On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon Of Foxes and Doxies The characters in D. H. Lawrence's The Fox are, according to F. R. Leavis, "lower-middle-class and ordinary." In the film version, the class has been...
...It's high time to bring on Blitzen...
...The color photography is often striking, notably in a closing sequence of malevolent, surreal beauty...
...When have you last seen a hero unable to strike a single blow in his defense before the villains close in on him...
...That brings us to the film's sorest point, Sandy Dennis...
...But these are more than vitiated by a poor script, unsure direction, unbearably coy music, and some execrable acting...
...Still, there are compensations...
...Thus March masturbates in front of a mirror and a mute duologue ensues...
...If you can't, don't bother to try...
...Then we switch to a simplistic contest between heterosexual and homosexual love, reassuringly won by the former...
...The acting is persuasive, with shambling good and suavely dissembling evil expertly embodied by Gian Maria Volonte on the one hand, and Gabriele Ferzetti and a skillfully dubbed Irene Papas on the other...
...for example, not all anti-Semites are Jews...
...too bad so few of them have anything to do with film...
...Disconsolate at the sight of so much utter, unattainable loveliness, I recalled a device of Pierre Costals, the novelist-hero of Henri de Mont-herlant's Les Jeunes Filles...
...Henry Grenfel turns into Paul Grenfel (only sissies and pot bellies are called Henry...
...Here, for instance, he uses shots of hands, anybody's hands, as a leitmotiv...
...moreover, were scarce...
...After desperate scrutiny, I could fault Miss Geeson only with a hyperexcrescence between her incisors and bicuspids...
...The work was felt to be in need of updating, yet its meanings are closely bound to its World War I setting, when the fumbling uncertainties of man-woman relations were in a transitional period and when men...
...I recall the annotated reading list of one of my high school English teachers, which included "Of Human Bondage: a lesson from Spinoza, not deep...
...The current film might be described as "a lesson from Lawrence, not Lawrence...
...Superimpose on this a sick smile befitting a calf's head in a butcher shop, an embryonic laugh that emerges as an aural stillbirth, and an epic case of fidgets, and you have not so much a performance as a field trip for students of clinical psychiatry...
...Consequently, there is a far more intricate and subtly ambivalent set of interrelations at work, and, as Graham Hough has remarked, "the aesthetic surface is never broken by symbols that call attention to themselves...
...In the novella, the action takes place in an England the protagonist finds small and oppressive, from which he wants to escape to Canada with his chosen woman...
...The surface of the film breaks out in a horrible rash of symbols...
...Directed by Elio Petri in an uncompromisingly, and sometimes irritatingly, up-to-date style, this is no typical Mafia film a la Pietro Germi or Alberto Lattuada...
...that this suggests narcissism, inconsistent with her generous character (as the movie has it), did not seem to bother any of the film's fabricators...
...but then I would gladly give my eyeteeth to?and for—her any time...
...No interpretation holds up...
...Much is made of masturbation and lesbianism, and relatively little of Lawrence...
...Hollywood has, as usual, gone to work on the characters' names...
...Again, the lesbian scene between March and the delicate, infantile Jill is Holly-woodized into something like elder and younger sister going to sleep together, with one chaste goodnight kiss for a send-off...
...Boris Kaufman has some very nice helicopter and automobile shots of a car ride to Brooklyn, and there are two accomplished performances by Joseph Wiseman and Sorrell Booke...
...and, best of all, even March's favorite hen is elevated from Patty into Edwina...
...But you might want to see it, anyway, for one powerful reason: Young Judy Geeson in the altogether is the loveliest sight in movies so far this year, and unlikely to be outstripped by later contenders...
...To facilitate his envisaged parting from a new conquest, he unearths on the very first going to bed together a "safety exit"—some flaw he can fix upon when he wants to end the affair...
...In the film, the hero is going to take March from Canada to, of all places, Vermont, which I can explain only as an aberrant craving for maple sugar...
...The screenplay has its moments of quiet conviction (Carlino is a gifted playwright), though most of the awkward beauties of Lawrence's dialogue, almost compulsive in its simplicity, are unhappily missing...
...In the film version, the class has been slightly upped while the ordinariness has been strenuously diminished...
...Hollywood is a great little maker of images...
...The original story is vivid and meaningful because no one in it is a type: The hero is only a boy, March is a shy creature for all her assuming the male role vis-a-vis Jill, and Jill is neither so cute nor so weird as the film (or Sandy Dennis) makes her out to be...
