On Screen

...It is not so much a question of individual shortcomings, however, as of what these actors jointly undo...

...A long hammy silence, then blackout...

...Miss Carlin's suicidal frenzy and postsuicidal hysteria and exhaustion arouse enough pity and terror to satisfy the strictest Aristotelian...

...Joanna, a rich, feckless cutie from the provinces, comes to London to study art...

...Part of the trouble is the medium itself...

...Yet sapling joys do shoot up from time to time, only to wither swiftly and sheepishly...

...Her innocence comes across studied, and she pathetically lacks pathos...

...Miss Carlin is (or, I hope, was) a secretary in real life who never acted before...

...if the actor is very great, he may be able also to show the genuine sense of emptiness at the core...

...Walter Lassally has photographed in fantabulous color, especially a super-Noldeish North African sunset that is just super...

...Here Lumet is most to blame...

...Unfortunately, he is not nearly so secretive about his philosophy, which gushes from him in faded epigrams that come straight out of mothballs, if indeed they aren't the mothballs themselves...

...Its story line is simple: A middle-aged husband and wife disguise their boredom with inane jokes and hollow laughter...

...Nevertheless, this is (along with Rachel, Rachel, Bullitt, Pretty Poison, and Greetings) one of a small handful of American films released in recent times that can be viewed by adult audiences without blanching...

...As Kon-stantin, David Warner tries hard to compensate for his lack of sensitive looks and personal charm...

...Indeed, the first half of the film is heavy going because of the relentless cataloguing of triviality...

...And, of course, there must be performances...

...Or, at the end, how stupid to cut that great line, "The fact is, Konstantin has shot himself," and substitute a view of Trep-lev's bloody body—just like the sea gull's!—floating in the lake, then have Dorn enter the drawing room ominous and silent, and have a slow circular panning shot (a favorite Lumetian device) around the lotto table, where each face registers a different yet obvious expression...

...Dialogues are not so much conversations as reciprocally embarrassing confessions colliding in mid-air, and the atmosphere is so smoky with frustration that joy cannot grow in it...

...were she to pop up before me and ask me for my purse or my honor, I could not refuse...

...As I myself was leaving the Plaza, a woman was explaining portentously: "Unrequited love...

...Mason maintains an all-purpose remoteness, relieved only by faint but rather too genuine yearning, and makes Trigorin uninteresting...

...what comes out is not a young Aleksandr Blok but a young blockhead with pretensions...

...While Kathleen Widdoes acts Masha well enough, the aura of smugness and prissiness that always surrounds this actress erects a sympathy barrier...

...and how could poetry, except perhaps Edwin Markham's, live under that backward-sloping forehead...

...Seymour Cassel as the hippie who is beginning to go to seed and is all the more out for good times—but who is also a decent enough chap at heart —is exactly right...

...The Swedish house and lake used work in quite nicely, although one never gets a sense of exactly who lives in that house and exactly where...

...I don't know how much of it is acting and how much type casting, but whatever Cassel does has the clumsy charm of a fat baby disporting itself in its crib...

...the wife goes to a nightspot with other neglected wives, and they pick up a somewhat overage hippie whom they take back to the wife's house...

...and in this film, believe me, the hilt is a phallic symbol...

...It is proof of its power that I felt, and still feel, those missing 57 minutes hurt me like an amputated limb of my very own...

...While most of the actors speak in well-tailored English accents, Miss Signoret putters or sloshes about in a debraille French one (not a stylish one a la Charles Boyer) that is often incomprehensible...

...Husband and wife again face each other and their emptiness, this time without laughter...

...It is the kind of performance that makes me feel utterly indebted to the performer...

...Everything would be fine, except that some villainous underworld connections beat him up, whereupon he gallantly kills one of them only to be sent unchival-rously to jail for a lengthy stretch...

...Here Is Your Life is, like the works of Olmi, a necessary film...

...Vanessa Redgrave is—by now, at any rate—too much of a raw-boned, thirtyish, English governess to pass for the vulnerably young, sweetly tremulous Nina...

...The film is shown here in a version that (as Stanley Kauff-mann pointed out) has 57 minutes cut—presumably because it was running too long—yet this is a gemlike work combining true humanity and that high technical skill that humane, good-natured films so infrequently have...

...and the lotto players playing on as if nothing had happened...

...Not since the heyday of Italian neorealism have we seen such unacted acting, such living on the screen...

...whereas Chekhov's people, properly interpreted on the stage, are as fascinating as a juggling act in which the balls are continually dropped until one hangs on every move of the bizarre, unhappy prestidigitators in the hope that one of their tricks might succeed...

