Screen

...At the end of Mortal Thoughts, there was a mild explosion of rage...

...During the act ! was a scream, merely, whereas m~w hands, kindly, sensitive tips, occasionally rai~ a spoon, check the gauze for drainage and life has resumed a small suggestion of humanity, that hope, exhausted gratitude still doing all it can with hurt just a tfac-) for I am black (tor) a kind of indian in this land from which (con-) my blood (stant) must be cut Neville thinks the estate should have come to him and may yet if he can persuade Colin that he is sick enough to die...

...But if you harbor a perverse desire to be present at such a rehearsal, just betake yourself to A Kiss Before Dying, the latest 406: Commonweal adaptation of Ira Levin's melodramatic variation on An American Tragedy...

...GERALD WEALES SCREEN LETHAL SMOOCHES 'KISS' & 'MORTAL THOUGHTS' couple of days before a play opens, its cast usually meets in a rehearsal room or a hallway for what is called a"line run...

...Up there on the screen are such unequally gifted actors as Matt Dillon, Sean Young, James Russo, and Max von Sydow doing, as far as I can tell, a line run...

...Both audiences were quiet and attentive...

...D That's what Mortal Thoughts boils down to 4 before the final credits roll up...

...Of course, if you were ever to blunder into a line run, you would swear that you had never seen such colorless, such toneless, such spunkless actors in your entire life...

...When a police officer rises from his chair after questioning a witness, the camera comes to rest on the revolver at his hip...

...The cop isn't about to use his gun nor is he being particularly tough or menacing at that moment...

...All the actors work so hard on their New York/New Jersey Italian-American accents that they end up looking like drama students trying to impress a teacher with their homework...

...Both the opera and the musical have their virtues, but if it is Bumett's Secret Garden you want to see, check your video store for the film...

...The only reason that I can see for turning the character into a villain (indifference is so much more frightening than villainy) is that it provides a role for the estimable Robert Westenberg (the Big Bad Wolf from Into the Woods...

...Just keep clashing those cymbals and nobody will fall asleep...

...On stage, there are problems with the garden itself...

...He is a monster worth watching precisely because he is an apprentice monster who must, to use Thomas Harris's grim description of another killer in his novel Red Dragon, grow as accustomed to the screams of his victims as a sculptor grows accustomed to dust...

...Both musical versions of the book recognize the vitality of Martha (Dickon's sister, the chambermaid who looks after Mary) as a character and keep her on hand for the f'mal triumph in the garden...

...even if his victims are sympathetic or interesting people (which is decidedly, etc...

...They also falsify one of Burnett's central points--that Mary, surrounded by people in India, was as isolated as when she is alone in Yorkshire...

...After Kiss, the lights came up on a quietly bored, almost comatose audience...

...When Joyce kills her husband, Cynthia loyally covers up the circumstances of the slaying...

...Of course, this is hindsight...

...The effect was shocking because the murderer himself was shocked...

...Rudolph isn't even sure of how to begin and end certain sequences...

...The audience had been gripped by the putative story and its themes and therefore felt cheated by the last-minute cop-out...

...These weren't young people just killing time or out for a lark...

...A Kiss Before Dying amplifies every absurdity of Levin's novel and stifles all the possibilities of this story of a psychotic young proletarian who murders and marries his way into a supercapitalist family...

...Rudolph uses slow motion photography as if he had discovered the technique yesterday...

...But long before that twist, Mortal Thoughts is lamed by flighty direction and overblown, sweatily naturalistic acting...

...The usually witty Glenne Headly is the most egregious example of this...

...There was a vice, straps and the blade blacking out everything but the pain gunny sack breathed till to suffocate sounded like .salvation...

...At one point, Rudolph begins a scene with a shot of the sky, not because the sky plays a part in what follows but because the director wants to fill the entire screen with eye-stuuning brightness so that the audience will be startled into an attention that the filmmaking hasn't earned...

...When, late in this movie, Sean Young, recalling the effect her brother's suicide had on her, says, "I was a total zombie," you feel like shouting back at the screen, "But you're still a total zombie...

...Yet the bulk of D the movie offers a much different story: Cynthia (Demi Moore), a hairdresser with a conventional marriage, is the quietly horrified and fascinated witness of the ongoing marital warfare between her childhood pal and fellow beautician Joyce (Glenne Headly) and her brutal cokehead of a husband (Bruce W'tllis...

...RICHARD ALLEVA 14 June 1991:407...

...Jordan or Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life (without their heavenly credentials...

...I saw both A Kiss Before Dying and Mortal Thoughts in the company of dating couples, ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-five...

...With their lack of interest in their own projects, American commercial flimmakers are eliminating the very audiences they so desperately want to attract...

