On Screen

...The general boredom that infests popular art has also generated a hunger for instant genius that no one really wants...

...But there is one mannerism, a somber, time-devouring stare which he wedges into each seduction, that destroys the credible surface of his characterization...

...today, he is forever center stage playing to an audience that finds his act—self-selling, cliche Bohemian rebelliousness, a ready tongue for what ails Americans— as entertaining as Al Jolson...

...Broke and having just lost the big game to Minnesota Fats, Newman's Fast Eddie unaccountably floats into a bus terminal where he grins at Miss Laurie, works himself sleepily up into a mild hip dance, orders from the waitress in a comic Southern drawl, and whiffs a 10 cent cake under his nose as though it were a priceless Havana cigar...

...By contrast, Piper Laurie's underplaying in The Hustler is a relief...

...It gives the role an inexplicable theatricality...

...Like a 1930s Spencer Tracy movie plot, Splendor in the Grass, alas, commemorates rusted ideals and' disabled Americana...

...McLaren's Lines Horizontal offers a witheringly banal reduction of modern art platitudes: a Mondrian-like cage of blue-green intersected by thin proliferating bars, the whole agony augmented by a maraccasmandolin score that wheedles too much...

...There are critics (notably the Sight and Sound gang) who speak of Kazan as having changed radically since his maiden flights in Woman's Home Companion pulse racers like Pinky and Gentlemen's Agreement...

...As a factory grease monkey who is determined to have his kicks before the system grinds him down, Finney's smoothly enclosed dynamism has a clarity, fastidiously timed nimbleness and cat-like bite that would be remarkable in any era of films...

...Hingle and his son (Warren Beatty, turned into a James Dean-tinctured stalactite, his football player's length compressed to dwarf size) precede their Hardy family exchanges with a shoulder-jabbing caress that Kazan's memory seems to have cherished from gridiron visits...

...The artist of the past had to be discovered...

...Splendor in the Grass, Kazan's latest effort, points up this monotony by departing in one important respect from his earlier work: Having finally ditched the boxed-in theatrical form, Kazan hurls his shrieking restlessness directly at the audience in what seems a last ditch effort to summon up the memorializing grandeur of latter-day George Stevens direction...

...For its first four-fifths, the movie's tempo and quality are set by the obsessed hippety-hop and bullying force of Pat Hingle, going on like Frank Buck or Groucho Marx's Captain Spaulding as a Main St...

...Boredom first became a prevailing mood in films, and concurrently in the other arts, when various related figures of the mid1940s, noted for their driving egocentrism and technical virtuosity, produced a flat, dead surface sprayed with bravura technique...

...Those who have carried their innovations down to the present have fallen into a pit where they are prey to such enervating follies as cheekiness, deadhanded compulsiveness, poseurism, corner-cutting and an abscess-like idea that genius can flourish by standing pat and simply wrapping the package with more flash and shuffle...

...Curiously arrested and with tulip faces, Ohshima's effete kid hoodlums are equipped with the indolent gestures that originally underlined the toughness of Hollywood's gangster talent...

...Though she accepts a drunken situation or a climactic defeat as if there were no end to the tragedy that could be sluiced onto the screen, she is a welcome realist in a picture that is beggared by the artist-hero...

...Where everything in Allan Sillitoe's script is supposedly an acerbic rejection of industrial conditions, Finney's Arthur Seaton is an irritating winner in every act, reminiscent of the corny Voice of Genius imprinted long ago in Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth...

...Unaccountably, after Inge-ing its way along at this frenzied pace for some 115 minutes, the picture suddenly inhales deeply and, for its last reel, settles down to a pedestrian-gaited acceptance of dustlighted pastoral setting and listless atmosphere...

...tycoon...

...After a history of being shunted to the edge of American society where he was sometimes treated as an oddity, victim or fool, the old tormented Albert Ryder-type artist is quickly being replaced by the successful hero who sees himself as a pattern figure, a beloved cultural norm...

