Sorry, Wrong Number: Horatio Alger Calling
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen SORRY, WRONG NUMBER HORATIO ALGER CALLING AFTER world war II the Italian Neo-Realists, and later the French New Wave, rebelled against what they called "white-telephone comedies." This...
...In Blier's Going Places he took a season off to kick around women as if they were soccer balls...
...The first time he showed his prowess on a soccer field, he injured the team's star in a scrimmage...
...At a banquet he gives for all the town's important people, he confronts them with their duplicity and conspiracy in framing 14 March 1980: 149 him on that rape charge...
...Maybe it's more of a black telephone this time, a farce adapted from the Theater of the Absurd...
...What you've got is two movies, with whatever is left over after the flashback going into the second one...
...It's the same ending all over again...
...But the film doesn't end there...
...He's really as lonely as the long-distance runner...
...Francois is the hero of the hour because he has scored the winning goals in the local team's victory at the regional finals...
...This shaggy-dog story shows that Francois has at last gained some insight into his own character...
...When he couldn't bring himself to rape the girl on his first visit, she was so charmed that she befriended him...
...He just isn't that kind of rat, still...
...Having told the truckdriver he hitched with the first time that he was going to break in and rape her, he tells the one who picks him up on his return trip a very different story—about how he threatened to beat up his sergeant in the army if he ever caught the man off base, and one day he did catch him out shopping...
...Individual members of this cinematic species always seem weak...
...This led to other great roles as camp counselors, such as that Dewaere played in Bertrand Blier's Get Out Your Handkerchiefs...
...But like cockroaches and common colds, this strain of moviemaking proves surprisingly adaptable, ineradicable...
...When you swat one with a review, it is deceptively easy to kill off...
...The victim of a frame-up, he was serving his prison term when the team bus went off the road on the way to the finals...
...Desperate for substitutes with whom they might at least field a team, the town fathers got Francois released...
...What did you do...
...Now, as we arrive again at the point where the flashback began, he has seized the opportunity to reverse his fortunes, to emerge triumphant...
...It goes on as if it weren't already over at this point...
...Having told its Horatio Alger story, the film then tries to convince us that really Francois is much more hip than that...
...It survives forever...
...Nor does he actually wreck anybody's business and tear up the town as threatened in the second half of the movie...
...Commonweal: 150...
...During the flashback that follows, however, we learn that things have not always gone so well for him...
...But it's as insipid as ever...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Dewaere got his start kicking around a soccer ball during the opening scene of The Best Way...
...the truckdriver asks expectantly...
...This was the tradition each country had of movies with opulent production values and no imagination: the "Tradition of Quality," as its French practitioners put it, meaning a tradition without quality...
...It's a real Horatio Alger story...
...The attempt at bad taste here is as disingenuous as the good taste was in the original version...
...Dewaere is Francois Perrin, who is being paraded through the streets of his hometown in the film's opening scene...
...If winning the heart of the local millionaire's daughter isn't the plot of a Horatio Alger novel, I don't know what is...
...With vehicles like these, Dewaere became a star of about the same magnitude as Bill Murray in Meatball...
...Often adapted from a play that had had its best house at matinees, this was the sort of movie for which the archetypal set was a drawing room with too much upholstery, too many vases stuffed with fresh flowers, and a white telephone on the table...
...That's what Coup de Tete tries to do...
...In The Best Way Dewaere played a polymorphous perverse camp counselor who taunts homosexuals...
...Although he told a truckdriver on the way that he was going to break in and rape her now—why not, since he was in prison for the crime?—he couldn't bring himself to do it once he actually got there...
...The most recent example to crawl into our theaters is Coup de Tete (Hothead), which stars the new matinee idol of these films, Patrick Dewaere...
...Now, in Coup de Tete, Dewaere plays a soccer player let out of prison to star in the big game...
...Then he threatens to destroy all their business establishments the next day to get even, and to spill what he knows to the papers if they try to stop him...
...Movie history, like other kinds, is never written in absolutes...
...Now as he arrives at her house a second time, she's waiting to greet him with open arms...
...It's the final coup de grace for the whole, mistaken idea that this guy ever was a coup de the...
...The second ending, after the flashback, isn't really an alternative to the first one...
...The film conventionally began with the telephone ringing in the empty room so the leading lady could make an entrance (as if still on a stage) to answer it...
...One reason we knew in the first story that Francois was a right guy at heart was that as soon as he got out of prison, he hitch-hiked to the home of the beautiful heiress he had been accused of raping...
...These new films come at both life and art from the other side, but arrive at the same mid-point—a nul point—as their predecessors...
...Locker-room humor is very much the idiom of this kind of comedy...
...Gradually each new development evolves into its opposite, the relationship between them at first seeming more like continuance than contradiction...
...Now, twenty years after those white telephones were swept out to sea by the New Wave, they're washing up on our shores again from France, the flotsam and jetsam of the world cinema...
...For this he was not only thrown off the team and out of his job, but accused of rape...
...Oh, nothing," Francois admits, "I went on with my own shopping...
...A movie plot is bound to be in trouble when it uses a classic structure like the flashback but doesn't end once the structure is complete...
...Coup de The would be bad enough if it simply tried to play both ends against the middle like this, giving its hero his old-fashioned triumph over adversity and then letting him throw his success away with contempt in the modern, outlaw spirit...
...But the film isn't willing to take even that big a risk...
...Thus Dewaere made his American debut in this new genre several years ago in a film called The Best Way, which was directed by a protege of that old hand from the New Wave, Francois Truffaut...
...It's the sign of a movie that wants to have something both ways—to tell a certain story, and then un-tell it somehow, take it all back...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 5
