INFIDELITY AND NOSTALGIA

...The wedding night would be no better than a rape if Miss Seberg did not make an impassioned and civilizing speech just after Marvin has torn as much clothing off her as is consistent with showing no more than one eighth of an inch of aureola...

...Pookie a severe neurotic (or worse) who considers everyone a weirdo or a creep...

...So I would come to this film quite unbiased, except for glowing reports from those who saw it before me about how marvelous Liza Min-nelli is in the title part...

...It is once again a triangle, in which a somewhat mousy upper-bourgeois husband kills the jovially caddish lover of his languid, supercilious, but not unmaternal wife...

...Cuckoo is the story of Pookie Adams, who meets Jerry Wayne on the bus taking them to their neighboring colleges upstate New York...

...In due time, the wicked town meets a fate worthy of Sodom and Gomorrah...

...So, too, the connubial threesome collapses after a set of unhilarious contretemps...

...Paul Newman, as Butch, treats us to his usual smooth and soulless performance-rather like an aircraft piloted by remote control...

...Realizing, no doubt, that mature audiences wouldn't know what to make of this film, Paramount has contested the rating and is demanding a G-general, i.e., family-audience classification...

...Thus we get the quasi-imperceptible switch of Conrad Hall's photography from the sepia tones of yesteryear to the artfully understated colors of just yesterday...

...But I must also confess that I attended the Leys School in Cambridge, the subject of Hilton's novel, and that I was one of those new boys who at the start of every Michaelmas term tramped up Trump-ington Road to have tea with the kindly old retired master who was the model for Chips...

...And Hill's direction, like Goldman's scenario and Hall's cinematography, is too adorably and calculatedly puckish, as if the film had been made by a bunch of corrupt koalas...

...It jollies up and glamorizes these outlaws' careers in much the same way that Bonnie and Clyde did those, but, in broad outline and detail, depends even more on smart oneup-manship...

...Paint Your Wagon should certainly delight the entire family, especially if it comes equipped with more than one parent of either sex...

...Marvin and his cronies have been digging secret tunnels under each house to recover the gold dust seeping through floorboards...

...James Hilton's novel and its charming original movie version have been updated in Terence Rat-tigan's script, but before the cognoscenti get too rapturous about the original version's superior quality and credibility, they should be reminded that it also had Greer Gar-son...

...The other, even less musical, musical, is a remake of Goodbye, Mr...

...Pookie and Jerry shuttle between a rickety motel room where they practice their unplatonic brand of puppy love, and the picturesque open spaces around Hamilton College, where the novel is understood to take place and where the filming was actually done...

...But more about this next time...

...They are both freshmen: Jerry a budding entomolgist, as nice and staid and ordinary as they come...

...The attempt is to be both very attentive to period flavor, and wildly "now...

...Best of all, O'Toole's Chips is dignified even when he is ludicrous...

...Whereas the sentimentality in Chips emerges from a somewhat simplistic but not unpersuasive context, a recognizable ambience, The Sterile Cuckoo operates in some Cloud-Cuckoo-Land college unseen in movies since the June Allyson musical, Good News (1947...

...Marvin's wanderlust drives him on to new bonanzas, while Eastwood and Miss Seberg settle down to farming and a morally uplifting ending, which nets the film the relatively permissive rating of M-recommended for mature audiences...

...And on the old songs, Nelson Riddle's orchestrations do their leveling worst...

...This is George Roy Hill's comic Western with a plethora of supposedly stylish devices leading up to a bloody ending-In other words, Bonnie and Clyde rides again...

...If you add to this that none of the stars can sing-a minor obstacle Marvin and Eastwood surmount by the use of Sprechstimme, and Seberg by getting herself dubbed by someone else (the wiser solution, on the whole)-and that the climax with all those funnily crumbling houses would hardly elicit a smile from anyone but a professional demolition worker, you wonder why Paramount spent anywhere from 18 to 24 million dollars on this venture...

...At least not until the day a Mormon arrives with two wives and is persuaded to sell one off by auction...

...Here, as mysteriously as in Bluebeard's Castle, no other real presences exist besides Pookie and Jerry, and...

...For a fugitive moment we can fool ourselves into believing that she is a jolie laide, but forthwith she reverts to her usual mixture of Judith Crist and the Emperor Tiberius, and we must recognize her for a laide laide...

...Most absorbing, however, are their silences...

...Modeling himself in part after Redgrave (not a bad choice here), O'Toole makes Chips as gauche as he is lovable, as archaic as he is intelligent...

