On Screen

...Arthur Osgood, though still prominent among the screen credits, does not once appear...

...This can happen only on stage or screen...

...The key character, Danny Rosenberg, a frail, homely, tormented Jewish musical prodigy, becomes a big, blond, sexy, extroverted rock musician, with the Jew and Juilliard in his background equally soft-pedaled...

...A more elaborate youth film is The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, based on a semiautobi-ographical novel by the then 22-year-old Robert Westbrook, Columbia University dropout, former film assistant to Sidney Lumet, maker of underground films, author of a book called Journey Behind the Iron Curtain, and son of Sheilah Graham...

...For the book is a flashily superficial bit of sexy plot-concocting, gussied up with derivative "modernist" fictional devices, such as extensive fantasies, a book-within-a-book, sequences based on speculation by one character about another, etc...

...I seldom walk out on movies...

...imagine serving up a dead vulture and pretending it is Thanksgiving turkey...

...The film contains the obligatory nudity, though not for Miss Bergen, whose insufficiencies force the prying camera into truly Pascal-ian leaps—from shoulders to toes, usually...

...and a rival horde of black and white student militants who seem to be protesting only because they cannot get laid, or so as to be able to get laid immediately after or even during the worst campus fracas...

...is clearly improvisatory cinema, an enterprise that requires true brilliance somewhere...

...The last shot has him, a failed would-be teacher and failed revolutionary, quietly falling to screwing his girl, while fiercely muddleheaded campus fighting rages all around...

...Victoria Racimo is a sexy face and body, and Dianne Hull is not even another pretty face, just another good body...

...The latter is mentioned once, the former not even that often...

...Perhaps because the locale is Dublin, where youth rebellion seems confined to catching the boat for London, everything is pretty tame in Paddy...

...Here, however, brilliance is not forthcoming, although Allen Garfield contributes a juicy bit as a pornographic film producer...

...Once again, Charles Hirsch is producer and co-scenarist with Brian De Palma, who also directed...

...once again some of the same performers appear in roles that evolved from those in the previous film...

...It is, in fact, a sort of lesser, Hibernian Alfie, lacking the earlier film's poise and sharpness, but with the same sexual symbology for social unrest...

...m My far the slickest and most odious of the current youth films, however, is Getting Straight, which is as crooked as they come...

...Purporting to be an outspoken seriocomic satire on what goes on in our universities, the film, directed by Richard Rush from a screenplay by Robert Kaufman, would play both ends against the middle, if it had a middle...

...As the middle-aged dispenser of eternally young blarney ("Get married...

...Dearbhla Molloy is devastatingly dead-center as Maureen, making you feel both the girl's youthful givingness and grace and the conventionality underneath with a oneness that rightly defies easy categorization...

...One woman is the lusty widow, Claire Kearney, as generous with her money as with her somewhat jaisande charms...

...The filmmakers have run out of ideas: They either try to milk the same situations as before (making Peeping-Tom sex films), or if they come up with something new (militant Black Theater that humiliates and manhandles white liberal audiences), they stretch it out as desperately as a lost traveler in the Sahara his one gourd of water...

...It may be in the director (e.g., Fellini, in some of his earlier films), or it may be in the performers (e.g., Nichols and May—though they worked on the stage, which lends itself better to the genre, and their best routines were not improvised...

...But Des Cave is a truly engaging Paddy: a lout full of delicate feelings, with a face that combines naivete with shrewdness, and a manner that can leap from tenta-tiveness to self-assertion at the drop of a neckline, if not a hat...

...The actor seems to be sweating oil, his speech is tallowy, and his eyes exude a sickly-sweet pustulence...

...One problem is that the layabout's wit and wisdom of Harry Redmond never reaches the standards set for this sort of thing by Joyce and O'Casey...

...The melees depicted are particularly grating, with both militants and militia shown at their worst, and the tone switching irresponsibly from snide humor to heart-tugging gore...

...Though there is much nudity, the hero never displays his genitals, most or least limply...

...But the director, Daniel Haller, has, on the whole, directed with a fluid brio, failing only in a young-love montage sequence, which is photographed in the standard television deodorant-commercial manner...

...And there the similarity ends, for Hi, Mom...

...What Haller does get, though, is nicely varied moods and tempos, giving you the impression of watching something more substantial than Lee Dunne's screenplay, based on his own novel, actually provides...

