On Screen

...Burgess' suicide, for instance, and the epilogue with Marian an old woman sending the lonely, neurotic, middle-aged Leo on a last errand, are clouded almost to the point of incomprehensibility...

...But other things are muffed...

...There is, for example, Peter Fonda's first directorial venture, The Hired Hand...

...Here, at the crucial stage of puberty, among the idly and idyllically rich...

...But they cannot, or will not...

...Trumbo, whom blacklisting turned into a martyr, but whom not even black magic could turn into an artist, has directed here for the first time, from his own script based on his own '30s novel...

...Leo loses his heart, his innocence, and his future happiness...

...The script, by Alan Sharp, is of truly monumental insanity: Nothing in it is motivated, clarified, or allowed to resemble sense...

...Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun displays an ineptitude so old-fashioned, a woolli-ness so pathetically identifiable with the American '30s (an era that confused art with pamphleteering and postermaking), a banality so triumphant as to make you retch more in sadness than in nausea...

...Into these dilapidated, physically and morally disintegrating premises, Skolimowski has dragged everything from Kafka to Genet, from Murnau to Truffaut and Godard, in a desperate attempt to stir up new waves in an old pool...

...Losey has little feeling for the rhythms and choreography of these capers, and they have a leaden arbitrariness about them...

...The scenes of derogation, humiliation, and castration are effectively managed—Pinter and Losey are past masters at this sort of thing...

...he might be using a good word lightly...

...As the grown-up Leo, Michael Redgrave gives the impression of having just come out of a two-hour hiccupping spell and being afraid the fit might start again...

...He falls in deep, boyish love with Marian, the lovely daughter of the house, engaged to a viscount...

...Miller) coupled with some of the slowest lap dissolves ever contrived (by Frank Mazzola), so that there are long moments when you are watching two films, one on top of the other, and both equally bad...

...Scenes are ruthlessly foreshortened so that the action lurches ahead jerkily...

...Their two previous, not uninteresting yet vastly overrated collaborations...

...The boy likes Ted and has no idea that the notes refer to assignations...

...The fun and games, the little fights between Leo and his classmate and host—sometimes playful, sometimes deeply although obscurely hostile?are staged with unconvincing stiffness...

...he exudes that upper-class vagueness of which it is hard to say whether it is shrewd, obtuse, or both in one...

...In the central role of Leo, Dominic Guard is splendidly chubby, forthright, ordinary and likable?quite unprecious and unactorish?and he holds the picture together...

...The massive oaken staircase at Brandham Hall is manorial enough, God knows, but Losey dwells on it obsessively, with great thumpings of boots up and down it as well as occasional fisticuffs, as if it were, at the very least, a cross between Jacob's Ladder and the Tower of Babel...

...Leo, who thinks himself gifted with magical powers, is really a poor minnow out of water in these posh surroundings...

...Michael Gough makes a nicely abstracted father...

...Julie Christie is just adequate as Marian...

...The people in the film do little or nothing, except occasionally mutilate or kill one another, and the atmosphere around them is supposed to do the acting...

...O art, what botches are committed in thy name...

...Small wonder then that it should have attracted the director-scenarist team of Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter, who have now made a film of Hartley's 1950 novel, The Go-Between...

...The crucial cricket match is reasonably well done, though the scene does not quite succeed in emblematizing the different class mentalities involved...

...Let no one casually drop the word "rotten" until he has sampled these three...

...BUT THE simple-minded straining for depth in The Hired Hand is harmless compared to the modish, slick pseudoprofundities of Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End...

...But Pinter and Losey must gum up the works with gimmickry...

...Edward Fox's viscount is properly balanced between fumbling friendliness and contumelious remoteness...

...the worst among them the flash-forwards, whereby we see an episode from the future encroaching, bit by bigger bit, upon the past, needlessly puzzling and unnerving us...

...Other Losey fixations are in evidence, too...

...Warner Brothers is supposed to have snipped out some of the horrors, though what they could find more odious than what they left in defies my feeble imagination...

...Marian toys with Leo's feelings, flirting with him, bullying him, and ignoring him by turns...

...no need to smuggle the future into it...

...An interesting network of relationships evolves among Leo and the various Maudsleys, older or younger, and the two men in Marian's life...