...Meanwhile we can definitely learn one thing from the film: Miss Seberg has a much larger bosom than has hitherto been evidenced—unless it, too, is part of the trick engineering that built collapsible No Name City...

...They are often grind-ingly long, yet they provide spaces that we can furnish with our own surmises...

...For Ross is famous as the choreographer of such dazzlingly perverse ballets as Caprichos, The Maids, and Tristan, a far cry from this monument to naive innocence...

...Herbert Ross directed this supreme pizzicato for heartstrings, and aside from the fact that doing the musical sequences for Funny Girl and choreographing Doctor Dolittle were scant preparation for this large-scale directorial debut, he is altogether an odd choice for the job...

...I must confess that Goodbye, Mr...

...Stephane Audran (Mme Chabrol) is merely polished, but she fits her role by sheer snottiness and a face and figure that disturbingly flirt with both beauty and ugliness, never settling down with either...

...the continual dependence of William Goldman's script on standing every possible Western convention on its brainless head...

...He disposes of the body meticulously but not without some comic difficulties, and ends up by regaining his wife's love for this deed of passionate devotion just as, ironically, the police come to get him...

...As for the new plot, it is the contrivance of Paddy Chayefsky, and has Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood as loving partners in a gold claim in rowdy Tent City, where men are men and women don't exist...

...Pookie's "tragic" background is sketched in with few and unconvincing strokes...

...He asks for a month's respite...

...Alvin Sargent wrote the screenplay from a successful 1965 first novel by John Nichols, which, like most of Mulligan's films, I managed to miss...

...The highest bidder, with his partner's money, is hard-brawling, hard-guzzling Lee Marvin, who marries Jean Seberg, the surplus spouse, in a quaintly ad hoc ceremony...

...This, of course, requires excellence in the actors, and Michel Bouquet, as the husband, and Maurice Ronet, as the lover, have it to spare...

...In their egalitarian way, the filmmakers have scrapped most of the bad book and quite a few of the pleasant songs...

...How, one wonders, does she take care of herself and survive during a lengthy disappearance she laconically describes with "I was in Boston...

...And Liza Minnelli...

...And O'Toole's talent has a fortuitous ally in his face, which manages to look at all ages (the make-up, by the way, is not the best) like a British public-school boy's face: crisp, limpid, and impervious to wear and tear...

...It is a simple, oversimplified, unconvincing little film...

...But she tends to do too much, her whole body shaking like an overworked steam engine, her eyes carrying on like gaskets about to burst...

...Most of the supporting parts are also well handled, and only an over-eager secretary's sham sexiness is given the customary Chabrol comic-strip treatment...

...Fcr the cast-off songs they have substituted new ones with music by Andre Previn that strikes the ear as stimulatingly as sheet music an eye that cannot read notes...

...Jerry's is left blank...

...And Rattigan is the right scenarist for this sort of bittersweet entertainment exuding civilized sentimentality...

...THAT BRINGS ME tO One of Miss Crist's recent favorites, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid...

...Jerry loves her, but Pookie's pos-sessiveness and emotional blackmail-not to mention her antagonizing everyone around-drive the young entomolgist back into his protective carapace...

...She keeps descending on Jerry and, by and by, with her misanthropy and glib talk and availability, fascinates, cajoles, and browbeats him into an affair with her...

...As his girlfriend, Katherine Ross is rapidly losing her youthful bloom without sprouting any compensatory growth in artistic stature...

...I repeat, there is not a single teacher around, and other students are lay figures occasionally scurrying by, or seen at one of those movie junior proms that would make a sardine feel confined...

...For the rest, he has directed with assurance, indeed finesse, restraining even that ostentatious interior decorator who lurks in his indecorous interior...

...Chips, which should have stuck to tearjerking instead of dabbling in tunejerking...

...Pakula cannot decide whether Pookie is a dangerous nut who disturbs the hell out of her serious friend, or whether Jerry is a humorless grind who spoils Pookie's delightful sport...

...But Chabrol succeeds in making his fairly standard characters interesting in their minor quirks, the slightly raveled texture of their lives, the urbane banalities they bandy about, which seem somehow to debouch on malfeasance and crime...

...Of course, if there are enough misguided souls around to make the company recoup its investment, we shall have our answer...

...First there is Paint Your Wagon, from the old Lerner-Loewe stage musical, remembered for its bad book and pleasant songs...

...Not that Petula Clark, homely and bow-legged, is much of an actress, yet she is at least a straightforward, unmannered human being...

