On Screen

...Rotunno is the master of what might be called flexible color: color that you notice when necessary, but that can as easily fade into—or out of—the background when required...

...Paul Scofield and Dirk Bogarde are marvelous at it, and so were once Trevor Howard and John Mills...

...There is also the sense of danger skulking on the highways —as in an episode where the killers contemplate doing away with the next motorist who'll give them a lift when chance, curiously, takes over...

...now it makes you root for a speedy comeuppance, now for mercy and abolition of capital punishment...

...and a lack of humor in the basic approach?though some of Camus' and Mas-troianni's humor gets in anyway...

...Complexity is one thing, inconsistency another...

...Yet beyond all this the film has its good points...

...As for making the film more filmic, this leads into such bizarre bits of hamminess as having the hangman's face turn into that of Perry's father...

...Altogether, because this is a true story, the role of chance in human lives and deaths is conveyed with authoritative awesomeness...

...There is, I suppose, a slight soft-pedaling even in the script...

...It is true that the film of The Stranger cannot begin to equal its source as a work of art, and it may well be that people who have not read the book will not see what all the fuss in the film is about...

...Still, in the main, the mise en scene is stunningly right—with two minor exceptions...

...That yellow is worthy of Vermeer, and of the little patch of Vermeerian yellow that Proust's Bergotte must get up from his deathbed to study...

...I am pleased that it has been filmed at all...

...Thus the chaplain in the book asks the condemned Meursault how he will face death, "cette terrible epreuve," which is pretty grandiose language...

...How is the cinema to convey all this...

...Most surprising is the warm and touching portrayal of Marie that Visconti has elicited from Anna Karina, an actress whose talent Godard succeeded in keeping under wraps throughout the many films he made with her...

...in fact, it marks a slight step up for its director, Richard Brooks, best remembered for reducing Lord Jim to pablum and The Brothers Karama-zov to pulp...

...But a movie about criminals cannot be both The Asphalt Jungle and White Heat, both Rififi and Hands on the City...

...Yet a few words are necessary about what may have been the best American film of 1967...

...now he has been sentenced to two years of hard labor for drunkenly dismantling as menacing a phalanx of parking meters as could have sprouted from the sowing of a dragon's teeth...

...As played by Paul Stewart, he is, on top of all those other good things, the archetypal Jewish "mensch...

...There is a good underlying sense of rhythm, and perky acting from an able, largely New York-based cast whom it is invigorating to watch...

...This is not an easy thing to do: Yves Montand has been trying for years and still has only scratched the surface...

...For all this ability to constrict the throat, however...

...yet every camera set-up or trick shot, low-angle or overhead shot, slow dissolve or fast cut somehow works...

...In Marcello Mastroianni—even dubbed into French—Visconti has a superb Meursault...

...By his absolute straightforwardness, Visconti makes up to a large extent for the three failings of the film: the inability quite to convey the oppressive, brutalizing, maddening Algerian sun...

...I do not mean that a film cannot dramatize conflicting positions with some feeling for al...

...And it turns Truman Capote into a figure called The Reporter—a grizzled, canny, humane though cynical, wonderfully virile regular guy...

...Elle m'a dil que j'etais bizarre" comes out backwards as "I told her she was a strange one...

...To handle the detail correctly, Brooks went to the exact locations?only to prove, once again, that the camera photographs the photographer...

...and the need to make it all "filmic," as that term is conventionally understood—having the proper suspense, climaxes, visual effects, and so on...

...The script is, on the whole, intelligent, and makes only a few concessions to saleable obviousness...

...Luke has done poorly in the Army after a brilliant start...

...Paul Newman makes Luke into one of his flawless creations...

...yes, that was shot in the actual courtroom...

...In Cold Blood barely grips the heart, and it provides the mind with confusingly varied, only mildly tempting, cafeteria-style food for thought...

...Not that it is so bad as Hollywood products go...

...The problem of point of view is even graver...

...The hero, Meursault, thus becomes the patron saint of Absurdism...

...The all-important "Plutot que du regret j'eprouve un certain ennui," dwindles to "What I feel isn't so much regret...

...by the steady use of the French passe compose tense (instead of the customary narrative passe simple) which, in fiction, not only falls off-puttingly on French ears, but also, in minimizing the active ingredient of the verbs, gives events a viscous, inert quality...