...Ohshima's The Sun's Burial is like a pocket history of films, from the culvert romance of Gibson Gowland and Zazu Pitts in Greed to the spangled effects of Gate of Hell...

...and (2) the big Sunday dinner, with the camera sneering at the vitamin-rich quality of every pork tenderloin slice, and Audrey Christie's Silver Cord mother hooting like a Comanche around the table...

...Almost everything Newman tries is enclosed by a hidden smile and his new-found inability to play either small or straight...

...Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Paul Newman in The Hustler and the horde of Japanese kids in The Sun's Burial use the garments of depression-era characterization as a convenience...

...The movie spectator is being deadened not by the traditional gangster, sexathlete or embattled factory hand, but by the artist as a social success...

...Another team of high steppers, Norman McLaren and Nagisa Ohshima, appeared on a recent Cinema Sweet 16 program as well as at film festivals where they won the prize that goes automatically to non-Hollywood entries...

...ON SCREEN By Manny Farber Purveyors of Effervescent Boredom A parlor game for film lovers these days is trying to find something worth discussing in a period notable for its grinding boredom...

...The whole job reeks of flaunting success, of playing in a tantalizing manner with a character supposedly up to his ears in industrial boredom...

...Some of the most nerve jangling are: (1) a meeting of highschool pals, signalized by a ringaround-the-rosy formation, plus a joyous leaping and shrieking as though in a life-time rehearsal for The Student Prince...

...The Hustler is cut down to almost nothing by tons of pompous elegance (Paul Newman and male associates), and then intermitantly saved by Miss Laurie's grace on top of inferiority, slackness and a willed driving towards self-destruction...

...This ubiquitous blooming is less obnoxious than the short-cutting of techniques that goes with it...

...Gazzara, whose villiany in End as a Man had an undercutting zip, has now lapsed into an inane mouthing of cruelty, an eye-bugging scorn and a Punch-and-Judy immobility that extends from his humid lower lip down to his toes...

...The people who engineered the first on-the-surface masterpieces were basically dullards, but they lessened the sophomoric impact through fretful, wiry excitement (Pollock's action painting) or hypnotic effervescence and amateurish zeal for grand art (Orson Welles' Citizen Kane...

...Simultaneous with the release of art from a groping interior act to obvious catapult effects, the bravura specialist has managed to surface himself as a social figure...

...McLaren seems to have been reciting these platitudes since grade school...

...Actually, the heaving pseudo-energy and grass-roots heroism of Viva Zapata or On the Waterfront—as pointlessly frenetic as TV wrestling —only emphasize how little Kazan has changed from the shapeless, garrulous and endlessly dawdling style of his first movies...

...With the resilience missing, the flip motions only accentuate the supineness of actors who, while trying for the shrill terror of a Goya drawing, resemble a subway vendor's jiggling dolls...

...Freed from perspective-jolting camera work, even the size of the actors returns to realistic proportions...

...It rides high over the character, comments on society rather than being part of it, moves in a flauncy manner and is full of strut and hokum...

...In reality, their acting seems to exude a glistening fat that is strictly of the 1960s...

...Without struggle, one can think of 20 such performances that symbolize flashbulb success colliding with a McGuffey Reader vocabulary: Ina Bahn and Ben Gazzara (The Young Doctors), Salome Jens (Angel Baby), David Janssen (The Roaring Twenties, a biography of Arnold Rothstein...

...Kazan's movie is full of trop gestures, planted not only as criticism against American bumptiousness and boobyishness, but as spot advertisements for the director's genius...

...The surface revolution wrought by Dizzy Gillespie, Jackson Pollock and other firebrands, started a wave of art works in which character was the major missing link while affirmation, like the clear-cut wallop of linoleum design, was the most noticeable feature...

...Probably none of these die-hard geniuses has stood pat with as little loss to his inexplicably failure-proof reputation as Elia Kazan...