Severe Glaucoma

...I can merely submit my personal choices...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Severe Glaucoma If you do not care how ill-gotten and obscene your laughs may be, there are two films to be seen currently that are guaranteed to have you rolling on the theater floor—whether in fits of laughter or of apoplexy depends entirely on your temparament...

...When you are not being hit over the head with the symbolism, you're being punched in the stomach by would-be inven tive camera work, while, unremittingly, Ernest Gold's score fills your nostrils with acrid exhalations...

...When asked, "What do you want to prove...

...Kramer and Mann, I dare say, were already in the original Narrenschiff among those who "would be that which they are not/And think that all the world is blind...

...Let them be portentous multiple stories offering a cross-section of humanity, let them be bloated with sardonic political hindsight, let them be allegories of the World—let them, above all, be based on overpraised and underread bestsellers, and they are sure to be universally acclaimed...

...But the direction of individual scenes, the color photography of Giuseppe Rotunno, the music of the distinguished Goffredo Petrassi, and some overwhelming ensemble acting by Sylvie, Jacques Perrin, and Marcello Mastroianni—as well as incisive writing—make this one of the most moving movies of all time...

...For emotional catharsis: the moment when Miss Saint, who has bravely and forgivingly listened during a nocturnal car ride to her husband's confession, hears that he and Liz made love also in motels...

...It is a terribly somber film and Vasco Pratolini's adaptation from his own novel remains, despite Zurlini's collaboration, disjointedly episodic...

...Everyone will find his own favorite gems in this enlightened film...

...And so he bids an eloquently understated temporary farewell to his wife, and an eloquently mute permanent farewell to his mistress...

...LANDAU (who has always been to Jean—more than her true friend —her agent): She didn't die of pneumonia...

...a newcomer, Gila Golan, plays awakening womanhood like a bear coming out of hibernation...

...It is also possible to get one's kicks merely out of watching Miss Taylor, who has grown so ample that it has become necessary to dress her almost exclusively in a variety of ambulatory tents...

...Moral: Adulterers who respect their wives should always ply their avocation in hotels...

...and confronted with Taylor's poetically bohemian, highly sexy atheism (she spouts about nature and sex, and her table is littered with poets in Penguin editions), Burton's latitudinarian—or, perhaps, platitudinarian—churchmanship becomes so broad as to be expressible only in a horizontal position...

...Why, the word "abortion" alone is mentioned three times...

...High-minded as Jean is—"I couldn't love a man I didn't like...

...Shades of Paphnutius and the Reverend Davidson...

...A pop singer then intones the theme song, "Lonely Girl," while a montage of stills of Carroll Baker in her glory (an ironic apotheosis, I presume) leads into "The End"— in more ways than one...

...For intellectual stimulus: the moment after Liz's kid has uttered the first lines of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English and Miss Saint rushes to Burton to announce breathlessly that the child has just recited said prologue in the original Old English...

...she explains, "That I'm alive, every inch of me, every part of me...

...MOTHER (shrieks something hysterical at Doctor that I did not get...

...Oskar Werner gives his usual somewhat hallucinated performance, but, at that, his bittersweet somnambulism is more interesting than Simone Signoret's by now cliche tough good woman or beat-up dreamer...

...Before you know it, it is muscular Christianity versus adipose femininity...

...Yes —I couldn't think of the word ") naively marries a man who, announcing on their wedding night, "I'll give you love in every way," must be told, "Except the one that counts," which leads to the aforementioned big tragedy as the impotent bridegroom beats up Jean (off-camera...

...But the most disheartening thing about Ship of Fools is the favorable press it garnered and the queue of fools outside the theaters in which it is playing...

...but, unluckily for the marble statue, "Oh, mama, all they want is my body...

...if not blind, at least the victim of severe glaucoma...

...Inspired by Sebastian Brant's lengthy and boring 15th-century verse satire, Katherine Anne Porter wrote a lengthy and boring 19thcentury novel...

...There are films that are simply bathed in the odor of middlebrow sanctity...

...The Sandpiper is based on a story by the producer, Martin Ransohoff, who clearly set out to prove that anyone who has been around movies long enough can write one, and if the price the viewer must pay is no objection, the case may now be considered proved...

...Who is happy...

...She moans, "There's nobody deader than I am right now," and, understandably, drifts into a life of drunkenness and er I cannot think of the word...