...I think that once they realized they had been duped or self-duped into doing James Dearden's wretched script, the performers embarked on a sort of misguided, internal strike...

...Set bound, the opera could not present the garden until the end of the play, when a crumpled, discolored canvas was removed to reveal a pastel garden set, which means that the three children have to discover the garden at once...

...For that, you might well turn to the 1984 BBC adaptation of the book in which film can show the changing garden, can let us see and almost touch Dickon's animals and the robin which leads Mary to the garden...

...AYONNE WIVES SLAY HUBS IN MURDER SWAP...

...Why's it coming back, always a succubus...

...This moment insured that the audience would remain at least slightly interested in the young psycho as he goes about eliminating others throughout the remainder of the film...

...Mary's parents, her Indian servants, and various unidentified waltzers float in with great frequency and make scenes difficult to perceive...

...In 1956, Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward did the first screen version of this story in Kiss...

...We get more of the garden there, although Heidi Landesman's charmingly theatrical sets never evoke the real magic that Bumett had in mind...

...Yet, performing the story's first murder (an inconveniently pregnant fianc6e is chucked off a skyscraper), Wagner did something that was both memorable in itself and dramatically fruitful for the rest of the movie...

...Both recognize that the dressing scene between her and Mary is a natural for a musical number...

...A note in the New York Times on May 3 indicated that, even though the show was open and running, the producers were planning to cut back on the intrusive ghosts to make things clearer for children, an important element in potential audiences...

...If a protagonist is stone-cold vicious to begin with, why should we watch him for another two hours, even if his depredations are artfully filmed (which is decidedly not the case here...

...I suspect the latter...

...Matt Dillon does the same scene in the remake, but he shows no emotion whatsoever even though this is presumably the character's first murder...

...But why is an elderly man also shot in slow motion when he is merely collecting gifts at his daughter's wedding...

...The word "run" is precise for the actors usually race through the script, deliberately discarding the inflections and pauses that have evolved during rehearsals and that will be revived on opening night...

...The movie had promised nothing from its very first frame, and so, when nothing was delivered, there were no complaints...

...But a flashback at the very end of this movie completely jettisons what we have just spent two hours watching...

...Bumett simply forgot her...

...After he pushed the girl to her death, Wagner kept his arms extended straight out for several seconds and his entire body locked stiffin reaction to what he had just done...

...And if line runs in rehearsal rooms or corridors make actors seem like so many chanting androids, imagine how movie performers register with their expressionless faces twenty feet tall and forty feet wide...

...It's much more fun to watch an honest-to-God robot like Arnold Schwartzenegger's Terminator...

...He doesn't coast on the wise-guy persona he developed in Moonlighting and Die Hard but reshapes it without fuss into an appropriately repellent character...

...But it's a striking way to end a scene so Rudolph tosses it at us, like a composer ending a symphonic movement with a clash of cymbals because he can't think of the right notes to set down...

...If the children have to edge their way around the brothers to get to their own story, they also have to face the beneficent interference of the dead Lily, who is as busy as Mr...

...Swallowing's strenuous, some throat nearly closing over from so much emptiness, nausea, an acidic gullet and its limb lump, that .sacrifice required to slump away from the phantom trap...

...Were the actors misdirected or did they simply refuse to deliver...

...Sometimes it is legitimately employed to convey a character's bewilderment, as when Moore is led into a police station for questioning...

...Wagner has never, to understate the case, been one of my favorite actors...

...But she is only the most prominent of the ghosts that haunt the play...

...dybbuk, ! go on mouthing about...

...If director Alan Rudolph and his scriptwriters had stuck to that story and committed themselves to exploring its ramifications, the result might have been an Americanized, murderous version of Entre Nous: a study of how the bonds between women--rooted in childhood friendship, common culture, and mutual commiseration over the sexual depredations of males---can finally destroy marital loyalty...

...But Bruce Wtllis does well as the husband/victim...

...One thing, of course, leads to another and Cynthia, now a virtual accomplice to murder, sees her own marriage come to a violent halt...

...They had come to be told a story and were willing to follow it with attention...

...That does away with the moment which"frue Gardenites will insist is the most important one in the book, when Mary enters the garden alone and thinks the dormant plants are dead...

...That scene isn't on Broadway either...

...For that is the line run's purpose: it's a last-minute step towards making the performers so fluent that opening night jitters won't make them go blank once the curtain goes up...

...No director is present or needed, only an assistant stage manager holding the prompt book to make sure everyone is word perfect...

...Characterization, motivation, social comment, narrative drive are all flushed down the drain for the sake of a final twist that reduces Mortal Thoughts to the headline with which I began this review...