BEYOND EUPHORIA: OUR LIBERATED MOVIES

...Burgess may not have realized it, but his book provided Kubrick with the ideal vehicle to combine the freakout technology of 2001 and the hip-nihilistic philosophy of Dr...

...But the connections it makes this way tend to be fatuous or simply pointless, so that a technique that was an exciting breakthrough in the narrative arts not so very long ago becomes as trivial as fancy angles and cuts in a beer commercial...

...The license to reject Americanism has opened up the opportunity to show us America with fresh eyes...

...one of the tests of integrity in the new climate is that a movie shouldn't look too much like a Hollywood production...

...The book was funny but not only funny...

...They conveyed a feeling of commu nity among the young and rootless, people adrift and cut off from everything and every one except others like themselves...

...Although its themes aren't very different from those of A Clockwork Orange—both movies say the young must be given the freedom to go their own way—Billy Jack has a sense of innocence and passion that work as an antidote to the glossy cynicism of A Clockwork Orange...

...When at the end of a TV debate the candidate finally cuts loose, his comments are so general that we don't know how to take them...

...The emergence of a new black audience in the past few years has been an important phenomenon politically, economically, and sociologically, but until Sounder the movies produced for this audience had been generally atrocious, from the raw, independently made Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss Song to the slick studio-tooled Shaft's Big Score...

...The hero's problem is that he gets sucked into everything he thought he was against and becomes a prisoner of his own political strategists...

...he provides the excuse for enjoying it by presenting a world so far out of control that only fools and squares cling to outmoded notions of decency and progress...

...Richard Benjamin played an earlier Roth hero in Goodbye, Columbus and wasn't too bad, but he simply doesn't have the capacity for fury and for the conflict of love and hate the role of Portnoy demands...

...The movie demonstrates what goes wrong when the same old flat methods of hack moviemaking are applied to daring new material...

...All decked out in rock music, faded jeans, and the great outdoors, this counterculture morality play is much more persuasive emotionally than intellectually...

...The reality we pick up through the new documentaries and public-affairs shows on television has a rougher texture, and we are more likely now to believe in the intelligence that looks as if it just happens to have been caught than in the meticulously planted information of a carefully staged movie...

...Portnoy complains that he's living in the middle of a Jewish joke, and it isn't funny...

...Strangelove...

...Miller, or for George Segal, whose portrait of a manic New York junkie in Born to Win puts the drug addict in the line of foolhardy urban heroes who are exciting because they take crazy chances and don't hold back...

...What kind of dealing goes on to produce a hip movie that invites us to dig a charming hypocrite and laugh at the squares who fall for him...

...Something like this apparently happened BEYOND EUPHORIA: OUT LIBERATED MOVIES in Sounder...

...Director Michael Ritchie captures the behindthe scenes flavor of a political campaign with smart, brisk documentary authenticity, and that gives his movie a certain feel of credibility...

...they may have ignored the genius of Griffith and Keaton, and they certainly missed out on considerable pleasure...

...This new phenomenon makes a shambles of the old theory that the system couldn't tolerate subversive thoughts in mass culture...

...The movie makes a superficial stab at following the novel's structure, starting with Portnoy on the couch and then picking up flashback sequences, but this is a kind of brainless pseudofidelity which simply doesn't work...

...But the smoothness, the cleverness, the brilliant technique only intensify one's awareness of the vacuousness of the material...

...The challenge now is to integrate this new social and political range with the screen's traditional storytelling role...

...86 MARTIN KNELMAN...

...By using actors who weren't in the script, Altman gave his community continuity, density, and identity...

...The most talented moviemakers of the past few years have often worked toward new styles of social realism, reaching for more depth, more looseness and richer textures without abandoning traditional forms...

...During his treatment Alex is told: "When we're healthy we respond to the hateful with nausea...

...The movies were supposed to give us soothing fantasies and easy emotional experiences, to which we could go for escape and confirmation of what we already knew...

...Lions Club squares who sing There'll Be Some Changes Made...

...careening from nutty slapstick to smart romance to crime caper to brutal big-town horror story at a clip that takes one's breath away, the movie demonMARTIN KNELMAN strates that glee and self-destruction are different sides of the same scene in the absurd frenzy of the freaky city...

