On Screen

...Yet it has the slightly demented au-thoritativeness of dreams brooking no argument...

...When Annie gets home, she finds that Zita has died, but mother and doctor are there to offer quiet support...

...Foremost among these, aside from some fetching remnants of the original, is Alan Arkin's performance as Mr...

...Enrico, who made the extraordinary In the Midst of Life (seen here, unfortunately, only piecemeal, episode by episode) and some excellent shorts, subsequently turned to commercial adventure films...

...finally she is talking in French just to herself to keep her courage up...

...Singer...

...The character of Antonapoulos has been much flattened out...

...Arkin has lately been used as an accent comedian, though some of his accents are rather poor...

...That is what I mean by texture, and that is what The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter hasn't got...

...During her nocturnal adventures, encouraged by the sage family doctor and friend, (a charmingly and unsenti-mentally drawn figure acted to perfection by Paul Crochet—antiseptic, acerbic, yet ruefully human), Annie meets up with all kinds of men...

...Each of these, down to a truckdriver who gives her a lift, contributes more than a vignette...

...still, the mixture of comedy and pathos in this sequence is persuasive and affecting...

...still another is a young double bass player and sports car enthusiast who finally becomes her first lover...

...But where the film could have gone beyond the book is in the treatment of the homosexual motifs...

...Carson McCullers' novel is episodic, somewhat lopsided, and too fragile...

...It is perhaps possible to streamline some novels into acceptable movies, though not by Ryan's methods...

...tbis^novekv-devi-ous and elusive, would most likely resist any adaptation...

...One man is a sardonic young Negro activist who nevertheless keeps his cool...

...The latter scene is fresh, tactful, and savory...

...Such is Enrico's artistry that the scene functions joyously as reality even though we know that it is fantasy...

...Sondra Locke just barely squeezes by as the adultified Mick...

...Strick is not much of a director, except perhaps by comparison to his successor, Robert Ellis Miller...

...Some of the juveniles are quite good, but most of the supporting roles are routinely handled, and Stacy Keach is surprisingly ineffectual as a tramp—a character, to be sure, rather more complex in the novel...

...clearly it should have been left in the novel's period without half-baked changes that place it squarely in no period at all...

...Annie takes her bass player to the suburban house in which she grew up under Aunt Zita's care...

...The dialogue, as always, is free of platitudes and literate...

...she escapes into a big night on the town...

...It is also rather dated in its social reportage about Negroes and poor whites, and it is the victim of sexual reticences that today make it seem even more of a period piece...

...The editing here is masterly: There is a sequence in which Annie goes up the stairs to what used to be her room, and the simple ascent of a stairway becomes, through brilliance of photography and montage, an adventure to make you hold your breath and heartbeat...

...Annie, a young student living with her mother, is unable to bear the fact that her beloved Aunt Zita is dying in the next room...

...But here she is, alive and bustling about, and Annie (without changing appearances) is both the child she was and Simon's girl friend showing him around the house...

...Singer, I loved you"—the kind of obviousness the novel scrupulously avoids...

...Zita is greatly helped by Francois Roubeix' discreetly penetrating music, often just a Spanish guitar solo...

...The climactic scene is both brilliant and on the verge of soupiness...

...What makes it memorable is the performance of Gian Maria Volonte as the jolly psychopath who heads the gang of bank robbers...

...Or he has the film ending with Mick sobbing on Mr...

...his Russian submarine officer, from Brukljin...

...Zita is a gem of purest ray serene—well, let's except one or two impure rays...

...She insists on going in to see her aunt, whose agony was so un-watchable...

...Thomas C. Ryan, who both co-produced and wrote the script, has updated the events and retarded the psychology and dialogue, so that we are served an unconvincing Southern society of the '60s blithely mouthing early Hollywoodese...

...now the whole Spanish, paternal side of her family is becoming extinct...

...the way a neighboring church tower peers in between the arches is a triumph of the camera...

...Joseph Strick, the original director, wanted to make more of these, and was promptly fired for his pains...

...We know that Zita lies in another house, dying...

...The Negro question doesn't work at all in the film...

...Chuck McCann is adequate as the infantilized Antonapoulos...

...He speaks no French and she very little Spanish, yet she attempts to tell him about her father who could blow up bridges...

...now he sits in that cage where the Paris police put their pick-ups and she sits just outside it...

