On Screen

...One would first have to demonstrate the esthetic value of this new look, which Mrs...

...Berta Litvina squeezes some good moments out of the stereotyped part of Rachel...

...The jokes fall short of comic illumination, and the overtures are, generally, ill-considered...

...Israel's official entry at Cannes this year was The Dreamer, and, significantly, its producer, director and cinematographer, three Sabras in their 20s, all graduated from the N.Y.U...

...He has even managed a few quiet moments aptly: the penultimate scene, with Yossarian, Danby and Tappman each debating from a different hospital bed, and the static camera taking it all in from above...

...I am going to be brief about the superproduction of Catch-22 because I am one of those illiterates who did not read the novel, having found its humor, on the whole, not my canteen of tea...

...The movie is typical film-school stuff: boring, pretentious, arty, self-conscious, self-righteous, and false...

...Watermelon Man concerns a narrow-minded, loudmouthed insurance salesman, a smart aleck who wakes up in the middle of an ordinary night to find himself turned into a Negro...

...Andreas Winding's color cinematography is finely balanced...

...heat-wavy, so that a squadron of rickety bombers taking off seems to swim jerkily through the liquefying air...

...I am no inveterate Beatle-baiter, having enjoyed A Hard Day's Night and Yellow Submarine, as well as some Beatle records...

...film school...

...Or when Nately's whore does her stabbing disguised as a G.I...

...Paul McCartney, a chubbily handsome young man, appears quite pleasant with, or despite, his generation-shaping look...

...But Melvin Van Peebles, the black director, and Herman Raucher, his white scenarist, opt for flashy, superficial farce with gobs of facile portentousness...

...The idea suggests Kafka's Metamorphosis: like Gregor Samsa, Jeff Gerber becomes an outcast overnight, and the unexplained transformation could be put to powerful uses...

...Moreover, absurdism on film is devilishly hard to carry off, because, unlike the stage picture, the screen image perforce packs in a lot of direct, visual reality, and thrusts upon the absurdist filmmaker the opposite of Brecht's alienation effect, a reality effect...

...but when he hurled himself into her bed, was he after soul...

...Paul Glickman's color photography runs amuck with such perennial favorites as gnarled old faces, poetic meadows traversed by young lovers, and naked bodies revolving in sexual ecstasy...

...Crist thinks have zoomed by since the fifties (including perhaps those old-timers who haplessly sport the hippie look), makes someone a delight to look at...

...We are free to view this scene as ridiculous or sublime according to our prejudices, and it is a fitting ending for a morally and esthetically ambiguous venture...

...Buck Henry himself, as a corny Lt...

...Indeed, the characters in this screenplay by Sebastien Japrisot do not nearly make sense—beginning with a rapist who lets his victim become untied after the rape, hangs around the house for not even a crazy reason, and allows a rackful of guns to stand there waiting for the victim's reprisal...

...One is aware, especially now that their break-up has been announced, that the Beatles have progressed from the beatific stage to canonization, and that their fingernail parings have become priceless...

...of the four young men who have affected the lifestyle of one generation and—look around you and then back to photos of the fifties—at very least the appearance of several generations...

...And when old Rachel starts sulking about his new relationship, he promptly and incredibly drops it...

...At least Annie Cordy is good as the heroine's once wayward, now sober mother, and, in a small part, Jill Ireland is genuinely sexy...

...we see the inscrutable smirking of Yoko (truly, in Wilde's phrase, a Sphinx without a secret...

...But the others...

...For this purpose, it is appropriate to consult the film reviewer who has attained the highest degree of that kind of interest, Judith Crist...

...Add to this weird coincidences and calamitous misunderstandings enough for Dumas pere to stretch out into a tetralogy, and you have as hokey a thriller as can come from the crassest of Hitchcock imitators, in whose ranks we must include the maker of Topaz and Torn Curtain himself...

...This is too bad, because Nichols clearly has real talent in several areas, although his greatest deficiency —an underlying lack of ballsiness...

...I myself could not find a single outstanding song in the film, but that is not the point...

...but I do long for Clement to try, once again, for something more...

...Students should learn through such mistakes, but the public might profitably be spared them...

...out of the window...

...the others are, or come across as, amateurs...

...The Bed Sitting Room) mold...

