On the Trail of the American Hero
Henry, Washington
WHAT IS A MAGAZINE these days without its judicious film critic, whether for scene significant or kitsch unlimited: Stanley Kubrick cannot be too heavy, nor Peter Fonda too light. But why do...
...The Real America here is a depression dance marathon stirred into pointless and vicious animation by the fake enthusiam of the forever-exploiting ringmaster...
...Alice and Ray want to create something different and better for the young people around them, but their moments of spontaneous beauty pass all too soon—and with all too much banality—into helpless bitterness...
...Let's face it—when it comes to current American film heroes, Barbra Streisand is the only one with balls...
...And to grant his last wish before the massacre, the big ole country is turning over its movies, its magazines and its liberal sensibilities...
...With suitable anxiety and the aid of a proper Polonius, you may never realize it...
...Arlo would be the most pathetic victim of all if he took his film seriously, but he's so cheerful and unpretentious—as in his song— that he communicates straight through the movie...
...Yet in his wiped-out TO CONTRIBUTORS We strongly urge anyone submitting ma terial to DISSENT to keep a carbon copy...
...Jane Fonda in fact is such a gleamingeyed toughie that it is perfectly unbelievable when in the end she asks plum-face to kill her...
...plum-faced innocence he attracts the two belles of the ball: the tinsel Harlow, Susannah York, and the steely Jane Fonda, both so full of vitality they threaten to explode the simpleminded dreariness of the conception...
...The idea is to show a new mode of grace in action...
...The actors and audience for this film might have been created by the Beatles, like the "pretty nurse selling poppies from a tray...
...In ten years Butch may be called camp...
...It is announced that Peter and his Panza are "threatening" to America because they "represent Freedom"—and sure enough, they are abruptly shot from their steeds, in a piece of stunning photographic work that sent viewers into the street with proudly blown minds...
...Neither deadpan symbols nor campy cop-outs, Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman play vagrant hustlers in New York's Times Square district...
...But even now it has its appeal to those for whom life has been reduced to a series of poses in the face of monolithic retaliation—with the corollary that movies, with their cleaner, clearer poses, are realler than life...
...Hollywood movies can't be that—most of them are made by committees of little boys...
...The sensitive, grainy camera work makes the falseness of content all the more obvious...
...His consort is usually another male anyhow, and one or both lovers are certain to bring down murder from the big fuzzy establishment-in-the-sky...
...They are heroes who shoot straight but never kill until they are accidentally on the side of the law...
...Sure enough, Hollywood once again gives backhand recognition to Louie's power: they let him lead the band for a minute with his back to the camera, then permit him to turn and sing less than one chorus...
...It makes an honest effort to show young members of the "counter-culture" in their nonsymbolic complexity and confusion...
...He lets us know he shares with us our embarrassment...
...Arlo is a fragile boy who seems to fold in sweet misgiving when confronted with a line like, "Don't crowd him, he's trying to get his head"—or when, with really daring bad taste, the film compels him to reenact hospital visits to the dying Woodie Guthrie...
...But the result is a picture that is simply unbelievable...
...Meanwhile Arlo Guthrie, the hero of the piece, has nothing better to do than wander through the story singing his song, grinning at people and patting them, and either offending them or turning them on with his long hair...
...But why do they all read like Polonius...
...Midnight Cowboy puts its heroic couple in a more human position...
...He comes encased in a woolly delicacy, so sensitive, so vulnerable, that nothing can reach him short of death...
...The "contact" scenes in the pictures I am about to describe are nearly 100 percent unbelievable...
...She is all over Walter Matthau and in the course of the picture she thoroughly emasculates him...
...Winning is out altogether...
...Since Paul Newman and Robert Redford don't care what happens to them, one is constantly aware of MOVIES actors in a movie taken by their own cuteness...
...Their reality as heroes exists outside the ffim—as surrogates through whom one fumbles and dies with overwhelming charm...
...mails these days are not exactly at the peak of efficiency and we have had one or two unhappy situations in which articles were lost in the mails...