...Alienation and disenchantment, once the private attitudes of dissenting intellectuals, are now openly sold as pop culture...

...Compared to Ingmar Bergman's Shame, whose theme was also what war does to people sucked into it, or The Sorrow and the Pity, the superb Marcel Ophuls documentary about the Nazi occupation of France, Slaughterhouse Five is an embarrassment, not only because it approaches the subject with infinitely less intelligence, feeling, and artistry but because its slickness is morally offensive...

...it told the painful part that Sam Levenson and Myron Cohen left out...

...As we leave Billy 423 billion miles from earth making love to a starlet on a dome that looks like Buckminster Fuller's U.S...

...On the other hand, The Candidate, which tries to show how the ideals of a young, energetic politician vanish by the time he gets elected, is an illustration of what happens when some of the techniques of the new film journalism are applied to a story that's too conventionally thin to support them...

...The slick decadence is there to be wallowed in...

...and by taking a deliberately understated approach, he broke through the planted feeling of conventional set-ups and created the impression that in the act of filming them he was discovering his characters and story spontaneously...

...Slaughterhouse Five was peculiarly out of date by the time it reached the screen...

...It's being rejected on movie screens all over the world, week in and week out, by movie heroes cast in the mold of Benjamin Braddock (The Graduate), Cap 80 tain America (Easy Rider) and Bobby (Five Easy Pieces), who summed up the attitude of the modern American screen hero with "Keep on telling me about the good life, Eldon, because it makes me puke...

...Miller, Robert Altman—presenting his own version of the frontier myth— built a mining town and then populated it...

...The genius of the Philip Roth novel was to integrate two forms of Jewish American narrative that had always been separate: the literary chronicles of the educated writers whom Norman Podhoretz called "the Jewish heirs of Henry James" and the low-brow comics who made the experience of the Jewish immigrant in America a staple of popular entertainment...

...For a while you couldn't drop into a movie without getting hit by an apocalypse...

...In Born to Win, which flopped so badly almost no one saw it, Ivan Passer, a Czech, not only dared to take on a project that de pended on an intuitive grasp of the Ameri can style and idiom but succeeded...

...This odd contradiction of fantastic technical sophistication in the service of smug posturing has become almost a defining characteristic of classy bad movies in the past few years...

...Its attitude belongs to a simpler period, when the mass media were expected to provide propa ganda for American values, the American system, and the American way of life...

...a goonish son who desecrates cemeteries but makes up for the misdeeds by volunteering for Vietnam...

...The Godfather not only resurrected the genre of gangster movies that flourished in the '30s but smashed right through the old patterns to achieve a new grandeur and a new level of social realism...

...The heavy, self-important style cues the audience for every reaction, like a dictator signaling his henchmen when he wants his jokes to be laughed at...

...You don't forget for a moment that this is a glittering production, and that's one of the major reasons why Vonnegut's defeatist whimsy—which mixes pop fatalism and mysticism with bits of science fiction and grim little jokes— seems so much phonier on the screen than in print...

...People who don't have time for movies often have a soft spot for genre pictures, associating them with their own childhood innocence, but anyone who actually goes to them knows you can get an overdose of tedium from sitting through tired reruns of MARTIN KNELMAN the same old used-up stories, trotted out week after week and year after year...

...and by mixing farce with violence and turning conventions inside out, it pointed up the pleasure of surprise and opened the way to new treatments of old legends...

...rancis Ford Coppola brought surprising depth to a big-studio style of moviemaking in The Godfather, but most of the exciting developments in recent American movies have come through the search for more BEYOND EUPHORIA: OUT LIBERATED MOVIES open, flexible ways of working...

...Although the attitudes expressed by the most important pictures of the past few years have been peculiarly modern, whether they were dealing with the present or not, it's surprising how many of them have been developed from traditional forms...

...Although Karen Black as The Monkey creates a funny, vulnerable extension of the character in the book, her bizarre affair with Portnoy loses its point because we don't see how his instability is linked to his childhood...

...But by making Alex, the thug hero of A Clockwork Orange, a charming scoundrel and everyone else fools and swine, Stanley Kubrick's movie tells us that Alex's choices are right...

