Youth Kick

...love, withhold love, commit suicide as aimlessly as motes jiggle in a sunbeam...

...Anderson's only other feature film was This Sporting Life, which struck some powerful attitudes but remained hollow at the core...

...While the smut flows liberally, anything that looks like a healthy bit of sexuality is doled out like water to a caravan lost in the desert...

...Bartlett's directorial flair consists of things like having his hero wander through a peaceful old-fashioned graveyard while the sound track crepitates and explodes with all the noises of the Vietnam war...

...it is only the apocryphal and apocalyptic material that fails to persuade...

...As in This Sporting Life, one gets a feeling of richly sculptured individual scenes, but a deficient sense of the whole and somewhat nebulous continuity...

...the obsession of one of the trio with solving the JFK assassination, even if it means using the bodies of otherwise inclined bed partners for complicated ballistic computations...

...It is unclear on what he lives or what he wants...

...When the West Coast crowd tries to make such a youth film, however, the results are disastrous...

...The acting is winsome and has a certain jaunty insouciance about it that makes even its lapses seem intentional...

...This may sound defensible, even challenging, on paper...

...Something similar can be said about Greetings, by two young New York film-makers, Brian De Palma and Charles Hirsch...

...Ever stranger strands crop up in the fabric of things, but they are not shown as one person's vision, rather as a world slowly turning psychotic...

...When he finally leaves the most charming girl who became his mistress for no fathomable reason, he sends her a copy of Thoreau inscribed "Your [sic] alwa's [sic] with me...

...People arrive and depart for no good reasons...

...The entire film was sired by A Man and a Woman upon The Graduate, and emerges a worse mongrel than either parent...

...The infiltration of the surreal is not uncleverly managed...

...or why, wherever his skulking and maundering takes him, the landscapes and seascapes are gorgeous, as if there were no dreary flatlands in California, and no world at all beyond it...

...if I may be permitted to drop the ellipsis) is much more effective while it chronicles the faintly surreal realities of English public-school life than when it enters the domain of the surreal whole hog...

...Richard Moore's color photography is redolent with arty coyness, and the leading man, Kent Lane (which sounds more like a suburban address than a human appellation), accomplishes the difficult task of being at once brutish and effete...

...Hall Bartlett's Changes is a pure abomination...

...A pipe-smoking woman dean detects the activities of our succubae, but utters merely a gentle reprimand...

...The pompous and sanctimonious chaplain hits a junior-school boy over the head during class with plausible brutality...

...or how, at the most unlikely times, he manages to be in Big Sur...

...Of the girls, only Michele Carey is prepossessing, but even she is afflicted with a Liz Tayor voice, though that is still preferable to the conglomeration of pop songs on the sound track...

...and the adventures and misadventures of all three with a variety of girls...

...The dialogue is replete with college humor-magazine repartee (second-rate college), and one sometimes cannot tell whether it is meant to be funny...

...Paxton is drained of almost all his vital juices when the two other, less involved girls convince the wasp, whose love-hate knows no bounds, that Paxton must be released—after a fortnight of round-the-clock performing...

...the next one, however, is punished by the chaplain's hand disappearing under the lad's shirt front and doing something unmentionable there...

...That, doubtless, is how the film got its R rating (minors admitted only in the company of adults) instead of the X it so richly deserves...

...Thus color photography had to be abandoned at times for monochrome, resulting in what looks like an arty visual crazy quilt, for which Miroslav Ondricek, the gifted Czech cinematographer, should not be blamed...

...and, all the time, peddle truisms as portentously as if they were pushing dope...

...We are told how Mick and his two henchmen, Johnny and Wallace, begin by resisting, quite naturally and naturalistically, the authority of the prefects, or "whips," of College House, only to end by staging a bloody, and entirely surrealist, revolution...

...Another unappetizing feature of the film is that, though its subject is copulation, it was directed by Richard Wilson with a tape measure and stop watch: The moment a zipper reaches a danger area, we cut to something else...

...He has to be rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital, but eventually all ends well, with Paxton winning back the affection of the chief succuba in the baggage trunk of the Greyhound bus on which she was about to escape him...

...No less nauseating, though occasionally more diverting, is Three in the Attic...