...Once again, as in The Servant and Accident, he exhibits a staircase fixation that is positively maniacal...

...The episode with Diana Dors is one of the more nauseating in recent film history...

...Alan Bates, as Ted, is beginning to look and act like Hugh Griffith, a frightening case of premature senility...

...This insufferably pretentious, alienating-ly arcane, and ultimately quite vacuous Polish writer-director has here concocted a parable about a London public bath, where people come in pursuit of sexual fantasies to be gratified by the pretty, scheming girl attendant (Jane Asher), or the innocent young boy attendant (John Moulder-Brown...

...This is achieved through ultrafancy photography by Vilmos Zsigmond (who is even trickier here than in McCahe & Mrs...

...Various ominousness-increasing devices are dragged in...

...To analyze its absurdities would be, in Dr...

...For sheer moral ugliness, psychic sickness, and esthetic repulsiveness, even Deep End is small potatoes compared to Ken Russell's latest, The Devils...

...tell a story cleanly...

...By comparison...

...It is one of those an-noyingly studio-made films where four people represent a crowd, and a whole district is reduced to a set that would fit into your garage?which is wonderfully expressionistic, and so economical, too...

...The film suffers from spiritual coprophilia, actually, which is rather more serious than mere physical perversion...

...Despite its mediocrity, The Go-Between is superior to most of what is playing around...

...The Servant and Accident, tried to be comic but full of terrible implications...

...he does not even know about sex yet, and his questions are met with evasions...

...It concerns the thirteenth summer of Leo, a poor but genteel boy, spent at the large Norfolk estate belonging to the Maudsleys, the wealthy family of a schoolmate...

...If the point is that, as the narrator says at the outset, "the past is a foreign country—they do things differently there," then the past must be unsettling enough by being the past...

...Gerry Fisher's color cinematography is delicately inviting...

...Based on a section of Aldous Huxley's sober The Devils of Loudun and the middling play John Whiting extracted from it, Russell's film takes a quantum leap from his abominable The Music Lovers into a dung heap...

...I am doubtful whether the mother, played by Margaret Leighton with that fine madness of hers that gets, with every appearance, a little more mad and a little less fine, needs to be quite so demented, and the discovery of Ted and Marian in flagrante delicto seems both too crude and too burlesque...

...the film does convey the amusingly quaint and rigid social conventions, condescensions, and contests that form this social fabric whose first unravelings we are allowed to witness...

...Michel Legrand's music is, as this antimusician's work always is, crassly assertive...

...The not uninteresting and also much overrated The Go-Between continues the tradition...

...I don't know which is worse: the pretentious preciosity of Herb Gardner's script, the self-indulgent effect-mongering of Ulu Grosbard's direction, or the quintcssentially self-parodying performance of Barbara Harris...

...The magic experiments are slurred over and turned into deliberately murky Pinterian hocus-pocus...

...The time is 1900, and the film catches the period well enough...

...I did not review Who Is Harry Kellerman . . . (the title goes on for several miles, but I'll spare you) because I had naively hoped it would have the decency to go away before my objurgation could reach print...

...Gradually she enlists him as a go-between carrying notes to and from Ted Burgess, a tenant farmer with whom she is having an affair...

...Nevertheless, there is a good plot going here along with acute observation of socio-psychological detail (mostly Hartley's achievement, but at least preserved by the film), and even in splintered form they hold our attention...

...The film is so absolutely stilted—down to its last performance, its very set design, staging and camera positions—as to deserve enshrining in the Pantheon of Kitsch, right between Jan Peerce's recording of "The Bluebird of Happiness" and the collected works of Norman Rockwell...

...Johnson's admirable phrase, "to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation...

...Almost every time Leo carries a letter between the lovers, we zoom into or out of long shots with a regularity that quickly moves from grandioseness to dreariness...

...the entertainment that follows it permits the humor to sink lower than genteel comedy can afford to stoop...

...the rest of Deep End merely achieves the uninteresting feat of drowning in its own shallowness...

...The older Maudsley boy is a stock character, his snobbish attempts at being democratic made overexplicit and ludicrous...

...I shall refrain from saying more because, not having a degree in sanitary engineering, I don't know how to review a cesspool...