...Marjoe is a compelling study of a real-life con-man preacher who is part Elmer Gantry and part Mick Jagger, and it's carried by the considerable show-biz talent of its subject and by the sensational charge of seeing the Jesus mania exposed just when it has caught on with the counter culture as the ultimate Dionysian freakout...

...even if it isn't very good, an American movie about contemporary experience and attitudes can make contact in a more direct, more personal way than other kinds of movies...

...But going behind the scenes, we don't find any difference between the image and the man...

...and a daughter whose reaction to her mother's death in her car is "But she drove a Cadillac...

...It establishes a bond with its audiences giving them a psychodramatic chance to work off hostility against an educational and political establishment which they experience as repressive and stifling...

...Yet the ambience is undone by an inadequate dramatic presentation...

...The nega tive side of that mood was the sense that something had gone terribly sour, summed up by Jack Nicholson's line in Easy Rider, "This used to be a hell of a good country...

...And since the new audiences looked to movies for an emotional charge, as a way of being alive to contemporary experiences, movies could ignore the old pieties...

...Finding the technical solution in the chant on the couch delivered by his hero-victim, Roth incorporated the stand-up comic's monologue in a dazzling literary form...

...THE NEW AUDIENCE demands more immediacy and relevance...

...Peter Fonda in Easy Rider and Arlo Guthrie in Alice's Restaurant rode out in search of a new frontier that had to do with more than geography...

...The affirmative note Sounder strikes is not a fake happy ending but a dramatic fact that has been honestly earned...

...What these movies represent is the perpetuation of myths that nobody cares about any more, kept on by customs, inertia, and commercial convenience...

...But they weren't wrong about commercial American movies in general...

...Sounder comes as a reminder that breaking through the cheerful view of life is not enough...

...Censorship is no longer a problem on the screen, but the obscene words and ideas have become meanspirited because the context that gave them their sting has been so thinned out they now have no emotional meaning...

...Sounder tells the story of a black sharecropping family in the '30s, and you really believe in this family as a family...

...Miller, Robert Altman offered an ironic new view of pioneer legend which, coming at a time when Americans felt more helpless and hemmed in than ever, seemed like a bittersweet elegy for all the elusive, romantic American dreams that never could have been...

...Born to Win shows more effectively than any of the other recent movies about New York in decay how comedy and horror go together in Manhattan lowlife...

...Yet for at least five years moviemakers and audiences have been liberated from the bland optimism Slaughterhouse Five was attacking...

...The new movie legend spilled off the screen and into the audience, partly because it was so hard to distinguish between the characters in these movies and the people watching them and partly because the movies were about experiences and attitudes that the audience shared...

...And when movies meet that challenge, they prove that the term popular art is not necessarily a contradiction in terms...

...We know this boy is going to make it, and we know why—and because we know why, the movie tells us in its own modest terms much more than journalists and sociologists and political analysts can about the reason for the black revolution, and the price of it...

...The film's fresh quality cuts through a crude story about a pregnant girl who runs away to a freedom school, and the freedom school community—representing a new kind of pioneer society, uncorrupted by the prejudices and injustices of the old boobs in town—comes to life on screen with an impact that creates a strong emotional core, especially in some marvelous improvisational street-theater skits...

...They don't understand, that is, how buying and selling revolution helps to keep the system going...

...Bonnie and Clyde took a fresh approach to outlaw lore by presenting the Barrow gang as innocent bumpkins who turned to crime for fame and glamor...

...There's a complex set of emotional relationships beneath the surface of the dialogue, expressed in looks and gestures and nuances and a wonderful emphasis on physical touching...

...The Anthony Burgess novel could have made a good movie, and the time was certainly right for it, but through one of the more fiendish ironies of contemporary culture, the writer achieved his breakthrough to fame and fortune only when his book was turned into a movie that distorted everything he was trying to say...

...formula Westerns, comedies, love stories, and thrillers are the deadwood of the industry, keeping the theaters supplied with what the industry calls "product...

...Anybody who has been going to American movies for the past five years must know that things have been turned inside out since 1948, when Robert Warshow complained that "America as a social and political institution is committed to a cheerful view of life" and "euphoria spreads over our culture like the broad smile of an idiot...