...Alfred Lynch is a believable Medvedenko, but Ronald Radd a noisy cliche of a Shamrayev...

...Troell, like Johnson, has infused it all with keen specific observation bursting with truth...

...It is another trashy piece about the glories of mod London, made even trashier by the fact of taking itself seriously...

...And what preposterous directorial ideas he has...

...Needless to say, they are all variations on the theme of living life to the hilt...

...Out of this fairly arid and fairly trite material, Cassavetes has fashioned a film that contains a good deal of aridity and triteness...

...As her train pulls out of the station, the entire cast of the film sees her off with a song and dance—a delightfully Brechtian alienation-effect that would surely turn Brecht's stomach...

...Gerry Fisher's color photography, at least in the print on display at the Plaza Theater, is rather poor: It looks like hand-tinted film, the faces mostly heliotrope, and nature a washed-out bluish green or greenish blue...

...Performances that can make demanding stage roles survive this transplanting into alien ground...

...Abetter film, though still ultimately disappointing, is Faces by John Cassavetes...

...We are to understand that these are the cachinna-tions of the damned, but we would get the point without having our heads stuck in a loudspeaker chock full of canned laughter...

...As Trigorin, James Mason acts dazed, uncomfortable, constrained...

...Then, again, a filmed play requires inventiveness in camera setups, a sharp feeling for montage, and self-effacing camera movements, lest, given the sparseness of action, one become aware of technical overcompensation...

...Even from good actors, though, Lumet can extract glutinous or shrill, colorless or desperate performances...

...Eileen Herlie a flat Paulina...

...Here Is Your Life spans the years of World War I, during which young Olof muddles through into maturity, starting out as a boy worker in a sawmill of the stark North, and gradually working himself down to the South through a multiplicity of odd jobs, but clearly headed for a literary career...

...The interiors are better...

...Even that laughter could be explained as a gap-filler until one thinks of what to say next...

...Perhaps the worst performance (after Signoret's) is Denholm Elliott's Dorn...

...Harry Andrews is an unshaded, frenetic Sorin...

...Elliott, who can be brilliant as a roue, weakling, or bounder, simply cannot cope with the decent, weary doctor—a sympathetic and perceptive man gone stale with age and provincial drudgery...

...That is the basic quality of The Sea Gull, and even if Sidney Lumet had captured it in his film version, it would probably have made for a cumbrous, oppressive film...

...The hippie saves her, only to escape hurriedly as the husband returns...

...Frustrated lives palpitating in concert, hurling unsolicited gifts and demands at one another, misunderstanding or understanding one another too well, and hurting either way, they talk and live right past one another...

...His wig, moreover, makes him look like some villainous marquis at the court of Louis XV, or, equally inappropriately, a diabolical Mark Twain...

...But he captures nothing of the sort...

...Troell photographed, edited, directed, and co-scripted it from an autobiographical novel by Eyvind Johnson, one of Sweden's leading novelists...

...It is that awkward, whispered last line—with its "the fact is" and to Trigorin, of all people—that is needed...

...In addition, John Marley as the husband and Gena Rowlands as the call girl are only just passable...

...Her fourth-act scene (which loses much by being shot outdoors) remains wholly unmoving...

...Olof's adventures are funny and serious, private and universal, and Troell always gives you the exact feel of an experience or setting, from what is most exhilarating about it down to what is most painful...

...Or, more precisely, the stage always shows you the space between the actors, the small but sufficient abyss into which their enterprises hurtle...

...Some of Sweden's most famous actors appear in small parts, but even the least known perform with great exactness and dignity...

...If, however, you want unadulter-atedly unadult movies, I doubt that you could do better (or worse) than Joanna...

...His tetralogy, The Story of Olof, of which this is a part, should, along with its two or three sequels, be translated into English...

...and the forced laughter that accompanies them sounds as if the characters were being literally tickled to death...

...That may have been her own, unabetted cloddishness, but I cannot help feeling that Lu-met's unrequited love for "Art" encourages such vulgar errors...

...It's all absolutely groovy and perfectly ghastly...

...Better yet is Lynn Carlin as the wife...

...Lord Peter dies with a lordly, understated pathos, but meanwhile Joanna has found true love with his madcap Negro mistress's brother, a gorgeous and sophisticated young African who owns a nightclub and has, apparently, possessed every nubile girl in London, i.e., roughly nine tenths of the population, but, naturally, falls deeply in love with Joanna...

...Poetry and squalor go hand in hand and form, together, a wonderfully visual, palpable poetic prose...

