Screen:

...to be discarded like toys when the primary purposes of cruelty Movie critics have often noted the sly ambivalence of reliand caricature have been satisfied...

...To watch Lancaster walk with his awkward Tough Guys has two strong voices but ends up mostly with ramrod dignity, or resolutely threaten Douglas with "another empty echoes...

...Unfortunately the which has them hijacking the same train, the "Gold Coast obvious, demographically calculated appeal in the film to Flyer" which they originally robbed in 1955, and which they those at least over thirty-five is not matched with maturity in lust after again when hauled out for a sentimental nostalgic tone...

...The idea of casting the two entry in the genre, as Connery, exactly like Jane Fonda, starts together again is good and their teamwork at times evokes 24 October 1986: 553 ghosts of old collaborations like Gunfight at the O.K...

...Eco provided the raw materials for a literal voice...

...With typical technical proficiency Annaud prepares may be mistaken in assuming that he provided Annaud with us for his entry with a scary buildup...

...In the film, ideas are trifled with, only mugs well but his role is dramatically inert...

...controversy is far from over, it can reasonably be hoped that it Some of Annaud's images of the Middle Ages are so farcical has become a dialogue between two positions that basically they resemble Monty Python's Jabberwocky and The Search understand one another, rather than a full-scale Vatican offen- for the Holy Grail...

...A toothless hunchback shows up on cue, then a Middle Ages, then pretends he wants us to condemn the fruitcake "mystic" (played by William Hickey, who repeats spectacle...

...Commonweal: 554...

...The acting laurels belong mostly to Sean Connery as continuous ascent up to modern enlightenment...

...But the harum-scarum plot quickly undoes his effort at Gothic, way back when, a fact which Annaud never tires of openmindedness about closemindedness...

...of the Name of the Rose for a simple reason...

...The ending, with an evasive freeze-frame borhole in his chin" when they argue over the new caper, provides rowed from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is particugenuine small treats...

...The List of Adrian Messenger, The Devil's Disciple, and The fault lies with a screenplay and directing (by Jeff Kanew) Seven Days in May...

...As a result, it Eco's hero William of Baskerville, the visiting Franciscan never engages the thought of the past...

...I know Eco's book only at second hand, and Inquisitor...

...Feodor Chaliapin, Jr., as an elder tion...

...Corral, played a stagecoach robber who tackled a train as a last hurrah...

...What Annaud seems to have lost, or discarded, is the between him and Connery, but simply a lame contest between genuine treatment of serious cultural and religious issues that superstition and reason, with all nuances eliminated...

...gious epics like The Ten Commandments, where De Mille Annaud's hand is tipped when Connery and his ward, Aldo combined prurience and moralism: viewers were treated to a of Metz (Christian Slater) first enter the abbey: all the monks lush spectacle of sin, only to be reminded, quite late in such have been taken from central casting at Planet of the Apes, films, how much the naughty were punished...

...repeating as his camera devours the abbey as the ultimate F. Murray Abraham is similarly straitjacketed as a sadistic haunted house...

...With its references to the difficulty of delivers...

...But small treats are all that Tough Guys larly disappointing...

...Connery is not just James Bond in cowl and sandals...

...only a sublime recapitulation of what is already known...

...health, and humor into a world of crazed (here, fanatically For a moment, Chaliapin made this possible simply by tone of religious) Italians...

...as Benedictine, almost transcends the caricature when he prohis name indicates, he is also a genuine Sherlock and plays his nounces with fervor, "There is no progress in knowledge, role with deadpan wit and convincing charm...

...He also lacks the genuine curiosity of Bergman, who, rationalist though he is, appreciates mystery (is there a finer moment in religious film: than Death's sad confession in The Screen Seventh Seal that even he does not know about the afterlife...

...But Annaud lacks their satirical honesty...

...spectacular crime...

...It is But Connery has a second, more limiting archetype to easy to attack this, and easy to identify the mistakes that have inhabit - that of the Englishman, who, as in all Gothic plagued church history because of it...

...But his vision makes serial murder, vivisection, his hammy Italian from Prizzi's Honor, perhaps assuming that impaling, burning at the stake, and disemboweling the center Annaud would appreciate the equation of monks and Mafia...

