MOVIES After the Facts

A number of this month’s films make direct claims to truthfulness, and others imply a kind of truth by using, for instance, television news clips. Consider these possibilities: a biography of a famous dancer, a mini-history of the college generation of the late Sixties, a “true story” about a man’s two children being “hidden” from him by the government. All three movies are models of sophisticated technique, but one is frequently more aware of the camera’s clever movement than of what it shows.

Director Herbert Ross claims that all the sources and facts have been checked and balanced in Nijinsky, which is sometimes confusing but always mesmerizing. I’d guess that many moviegoers will check out those sources for themselves and balance them against this version of the facts.

The way some people table-hop at parties, Nijinsky city-hops: Budapest, February 1912; Greece, March 1912; Monte Carlo, April 1912. The places look fabulous and so does the cinematography of Douglas Slo-combe, who can at once bring great clarity and subtle sensuousness to a shot.

In 1912, Nijinsky (George de la Pena) was at the height of his art, his fame, and, not least, his infamy. This portrait of the great Polish dancer by way of the Ballet Russe is “framed,” as it were, by Romola de Pulsky (Leslie Browne) first setting eyes on Nijinsky in Budapest and then pursuing him until she eventually catches him in marriage. What de Pulsky didn’t realize was that Nijinsky was living with the ballet’s autocratic impresario, Sergei Diaghilev (Alan Bates); in the hothouse atmosphere of the Ballet Russe, a woman was no more than decorative touch. Disaster was inevitable, even without Nijin-sky’s incipient schizophrenia.

The problem with the movie, which seems overlong at two hours, is that it’s not nearly long enough. One wants more characterization, more of those opulent settings, more coherence, and, especially, more scenes from the famous ballets. Nijinsky and his art are too rich and too complicated for a two-hour film of this scope. As it stands, Alan Bates is a brilliant Diaghilev in a portrait of an artist that seems only half completed.

A Small Circle of Friends seems to be manufactured out of other movies. In style, it aspires to be a The Way We Were of the late Sixties: as glossy as an ad, as shallow as a picture postcard, and full of music tocue our passions.

The circle of friends includes would-be journalist Leo DaVinci (Brad Davis), who arrives at Harvard like an anchovy dominating a pizza, would-be artist Jessica (Karen Allen), who loves Leo but collides with his ego, and would-be doctor Nick (Jameson Parker), who plays odd man out to Jessica until she invites him in out of the cold.

We drop in on various years of the late Sixties and get the once-over-lightly on the war, the draft, the riots, the protests. All of it has the depth and resonance of a Marvel love comic book – or, more precisely, a Marvel love comic book with “relevant” updating about social consciousness and the Pill. One can only surmise that director Rob Cohen and writer Ezra Sacks spent a lot of time at the movies before they decided to make one.

In Hide in Plain Sight, life has authored a tale that would chill the heart of Franz Kafka. The locale is Buffalo, New York; the year, 1967. A blue-collar factory worker (James Caan) is divorced, but baby-sits for his two kids while his ex-wife goes out with a small-time hood. She marries the hood, who ends up in jail after an ill-planned hold-up and then testifies against his former cronies when the police promise him protection under the new Witness Relocation Program. The hood, his new wife, and the kids are given new identities in another state. The Caan character, who has always obeyed the law, is given the run-around by everyone until heends up almost in a state of madness.

A note at the beginning of the film promises us a “dramatization of a true story,” which sounds a bit contradictory. The movie itself has its share of contradictions. Caan, in a cast that is uniformly persuasive, is actorish and mannered. Caan, who doubles as director, is also mannered in many of his staged scenes, which play like quotes from other films rather than part of a “true story.” A handheld camera style would have been more appropriate to the film’s content. And director Caan should have canned actor Caan.

They’re an odd couple, this pair of cops in The Black Marble. He’s a Russian-American named Valnikov (Robert Foxworth), who downs impressive amounts of vodka at every opportunity. She’s a no-nonsense lady named Natalie (Paula Prentiss), who resents being assigned to work with this apparent lush. Why was he reassigned from homicide? And why does he have these odd dreams about a rabbit being skinned?

This odd couple finds itself faced with, of all things, a dognapping. A seedy guy named Philo Skinner (Harry Dean Stanton) handles show dogs when he’s not losing bets. Because of the latter, he nabs a cute little thing named Vicki and demands $85,000 in ransom from her owner.

Clearly not your standard cops and robbers. And a decided change of pace for the team that brought us The Onion Field – with writer Joseph Wambaugh again adapting his own book and Harold Becker directing. They have Foxworth and Prentiss on hand to give the best performances of their careers, which is fortunate, because the situation is so obvious that the film’s success depends on characterization. Wambaugh has written often about the pain of being a cop; Valnikov is a memorable portrait of what happens to a gentle man in this often violent world.

As a former fiddle player, I have to complain about James Brooks’ terrible faking on the violin. He can’t even hold a bow properly, never mind the fingering. Brooks was creepy and memorable in The Onion Field. Here he’s a sort of Fiddler on the Fountain. On the subject of music, Maurice Jarre’s score seems to have nothing to do with this movie. As for Harry Dean Stanton, he should get the Sleaze Award of the decade: He makes you want to take a shower.



Nothing Personal. Suzanne Somers’ first feature film is a lot less likable than she is. It’s a sort of updated Frank Capra tale about a professor of constitutional law (Donald Sutherland) and a novice Washington lawyer (Somers) who take on big business and the government over the killing of baby seals in Canada. A good situation for feisty comedy and acerbic satire, but Robert Kaufman’s script is thin, George Bloom-field’s direction a bit slack, and the sparks that fly between Somers and Sutherland few and far between; they’re both extremely likable, and that’s about it.



Serial. Welcome to Marin County, birthplace of the Me Decade, where the adults are continually putting the make on one another and the kids are screwed up. You have hot tubs and do-it-yourself weddings and do-it-yourself divorces. You have therapists who seem nuttier than their patients, a crazed molorcycle gang, and those religious love bugs who try to grin you to death. Well, you have so many couples and kids and subplots that this picture is essentially a collection of fragments, varying from raunchy-dirty to raunchy-funny. Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld play the lead couple in this game of Freudian roulette, but the bullets turn out to be blanks at least half the time.



Simon. The unsung writing half of Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman, makes his first solo flight with this offbeat first feature film. It gets off the ground nicely, stays up in thin air too long, and makes a rocky landing. Five genius types at something called the Institute for Advanced Concepts, headed by the whimsical Austin Pen-dleton, like to mess around with things, like TV’s Nielsen Ratings. For their masterpiece de resistance, they select a chap with no parents – Simon (Alan Arkin) – and con him and the country into thinking he’s from outer space. He starts behaving like an Old Testament prophet, decreeing that there will be no more Muzak in elevators and no more junk food and other bromides. Brickman is not as sharp a satirist as former colleague Allen and not nearly as funny. It’s a souffle of a show that only half rises; nonetheless, it’s an interesting debut.



Little Miss Marker. To be honest, I didn’tsee the Shirley Temple version of this movie,made in 1934 and taken from the story byDamon Runyon. It’s about a bookie calledSorrowful Jones (Walter Matthau), whokidnaps the little miss (Sara Stimson) as insurance on the $10 her father owes him.Then there’s the tough guy, Blackie (TonyCurtis), who owns a gambling joint, and, ofcourse, the love interest, in the person ofAmanda (Julie Andrews), who’s supposedto be Blackie’s girl but who’s really sweet onSorrowful. Writer/director Walter Bernstein supplies all the requisite gambling andhorse racing and good clean fun that a re-makeof this sort requires.