...Easy Rider, Alice's Restaurant, and Woodstock created a youth mythology—an electronic feedback to confirm the existence of the counter culture— and their popularity caused a small revolution in an industry that was coming apart anyway...

...It calls for the improvisational gift of Warren Beatty, as the mumbling, sweetly inept pioneer capitalist in McCabe and Mrs...

...Since the exaggeration is not in the mind of Portnoy looking back in anger but in the playing of the scenes, they seem simply overacted...

...In 1973, we don't need gangsters to reject Americanism...

...The Corleones' story is presented as a perverted but successful actualization of the American dream, and we see this family of monsters as a parallel rather than a threat to the established order...

...Explaining how the gangster movie filled this need for disguise, Warshow wrote: "In ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and demands of modern life, which rejects Americanism itself...

...There had been rebel heroes before—strong, silent cowboys, Bogey's tough guy, Paul Newman's charming bastard, Marlon Brando's misunderstood delinquent—but a big change began at the end of the 1960s when the romantic hip martyr, already •part of the mythology of rock music and pop posters and New Left politics and communal events like the Woodstock festival, was brought into commercial American movies...

...The family chronicle is beautifully complete, but the movie is not just about this family: it's about secret horrors and false fronts, and how people turn themselves into demons to maintain power and wealth—and that's what makes it the all-American nightmare...

...Burgess wanted to make his readers see the cost of moral choice...

...II Breaking through the old taboos of mass culture is a healthy impulse, but it doesn't necessarily produce art...

...Huston has a flawless feeling for marginal details, and his movie is memorable for the look and texture of the gym and the bar, and for the brilliant use of local characters, especially a young black who delivers a rhetorical monologue explaining all a fighter really needs is the will to "kick ass...

...But we aren't supposed to react to the movie with nausea, although some of us do...

...Kubrick doesn't merely depict decadence...

...Although it was produced and directed by whites, Sounder is the first movie that meets the emotional need for strong black screen characters...

...Easy Rider reassembled the frontier myth for the rock-and-drug culture, replacing the horses with motorbikes and the cowboys with hippie martyrs looking for a new America, and seductively used the moral simplicities of the Western genre to express the youth culture's paranoia about the straight world...

...THE USE OF NONACTORS and existing communities can add an extra dimension, but even more remarkable is the influence documentary techniques have had on directors trying to achieve the same effects by using sets and actors in looser ways...

...The movie treats the fluidity of time with almost throwaway ease, arranging episodes by association rather than chronology as Billy Pilgrim, the flipped-out war veteran, takes refuge in tripping backward and forward in time...

...You could see why black audiences needed to be freed from the Hattie McDaniel image of an earlier period and from the phony pieties of '60s movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which showed it's all right to let your daughter marry a black provided he's greater than Albert Schweitzer...

...The Strawberry Statement, Zabriskie Point, Joe, End of the Road, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Little Murders, and Carnal Knowledge dumped on the present conditions of American life, and Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Little Big Man, and Catch-22 found nightmares in the American past...

...we're given a richly detailed sense of how good, simple people are affected by their work and what they do in their spare moments and how all aspects of their life are defined by their sense of the space and the country around them...

...we're supposed to enjoy it the way the unadulterated Alex enjoys rape, murder, and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony—as pure sensual experiences...

...Paul Winfield as the father and Kevin Hooks as the boy have a rapport that explains what ties the generations together and what separates them—the son's drive to break out of the family's cycle of defeat and the father's hope that giving his son that drive will mean his own life hasn't been all defeat...

...In McCabe and Mrs...

...Popular with college students, perhaps because it tells them that in a world gone out of control you might as well go off on your own trip, Vonnegut's novel has been turned into a Hollywood production which, by the very fact that it exists, gives the lie to the assumption behind his parable: that the system survives by stifling dissent and spreading wonderful lies to make people want to go on living...

...Martin Ritt, the director, has used several nonactors wonderfully well in supporting parts—a black preacher, several children, a white judge and a white clerk— but more important, he has developed a complex natural depth in his leading actors, whose impact can only partly be explained by the fact that they come fresh, without the strong association of previous big roles...

...With his clean-cut good looks and his supercool style, Robert Redford is an image-maker's dream to begin with—and since we never understand what excitingly dangerous things he is prevented from saying, the premise of the movie doesn't make much sense...

