THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
as he is with an actor-packed kaleidoscope. The play catches its characters--the tough proprietor of a waterfront bar and her seaman lover--at the moment when the lover's proposal of marriage...
...It is true that Teddy has no personality of his own and has constructed one (or several) of mannerisms borrowed to hide the fact that he is another loser in a world which has lost its heroes, but the borrowings seem to belong to the actor rather than the character...
...This is hardly a dancing-in-the-streets review, but let me temper my negative reactions by insisting that, despite any shortcomings in these three productions, the Circle is plainly alive and sure of itself and that, in these tired and tepid days, is important to the American theater...
...The film's final sequence, the all-talkingallsinging-all-dancing finale, is the ballet sequence from An American in Paris, which is introduced as the greatest movie musical number ever...
...Bogdanovich's adaptation couldn't be more scrupulous about following the original Henry James novella, and the locations, the costumes, the lighting--ah, especially the !ighting---could hardly be more becoming...
...While the two books deal with many of the same facts, and share many assumptions about the possibility of nuclear terror they differ fundamentally in style and approach...
...To appreciate how good Astaire and Powell really are, and how clunky the Esther Williams number is, you have to see a whole film of each...
...The play catches its characters--the tough proprietor of a waterfront bar and her seaman lover--at the moment when the lover's proposal of marriage forces to the surface her fear of commitment and his sense of his own inadequacy...
...James was careful not to let anything so direct and certain as a look get into his novel, where moral innuendo is the only action and everything else, from kissing to dying, happens in the wings with hardly a mention...
...Having Gene Kelly make a spectacle of himself, as if he were Esther Williams too, is not exactly MGM's greatest accomplishment...
...The film is (how shall one say it...
...Sometimes the process becomes too mechanical--another turn for turning's sake---but the characters take on a touching solidity, partly because they are around and talking for so long and partly because the performers flesh them out...
...MGM is where the real musical headliners were too...
...This is what Daisy Miller would suggest anyway...
...They make five minutes from one of those Esther Williams water ballets seem as entertaining as five non-stop minutes of tap-dancing by Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell...
...This last may seem an unfortunate choice of phrase since the actress is Conchata Ferrell, a very fat woman whom I first saw as the noisy prostitute in The Hot L Baltimore, but Ferrell is not only an actress of considerable skill, she is also, despite her size, one of the loveliest women to turn up on the New York stage in recent years...
...That's Entertainment certainly is---entertainment, that is...
...Again, though, the ultimate result is rather disappointing, like a smorgasbord where you get a bite of everything and come away still feeling you haven't had a meal...
...But most important of all, they attempt to work out some practical strategies that might minimize or prevent that grim possibility from becoming a reality...
...But if Haley wanted to make this a history lesson in the Golden Age of Musicals, he might have given equal billing to these films' directors and songwriters...
...Other performers--notably Elizabeth Sturges as Angel--are saddled with physical business that conveys not character but the insistence that work has been done on this show...
...Despite his admiration for Hawks, Ford, Welles, Lang, et al., Bogdanovich's own talents seem more eompat~ le with another Hollywood tradition, that of the tasteful adaptation and the "quality" dramatic film--the tradition of Cukor and Victor Fleming rather than Hawks or Ford...
...These simple assumptions lead to the grim possibility that terrorists might be using home-made nuclear devices within the next decade or two...
...Add to that statement the premise that it's much easier to make a crude atomic bomb than most people think...
...The playwright doles out biographical details as though he had learned from Ibsen that you can keep an action in the present going by feeding it with facts from the past...
...It's a vague talent not to be confused with movie direction...
...It provides the ideal Commonweal...
...Each makes fascinating and compelling reading, and taken together they provide the psycholog28 June 1974:362...
...Consider that clandestine A-bomb makers need less than 10 pounds of plutonium or 25 pounds of enriched uranium to make a kiloton-range explosive...
...Perhaps for that reason, the production is consistently and annoyingly artificial...
...Medoff's diner, for all the attention to realistic detail (wiping the counter, pouring coffee), never becomes as real as Wilson's hotel lobby...
...introduces each sequence...
...She talks ve.ry fast, apparently so that the emphasis will be distributed absolutely evenly over everything she says and nothing will take on special significance...
...But in the context Of The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, even What's Up, Doc?, Bogdanovich's tribute to Hawks' comedy style, begins to look like mere screwball atmospherics, as if old movies were themselves simply another historical epoch for Bogdanovich to recreate...
