Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen SEASONAL SLUMPS WINTERS OF OUR DISCONTENT ALAN ALDA'S The Four Seasons is a film I've reviewed before, often. It's yet another example of the ubiquitous, pernicious influence of TV on...
...Nothing has been resolved...
...One relationship has deteriorated, the one between them and me...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.ESTERBECK, JR...
...He delivers a tirade they have all been trying to goad him into...
...Sure, there have always been episodic stories...
...Around the time the film finished shooting, Starr announced that he and the former Playboy centerfold were getting married...
...One comes during the fall weekend in New England when Jack Burroughs (Alda) confronts Nick Callan (Len Cariou) about Nick's cheating on his wife (Sandy Dennis...
...This behavior is supposed to be his big break-through, and it's certainly the closest we're ever going to get to a denouement in this movie...
...Seldom has a film pandered to teenage disgrun-tlement with parents more than Polyester does...
...It's yet another example of the ubiquitous, pernicious influence of TV on movies...
...There wasn't a whole lot of dialogue to be memorized," he explained in a recent interview where he tried not to let his own vocabulary exceed the movie's...
...His interpretation of the role consists primarily of scratching his crotch...
...Since he spends his spare time daubing pigment on cave walls and inventing the wheel, we surmise that he is the Leonardo Da Vinci of his day...
...Alda's script and direction do have moments when they seem to come to life - a funny line here, a bit of cute mugging there...
...It's hard not to see Ringo Starr's part in Caveman as autobiographical...
...He shouts and stomps around on the ankle he injured skiing, and he throws into the fireplace an enormous moosehead he's ripped off the wall...
...These people have just been all wet from the beginning...
...It's four installments of a sit-com, a half hour each (actually, a little less than that, to leave time for the commercials...
...It and Caveman are the most puerile movies I've seen in a long while...
...Even that doesn't make a difference, though...
...These separate-admission screenings are patronized exclusively by teeny-boppers...
...I don't think that's true, though...
...This one is so televisionized, it comes right from the package as a four-part mini-series...
...Allow six weeks advance notice...
...FOR CHANGE OF ADDRESS, please provide both new and old address (use address label from a recent issue) including zip code...
...The Four Seasons" is also some music by Vivaldi...
...They're never sure that they're getting the satisfaction out of life which money, good food, leisure, and success ought to be bringing them...
...I've had all this share-your-feelings crap I can take...
...Only to peopie brought up on The Flint stones could this movie be funny...
...Jack's solution is to jump out of a rowboat with all his clothes on...
...It does have its odd moments...
...At the end of the last season, Danny falls through the ice on the pond near their ski lodge-with all his clothes on, of course...
...Tab Hunter is also in the cast in the role of a gigolo-a slight change of image with which he is trying to launch a comeback...
...No, wait...
...At one point during the first season, Jack wants to do something to make everybody's weekend in the country memorable...
...Waters's reputation is based primarily on the success of his 1972 Pink Flamingos, a film that was made for $ 12,000 and earned a small fortune playing the midnight show on Fridays and Saturdays...
...It seems familiar to teenagers even before they've seen it...
...Tits and ass...
...The Odyssey and the Bible started a kind of fad for them...
...There Starr plays Atouk, a pint-sized caveman who makes up in sensitivity and brains what he lacks in brawn...
...None of the relationships has either advanced or deteriorated...
...But these are only erratic blips on the otherwise flat brain wave of this movie...
...They were all the top women in their field . . . Margaret Thatcher...
...They're always worried about this...
...However primitive Waters's characters may be, though, they are not as dumbfounded as those in Caveman...
...Just before or after Kate's speech, it's Jack's turn...
...The four seasons are a spring, summer, fall and winter weekend on which some couples go away together...
...In this movie, and therefore in these people's lives, there's an inescapable sameness to everything that happens...
...In the ski lodge the night before Danny's mishap, Kate complains to Jack about how they've lost touch with a lot of friends over the years just because they had gotten to know them so well it became embarrassing to see them...
...The music implies that what we're seeing is a play for alt seasons, an illustration of problems that have always existed and always will...
...Kate and Jack and Danny and Nick and the others are very much the sort of people who are never sure how they feel...
...Yet there is this nagging sense that something more is needed or no one will even be able to remember the experience...
...But I still didn't want to have to watch it...
...This scenario conforms pretty closely to the one in the film...
...In this market where a movie's whole purpose is to be a mindless ritual, a Waters film has a special advantage...
...it's listless...
...Bully for him...
...Smoke a little dope, play a little kissy-face, watch a movie so familiar that you don't really have to watch it at all to know what's in it...
...But The Four Seasons is something else...
...Classical music of this sort is used as theme music with contemporary schlock comedies like this one to give them a little dignity, a little immortality...
...Starr's relationship with co-star Barbara Bach makes the movie seem irresistibly relevant to real life...
...Nick assures Jack that his mistresses "weren't just hat-check girls...
...He spends, almost the whole movie chasing after Miss Bach...
...The film is a travesty of a cliche...
...As a story The Four Seasons is peculiarly modern-weightless, centerless, directionless: a real piece of space-age technology-and the nonsensical human relationships the film depicts are equally limited in their scope...
...Please, spare me...
...Suddenly her eyes re-appear above the roof line of the car and she asks, "Is this the fun part...
...It's a question I had just been asking myself...
...I didn't want to know these crabby, frustrated people this well...
...Indira Gandhi.'' Then there is the moment on the summer cruise when the dentist, Danny Zimmer (Jack Wes-ton), comes topside one morning, and we can see in his face the point at which he spots Nick and his girlfriend (Bess Armstrong) swimming nude...
...So, OK...
...Waters's typical suburban family includes a porno-king father (David Samson), a sex-crazed daughter (Mary Gar-lington), a drug-crazed son (Ken King), and an obese, hysterical mother played by Waters's transvestite star, Divine...
...Another of those moments when the film seems to rally briefly comes as Jack's wife Kate (Carol Burnett) is about to get into a car amid a lot of tense feelings that have built up over the winter ski weekend...
...She's criticizing herself and Jack for not having had the fortitude to go on with those relationships, but that's exactly how I felt about my relationship with them after only a couple of hours...
...This could easily be the self-image of a former Beatle, especially if he had been twit enough to believe the stuff that was written about the group back in the sixties...
...It's been a perfect weekend-the cooking, the wine, the talk, the companionship, all perfect...
...And what does Atouk use his superior intellect for...
...We're back where we started...
...Are we . having fun yet...
...The vocabulary of all the characters in the film put together consists of only thirteen words, which was one of the things about Rudy De Luca and Carl Gottlieb's script that appealed to Starr...
...What is it that a genius like him wants out of life...
...A movie I actually did walk out of before the end is John Waters's Polyester...
Vol. 108 • July 1981 • No. 13