...He stares ahead soulfully to his apocalyptic demise, lapsing into speech now and then to proclaim universal truths on the order of "you do your own thing in your own time...
...WHAT IS A MAGAZINE these days without its judicious film critic, whether for scene significant or kitsch unlimited: Stanley Kubrick cannot be too heavy, nor Peter Fonda too light...
...I'm referring of course to Miss Streisand, who does as she pleases with complete abandon, brings off everything she tries, and swamps anyone who comes on screen with her...
...But they are photographed these days by wizards—so that you may not realize until you are down the street and into the coffeeshop that you have watched in fascination the unfolding of nothing whatever...
...They shoot horses, don't they...
...The excuse would serve as well for My Lai...
...I went to see Hello, Dolly hoping to find in Louis Armstrong's brief appearance a glimmer of manhood in a style so unfamiliar and unappreciated that it would put all the rest to shame...
...The latest hero is turned out younger, cooler, and softer to the touch—and he would rather be killed than a killer be...
...Nevertheless I did discover in Hello, Dolly, the one and only American film hero who has retained the power of self-assertion, true love and total triumph...
...The success of the picture—in esteem as well as at the box office —makes it clear that the premise is useful and the hero appealing...
...Maybe their trouble—at least where Hollywood flicks are concerned—is to take each one so gravely as an aesthetic whole...
...Peter Fonda throws away his watch (nudge, nudge), puts a big American flag on his back (nudge, nudge), and goes off sitting across the south west on his star-spangled bike, in quest of . • . "getting my thing together...
...Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid duck the heavy symbolism by playing Western robbers as a total put-on...
...They Shoot Horses, Don't They...
...and though she feels she's in a play/she is anyway...
...It would work better with another Fonda, or with Jane pulling the trigger on plum-face...
...They specialize in cool wisecracks as they move from one fiasco to another...
...She is more heroic than Paul Newman, Peter Fonda, Dustin Hoffman and Arlo Guthrie put together and rolled into a baleful look...
...He knows that the movie itself is part of what it is fighting: the super-mediaconstruct pouncing on our feelings and strivings to turn them into manufactured items that cheapen and betray us...
...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Hoffman and Voight are extremely skillful, but one loves them finally as actors, as clowns, as sad sweet teddy-bears, rather than as characters in a meaningful film...
...With his frozen cupid mouth and stunned bambi eyes, plum-face wouldn't have to strain at playing dead...
...A pure victim, a case of infant mortality, you can't blame him for what he does...
...is one more skillful picture which collapses through the dead weight of its symbolism...
...Certainly he is not going to win his true love...
...The "image" is that people do not much affect one another...
...Eventuallythey are slaughtered by hundreds of Bolivian troops...
...The hero is a human cypher whose only distinctive act is his effort to dance eyes-closed in a beam of sunlight...
...But much to my chagrin, Louis Toms it to a fare-thee-well, clasping his hands and quivering with joy at the sight of his old Massa Barbra Streisand...
...The thesis is that America—which "used to be a helluva good country"—is now engaged in the massacre of its young...
...When they are most real —in their actual hustling, in their contact with would-be victims—the film proceeds with intensity and feeling...
...Sounds like straight farce, but it isn't made that way—the two robbers are glamorized as men of style and wit...
...Meanwhile one could trace in the films that are most soberly merchandized and discussed the continuing search for an American dreamhero, who takes new forms to suit new needs...
...Alice's Restaurant is in its way the most earnest of these films...
...Easy Rider is the prototype of the genre, partly because it takes itself so seriously...
...the younger the hero, the more likely he is to rise above that sort of thing...
...It is death he is bound for, and none other mistress...
...So keep a copy...
...But the story line deserts the tawdriness of hustling for a Runyanesque cuteness and a maudlin death rattle...
...He is systematically passive in his picaresque encounters— a series of tableaux painted up as Earthy Farm Life, Beautiful Youth Commune, Redneck Restaurant, Getting High Around the Campfire, and Naked Acid Trip through the Cemetery...
...We take more than usual precautions, but the U.S...
Vol. 17 • March 1970 • No. 2