...But Mastroianni is probably the only great screen lover—and only Latin—who can do it, and that combination is particularly piquant...

...The priest in the movie has more cool and speaks of "cette penible epreuve...

...these are fairly infrequent but, when they come, can match anything in films...

...The great accomplishment of the novel, of course, was its presentation of the concept of the Absurd, and of an exemplar of a life lived and thrown away for its sake...

...only Pierre Bertin as the judge and Alfred Adam as the prosecutor are guilty of virtuoso histrionics...

...From cool to cold means a goodly dip on the thermometer, and it means as much on my critical scale as I turn to In Cold Blood...

...and it is unfortunate that Visconti could not restrain his propensity for casting pretty boys in the roles of the avenging Arabs...

...And Mastroianni is one of the few actors who can convey thinking on camera, communicate the effort or excitement of it, and make it exhilarating to watch...

...For Luke is a bit of a fantastic, a Jack Armstrong turned Till Eulenspiegel, and the film goes wistful, sardonic, cruel and uproarious not quite when and not quite as you expect it...

...By far the most absorbing film of the year's end is Luchino Visconti's version of Camus' The Stranger...

...or having Conrad Hall photograph it all in the flashiest chiaroscuro...

...or equipping the soundtrack with a portentous, hypertrophic score by Quincy Jones...

...To sum it all up, there was something rather queasy about Capote's enterprise, and Brooks' addenda make it only queasier...

...I am reminded of the aged Goethe saying that he was bored with his Faust and could bear to read it only in Nerval's French translation...

...It is not great direction, because one does not feel that anything about it is unique...

...Yes, this is the Clutter home...

...It is too bad that in the beach scene money could not be found to equip others besides the principals with period bathing suits...

...Karina's bosom is a joy, and so, in many ways, is The Stranger...

...Ostensibly a comedy-drama about a Southern prison and chain gangs, it is actually the story of a variously gifted man with no major aptitude other than a superb hate of regimentation...

...Only it has been constructed in such a way that it is transparent for things and opaque for meanings...

...by the preponderance of indirect discourse, reducing everything to a kind of outline...

...Pauline Kael complains, not without justice, that it was filmed too late...

...He is winning without being cute, defeated and groveling without invoking undue pathos, and his muted sadnesses blend seamlessly and manfully with his engagingly muted joys...

...You cannot bring in Freud—on the most elementary level, to be sure—when it is convenient...

...In black and white, it would seem to be etchings rather, or delicate washes...

...It is a hairbreadth rescue, but it works in this sympathetic and, for the most part, unsentimental film...

...the shifting, inchoate, self-contradictory sympathies and antipathies lurking under Capote's mask of impassivity...

...It is, certainly, a transparency: We see everything that it sees...

...This is achieved only to a slight extent by controlling the costume and set design or manipulating backgrounds...

...The aura of a damnably logical brain chewing away dumbfounded and slightly amused on the illogic of the world is portrayed by Mastroianni with exquisite fastidiousness as well as a shy, courteous modesty...

...it is done mostly with the subtlest use of light values since Impressionist painting...

...Her talent was not the only thing he kept swathed: Her body, too, remained hidden until now, when a delightful physique emerges...

...Though the actor is much too glamorous for the part, he manages to shrink himself into the disaffected, slightly dazed, but intelligent nonentity Camus had in mind...

...The director gets his greatest help from his cinematographer, the incomparable Giuseppe Rotunno...

...He has served as his own screenwriter, and from even a cursory scanning of the book I can tell he meant to be faithful to it but was defeated by three problems: the book's superabundance of detail, much of it barely relevant but arguably more interesting than the more pertinent stuff...

...but Brooks does not capture the genius loci...

...Few of the places he shows us seem used: The people and their ambience assume no other relationship except the flimsy one of contiguity...

...Even secondary figures, like the detectives or Perry's parents, are seen through this ceaselessly whirling perspective that is both emotionally and intellectually self-defeating...

...Chief among these is the acting of Scott Wilson and Robert Blake as the killers...

...The significant detail is missing—whether it is something about the upholstery of a chair or the precise proportions of a room...

...To the rescue comes, above all, an offbeat, ironic understatement laced with little jolts of eccentricity in both protagonist and plot...

...In a modest but undeniable way, Rotunno's use of yellow constitutes a stroke of genius time will not etiolate...