...The camera—except as handled by a master, which Lumet categorically is not—cannot capture the hollowness of space, the oppressive immovableness of a seemingly harmless enclosure, stasis settling on everything like a fine, corrosive dust...

...Michael Same, the young director who is Miss Waite's former lover and present Pygmalion (orders do reverse themselves...

...as Masha adjusts her disarrayed undergarments, she declares that she wears black out of mourning for her life...

...Her appearance has also become hard to take, especially when the text has her remark on how well she has kept her figure, and her acting is unsubtle—in part, I suppose, from exhaustion from her bouts with English...

...in the other, arty cleverness...

...The translation by Moura Budberg is all right, but it has been carefully pruned of literary or cultural references that might puzzle the customers of less privileged neighborhood theaters...

...Yet that is the opposite of what characterizes this successful second-rate writer: postures of existential despair, affectations of bluff simplicity, and, underneath, complacency...

...But Lumet is either too dazzled or too crudely confident to be at home in art...

...Here Is Your Life is the first film of Jan Troell, a young Swede who was once Bo Widerberg's cameraman and whose second film has since gone on to win the grand prize in Berlin...

...Joanna, remembering some of Lord Peter's more exquisite maxims, goes back home to bear her lover's child and, presumably, wait for the happy reunion—though she makes some mention of returning to London and who knows what peri-peties that may bring...

...Joanna is played by Genevieve Waite, a piece of fluff with a thin-nish sound piped into it (for all our advances in electronics, automata have not yet acquired fully human voices), and sliding whichever way the ground underneath inclines...

...A jaw like hers could take all of fate's punches...

...every unsuccessful move can be seen in all its ramifications...

...At best, Cassavetes may have committed a lot of Method exercises to paper and film...

...She ends up in bed with him and, in the morning, attempts suicide...

...Lumet's boredom is one that settles viscously on the viewer who cares not a straw for Lumet's straw men...

...The stage always affords full view of the arena of fumbles...

...There is one color sequence in this soberly black-and-white film, and that is a revelation...

...Made on a shoestring over several years, mostly around the Cassavetes' or friends' houses, and always ducking the unions with their deadening demands, Faces is quite an accomplishment despite its obvious flaws...

...Least excusable here is the casting of Simone Signoret as Arkadina...

...but, disgruntled, the husband spends a night with a sympathetic call girl (some other businessmen and another lady of the night add grim local color...

...At the beginning, Masha and Medvedenko, totally out of period and character, are shown rolling around in the tall grass...

...No one, not even Beckett, has drawn such recondite harmonies and such subtle discords from the motions, utterances, and silences of boredom...

...Once the wives and the hippie take over, Faces does generate excitement and that brash, tawdry pathos that is so germane to Southern California, and not wholly unrelated to the rest of our world...

...has directed with chic fragmentation and all the artistry of a manicurist who applies a different shade of polish to each artificial nail...

...Before you can say Mick Jagger, she is cutting classes, sleeping around, absorbing hedonistic commonplaces from a pompous young German art instructor, and even worse epicurean platitudes from a rich young playboy-lord, who is slowly dying of a disease he gallantly hides until the end...

...Faces is marred by a foolish introductory gimmick—in a prologue, the film itself is presented as a publicity film being screened for the husband and his business associates —and by its grainy, excessively hand-held camera work that makes you wonder whether the images perhaps weren't shot on film at all but directly on some kind of specially treated shoestring...

...Even if Lumet was trying to adhere to Chekhov's designation of the play as a "comedy," that surely means a sad comedy of absurd waste, and it is better for Nina to err on the side of Ophelia than on that of a budding Madwoman of Chaillot...

...What she does here surpasses anything that all except two or three of our very best actresses could do, and they could not improve on it...

...This is due in good measure to the acting...

...The number of bad jokes that are told in the house that is not a home and in the home that is not a home is legion...

...We follow his encounters with loneliness, death, love, Marx, and culture...

...the direction and photography are always at that exact point where life and art meet, and from which any veering in one direction would spell drab naturalism...

...as her lordly but moribund mentor, Donald Sutherland is nauseating: Toad of Toad Hall's conception of Oscar Wilde...

...We are told that there was a written script, yet the film tends to look and sound like actors' improvisations...

...Never was color used so sparingly, Spartanly, awesomely to suggest that even to the eyes of memory (this is a memory sequence) the past can be both lovely and unbearably tragic...

...As her ebony lover, Calvin Lock-hart is like beautiful...

...If you think this is typical or predictable, you are only very superficially right...