, Philly.

It took three years of shooting to allow Philly and his parents, Max and Pearl, to tell their story spontaneously and naturally in front of the camera. Having spent so much time with the family, Wohl has created a film that addresses more than the problems of mental retardation. We agree with him when he says, “This started out as a story about Philly’s progress toward independence, but became a saga of a family in a crisis situation when a loved one is leaving home for the first time. “

Interestingly enough, it was Ira Wohl as concerned relative and not film maker who encouraged the family to prepare for the time when they would not be around to take care of Philly. It was just a few weeks before Philly was to receive a battery of tests determining where he might be placed that Wohl decided to shoot some film. Realizing that he might have some powerful material, he continued filming periodically for the next three years. As viewers, we are privy to many intimate moments revealing the agony of parents trying to let go, as well as the pride and joy of those same parents watching their son thrive and enjoy new environments.

Best Boy opened in New York two months ago and will be shown in other cities around the country, a strategy that hasn’t proved too successful with other documentary films. By now, though, it may have won an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary. If so, the award was richly deserved.



“Shwell, ” says the short guy with a slight lisp, whom middle-agers recognize at once and younger people may not be able to place. And “shwell” sets the tone for The Man With Bogart’s Face. In this contemporary comic detective story, the leading man, Sam Marlowe (Robert Sacchi), is a film addict and private eye who gets a plastic surgeon to make him into Bogey.

Drawing from every movie ever made, Sam Marlowe writes his own script as he becomes a much sought-after star detective. Much of the action is reminiscent of golden moments from the silver screen, but not without that old Bogie sarcastic touch. “After all, ” Marlowe says, “Hollywood Boulevard isn’t what it used to be, but then it never was. “

Sam Marlowe spends most of his time tracking down the killer of an ex-Nazi. In his idle moments he plays love boy to a Gene Tierney look-alike, Gena (Michelle Phillips). Marlowe solves the case, threading his way through the two- and three-liners and discovering plenty of bullet-riddled corpses along the way.

The producers capitalize on Robert Sac-chi, who is an amazing Bogie look-alike on and off screen. The face that bothered him in high school because he wanted to resemble Paul Newman, not some long-gone actor named Bogart, has turned his acting career into a gold mine. He has traveled for five years starring in a show called “Bogey’s Back. ” It’s worth noting that Mr. Sacchi doesn’t feel he has been typecast.



The Haunting Of M is a ghost story for the weak of heart. Don’t misunderstand; there are times when you may be frightened, and not because of special effects clichés. The ghost as a young man is as real as his mysterious presence in a family portrait taken at an elegant party honoring a young marriageable daughter, Marianna. The attractive and coy Marianna becomes infatuated with the picture and soon begins to act strangely. Her older sister Halina, who has come from the city for a short visit, tries to unravel the cause of her sister’s illness and the identity of the ghost only to find that her semi-invalid aunt was intimately involved with the apparition 40 years earlier.

Film maker Anna Thomas (writer and director) describes her movie as a psychological character study. The problem is that she hasn’t dug deep enough: There are continual hints of repressed sexuality and familial conflicts, but the characters don’t progress beyond the point of imparting certain basic information; the images of the Scottish countryside and turn-of-the-century ambiance are more compelling than the relationships we see.

The cinematographer on this independent 16mm production was Greg Nava; the soundman and associate producer was Robert Yerington. The entire production crew deserves kudos for the ambitiousness of their undertaking.



The Changeling is a sophisticated ghost story about the things that go bump in the night.

John Russell (George C. Scott) returns to Seattle for peace and anonymity after the death of his wife and daughter. Once there, he rents a large mansion from the local historical society and soon discovers that a force in the house is trying to communicate with him, at first through loud, rhythmic banging. Respect for the unknown and a certain amount of skepticism in the beginning soon give way to Russell’s obsession with trying to discover the source of the sounds. He is accompanied on his odyssey by Claire Norman (Trish Van Devere), the person from the historical society responsible for renting the house to him. First, it’s the discovery of a hidden room whose cobwebs hide a gruesome secret, then one of the best seances ever filmed that leads the principal characters and the audience through a sequence of shattering glass, quivering chandeliers, runaway wheelchairs, and a detective story that will keep you on the edge of your seat. They may read like the conventional devices of the genre, but director Peter Medak wields these terror-inducers with great finesse.



Alcohol isn’t the only sustenance for skid row residents in Ralph Waite’s new film On The Nickel. Waite has attempted to touch the audience with his skid row characters. They have feelings just like us, only they are more afraid of living than of dying.

Ralph Waite is the John Walton of television renown, and with his made-from-television dollars, he funded, wrote, produced, directed, and starred in On The Nickel. (Off screen he went one step further and established a center where skid row women could get a meal, a bath, and some help if they wanted it. )

The film is not entirely convincing, especially when Waite steps in front of the camera. He comes off too strong in melodramatic scenes that could have been done with a lot less romantic schmaltz.

But despite some difficulty, the film’s strengths shine through. Waite shows the love and resilience that exist in this seedier side of life. The film begins slowly, focusing on Sam (Donald Moffat), a former alcoholic who has cleaned up his act, kicked the bottle, and moved farther, but not too far, uptown. Sam is a survivor who is shuffling determinedly in the right direction, but he is lonely and yearns more for his former comrades, who made up a supportive family, than for the bottle.

Life is not easy on these characters. We watch as Sam returns home to skid row and tries unsuccessfully to keep his friend C. G. (Waite) from killing himself with alcohol.

Just when you think the film is ending, it takes an unexpectedly delightful turn as C. G. ’s skid row family of friends tries to retrieve his ashes from the crematory without paying the $12 fee. Their bumbling attempts immerse the audience in a half-hour of laughter. And in the end, C. G. is sprinkled at the roots of a tree where he is watered with – what else? – wine.

Ralph Waite and On The Nickel represent a strange phenomenon in the film business, one which plagues many independently produced films. With all his money and all his exposure and box-office appeal, Waite still has been unable to get a distributor for his film and is now distributing it himself.



To most people on this side of the Atlantic, the undeclared war in Northern Ireland seems obscure and senseless, highlighted occasionally by a bombing or a shooting. For Michael Flaherty (Craig Wasson), the central character in The Outsider, the war has a different meaning. He has listened since boyhood to grandfather Seamus (Sterling Hayden) recount his own daring exploits in the Irish struggle for independence. So after a disillusioning tour in Vietnam, the idealistic Michael goes off to join the IRA, hoping to find the right cause. It’s not long before the IRA leadership decides their American volunteer will serve their purposes best by dying from a British bullet in Belfast. Claiming that Michael died for the cause, the IRA could count on increased contributions from Irish-Americans. So much for the right cause.

Writer/Director Tony Luraschi uses this story to paint a grim and realistic picture of a war without heroes, medals, or parades, where each side has its good guys and bad guys. His lucid script and uncomplicated direction combine with a cast of seasoned Irish and British actors to give the film a realism unequalled in most war films.