...What happens to Luke in the prison and chain gang—among guards who span the usual range of sadism, latent homosexuality, and petty meanness...

...Sartre shows how this is achieved: by the shortness and disconnectedness of the sentences, each of them seeming to be a fresh start...

...You cannot have obvious sympathy for one of the killers and almost none for the other, no matter if one of them is superficially more likable...

...There are adequate contributions also by other performers, and some of the nonprofessional Kansas types provide genuine local colorlessness...

...The screenplay by Suso Cechi d'Amico, Georges Conchon and Emmanuel Robles consists mostly of translating Camus' indirect discourse into direct, which, unfortunately, sounds sometimes more ludicrous, sometimes less, and either way lessens the sense of alienation...

...A boldly modernistic director might have found equivalents, although, I fear, only at the cost of the luminous simplicity of the novel?an artful simplicity, if you like, yet one that hides its art...

...of these only a conversation with God in an abandoned church and a series of tendentious dissolves at the end can be pronounced indigestible...

...Or, more particularly, a special shade of yellow...

...I say visualization?not a mere set of illustrations for Camus' novel, but a respectful translation into another medium, which, while gathering radiance from the original also reflects renewed luster upon it...

...I have not read the book but, I'm afraid, I have seen the movie...

...and prisoners who are not all that unlike the jolly Gi's of Stalag 17—is saved from plummeting into cliche by freshly observed and overheard detail...

...If, on the other hand, the idea is to be strictly documentary, you cannot have didactic colloquies between a seasoned crime reporter and an Ivy League tiro right in the shadow of the gallows, with soured humanism dribbling from the former and anguished hurnanitarianism gushing from the latter...

...the attempt to render the absurdity of Meursault's trial by resorting to conventional caricature (the wrong equivalent: the grotesque is not the same as the senseless...

...Otherwise, the scenarists are true to the original in a way that the execrable subtitles are not...

...And, at the risk of sounding fanciful, I must pay homage to Rotunno's yellows...

...The quaint, slightly inappropriate ballad he sings and plays on the banjo when he learns of his mother's death—with wryness, defiance, almost a touch of black humor, yet also genuine grief—eptomizes the tart mixture of flavors in this performance and this character...

...that glass "will be the consciousness of the Stranger...

...Camus, were he alive, might have felt the same way about Visconti's transposition...

...In a long book, this might be less bothersome, because time and space function differently there (the film is not long by today's standards...

...Add to this handsome though understated color photography by Conrad Hall and a pawky score by Lalo Schifrin, and you have, in Cool Hand Luke, a film that presses ahead with bouncy determination past—even through —various pitfalls...

...But as Camus insisted, "a novel is never just a philosophy couched in images," and thus the very style of the book is a triumph of the Absurd...

...and throw him out on his ear when that suits your purpose...

...Sarris is undoubtedly more learned than I am in matters of filmography, but when it comes to appreciating bathycol-pian endowments, I yield to no man...

...of them, but that it cannot assume a basic editorial stance and then change it around with impunity...

...Stuart Rosenberg, the most recent refugee from television, has directed his first film with what I can best call a very nice kind of slickness...

...The movie (and this seems to be true of the book as well) continually shifts its ground: Now it is full of compassion for the victims, now for the murderers...

...Andrew Sarris has commented on this unveiling, complaining that the actual bosom can be no match for what we imagined...

...He can show you what a place looks like, not how it feels to be or live in it...

...The atmosphere of provincial bus terminals and small-town department stores cannot but yield a certain fascination...

...You find it in Family Diary, and again here in a wall of Meursault's prison...

...Not since Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest has there been such a reverent, doggedly faithful filmization of a fine novel...

...and if Bresson was, perhaps, a little more daring (or fanatical) in his work, Visconti has a more important book and some abler teammates in his favor...

...It leaves the memory prickling...

...The supporting cast performs remarkably down to the very extras...

...This was managed, as Sartre points out in his famous explication of The Stranger, by presenting the events of the story as happening behind plate glass...

...in color, the most comprehensive palette...

...No one who has seen Family Diary, The Leopard, The Organizer, The Bible (to name only a few of his triumphs) can be unaware of what this genuine artist can do with his—is it camera...

...Visconti's picture is primarily for those who know the novel—and I think that knowledge of so philosophically influential and artistically seminal a work can be demanded by the film-maker—and for them this will be a devoted and beautiful visualization...