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...Greystoke, by contrast, is visually superb...

...In the second act, we listen as Shelly Levene, the fallen star -- beautifully played by Robert Prosky (but then the performances are uniformly fine) -- traps himself with a slip of his non-stop tongue, the aggressive beseeching of Act I having given way to crowing triumph over a presumably solid sale...

...GERALD WEALES I I I I I I I I I Screen MERMAIDS & MONKEYS NATURE VS...

...The mermaid is the alien lover whose caresses are misunderstood as she nearly sacrifices all for her human beloved...

...When the truth about her identity comes out, Allen must make a parallel decision about her, a choice he almost blows...

...Splash skirts the edge of social criticism, then backs away...

...Allen asks...

...In Glengarry, too, human feeling is finally stronger than greed...

...Commonweal: 280...

...Madison may not look like E.T...

...Although gorgeous and sensual, she is also more: a naif with no experience of civilization, its language, commerce, or mores...

...The office manager, who has been willing to accept Shelly's money in Act I, now turns him in for burglary.despite the escalation of the offered bribe...

...After losing his natural parents and then his ape foster parents, Tarzan is rescued from the jungle by a Belgian scientist named D'Amot (Ian Holm), and then returned to Greystoke and his grandfather (Sir Ralph Richardson in his last film role...

...To its credit, Greystoke is trying to be a different kind of movie...

...Perhaps its problems ultimately derive from its strange, hybrid nature: it is both an adventure movie, with all the associations that jungles, vines, boa constrictors, and leopards call up, and a tragedy, in which Tarzan cannot possibly choose the fight course...

...there is no one-on-one relationship, not even with Jane, that fully objectifies the split that he feels between nature and culture...

...Daryl Hannah's achievement is to make the mermaid's innocence thoroughly believable, especially when, having learned English with preternatural speed by watching TV, she repeats the catchphrases of ads with deadpan sincerity...

...When Madison the mermaid (Daryl Hannah) finally shows up, however, Splash begins to surge with a rhythm that alternates successfully between sarcasm and sentiment, kvetching and lyric poetry...

...With a lustrous fish tail when wet and lissome legs when dry, Madison passes between nature and culture with a slightly subversive message...

...An adventure-tragedy is a curious blend, and perhaps simply defies an audience's expectations, or ingrained prejudices...

...Madison takes it, turns it around, examines it thoughtfully, and then begins to cry...

...Its first half details jungle life in vivid and sometimes shockingly violent vignettes: Layton doesn't live with "Cheetah" but a band of apes savagely bedeviled by leopards, snakes, pygmies, and their own power struggles...

...racked onto respirators, machines almost get Madison...

...Love -- fatherly, avuncular, whatever -- has triumphed over the platitudes of success...

...Despite my reservations, the production should be seen by anyone who cares about Miller, Hoffman~ or the American theater...

...it came in with a "PG...

...Like E.T., Splash tickles the fancy and touches the heart...

...Ron Howard almost, but not quite, manages the same with Splash...

...To an extent, it succeeds, and provides another version of civilization and its discontents...

...That scene recalls a more famous salesman, the much gentler Willy Loman, whose product is presumably less suspect than Shelly's, and the conflict between doing and achieving in him, between sales as a personality trade and success in its most blatant manifestations...

...Spielberg managed to be both light and deep with E.T...

...In the original tale, John Layton, a human infant, is orphaned in the jungle, raised by ape parents, and lured back to civilization and the ancestral estate of his family, Greystoke, there to face an uncertain future...

...Here Splash's satire fails, however: it's just too easy for Allen to accept Madison, the package is too gorgeous, tails or not...

...This allows for some slapstick at beauty's expense when, for example, she grotesquely 4 May 1984" 2 79 munches lobster ~i la mer at a posh restaurant...

...It barely misses Spielberg's magic...

...The comparison is fair...

...When Allen tells her to open it, she asks with wide-eyed astonishment, "You mean there's something more...

...Certainly this makes clear Tarzan's predicament: he is a man without a species, without a proper niche on the great chain of being...

...The revelation in the production is John Malkovich's Biff...

...How long are you here...

...Here, as in Chariots of Fire, Hudson satirizes British pomp, personified in dry-asdust scientists and spoiled dandies whom Jane (Andie MacDowell) rejects in favor of the wild man (Christopher Lambert...

...When Madison's secret is revealed, she is arrested, experimented on, almost dissected, and even pursued by the fish-stick queen Mrs...

...Yet the performance disturbed me because I was too conscious at first of the actor at work, more aware of Dustin Hoffman in disguise than of Willy Loman...

...Except f0r the underwater sequences, Splash looks undistinguished and sometimes seems like a home movie...

...His Willy is carefully conceived, moving abruptly from expectant glee to sullen hurt to sudden anger, all appropriate to the character...

...Despite its ads -- featuring a luscious mermaid languorously draped across a beach like a Playboy sea-bunny -Splash is not sexploitational...

...Moreover, the final abandonment of civilization at the end of the film is too facile and needed better preparation...

...Fortunately she is an aqua-terrestrial...

...She could be wonderfully effective in some moments, but on occasion ---:" the infamous "little boat looking for a harbor" telephone scene is the best example -- she seemed to send her speeches, line by separate line, into the balcony like a batter knocking out flies...