...On the few occasions when she dares reveal her bosom (or part thereof), one breast (or part thereof) proves sufficient to traverse an entire widescreen frame—diagonally...

...Sebastian Brant was wrong: The world is...

...Against a background of Big Sur, this is a story that is meant to combine the devil-may-care lyricism of Edna Millay with the philosophizing randiness of Henry Miller (itself a combination not unworthy of the wax museums), but turns out to be merely Jack Kerouac strained through Kathleen Norris...

...There is, for example, precious little to laugh at in Ship of Fools, with the possible exception of the performances of Elizabeth Ashley and George Segal as a pair of sparring artistlovers...

...Morality (as described above) will out, but first, what frank references to carnality...

...Mann's dialogue, aside from leaden moralizing heavy enough to sink a Cunard flagship, abounds in conceits like, "Are you happy...

...Who has...

...The film, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and directed by Vincente Minnelli, had every chance of being another piece of that mildly sentimental, reasonably vulgar, and vastly foolish nonsense that would have done this beloved genre proud...

...Moments of adulterous bliss are followed closely by hours of tormented responsibility, and the whole thing ends with Burton chucking his cushy job and going off on mission work to Mexico—he is an Episcopalian, but the iguanas, presumably, won't know the difference...

...she learns that "a bedroom with only one person in it is the loneliest place in the world, but the script tends to eschew an excess of such profundities, realizing that "life doesn't move on philosophy alone...

...When a misdemeanor condemns her son to a posh West-Coast Groton of which the Reverend Richard Burton (happily married to Eva Marie Saint) is the headmaster, ideas begin to clash and bodies to mash...

...Our Jean, it turns out, had "the body of a woman and the emotions of a child," though, as we are also informed, "in that slim, delicate body is a woman as strong as a marble statue...

...Vivien Leigh is effectively type-cast...

...Instead, it took it in its puny head to be adult...

...Even the special photographic effects have about them a clumsy officiousness one associates with Kramer...

...Here we get the tried-and- tested formula of taking a luridly sensational story that everyone has heard or read about down to the last appetizingly aberrant detail, and presenting it as straight Louisa May Alcott interlarded with a measured amount of discreetly pornographic allusions...

...at the word "motels" something snaps, and she leaps, blubbering, out of the car, to cover the remaining umpteen miles on foot...

...She who was so pure ("Arthur Landau, you once told me that you never er er " "Procured...

...DOCTOR : She's beyond help— our help...

...Regrettably , not all frightful movies are funny...

...now Stanley Kramer, the producer-director, and Abby Mann, his script-writer, have turned this into a movie that is not only long and dull but also obvious and pretentious, thus closing the gap between Sebastian Brant and Harry Brandt, after whom a chain of second-run movie houses is named...

...Harlow, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of The Sandpiper, and not only because Carroll Baker is concave where Liz Taylor is convex...

...What else but purblindness could account for the failure of Valerio Zurlini's Family Diary when it was first released...

...which are not very different from such tidbits in Harlow as, "There's something wrong with all of us, sweetheart, it just takes a while to find out...

...So much aliveness must, alas, inevitably end in a heart-rending death scene in an oxygen tent: JEAN : I promise I'll be a good girl, mama...

...Jean, in sum, was "a little girl who suffered a big tragedy...

...She gave it all to everyone else—there wasn't any left for her...

...The Sandpiper and Joseph Levine's Harlow will not widen your horizon, but they are sure to extend your rictus...

...The screenplay is partly by Dalton Trumbo, and what it proves is that just because you were one of the "Hollywood Ten," your work need not be distinguishable from that of the Hollywood thousands...

...The New Yorker Theater revived it for two days, but what are two days...

...and various competent actors exude an ichor of overemphasis to the director's palpable delight...

...We have here a free-thinking and free-loving Liz Taylor who supports herself and a small illegitimate son in a lush studio-made cottage by selling an occasional painting...

...or "I haven't lived...

...As for Kramer's direction, it is, as ever, attempting to perform pirouettes in astronauts' boots by way of harrying the cloddish into becoming art...

...It is all rather like a five-year- old boy being dragged out of bed at midnight by his avant-garde parents to entertain their guests with a repertoire of dirty words...

...And there is posing in the nude, and guarded hints of an interracial affair, and beach parties that are implied orgies, and a few proto-four-letter words, and such bold wrangling about the existence of God...

...she died of life...