On Film

...In the role of Dave, newcomer Eric Roberts looks and acts as if he were a cross between Robby Benson and Richard Gere, alternating strangled inarticulateness with fits of violence...

...The one obstacle to their romance seems to be the guilt they share about their immense wealth...

...They are so rich, in fact, that she turns to him about halfway through the film and casually asks if he would like to go to Hong Kong...

...Hence, we are forced to witness an utterly incredible affair between Oliver and Marcie Bon-wit (Candice Bergen), who is??yes, the Bonwit Teller heiress...

...Yet without an adequate historical and social context, the movie is little more than a Romany translation of The Godfather...

...are missing...

...This one, though, seems almost deliberately designed to confirm the charge and to confound the actor's sympathetic, albeit critical, supporters...

...The great strength of the original was its ability to convince the audience that what it was seeing was entirely unremarkable??that the mun-daneness of dehumanization, of having one's body and soul "snatched," was the real horror...

...For when Marvin began pulling off some of the hoariest gags in the world in an attempt to hide a girl in his bedroom from Millie, I left??before another bout of bitching could begin...

...Since we have experienced so little of the gypsies' "old ways," this attempt to impose retroactively a conflict between tradition and modernity seems feeble and forced...

...Chauncey Grump and his wife (Richard Pryor and Gloria Gifford...

...Alas, Simpson is there only to fix up Oliver with a new girl...

...Part of Pierson's problem is time...

...The 1978 Invasion begins in outer space, in Dolby sound, with a detailed sequence showing the progress of the alien spores??from germination to landing on earth...

...The genesis of the process, whether in outer space or on Earth, was totally irrelevant...

...When they left, I did too...

...Playing Jimmie Haskell and John Carlini's score backed by such stalwarts as bassist Buell Neidlinger, Grappelli helps the movie convey some of the romantic and exotic flavor of Romany culture...

...He is approached by an old friend, Stephen Simpson (Charles Haid), and we think??aha...

...As Groffo, Dave's father, who finds himself rejected in favor of his son by his own father, Hirsch manages just the right note of impotent rage...

...Whenever Luthor is on screen with his assistants, the bumbling Otis (Ned Beatty) and the supposedly glamorous Eve Teschmacher (Valerie Perrine, whose chest seems to have been inflated by a tire pump), the film resembles TV's Batman...

...Philip Kaufman, the director, does not realize that all these remarkable effects are completely beside the point...

...At his father's funeral, the denouement of the film, Dave's thoughts are heard in a voice-over narration: "Maybe I can lead them into the 20th century," he muses, as the rest of the tribe ??including Groffo's group, who are apparently willing to let bygones be bygones??follow him away from the grave...

...Only the balloons with "POW...

...Nor is the point of Every Which Way But Loose ever made clear...

...Eastwood plays a trucker by the name of Philo who meanders from one inane adventure to another??barroom brawls, back alley fist fights for money, more barroom brawls, quick romantic interludes, more barroom brawls??all to the tune of 13 country-and-western tunes by Mel Tillis, Charlie Rich and other Nashville performers...

...Like Michael Cor-leone, Dave Stepanowicz, the young gypsy who would be "king," is a reluctant successor to the leadership of a clan of outsiders in American society...

...In the past, I have often defended Eastwood's films against the accusation that they are nothing except mindless entertainment for equally mindless audiences...

...Clint Eastwood's new vehicle thus puts me in a somewhat uncomfortable position...

...Richter never got it...

...Diana Barrie, the movie star (Maggie Smith), bitches at her husband, Sidney Cochran (Michael Caine), the bisexual antique dealer...

...However, / would like to bitch about the new version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers...

...If Every Which Way But Loose is a stiff-necked redneck flick, Oliver's Story is a terribly effete wASP-elite film...

...In the long, visually splendid prologue, we watch the last days of the planet Krypton...

...he new film King of the Gypsies really should be called King of the Gypsy Musicians, in honor of its star attraction, Stephane Grappelli, the veteran violinist who performed in Paris 40 years ago with the legendary gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt...

...Regrettably, his comedic gifts are closer to those of Charles Bronson than to those of Burt Reynolds...

...To rouse him from his lethargy, his father-in-law tells Oliver that if he had died instead of Jenny, "She wasn't the type to go off to a nunnery...

...Two things contribute to this impression...

...The joke of the 1956 version was that bland characters simply grew even more bland when their bodies were "snatched...

...The sole members of the cast who don't bitch at each other are Marvin and Millie Michaels (Walter Matthau and Elaine May...

...and he also rises to power by embracing the very culture he had once rejected...

