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...We (and Sam) come to recognize that he is a product and a victim of the narrow society which created him, that although he can be admirable (as a public servant), as a human being he lacks the capacity to feel deeply...

...An instant, execrated celebrity, Scalia doesn't merely plead guilty...

...The story is one by the Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia...

...the establishment of a just precedent, immediately undermined by the wheels of Fascist injustice, which will nonetheless inspire further justice long after those wheels have ground to a halt...

...A middle-aged couple, dressed in meticulous white, sit at the table and wait for their clam chowder to be served, watching the more flamboyant behavior in the booth with a mixture of disapproval and open fascination...

...Sam is shepherded by Bud, a bright Irish Catholic lawyer, who admires Sam and his WASP connections (the old-boy network), but does not want Sam to look too preppy for the general public...

...Therefore he was able to free himself of the the burdens of Alison and Perry by manipulating them into a marriage that was a foreordained disaster...

...We execute monsters like Scalia so that the average citizen can sleep with his front door open," pontificates a justice department toady...

...teased...

...he OldBoy takes place in familiar Gumey country, this time a classy New England prep school to which Sam--the perfect image of a candidate for governor--returns to make the graduation speech and, almost as an afterthought, to announce a tennis complex to be funded by the mother of his dead friend Perry, whose name it will bear...

...played body-and-mind games...

...Yet, looking back at it after a few weeks, I find that the force has dissipated and that the ideas seem either faulty or obvious...

...He soared in Shepardian lyricism, cobbled out of patriotic clichrs...

...the bestowal of a dubious mercy on a man who doesn't want it...

...Judge DiFrancesco, fascinated not only by this case but by the quirkiness of human nature, resists the persuasions of his judicial colleagues and the much less subtle pressure of the national government to wrap things up...

...Nothing can really be still, none can rest while the investigation is underway, while terrible truths are being pulled into the light in a land ruled by masters of prevarication...

...The play ends with the entire cast reprising "Goodnight, Irene," which the couple had sung earlier, with the emphasis on the stanza about lying down to die...

...At least three of these alternate routes were being feverishly investigated in the lobby of the theater where v I had just seen Open Doors...

...The revelation of an encompassing, cancerlike irrationality of which the multiple murders were the products...

...It's like seeing a frozen sea instantly turn into an onrushing flood...

...In 1937, a Palermo bureaucrat, Scalia, murders the supervisor who has sacked him, the underling who has replaced him, and his own wife...

...Those crowds milling around, those screaming peasants...

...I mean, Bertolucci really makes you see history on the hoof...

...cajoled...

...and, finally, DiFrancesco's personal revelation that his ongoing search for truth and justice need not be as lonely as it has been, that he has blinded himself to a human benevolence that is never quite quenchable even in the worst of times...

...Then, just as the shot is beginning to seem interminable, two quick close-ups of the vehicle visually and aurally slam us...

...The mass-cult freeway: "Don't you think it was too slow...

...swooped from ingratiating softness to fulminating anger...

...Volante's genius is to create an individual so self-contained and private that the camera seems to spy on him...

...The schema of this movie resembles that of a Costa-Gavras film like Z or State of Siege: an investigation of an apparently isolated crime uncovers a network of government corruption...

...Indeed, Gianni Amelio's grave, radical (philosophically, not politically), and very wise movie will play admirably in the privacy of your home, sometime after midnight, when even the most loved of loved ones are in bed, though you, for some strange reason, want to trouble yourself into more hours of sleeplessness...

...His performance was a delight to watch even as I wondered--as in Burn This--if there were a character being consumed rather than created by Malkovich's fire...

...A good part of Open Doors is adagio, but that is the tempo of DiFrancesco's wintry spirit...

...And too repetitive...

...The moviemakers never expect to touch bottom, but they show us marvels and monstrosities as we follow their cord many fathoms deep...

...The waitress, named Glory Bee for heaven's sake, is a very pretty young black woman, inept at best, otherwise downright mutinous in the way she ignores the exasperated couple to concentrate on the Colonel and Stubbs...

...That, as it turns out, is the least of Bud's worries...

...The outcome...

...It is not too much to ask of an audience that it adjust itself to the measure of an extraordinary consciousness laid bare by extraordinary artists...

...One example among many: after a particularly unruly session in court, a police van drives Scalia back to prison...

...Open Doors is so wise about the sheer peril of being alive that it makes you a little frightened of your own heartbeat...

...he has brought Stubbs, in his wheel chair, on an outing from the hospital for a gooey ice cream treat...

...But the slowness is far from unalleviated...

...A long, circular shot of the pier lulls us just as surely as the serenity of the settling lulls the judge...

...States of Shock, which played a limited run at the American Place Theatre, is set at some unspecified time in which the United States is being destroyed by an unidentified war, represented by bombing attacks (courtesy of the sound and lighting designers), vigorous percussion work, and news of offstage and onstage shortages...

...I agree with John Simon that the tempo of any scene in a truly good movie is at one with its meaning...

...But the camera doesn't zoom forward to meet it, nor does the van seem to make any progress...

...No, this movie is a plumb line lowered by its creators into the depths of human nature...

...Shepard's plays are full of elusive fathers and discomfited sons, but in States of Shock the generational theme is elevated into a political statement...

...A long shot of the van shows it heading toward the camera...