...The Corleones' power structure and their style are deliberately compared to those of big government and big business, so that this horrifying family becomes not the antithesis of the American way but a symbol of it...

...George Roy Hill's direction and Stephen Geller's screenplay strike a far more sneering tone than the MARTIN KNELMAN novel, and the satire is conceived in such a crude, mean spirit that the subject is no longer how simple people are victimized...

...It's true that Hollywood produced fairy tales as long as political and economic pressures demanded fairy tales, but the industry turned out to be quite ready to market revolution when it became a salable item...

...It is not enough in a movie like McCabe and Mrs...

...Fantasies of doom have replaced fantasies of escape...

...it expands our awareness...

...More traditional kinds of movies have not stopped coming out, but they don't create much excitement...

...There's something musty and hopeless about the atmosphere of theaters playing these films...

...And with McCabe and Mrs...

...Only 25 years ago criticism of the social and political order was considered so dangerous that it had to be sneaked into movies...

...But everyone around him is treated with contempt: his grasping, aggressively stupid slob of a wife...

...The irony of the movie is that it turns the material back into Sam Levenson...

...That's one reason why lines that are still funny and ferocious when you read them sound gross and ugly when you hear them in a movie theater, and dirty in a whole new way...

...Marjoe's explanation for what he's doing seems awfully confused, and as you watch him going through his brilliant miracle shtick at a revival meeting and then casually joking about the shame of it while being interviewed in a motel room, it becomes disconcertingly clear that the most interesting material in this act is what we aren't being told about how and why the movie was made...

...The new freedom of the screen has been extended to the audience, and it's intoxicating...

...But the movie belongs most of all to Cicely Tyson as the mother...

...I don't know what's going on...

...Craftsmanship and professionalism in the old sense have become suspect...

...The irony is that a movie that attacks programmed behavior and proselytizes for the freeing of human impulses gives virtually no freedom to the impulses of the audience...

...the responses of the audience suggest indifference and apathy, as if the customers come because they can't kick the habit, not because they expect to have a good time...

...his point was that it's better to commit evil through free will than to have good imposed on us...

...The trite family flashbacks contain very little sense of how Sophie's demonstrative love veils strong demands, driving the child to justify his parents' lives, and Lee Grant gives the sort of flat caricature of Jewish mothers one might expect in a Neil Simon comedy...

...Maybe Portnoy's Complaint couldn't have been filmed 10 or 20 years ago, but does that make Ernest Lehman's movie an advance...

...an earnest army buddy who's dismissed as a boob because he teaches at a technical school instead of a university...

...we have to break through predigested sentiments and directed reactions, too...

...And just when the white audience had disintegrated, there emerged a huge black audience eager for its own heroes to attack white America...

...Despite one's reservations, Marjoe shows us a piece of American life that we didn't used to get at the movies...

...In Fat City John Huston catches the style and flavor of the boxing scene in Stockton, California—not the glamorous world of the champs but the shabby milieu of the scramblers who get their brains bashed and never quite make it—with absolute fidelity, achieving perhaps an ideal marriage of fiction and documentary realism...

...This new, open-ended method of making movies calls for new styles of acting...

...What Sounder has in common with the other most exhilarating American movies of the past few years is that it gives us room to participate and discover complex and subtle insights instead of having points thrust upon us...

...But that didn't make the emergence of black superstuds and antiwhite brutality a cultural advance—even if it provided a psychodramatic release for black audiences...

...Since the popular arts were designed to appeal to a mass audience, movies for a long time were easily dismissed as a diversion that could be counted on not to be too disturbing —particularly if they came from Hollywood...

...you can feel it from the grand sweep of the camera pulling back to let us take it all in...

...belonging to the same psychic environment, the audience is alive to what is happening on the screen...

...They applaud the director's platitudes about "man's capacity to rationalize violence" because they don't understand the absurdly ironical rules of the current market by which huge movie companies try to sell films like Slaughterhouse Five to affluent ticket-buyers by reinforcing their own progressive biases...

...THE DESTRUCTION of the studio system, though economically disastrous, created an exciting new climate in which for the first time American commercial movies could be made for minority audiences...

...When a movie sets out to expose political images as superficial and manufactured, it doesn't help if the movie itself seems superficial and manufactured...