...Among Philo's sidekicks are his brother Or-ville, the paradigmatic bucolic slob (wonderfully played by Geoffrey Lewis), and??believe it or not??an orangutan named Clyde, who is so good that he makes the rest of the cast look like, well, monkeys...

...Maas had plenty of space in the book to cover both the history of the gypsies and the details of their everyday existence, from their elaborate scams to their tightly knit, almost medieval family structure...

...Neil Simon's adaptation of his own Broadway hit offers little more than uninterrupted bitching that is supposed to be funny...

...Eastwood probably wants to expand his professional horizons by duplicating the success of such entertaining shaggy dog movies as Smokey and the Bandit...

...Eight years after Love Story, he is still moping...

...Unfortunately, besides the music very little else of the gypsy milieu emerges from Frank Pierson's uninspired direction of his own clumsy adaptation of the best seller by Peter Maas...

...Only Judd Hirsch, the star of Taxi on television and perhaps the homeliest actor in Hollywood, comes out of this mess with a shred of dignity...

...The first half of Superman, by contrast, is exciting...

...We then follow the life of the boy, who is found by Ma and Pa Kent (Phyllis Thaxter and Glenn Ford) and grows to young manhood in Smalltown, U.S.A...

...Willis Panama and his wife (Bill Cosby and the lovely Sheila Frazier) bitch at their "best friends," Dr...

...When we last saw Oliver Barrett (Ryan O'Neal), the young scion of an old New England family, he was mourning the loss of his bride, Jenny (Ali MacGraw...

...Jor-El (solemnly played by Marlon Brando) predicts the planet will explode??a warning that goes unheeded...

...Pierson has barely enough time to hint at their lengthy past in an extremely compressed voice-over narration at the beginning of the film, and to supply a few very brief vignettes to illustrate their underground society...

...Through all this nonsense Eastwood manages exactly three expressions??a moonstruck dopiness while pursuing his true love (Sondra Locke), a slow burn just before his fists fly, and an easy-going grin when he horses around with Orville and Clyde...

...Later, after the spores give birth to the "body snatching" pods, each gruesome step of their development into humanoid form is shown in spectacular and no doubt expensive fashion...

...In fact, the real trouble with Invasion of the Body Snatchers is that it was made by the same pod people it is supposed to be about...

...Eventually the conflict between Dave and Groffo ends in a burst of shotgun shells??but we still don't know exactly what the story was about...

...After about 15 minutes of Eastwood's mugging, I began to long for the implacable stoicism of Dirty Harry...

...In the very next scene we see Oliver nude, showering following a workout...

...Such subtleties also escaped W.D...

...Just the opposite is true of the remake: It dwells lovingly on the kind of post-Star Wars special effects that tend to reduce movies to exercises in technological ingenuity...

...Or at least I think they are the sole members...

...The difficulty is, rather, that Superman's feats somehow seem remarkably unremarkable??or undesirable...

...The 1956 original was perhaps the finest science fiction thriller ever made??largely because the emphasis was less on science fiction than on thrills...

...So far, so good...

...I suppose not much should have been expected from the writer of Nickleodeon or the director of The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid...

...and "SOCK...

...Second, Superman himself is guilty of what I consider an unspeakable crime: He actually prevents Lex Luthor from causing California to sink into the sea...

...The acting is not the problem: Christopher Reeve is excellent as the mature Clark Kent/Superman, bringing just the right amount of befuddled timidity to the former and modest strength to the latter...

...now this could be a really interesting sequel to Love Story...

...Hannah Warren (Jane Fonda) bitches at her ex-husband, Bill (Alan Alda...

...A more gifted writer would have made them even more "laid back"??using "Californication" as a metaphor of literal dehumanization...

...he has his updated, swinging San Francisco types turn into their exact oppo-sites??cold and efficient automatons...

...Although Shelley Winters, Dave's grandmother, is somewhat more subdued than she has been recently, Sterling Hayden plays the old "King," Dave's grandfather, with enough bluster to fill the resulting silence...

...But once Clark leaves for Metropolis??to work for the Daily Planet and fight for "truth, justice, and the American way"??the movie begins to slide downhill...

...Richter, author of the new screenplay...

...And Margot Kidder is precisely the right combination of liberated woman and sex object as Lois Lane, heartthrob of the man of steel...

...XJ JL* JL ad the evil genius succeeded in his nefarious scheme, we might have been spared the spectacle of California Suite...

...First, his archenemy, Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), is too silly to be taken seriously...

...As Krypton presently disintegrates in a spectacular display of special effects, Jor-El manages to send his infant son to safety in a rocketship bound for Earth...