...What remains are some strong images, a remembered assault of sound and visual effect, and, most of all, an incredible performance by Malkovich...

...The legal stasis caused by fear and suppressed evidence is being broken by new evidence, and new truths rush away half-baked opinions and preconceptions...

...At the end of the play, when Stubbs gets up, in more ways than one, conquering both deficiencies, and the Colonel retreats to the wheel chair, the play reverts to the good Greek theme of the son's replacing the father...

...In States of Shock, I suspect that Malkovich and Shepard were playing the same demonic game with a shared disruption of all rules...

...The Karl Marx tunnel of eternal night: "Sure, this flick has a leftist stance, but it doesn't have the proletarian fervor of, say, Bertolucci's 1900...

...Set in what the characters keep calling a"family restaurant"---one table and one booth in Bill Stabile's brightly austere surroundings--the play consists of five characters who connect only minimally...

...The play, which is constructed of fragments and disparate images, was effective in the theater, building out of often broadly comic material a cumulative effect of loss...

...None, not the government officials who must obstruct justice, not the murderer who must seethe within his nightmares, and certainly not the good man who is made vulnerable through the only creature he unreservedly loves...

...Through flashbacks and noisy confrontation scenes, we learn that Perry was a confused homosexual, forced to go straight by Sam, his "old boy" (student mentor), who elects to "save" Perry by setting him up with Alison, the shopkeeper's daughter who was Sam's own first love (i.e., sexual partner...

...Much of the play is taken up with the Colonel's attempt to restage the scene with toy soldiers and tableware so that, as he keeps insisting, he can understand how his son's death happened...

...The spurious peace created by a murderous government is a tranquillity no wise man lets himself enjoy...

...Through the multiple meanings of "old boy," the play suggests that Sam's deficiences are those of his class, that he represents high-minded, intelligent men (a gender specific noun) who do 438: Commonweal...

...But this is precisely the progress of Scalia's case...

...Their most recent plays--Shepard's States of Shock and Gumey's The Old Boy--mark a change...

...In another scene, DiFrancesco is strolling on the waterfront with his motherless little daughter, whom he adores...

...On command or on impulse, he bares his chest for the audience...

...Gian Maria Volonte's performance as DiFrancesco is a masterpiece that incarnates the virtues of the entire film: intelligence leashed but fierce, an expressiveness that can never be mistaken 12 July 1991:437 as minimalism...

...RICHARD ALLEVA STAGE DEMONIC GAMES '$H_9 & '_9 BOY' here has never been any doubt about the social and political implications of the plays of Sam Shepard and A. R. Gumey, but neither playwright had been particularly overt in spelling out those implications...

...It never happened at all, or so we assume as it becomes clear that Stubbs is the son, rejected as an imperfect chip off the old block, impotent as well as wheel-chair bound...

...Maybe Italians have longer attention spans than ours...

...The Colonel is another of those characters (like the protagonist of Lanford Wilson's Burn This) in which Malkovich could pull out all stops...

...Therein lies the problem...

...The liberal overpass: "I loved the anticapital punishment stand this movie took but I don't know if I can recommend it to my more conservative friends...

...Yet, along the way, particularly in the demented patriotic rhetoric of the Colonel, the play shows not only that fathers and sons fail one another, but that fathers, in this good American context, provide wars in which to sacrifice sons...

...Calling this movie "slow" misses the point...

...on the contrary, it is constantly alternated and counterpointed...

...But, a moment later, DiFrancesco wakes with a start and finds the girl gone...

...It is also the pace at which he slowly turns each new piece of evidence this way and that, letting no facet go unexamined...

...A moment later his fear proves unfounded, but the scene, both in its visual design (circular calm torn by sudden short flights of panic) and in its tempo (the adagio of relaxation yielding to the allegro of search), communicates the main point of the entire film...

...Anyway, I thought it was too slow...

...But Open Doors is not a Costa-Gavras job in which leftist opinion equals virtue and right-wing extremity defines evil...

...He rises in panic, shouting her name and the camera scurries with him as he darts about...

...He refuses to accept the apparent lunacy of the crimes, insists on connecting the murders of the bureaucrats with the slaughter of the wife, shrewdly follows up leads, calls the crucial witnesses, asks the right questions...

...Steering my way toward the exit through a traffic jam of instant opinion, I found myself for the first time wishing that an extraordinary new film had come out immediately in video format...

...DiFrancesco dryly ripostes, "I keep my front door shut...

...I thought it was too slow...

...His boast is as brazen and cryptic as his crime and it arouses the curiosity of one of the justices trying the case...

...he demands the firing squad...

...The Colonel (John Malkovich in the most incredible hodgepodge of military dress I have seen since the Marx Brothers defended Freedonia in Duck Soup) commands the booth and finally the whole restaurant...

...He settles into a deck chair for a snooze while the child amuses herself...

...The latter, wounded in a war that sounds like a combination of Vietnam and Desert Storm, has a very visible wound, courtesy of makeup, where a shell passed through his body and killed the Colonel's son who was standing behind him...

...the uncovering of a network of immorality, both private and public...

...Public opinion cries out for blood but so does the justice department of Mussolini's government because, though proclaiming fervent allegiance to I1 Duce, the killer has also bragged that his brutal act "cleansed" some of the corruption of the Fascist municipality...