...A harder task is to discern mysteries since the 1790s, must try to inject some rationality, what possible grains of truth such an attitude might embody...

...provides some entertaining, camp sequences based on Um- Behind the travesty of The Name of the Rose is the Whig berto Eco's thriller set in an Italian Benedictine Abbey in interpretation of history, the notion of the centuries as one 1327...

...Abraham dignified Eco's horror...

...William's enemies seem scholar who turns sleuth and braves the wrath of the Inquisi- simply reactionary villains...

...flagellation, necrophilia, and other predictable paraphernalia of modern rationalist myth...

...From similar materials, Phillip Borsos made the evocative lywood just doesn't make them like they used to...

...Indeed, at times I thought that I T OUGH GUYS wastes the still considerable talents of Kirk had accidentally wandered back into Agnes of God, last year's Douglas and Burt Lancaster...

...He seems to like There are appropriately dark hints of perverse sexuality, them...

...nique, fine acting, intellectual pretension, and sheer Annaud presents this debate comically, as a shouting match depravity...

...The technique belongs to Jean Jacques An- between Franciscans and papal legates seemingly engaged in naud, who formerly made Quest for Fire, and who here the verbal trifle, "'Did Christ own his own garment or not...

...certain sectors of the Vatican, for this theology and the new to search the catacomb-like passages of the abbey (surrounded model of church emerging under its inspiration...

...Although the key issue in the plot involves the survival of Aristotle's manuscript on comedy, the reputed, missing second part of the Poetics, Annaud presents its significance in a. BAD HABITS garbled fashion, and never fully explores the rich tension of 'ROSE' & 'TOUGH GUYS' comedy and faith, or the importance of comedy to the faith of William of Baskerville...

...While the by scores of skulls...

...aging in a youth-oriented world, Tough Guys also copies from The fault lies not with the actors, or even the basic plot, Cocoon and television's The Golden Girls...

...As the careers of Lancaster and Douglas suggest, Holrun...

...Annaud does a with bulging eyes only the most obvious of their gargoyle De Mille in reverse: he lasciviates in the cruelty of the Catholic features...

...But when Abraham the caricatures of medieval Catholicism that seem basic to the arrives in the last half of the film, no vital drama develops plot...

...In Tough Guys they are up to their roles as that settles for petty jokes about changes since the fifties and old-time crooks who have just ended thirty-year jail sentences rarely penetrates the pathos implicit in the characters, their for a 1955 train robbery and who can't resist one last stab at a longing for a stab at glory in a world which has passed them by...

...1983 mini-hit The Grey Fox, where Richard Farnsworth TOM O'BRIEN Anne Porter A Night in Ireland Our steamship docked at night And by this light In Cobh, an Irish seaport I saw the crowds of the blessed A small one in those days From the greatest to the smallest The smallest were running and laughing Not an inn, not a tavern was open And Christ the Lord was with them And we had to wait till morning And also Mary For the train to Fermoy But before I could knock at the door But in the wooded hills Someone spoke to me Up above the town I think it was an angel Nightingales were awake He said You've come too soon All the dark thickets Go back into the towns Were rich with their songs Live there as love's apprentice And God will give you his kingdom It was in those woods And on that night I woke up just before sunrise I dreamed that I found the door When the nightingales ended their songs Of all doors the most hidden Dew gathered on the ferns And most renowned And the cool woods Gave off a scent of earth Overgrown with nettles In the early morning Rustic and low Built as if for children I was hungry and cold Or as a gate for sheep And I started back to the town In some back-country pasture At the first signs of day Already a sunlit smoke And through a chink in the door Was rising from the chimneys I saw the marvelous light And mist from the water That's purest of all lights Neither sun nor moon I heard a rooster crowing Nor any star I know of And then I heard the whistle Could give such light Of the train to Fermoy...

...Given similar short shrift are William's guilt over his past role in the Inquisition, and an interestTHE NAME OF THE ROSE combines skillful cinematic tech- ing debate with modern echoes, Christ's attitude to wealth...

...sive on something more feared than understood...