Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen BACK FROM THE DEAD THE DOWN-AND-OUTERS UP AND AWAY RICHARD DONNER's Inside Moves has the same kind of appeal that dodo birds have. Whenever I see a picture of a dodo bird, I can't help...
...Inside Moves at least rescues us for a few hours from the darkness of that void which TV has created in our lives...
...Even in the best sit corns on TV, the characters are all housebound now...
...Though self-sufficient, this world is also sealed...
...But it's not Savage's deft gestures and twitches that give this opening what is, quite literally, its impact...
...When Jerry does this, it creates a lot of problems between him and all the regulars at the bar he's left behind, and they're problems the film can never really resolve...
...In the one late episode I remember from the bar, Archie seemed to have aged horribly...
...Archie was a benign Hitler holed up in the bunker of his personality, a Dracula raging in his schloss because if he ever went out into the everyday light of reality, he'd wither right before our eyes...
...After it, we are ready to believe anything...
...He was as out-of-date and embarrassing as a character in a re-run of The Goldbergs would be...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.ESTERBECK, JR...
...These men have passed beyond any social pathology, beyond being the mere damaged personalities we might expect to find hanging out in a bar...
...It is, both socially and aesthetically, a closed world, one that's still a dead end for the people in it...
...He's an actor who can show us everything we need to know about Roary's background, about what has brought him to this suicide attempt, virtually at first sight...
...The film's opening scene establishes this in a manner that is dramatic to say the least...
...After that opening, Donner and his scriptwriters, Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson, have us under their spell...
...But this time, we realize to our disbelief, we are seeing a real man plummet down the outside of the building...
...It has been ours...
...Even the guy who owns the bar (Steve Kahan) has a massive coronary and has to be carried out on a stretcher...
...The film itself becomes a kind of closed world, as if it had its own, inner laws of thermodynamics to obey...
...The story is centered on a neighborhood tavern, and it's about how the patrons, local residents all, are able to help each other out in time of need...
...We are even willing-indeed grateful-to believe that Roary could have survived this suicide attempt...
...Whenever I see a picture of a dodo bird, I can't help feeling a certain charm in its ungainliness, a poignancy that comes from knowing it's extinct...
...The one advantage this assortment of basket cases has is that the wounds inflicted on their bodies have left them healthy in mind and spirit...
...The film's cast of characters, adopted from a Todd Walton novel, has all its afflictions out in plain sight...
...We know that the only people left in the neighborhood bars in our run-down cities now are the bindlestiffs, the semi-derelict, the pensioners on fixed incomes, the hard-core unemployed-in short, the social and emotional cripples...
...There's a blind man (Burt Remsen), a paralytic in a wheelchair (Bill Henderson), and a bi-lateral amputee (Harold Russell, who really is an amputee, a World War II veteran who won two Oscars for his role in The Best Years of Our Lives and now heads the President's Commission for Affirmative Action...
...To go from one to the other is to pass back through the looking glass again, back into the real world...
...Still, the film continues to be appealing, to be a tour de force...
...The impact comes from a single shot, not more than a few seconds in length, in which we see Roary's body falling to earth...
...We accept at once that this is an entire community of men who have, like Roary, come back from the dead...
...The opening scene has not only been Roary's rite de passage...
...Inside Moves is also about something that's extinct, neighborhoods...
...In this kind of shot, we are used to seeing a dummy whose arms and legs flop about at impossible angles as it's dropped past the camera...
...To be somebody who is on TV, playing the game, is something else...
...Beyond it lay the limitless darkness, the void...
...It is his spectacular free fall which explodes us through the looking glass here...
...In acquiring physical disabilities we can see, they have freed themselves from the kind of mental ones we can't...
...Once he stepped out that door, Archie fell off the end of the world...
...This remains a man's world, and the center of the plot, such as it is, is a sports story rather than a love story...
...Nonetheless, the world they have created remains limited in certain ways...
...He had to keep it, as the series title said, "all in the family...
...Dismissed from the hospital, he limps off in a daze to look for the bar where, he's been told, he'll find others like himself, down-and-outers whom the hospital has somehow had to return to the world...
...In it Roary, an obvious misfit, a loner in a state of high anxiety, goes up in an office building and throws himself out a window...
...There's a prostitute with a heart of pure heroin (Amy Wright), a waitress (Diana Scarwid) who gets into a triangle with Jerry and Roary, and assorted lady bar flies...
...Jerry is a great schoolyard basketball player, an ace at one-on-one, despite his bum knee...
...But these roles are all like skin grafts that don't take...
...Inside Moves deals with this depressing reality by making all its local residents into physical cripples...
...For one thing, it is a world of men without women...
...In fact, he bought a bar, and immediately began to seem a rather, pathetic and doomed figure, someone no longer funny...
...Bunker was a name with the right associations...
...Their visible scars have carried them through the looking glass from that reality into a more pure-symbolic order of existence...
...The trouble with this premise is that to be one of those people who sit in bars watching the basketball games on TV is one thing...
...This just isn't a mise en scene in which we can believe any more, so pulling off a credible, even rather engaging movie about it is a surprising coup...
...John Savage is an actor with a natural vulnerability, a built-in edginess, that hasn't been seen in movies since Montgomery Clift...
...The least disabled members of the community are a couple of gimps, Roary (John Savage) and Jerry (David Morse...
...If only he could get an operation, he'd have a shot at the pros...
...Every bit of plot material it has generated somehow has to be used up...
...In the last episodes, as I recall, they did make the mistake of getting Archie out of the house...
...Only these charmed characters could bring back to life as well the credibility of an institution like the neighborhood bar, or the long-lost idea of neighborhood itself...
...Yet Donner, Curtin, and Levinson can't seem to leave off trying to solve them, either...
...He's stunt man Dennis Madalone...
...The plot contains a number of female roles...
...Bea Arthur's Maude and Archie Bunker on All in the Family virtually never left home...
...In effect, letting Archie out of the house killed the series since we had known all along that there was nothing there, outside the show's one set...
...The result is an ending full of fakecoincidence which, therefore, gives way to the kind of sentimentality and melodrama the film has resisted so well until then...
...No loose ends can be left...
Vol. 108 • March 1981 • No. 5