...Movies I go to for movie art...
...Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Powell, Anne Miller, Debbie Reynolds, Howard Keel, Mario Lanza, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Donald O'Connor: they all appear in this film in sequences from their best musicals...
...It is in impeccable taste, and what could be more fitting for an adaptation of James...
...The play itself is a mixture of possiblities which never quite merge into a single work...
...He is never clearly a metaphorical figure, as Duke Mantee is in Robert E. Sherwood's diner in The Petrified Forest, but all the harping on long-gone Western heroes (the answer to the titular question is "Never") suggests that he is the product and the victim of an America which has moved away from old certainties or, as Mason would say, old values...
...Mark Medoff's When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?, the third of the Circle transfers, is directed not by Mason, but by Kenneth Frankel...
...Here's one: "To produce enough electricity to keep Yonkers going for a year, a . . . nuclear reactor would make, as a by-product, just about enough plutonium to obliterate Yonkers...
...That way, Bogdanovich must have reasoned in his direction of Miss Shepherd, nothing Daisy says will seem arch or revealing, and she will remain inscrutable as she ought...
...they present in simple and logical progression the factual context that supports such a possibility...
...BOOKS HOMEMADE A-BOMBS WILLIAM LANOUETgE The Curve of Binding Energy JOHN McPHEE Farrar, Strau$, $7.95 Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards MASON WILLRICH & THEODORE B. TAYLOR Ballinger, $13.50...
...But it's typical of MGM to think otherwise...
...Paper $4.95 For all its technical complexity, there are a few facts about nuclear power that are quite simple...
...The man who put the film together, Jack Haley, Jr., has chosen a very didactic format in which some appropriate MGM star like Sinatra or Astaire, or Jimmy Stewart (Jimmy Stewart...
...roseate...
...When I want pure James, I can always read James...
...It glows---like the unassumingly innocent Daisy herself...
...Charles Manson), tormenting a group of people in a diner...
...It is her presence, I think that takes the saccharine edge off the final curtain, the desperate but tentative embrace of the couple, and that makes the play as effective as it is...
...On the surface, it gives us a demented young man, a bully, perhaps a moralist turned evil side up (cf...
...In the end That's Entertainment is perhaps not such a bad history lesson after all, for it is itself limited by the same MGM philosophy to which the original musicals had to conform...
...361 setting for a recitation of James' dialogue...
...GERALD WEALES WHAT'S ENTERTAINMENT...
...He has had the gall to bill himself as a "director" without giving credit to any of the directors, writers and musicians who made these musicals in the first place...
...Nothing could be further from the truth, of course...
...Though Haley may have preserved this illusion from the original musicals to make his own film feel more like a musical, it seems very narrow and presumptuous of him...
...OOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE SCREEN Peter Bogdanovich is turning out to be, disappointingly, a master of atmospheres and periods...
...Then look at the nuclear-power industry's estimates of the hundreds of tons of plutonium and enriched uranium that will be in use and produced as scrap during the next quarter century...
...Since he hasn't done so, you often get the feeling that the films came about because the stars in them just burst spontaneously into song and dance one day, much as the characters the stars play are supposed to be doing...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...The two books consider the consequences of that possibility...
...Well, perhaps something that was more a movie on its own terms could be...
...Still, the movie is a perfectly lovely evocation of the Grand Tour in the late 1800s...
...Even Cybill Shepherd does not acquit herself so badly as one might have feared...
...Thinking like this is what has now gotten MGM out of the movie business, and into running a Las Vegas hotel...
...The other problem with anthology films like this is that they are great levelers...
...The film is an anthology of song and dance numbers from over twenty-five years' worth of MGM musicals...
...The :only indiscretion is what appears sometimes in Miss Shepherd's glance, a come-hither look that she also uses to sell eye shadow and that creeps in ineluctably, but nonetheless inappropriately, here...
...Hooey...
...Then at the end, it turns out that everyone has somehow been changed--some of them strengthened--by his treatment of them, and the whole thing begins to suggest a parody of The Passing of the Third Floor Back...
...Bogdanovich's Hollywood heroes are John Ford and Howard Hawks...
...Kevin Conway is the Mari Gorman of this production, giving an eccentric performance, heavy on tricks and---for me, at least -----completely without the menace that the play demands and that others have found in it...
Vol. 100 • June 1974 • No. 15
