Hollywood's New Peepshow Naturalism

...The new thrill-glutted, Penny-Arcade film style first appeared in the late 1940s but was hard to grasp because it used past movie tradition as a free-lunch counter...

...But, more notably, the overtrained technique that occurs in popjungle (The Bridge on the River Kwai) or post-card Gulf Stream (Old Man and the Sea) is another example of Hollywood's drift from trek or frieze-like progression of events toward a succession of sensational moments, simplifying the screen, locking the story in place...

...the scene, which involves Tim Carey as an underworld weirdie flourishing in the rustic pleasures of a pastoral vacant lot, is a Spike Jones clatter of inanities banging off each other...

...The orgiastic tempo of director Stanley Kubrick is exciting, but his work leaves the vacuous feeling of having seen a filmed collage...

...The unkempt improvisations of Carey's slavering gives a stinging sense of haphazardly grasped character and of reality echoing beyond the bonds of the film's sequence...

...An audience accustomed to films with structure felt startled and thwarted by dream-like garbling of graphic exotica, such re-heated metaphors as Ray Milland's disrobed eyeball in a vein-ridden close-up (The Lost Weekend), the decadently banal sadism of a district attorney's limp as he stalks Monty Clift (A Place in the Sun), and that Thomas Wolfe moment of a war veteran enjoying a ghostly junket as he daydreams in the cockpit of an interred DC654321 (The Best Years of Our Lives...

...Its inventions have led to a peeposterous, self-conscious naturalism that, in the wilder works (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), betrays small truths with enough around-the-edge sensuosity to circle the theater labyrinth and plunk like pellets of vaseline...

...While the outside world, dying as a maj or screen novelty, is given only token identity, there is a feeling of zeroing in on a target of extraneous details, obviously magnified and filled with wimmen and vigor...

...Actually, the image-mongering of these late 1940s films brought a new stance into movie-making: a knothole vantage-point on life, a ruthless leisureliness that disregards the naturalist's regimen of responsibility, and the trick of jazzing up a dull truth with pseudo-documentary shrubbery...

...An over-cunning keeps the viewer in contact with the supernervous sensuosity of items, exotic surfaces...

...This ephemeral vitality hasn't been honored in films, except in an accidental way...

...the clings, tugs, stretch involved in the well-sexed costumes of an unbedded wife (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...

...On SCREEN By Manny Farber Hollywood's New Peepshow Naturalism NOT SINCE movie patrons of the early 1900s glimpsed What the Bootblack Saw through a kinetoscope cranny have movie moguls invested so in Peepshow and come up with such counterfeit magic...

...but, because of its detachment from all logical moorings, the contrivance acquires an eccentric vitality that is the special glory of authentic peeperism...

...Whatever this new tic-technique loses in substance and credibility, it almost supplements with a plasticity, a marginal life that intensifies subliminally as it slips from the audience's attention...

...The fooler in Peepshow is that its jolts are conspicuous waste effects: the beguilement comes from a combination of chicanery and crochet-like precision...

...A counterfeit graphicness—the fact that Orson Welles storms a plantation in a jeep, talks fast in a clogged-mattress Southernese and carries a lapel-pocket filled with a Japanese garden of choice Eversharps—is obvious in every scene of the likably precious Long Hot Summer...

...While Europeans have taken the high road, using plot and subject matter to make gee-whiz disclosures, lately arriving at high-class pornography (Smiles of a Summer Night) only a halter away from Vogue fashion ads, Hollywood has gone underground into technique...

...For the first time, producers are less interested in exploiting environment than in examining the concentrated existence that goes on in a keyhole view of life...

...The fantastic note is not in the hokey naturalism, but in, the exquisite speed-writing that arranges the spots and collides diem with steel-string clarity...

...The most likable "major star" has to be Paul Newman: his self-admiring nonchalance—drooping his hands, like reserve weapons, from his rear pockets—startles the audience, not with sexual frankness, which is already oldhat, but with a simple confrontation of sensual reality...

...With the telescoping of interest on singular surfaces, emphasis on sexual contraband becomes the biggest boxoffice trait...

...Marlon Brando's Nazi lion rising from a drunken sprawl to give a Prussian tug to the rear of his officer's coat, is an example of average gesture being loaded with sensual concentrate (and then played, unforgivably, as ballet...

...The spectator has to work through a smoke-screen of irrelevance in a brilliant scene from Kubrick's long-forgotten The Killing...