...As we watch the consolidation of power within one of the most powerful families in organized crime, as we watch control pass from one generation to the next, we know that the family will pay the price of many lives, but we don't have to pretend now that the criminals will lose their authority and be defeated by the law...

...pavilion at Expo '67, the jocular, mocking tone makes it clear that something is being satirized—but what, exactly...

...Like Lenny Bruce, whose wild and obscene stream of associations cut through the bourgeois decorum of entertainment, Roth used dirty secrets and uninhibited language as a form of liberation, as a way of expressing BEYOND EUPHORIA: OUT LIBERATED MOVIES 81 comedy and pain together...

...Expressing a stunning range of emotion and perception at a nonverbal level, she becomes a great symbol of the strength and quiet endurance, with a Biblical resonance and a sense of inner resources, that suggest Dilsey, the servant in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury...

...Michael Sacks, made up to look innocent in youth but tense and sinister in middle age, hides some of the weakness and confusion by being simply enigmatic, and by suggesting, with his clumsy gawkiness and his droop face, elements of foolishness and humorous ineptitude and a sad blankness...

...Slaughterhouse Five made a big impression at the Cannes Film Festival last year because Europeans assume it takes great courage to express antiestablishment values in a big commercial movie...

...The fact that A Clockwork Orange is more posh, hip, and knowing than The Wild Angels—a crummy bike movie that also justified youth fascism and antisocial terrorism by pointing to the degradation of the world around the mixed-up kids—hardly makes it more palatable...

...The novel was ironic and worn-out, with a flat, laconic prose style to convey weariness and numbness...

...The audience is made to feel sophisticated at the expense of the characters, and maybe we're supposed to be so flattered that we won't notice how the movie ridicules naive Andy Hardy values while pushing a point of view that's no less vacuous and a lot uglier...

...It's a measure of how much movies have changed that no disguises are needed or offered in The Godfather, that phenomenally popular and surprisingly rich gangster movie of the new age...

...Yet these details are contained within a movie that is highly stylized through Conrad Hall's shadowy blue-green imagery, Leonard Gardner's sparse Hemingway-style dialogue, and Huston's solemnly measured pacing...

...Intellectuals who took this condescending attitude may have overlooked the iconoclasm of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, You Only Live Once, Citizen Kane, and the anarchy implicit in the Marx Brothers...

...Slaughterhouse Five, which strikes a tone of scorn for square American values, is handsomely designed and photographed, with such fancy touches as Dede Allen's dazzling editing and a cultural tour of pre-bomb Dresden that looks like an episode from the Civilization television series, and snatches of Bach arranged by Glenn Gould to lend just the right tone of cool irony...

...It's impossible to believe that this was what his image-makers were trying to stop him from saying, since it sounds exactly like the sort of dynamic but essentially empty rhetoric that image-makers love to concoct...

...people didn't look to Hollywood for fresh visions or profound experiences...

...Miller or Born to Win for an actor to memorize his lines and bring his performance to the set...

...Ritt's open, leisurely style lets us experience the texture and the pace of the land and the people...

...Having broken away from backlot artificiality and the rule of inflexible studio tycoons, moviemakers have been groping for new styles to suit new subject matter and new attitudes...

...Sometimes, however, an authentic texture 84 can camouflage more subtle forms of manipulation...

...When movie actors are open to the complexities of experience and the intensity of the moment, the camera must be like a fix that lights them up and makes them alive to new possibilities...

...The director of Billy Jack, Tom Laughlin—who also plays its title character, a saintly but violent protector of a pacifist Indian community— uses kids playing more or less themselves to give the young audience a sense of participation...

...The difference between an important good 82 new movie and an important bad new movie usually has less to do with the social and political attitude it articulates than with the style it finds to present them...

...A Clockwork Orange is a trip into the nightmare future the way 2001 was a trip into outer space...

...If there was an imaginative way to film this novel, it has certainly evaded Lehman, who produced, directed, and wrote this loutish movie...

...There's something creepy about realizing that just by being in the audience, you have become part of the racket that's exploiting pathetic, ignorant people...

...You really do feel euphoria at the end of Sounder, and it isn't the kind of euphoria that was once said to have spread over American culture like the broad smile of an idiot...