...They rub shoulders with Aunt Zita, and the past and present merge...

...With Zita, based on a story by his wife, he returns to delicately personal themes resonant with understated universality...

...But there the similarity ends...

...His robot-like minuet of despair at his friend's grave is a memorable invention—as, indeed, are all his moments of muzzled grief...

...In one scene, perhaps the best in the film, the veteran cinematographer surpasses himself: Singer has taken Antonapoulos out to dinner on the terrace of a hotel in fake Venetian style...

...He is superb throughout,~but his acting in the last reels and his hysterical laughter on which the film closes will haunt me long after I have forgotten all else about this work...

...When Annie alone is released, she has a splendid outburst against the police...

...ON SCREEN By John Simon Coming of Age One of the prerequisites for a well-made film is texture: a certain density in the relations among the characters, a certain solidity of the setting, a topography you can feel in the soles of your feet...

...Brief mention must be made of The Violent Four, a competent though unspectacular Italian crime film by Carlo Lizzani, whose Hunchback of Rome left me cold...

...Houses, for instance, must seem lived in, and their rooms must have a recognizable spatial relationship to one another...

...His Inspector Clouzeau was strictly from Brouqueline...

...Her infinitely various face—tomboyish from some angles, flawlessly beautiful from others—helps...

...Even more outstanding is the color camera work of Jean Boffety, who, by a slight change in lighting, can make the same room exude vastly different hues and emotions...

...The imagined seduction scene is a mite gooey...

...Her Annie is child and girl by turns or both at once, and zigzags into ripeness before our eyes...

...A similarly small, intimate film about ordinary people yet with subtle implications—also including the motif of a young girl's coming of age as someone dear to her dies—is Robert Enrico's Ziia...

...They are all individuals with some special forte they hold out to Annie, who learns from them whether she accepts or refuses...

...In one exquisite scene, Annie sits in the police station with a Spanish refugee who has been brought in for killing a cat he meant to eat to keep from starving...

...This, again, might be sticky, but it is handled with a winning lightness and purity...

...Boffe-ty's colors may not quite match the sheer loveliness of a Red Desert or Elvira Madigan, but they have a flexibility and variety that would be hard to equal...

...Ryan, for example, has Mick say to her sheepish boy friend, "I want you to kiss me the way a husband kisses his wife," or some such endearing garbage, which is just the wrong kind of baby talk for her, especially as her age has been updated in the movie...

...The performances are all good, crowned by Joanna Shimkus' Annie...

...A town must hang together, so that you can sense how people get from «ne point to another...

...Zita suddenly turns a corner around a hedge, and the skipping little girl's figure continues its dwindling alone—right into the final fadeout...

...There are other people and incidents, such as a near-rape by a bunch of hippified hoodlums, and much riding about in various vehicles, which however is never boring as in Godard and Lelouch...

...Another asset of the film is James Wong Howe's color photography...

...What with Ryan's screenplay (from the same hand that gave us such bloopers as Bunny Lake Is Missing and The Pad—a bastardization of The Private Ear) and Miller's direction, we are treated to something less than a slick commercial product with some unusual saving graces...

...Annie first tried to protect the cat, then she tried to defend the Spaniard against the cops...

...but the real sexual initiation, later on in Simon's apartment, has thus been provided with an effective counterpart...

...It is quite effective and skillfull for the most part...

...Now that Zita is dead, Annie has a vision of herself as a child once again playing in Zita's garden as the camera fairly rapidly pulls away...

...But his deaf-mute is a genuine deaf-mute coming from a spiritual isolation ward out of which only his brightness and decency have partly sprung him...

...Her father (Zita's brother) was Spanish and died in the Civil War...

...While he does not look a bit Southern, what he does convey is more difficult and important—humanity and attractiveness, against the grain of the script, which would make Singer into a conventional do-gooder...

...but, ultimately, it is her unself-conscious, unhistrionic acting that lends Enrico's fine film its final glory...

...Singer's grave, "I loved you, Mr...

...Miss Shimkus, besides improving from film to film has an incomparable basic warmth and simple naturalness...

...another is a handsome farmer from the South of France whose beribboned prize ram escapes and leads them all a merry chase through nocturnal Paris...

...And he invests the part with a wonderfully unself-pitying bittersweet humor...