...All human mischief stems from hands poking around...
...There is little to recommend Sidney Lumet's heavy-handed—or, rather, heavy-hearted—satire: satire that tries to be devastating without having the courage to be satire...
...Nevertheless, this is a more exciting and at the same time more believable film than most of its kind...
...The most obvious weakness of the film is its exaggerated literal-mindedness: March, the more intensely alive of two young women living together on a little farm, has to be shown in a long, rapturous masturbation sequence—and, in typical Hollywood fashion, even onanism has to be played as a love scene...
...There are two beautiful performances...
...and shifting the emphasis to some sort of woman-against-the-elements out-doorsiness...
...Murder is made neither tragic nor comic here, only shabby and routine...
...If you can imagine a cross between Tom Jones and Peanuts taking place at and around church theatricals and high school orgies in provincial Lincolnshire, you more or less have the essence of Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush...
...This is a zoomingly streamlined representation of smooth, ruthless corruption, in which the glamorous and finally rewarded lovers are, in fact, archcriminals, and the one honest man is hopelessly outsmarted to the point where his integrity and intelligence emerge as supreme, suicidal folly...
...they are made more bewildering by extreme close-ups and flash pans...
...May I suggest Lady into Fox as a possible starring vehicle...
...The scriptwriters...
...Pauline Kael has apdy observed that Miss Dennis has "made an acting style out of postnasal drip...
...so, too, with perhaps a little more emphasis on low animal cunning, does that of the fox...
...We Slill Kill The Old Way is based on a novel by Leonardo Sciascia just published here as A Man's Blessing...
...A currently much disputed question in Hollywood, 1 am told, is whether the film is anti-Semitic...
...George Segal, Jack Warden, Zohra Lampert, Jessica Walter, and Alan King deserve to be awarded jointly the Tin Griffin of the Perth Amboy Festival...
...In the crucial confrontation scene between Miss Heywood and the bushy-tailed marauder, both perform stunningly...
...Petri, as he has shown in The Tenth Victim and his part of High Infidelity, is an adroit director, whose skill, unfortunately, tends to lapse into pointless prestidigitation...
...One wonders what is meant: the Black Hand (i.e., Mafia...
...Lewis John Carlino and Howard Koch, first transplant the action from the edge of an English village to what looks like the core of the Canadian wilderness, making the whole thing seem exotic and eccentric (what are these girls doing in Ultima Thule...
...Thus Nellie March becomes Ellen March (more like a starlet, that...
...In defense of Braverman it has been put forward that everyone in it and on it is Jewish...
...Keir Dullea is adequate as the man: He looks right and at least does not do anything wrong in a role that the screenplay reduced to utter banality...
...Which reminds me of my answer to a young woman's charge that a certain English drama critic must be a latent homosexual because of his constant ferreting out of supposed inversion in the plays he reviews...
...William Fraker is a not untalented color photographer-—he is much better here than he was in Games—and he has conveyed the spur-like sting of the wintry outdoors as palpably as the sensuous warmth inside the girls" cottage...
...Even this is much too explicit for what in Lawrence's story is subliminal and unconscious, however, and in its all but everyday normality, far more disturbing...
...In Italy, both book and film are called A ciascuno il suo, which means "to each his own," and may be a secret reference to American habits of titling...
...One final point of interest...
...Anne Heywood's March, sensitively modulated and broodingly suggestive, is easily the most Lauren-tian element of the film...
...I hope this unbilled vulpine charmer will not retire from the screen...
...Not necessarily," I said...
...Her work exudes intelligence...
...This may indeed be the only question that can be raised concerning this opus...
...Mark Rydell has directed with little urgency despite some purple cross-cutting, but Lalo Schif-rin's score (The President's Analyst and Cool Hand Luke were also scored by Schifrin) is ingenious, musicianly, and free from the greasiness of standard studio orchestrations...
...Bye, Bye, Braverman is based on Wallace Markfield's To an Early Grave, which I haven't read and, after seeing the film, probably never will...
...I cannot say as much for the direction of Clive Donner, which gets worse with each successive film...
...She has carried that most repugnant of Method devices—taking one or two trial runs on every sentence, if not phrase, one utters—to the level of a tic: Her every line of dialogue issues in triplicate, ready to be notarized...
...It should be added that she balances her postnasal condition with something like prefrontal lobotomy, so that when she is not a walking catarrh she is a blithering imbecile...
...The hand is quicker than the eye...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 7