...the other is the pretty, young fellow office-worker, Maureen...

...I'd rather go to work...

...however bad they are, they manage to provide more than the plays I review for other magazines...

...the one that is a comic greaseball, and thus funny rather than sexual, the most...

...There remains, however, the important question of whether a youth film takes up the concerns of youths or merely their cravings...

...Hi, Mom...

...Robert De Niro and Jennifer Salt, who have the principal roles, are not prodigal enough with verbal invention, and even their expressions, gestures and intonations lack the final comic polish...

...Paddy is a footloose lower-middle-class youth of, say, 20, who works his way up from butcher's delivery boy to insurance company clerk, from apparent virginity to a rich double life pleasuring two complementary women, only to end up chucking it all...

...The discotheque sequences are especially offensive with their pretentious and pointless trickery, and the rock score is undistinguished except for one rather fetching tune by Michel Legrand to which, however, the new Hollywood-hotshot song-writing team of Alan and Marilyn Bergmann have contributed their usual disfiguring lyrics...

...By some dire misconception, if a pretty girl makes faces, screams and assumes agonized attitudes, the result passes for a performance...

...Patently, the trouble lies in those four-letter words, "most" and "legs...

...Milo O'Shea of the wildly bifurcating eyebrows simply lacks charm...

...and for a truly nihilistic film, characters like the hero, the heroine, and the black militant are treated with highly dishonest sentimental leniency...

...Or was she mocking him...

...Elliott Gould is allowed to get away with a lethal dose of Method mugging as Harry...

...At least now it addresses its pandering to an audience with an enthusiastic if indiscriminate feeling for film, rather than to the previously postulated faceless audience whose one presumed feature was near-imbecility...

...And whereas Greetings...

...Here is a typical passage: "'Oh, groovy,' she moaned...

...Another prepossessing element is the restrained rock score by John Rubinstein, which includes a title song that, for once, really works, instead of being a nuisance and embarrassment...

...or a buoyant teen-age pick-up on the train returning from a weekend with Claire, now living in County Wicklow...

...as his deliciously wasp girl friend, Candice Bergen's pseudoacting continues not to improve...

...Fuck me, man.' Stanley was about to oblige when he noticed that his prick was hanging most limp between his legs...

...Maureen wants to marry Paddy, whom she truly loves...

...And sex, being by now by far the least censor-able thing, fares infinitely better than the inchoate political and social comment in the novel, which, sketchy and innocuous as it is, gets summarily excised from the film...

...And Paddy has further sexual adventures, such as a threesome with a bizarre girl artist described as a masochist (a word that puzzles Paddy) and a dandified young man from the insurance office...

...Still, when all is said, Paddy is still only a fair little film—which, however, is enough to make it loom large over most current offerings...

...But the film is not without its charm, its moments of earned pathos, and a pervasive sense of incommensurability between an old dispensation and a new one...

...Even that whining voice of Miss Bergen's makes one wish Papa's ventriloquizing would come to her aid...

...There are even more basic problems...

...There is, first, Hi, Mom!, by the same duo that made the delightful Greetings...

...the film drifts along as aimlessly as its hero, reducing the plot and characterization to an even barer minimum, and the actresses to maximum bareness...

...His good-natured floundering from girl friends to friends, from friends to family, makes for a jolly, rambling, sometimes affecting film...

...There is evidence also of much haphazard cutting of the finished product: The character of Dr...

...Something might still be salvaged if the protagonist, Harry Bailey, a veteran of Selma and Vietnam who returns to the university to get an M.A...

...Though the dirty words are there, they are used frugally rather than, as in the book, as a kind of baser basic English...

...and once again there is an exclamation point at the end of the title...

...is, regrettably, an almost total waste of time...

...had a unifying plot device—how to stay out of the Army —there is no such central motif here, and the film switches from a parody of porno filmmaking to a parody of educational tv programming (extremely superficial) to a parody of Black Theater (extremely laborious) to a parody of...

...Other than that, Paddy has a family to contend with, consisting of a tough, demanding widowed mother, a grouchy older brother and a dying younger one, as well as a sizzling malcontent of a sister, handsomely played by Ita Darcy...

...But, and it is a but as big as Nelson's Column, it has all been done before, often much better...

...But no...

...The color photography by Daniel La-cabre, a former assistant to Claude Lelouch, falls short of Lelouch's work, though the fault may in part be that of Pathecolor, a process I do not recall ever having yielded masterpieces of color cinematography...