...The second half of the movie involves lush views of late nineteen-century aristocratic England, particularly the family estate in the Scottish lowlands...

...Yet there is a revealing scene in Act II in which Shelly, at the insistence of the only other salesman who understands the art of con, recounts his moves, his thoughts, his sense of triumph in closing a most unlikely sale...

...The vocal softness in Malkovich which could be heard through the crudeness of his Lee in True West, particularly in the television version, is here transformed into a vulnerability that shows us just how much Biff has lost of "the old humor, the old confidence...

...Our language of deceit is hers of transparent feeling...

...One night, Allen -- unaware of her origins and real nature -- brings her a blue, gift-wrapped package...

...The best scene in the movie occurs with expert mimicry of upper-class accents followed by more guttural lion murmurs that inflame Jane's ardor...

...or that less genial avatar of the trapped beast, King Kong), but Splash's pl0t reveals her family resemblance...

...REYSTOKE is a more serious film, with publicity that stresses "no yodeling...

...A prelude details the empty life of one Allen (Torn Hanks), who wanders aimlessly from relationship to relationship...

...ironically, despite an initial awkwardness and vaudeville humor, Splash treats the same theme better...

...Such an ending hardly offers the lift and warmth that American Buffalo does, but however negative the officer manager's emotion, it does signal that there are human beings here, trapped and struggling beneath the presumed primacy of money as motivation and reward...

...it's so pretty," she whispers...

...Actor John Candy provides some spice as Allen's effervescent and irreverent older brother Alex, but his pranks wear thin after about twenty minutes...

...Civilization cannot tolerate her alien simplicity: like Kong shot down by airplane, or E.T...

...But it also illustrates the film's predicament: there is little sense of unity as Tarzan confronts his dilemma...

...It might be interesting to contemplate what Mamet's sense of the unreliability of language owes to Willy Loman's slippery verbal grasp on reality, but Death of a Salesman has been so often analyzed in classrooms and essays that, given the limitations of space, it is probably best to stick to this much praised production...

...Greystoke was a difficult movie to make, an effort worth seeing...

...As Teach says, "All that I'm saying, don't confuse business with pleasure...

...Indeed, Madison's refreshing simplicity becomes the source of Splash's satiric punch...

...The movie gets off to a slow start before its boy, meets-fish love story surfaces...

...At the end of American Buffalo, after Teach's need has pushed him from words to violence, Donny rejects him and turns protectively to Bobby...

...At the sea level of her innocence, Madison interprets everything so straightforwardly that we begin to see how spoiled we are, and how pure of heart it is to take things at face value...

...These men are jackals, for whom customers are fair game, but in Shelly's tale there is a glimpse of the possibility of achievement, of professional pride...

...His explanation: "I hate you...

...The supporting parts are well played, and Ben Edwards's impressive set suggests, without copying, Jo Mielziner's marvelous original design...

...CULTURE I UST WHEN you thought it was safe to go near the water, along comes Splash, a movie that seemed, from its publicity at least, like the first Disney film to merit an "R" rating...

...Paul...

...Kate Reid's Linda was also troubling...

...But Jane isn't Layton's only emotional tie, and therein lies Greystoke' s problem...

...The director, Hugh Hudson, formerly of Chariots of Fire, has here attempted to de-camp the Tarzan legend from the likes of Johnny Weismuller and Bo Derek and return to the source material of Edgar Rice Burroughs...

...Moreover, despite its Disney association (under the new label of Touchstone Films), Splash isn't childish either...

...Each performance in this sequence is fine, but the power of the acting is undercut by the "and-then" screenplay which produces an awkward, fragmented effect...

...He just has too many possible relationships, none of which provide a dramatic center...

...TOM O'BRIEN (Tom O'Brien, one of the guest critics reviewing movies for Commonweal, teaches at the Manhattan School of Music...

...He faces no painful decision between beautitude and beatitude, and no real sacrifice...

...Willy Loman comes to mind because Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is back on Broadway, thirty-five years after it first appeared, in a production that has come to town on an avalanche of publicity set loose by Dustin Hoffman's presence as star...

...Six days," she coos without a trace of irony, "six fun-filled days...

...This reading of the character alters the nature of the antagonism between him and his father, emphasizing still further the degree of delusion in Willy who cannot see Biff even when he wears his wounds openly...

...But it also provides for Splash's basic theme: the mermaid's simplicity becomes a rod to measure our culture's inadequacies and pretensions...

...The plot is hokey, the lines sometimes downright silly, but Splash is oddly moving and even a little bit instructive...

...By the second act, as the play worked its magic on me, Hoffman and Loman merged and the performance almost became the triumph that has been so widely heralded...

...Hoffman, as everyone who reads actor interviews knows, is a meticulous worker, concerned with the details of voice, gesture, dress as an indication of character...

...The tone of the movie, the second effort of television sit-corn actor Ron Howard, so adroitly synthesizes comedy and romance that there is even room for something philosophical...

...At first glance, Greystoke is much superior to Splash...

...but culture as a whole is often celebrated in Splash, especially on visits to Bloomingdale's and other upscale locations...

...Abandoning this is understandable...

...In the condemnatory context of this setting, the possibility of other rewards may seem doubtful...

...discontent with civilization, she can find a brave new home where the scientists can't reach her...