...The story could not be more trivial, and the fact that Chabrol (who this time wrote the screenplay without assistance from the dreadful Paul Gegauff) does not even bother to tell you how the case was cracked or what its outcome will be, reduces the plot to yet greater meager-ness...

...This provides a welcome change for Miss Seberg from all that polygyny...

...But if a girl is as abnormally stand-offish and world-hating as Pookie is, would she?could she-play the undauntable, irresistible enchantress to Jerry...

...One fine Sunday, when the whole town is watching circus games instead of praying in church, every last building collapses from Marvin's undermining...

...No need to go into the plot...

...These outdoor wandering and lovemaking sequences, photographed in undistinguished colors by Milton Krasner, and full of consciously lyrical long shots and conscientiously rhythmic dissolves, perilously approach equivalent scenes in Changes-that is to say, rock bottom...

...What justifies the film, besides Oswald Morris' supremely tactful color photography, and some quite palatable supporting performances, particularly Michael Redgrave's headmaster and Sian Phillips' scarlet lady of the theater, is Peter O'-Toole's Chips...

...So I may not be an unbiased judge...

...Despite some talent, she cannot fake charm or good looks...

...all Jerry can do is send her back to a father who has never forgiven her for causing his beloved wife's death in childbirth, and who is almost always on trips away from home...

...Chips moved me to tears...

...Though some of her kookier lines recede as swiftly and irretrievably as her chin, her outbursts of joy or panic are authentic and often affecting...

...For a more eccentric kind of sentimentality there is The Sterile Cuckoo, the first picture directed by Alan J. Pakula, who was previously Robert Mulligan's producer...

...When she reappears, she is an emotional wreck...

...Pookie, hurt to the quick, leaves school and vanishes...

...Nor is her attitude toward her pregnancy and miscarriage (unless they are more of her fabrications, which the movie does not seem to suggest) consistent with her pathology...

...This architectural model, the gold, and the French whores bringing in customers from all over, soon enable Tent City to become big, bustling, sinful No Name City...

...She is a real little homemaker, and gets her husbands to build the first log cabin in Tent City for her to play house-and-a-half in...

...the endless wisecracking of Paul Newman and Robert Redford in a language and humor that are half a century too early and half a continent too easterly for their historic time and place...

...That he did such a creditable, even if occasionally flawed, job is a lovely surprise...

...Or during its aftermath, with someone strumming a guitar as artfully scattered couples discreetly pet in distant prospect and chiaroscuro...

...Indeed, the film's message, if taken to heart, may prove an effective means of combating the rising divorce rate...

...These tuneless tunes flow into one another like a river bent on disproving Heracli-tus' dictum that you cannot bathe in the same water twice...

...The music and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse conquer new depths of ineptitude, and having these nonsongs done mostly in voice-over as interior monologues adds pretentiousness to their basic awfulness...

...Perhaps we are to overlook all this for the sake of that brilliant character, Pookie-lovable, horrible, bright, foolish psychopath in the making...

...But he uses conflicting traits as adeptly as a modern painter does clashing colors to create unexpected cohesions...

...While Marvin is off waylaying a cargo of French whores destined for Sonora and rerouting it to Tent City (so they won't all hanker after Jean), Eastwood and Miss Seberg fall in love, and there is nothing for it, after a little roughhouse between the partners, but to start a poly-androus menage...

...A typical example of the filmmakers' confusion is the Easter vacation: Jerry is staying over to catch up with his work, and Pookie lives with him in his room in connubial bliss and acrimony...

...Robert Redford, as Sundance, is fresher and racier, but he too runs out of tricks to sustain the dimen-sionless writing...

...And if she can do that, would she not, on some sick level, also dazzle and subjugate at least some of the creeps and weirdos...

...fleetingly, Jerry's roommate...

...Thereupon the wedding night proceeds amicably, though with Eastwood no longer sharing his partner's tent...

...For similarly high moral reasons, I presume, Joshua Logan's direction does not include a single love scene-not even a kiss-between Jean and either spouse, concentrating instead on the true male tenderness between Marvin and Eastwood...

...Most meretricious of all is Burt Bacharach's score, a systematic despoliation of Kurt Weill, with the main theme's opening bars taken straight out of Johnny Johnson...

...Claude Chabrol has long been one of my most execrated filmmakers, so that I am no less amazed at the genuine virtues of his La Femme Infidele than I would be if the calendar that my cleaners will, any day now, stick under my door were hand-painted by Pablo Picasso...