...And Maureen Toal coaxes every bit of humor and pathos out of the part of the aging mistress, without ever letting the characterization lapse into crudeness or stickiness...

...enabling him to teach, were a character whose changes had a meaning...

...But let us get back to our youth movies...

...As it is, it has only the two extremes: a horde of inhuman, computer-wielding, reactionary university authorities, occasionally leavened by a mere cynic or amiable nonentity...

...The acting is beautiful with a couple of exceptions...

...one cannot imagine why people would buy him drinks instead of hygienically throwing them in his face...

...in that case, however, the repeated gestures toward commitment of some sort are smelly red herrings...

...is so arch, derivative, pretentious, and crass that it drove me out of the theater gasping for air...

...But Harry fluctuates between a supposed vocation and teaching his pupils trivia (not to mention having his girl grade them), between belittling and endorsing the student activists, between wanting to make it at any cost and throwing it all up for a moronic jest...

...Yet the main trouble is that awful moral and ideological blur which, going the camera one better, manages to besmog foreground and background simultaneously...

...and even the girls are disrobed unevenly: the one that comes nearest to incipient stardom, least of all...

...Claire is content merely to keep him, in both senses, as long as possible...

...And as the rich Irish-American tourist out to hook him, Peggy Cass once again displays her standard mixture of ugliness and aggressiveness unsupported by any talent, which in some quarters passes for being a character...

...Where else could it be hanging: between his ears...

...There are also adventures of the mind, consisting mostly of Platonic dialogues in a pub with Harry Redmond, a self-styled poet who has never written a poem but whose talent for scrounging is as incontestable as his garrulity which earns him free drinks...

...Paddy, an Irish import, is not really a youth film, except insofar as its eponymous hero is young, restless and searching for an undefined fulfillment rather than willing to settle for a steady but routine job and a fine but basically conventional, marriage-bent girl...

...and the ending, as it now stands, is too amateurish even for these filmmakers—Westbrook, who wrote his own screenplay, and Leonard Horn, who directed...

...Richard Rush's direction is all fast, hollow cleverness, matched by Laszlo Kovacs' photography, a continual shuttling of focus between foreground and background, so that some part of the image is everlastingly submerged in an arty blur...

...Had I not seen Michael Greer do well on the stage, I could not have deduced ability from the droopy-faced slouch that is all we get here...

...The others are equally good, with only Judy Cornwell overdoing the eccentric artist...

...Yet Leo the Last, a film starring an actor I am devoted to, Marcello Mastro-ianni...

...and the "legs" is mere word-mongering...

...Unfortunately, it is that last datum that is most indicative...

...The main attraction remains the juvenile polymorphous sex-and-drug scene, with the obligatory rock background, and, because this is fundamentally the old college first-love-and-sex novel in new dress or undress, an occasional reference to Kant or Kenneth Patchen...

...repeatedly the suggestion is held out that either teaching or student revolt may have an inherent dignity, and equally consistently the ideal is kicked over by a cheap jibe or freewheeling foolishness...

...Yet it is dishonest even in its attempts at daring...

...The rest, including Don Johnson as Stanley, cannot get any kind of vote because they failed to register...

...I could go on, but let me leave a stone or two unturned, in case you do want to see the film for the sake of your fond recollections of its predecessor...

...So we might assume that the message is sheer nihilism...

...Badly written as it is, the novel does contain a rudiment of structure and some attention to form...

...At the crossroads between art and the market, the American film has almost always unherculeanly opted for the market...

...The "most" is a shabby way of achieving originality—a mere superlative will never take the place of imaged evocation...

...And though there is much talk of canes and whips, what we see is always decorously out of sexual sync...

...Victor Kemper's cinematography is poor, and the acting nonexistent, with the possible exception of Holly Near's fat Fran...

...Another is that the film was at least partly aimed at an Irish audience, which meant abiding by strict sexual censorship —the genuine scene of lovemaking has to be played fully clothed, in the manner of A Stranger Knocks...

...A new cinematic vocabulary for young-love-in-bloom sequences is desperately needed...

...It needs to keep its few mild surprises undivulged...

...Actually, it is more about Kant's homonym...

...Even this absurd oversimplification and manipulation might, up to a point, stand, if only the standpoint would stand still...