...Thereafter he depends on the kindness of motorists who pick him up and pretty young women who take him in (sometimes, conveniently, the two are the same...

...but the final holocaust would have required both more imaginative writing and, in the director, the unlikely combination of a Jean Vigo and a Luis Bunuel...

...Sex and rebellion (presumably so as not to offend the Motion Picture Association's raters) are totally bloodless, the former consisting of bathing-suited slow-motion rolling in the sand, the latter of some anodyne footage of a protest march that wouldn't demilitarize a kindergarten sand lot...

...the picture was, apparently, shot piecemeal over a protracted and often penurious period of time...

...these are so monotonous they make the drum beats with which they alternate sound positively melodious...

...Based on what must be his equally sleazy and smart-aleck novel, Stephen Yafa's screenplay concerns Paxton Quig-ley, a New England college stud who is servicing simultaneously three girls from the neighboring women's college: a haughty, intellectual wasp, a sassy Negro sexpot, and a weird Jewish flower child...

...Yet as one laughs, one isn't sure whether one is not in fact laughing at the author and director who thought this was so terribly clever...

...on the screen, it comes out untidy, indeed pretentious...

...Or, rather, when Paxton arouses Tobey's most ardent yearning by quoting an alleged bit of Kierkegaard at her, this is obviously intended as a joke...

...The funny or cruel scenes work very handily...

...When they discover his game, they imprison him in a dormitory attic and come to him by turns, one every hour on the hour, for sexual satisfaction...

...One is reminded of the good early specimens of Beat poetry—of Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, and others like them—when the movement was fresh and frisked all over geography, pornography, prosody, and tarnation...

...The ludicrous and dismal aspects of English boarding-school life (I, too, experienced them briefly) are caught with droll and dismaying precision, but are then escalated into hypertrophic horror...

...and L.A...

...mate and separate at random...

...Precisely because it makes no demands on our sympathy and commitment, Greetings earns our amused benediction...

...Platitudinous despair follows on platitudinous delight—consisting mostly of slow-motion frolics with certain shots held well beyond the limits of civilized endurance...

...There is much flippancy both in individual scenes and in their joining, the color photography is less than expert, and there are shenanigans worthy of the underground film at, say, its second most self-indulgent...

...Yet the film is never uninteresting, seldom unspirited, and there is some sort of intelligence even in its miscalculations...

...Or of having the stony-faced protagonist look on endlessly as a little boy and girl float across a playground in slow-motion pursuit of each other...

...Or if the bizarre little subplots—like the various homosexual motifs—were more than just hinted at and the surreal elements were shown flashing forth equally in all of them, the iffiness of It might be more controlled...

...Perhaps if the central part of Mick were more fully developed and more dynamically acted (not that young Malcolm McDowell is bad, mind you) one could enter the fantastic through his psyche and find it more acceptable...

...Still, David Sherwin's script has many racy moments, Lindsay Anderson's direction is always textured and full of gusto, and a cast of mingled newcomers and old-timers blends into a flawlessly incongruous cross section of bankrupt paideutics...

...Better yet would be to give it a new rating, XX: No one under or over 16 admitted...

...The housemaster's wife who, until then, was a model of vacuous placidity, is suddenly seen wandering nude through the boys' dormitory...

...The youth is involved in one more stereotyped situation than the next, and the dialogue in this script by Bartlett and Bill E. Kelly never fails to cement the stereotypes with sticky cliches...

...The story of three musketeers of nonconformity in a tradition-sodden English school functions admirably on the level of smug authoritarianism crossed by petty defiance...

...It is a loosely concatenated set of episodes involving two young men trying to coach their friend in flunking his Army physical—or, rather, psychical...

...Additional funds might have helped, too...

...Nevertheless, Greetings is saved by its spontaneity, zest, and easygoing wit that sometimes penetrates into satire and sometimes contents itself with zaniness...

...How he could have lasted two years at Berkeley, even if he had majored in Tree Surgery, is a mystery...

...in his Porsche, until he wrecks it in expiation for driving an idiot girl to suicide...

...It is the incoherent account of a wealthy, mawkish, platitude-mouthing dropout from Berkeley who wants to see the world and figure things out, and so proceeds to race up and down between S.F...