...As a result of this hyping up, a figure like Milo Minderbinder, rather than being just the ultimate caricature of free enterprise gone hogwild, becomes a cartoon version of the American dictator of the '70s...

...Sloppily photographed and casually spliced together, it could pass for a home movie, except that an unfunny funhouse is not a home...

...The only one who offends is the scenarist...

...Something could perhaps be made of t'is if either Eli or Rachel, and preferably both, were given some depth, and if their relationship extended beyond his sketching her and their going shopping together...

...We are asked to understand that Eli is some deeply sensitive, visionary being, in short, The Artist...

...At one point, Lennon mumbles a bit of impromptu rhyme, something like "Isadora Duncan/Goes for Telefunken," and that is about the height of wit in Let It Be, We witness several recording sessions and one improvised concert on top of the Apple building that stops the surrounding traffic...

...The film can certainly compete with Hitchcock in some respects, but that is no unalloyed blessing...

...but he is also quite smart enough to elude an expert pursuer...

...But, I suppose, rock has become the international anthem of the youth revolution, and while that movement lasts, so will rock...

...But I have skimmed it, and I can tell that Mike Nichols' conception and Buck Henry's screenplay, though ostensibly faithful to the book, have really tried to turn its absurdities into a kind of superabsurdism...

...And, as usual in such films, no white over 11 is allowed a shred of decency...

...We race from sex to satire to Significance at breakneck speed, and what is jettisoned is the novel's hallmark: its dogged, doggy worrying of every funnybone it can clamp its teeth on...

...But all this does not so much create a style as recapitulate most of the styles now in vogue, and it does create, at least for someone not familiar with Heller's novel, mysteries too thick to penetrate...

...Instead, she utters a few unmoving commonplaces (representing the author-director, Dan Wolman, just as much as the speaker) and is photographed in the most obvious closeups...

...When Wolman tries to introduce racy details or juicy minor characters, they emerge as perfect cliches or gratuitous grotesques...

...We are presented with a home for the aged where a young man, Eli, is employed as a handyman, maundering about calf-eyed and uttering no more than a few pregnant platitudes...

...Thus when Rachel talks about the old country and her memories of war, one hopes for something visually and verbally poignant...

...Though the whites become oppressors, Jeff enters into prompt solidarity with blacks of all types, changes from dull Mad-Av clothes to gorgeously wild color combinations and styles, appears to be well rid of a drearily nagging wife, and may at last begin to live...

...Rider on the Rain, and reviewers have rushed in with hosannas for paradise regained...

...The worst thing about the film, though, is that it makes turning black, once the initial trauma and immediate losses are sustained and risen above, seem rather simple and pleasant...

...In an attempt to make it all a jot less obvious, the movie's final scene shows Jeff and a motley bunch of raggedy blacks practicing up with mops and brooms for the coming revolution...

...Yet Clement does manage individual scenes quite nicely, and there is an intermittent density of texture and atmosphere in the film...

...And there is the housewife herself, gentle as a dove and hard as nails, too frightened to make a call to the police or simply confess her victimization to her husband, but quite ready to walk unaccompanied into a Parisian crime den, full of gangsters and prostitutes...

...It means preponderance of plot and technique at the expense of everything else...

...The direction, like the screenplay, lacks a sense of rhythm, to say nothing of shape and substance...

...When Jeff turns black, his boss typically wants to exploit him as a prestige Negro on his staff, and sends him out to mulct the still untapped blacks...

...In some of the film's sequences, John displays an open sore on his Adam's apple—symbolic, perhaps, of the canker in the Apple...

...in fatigues, her identity impenetrable to anyone not intimate with the novel, this is considered great fun—the obscurer, the more with-it and better...

...Still, a new and different style would not be necessarily bad, if only it did not, as here, inevitably clash with what survives of the old...

...The question is whether changing the "lifestyle" of one generation and the appearances of however many Mrs...

...Flouting, it would seem, even minimal sanitary measures, their hair looks like a Disneyland for the insect world, and their complexions appear to be portable bacterial cultures...

...Ever since his inspiration left him, the maker of Forbidden Games has shuttled between a few commercial ventures (only one of which, Purple Noon, succeeded even on its own terms) and long periods of silence...

...that a work essentially related to Dr...

...Now he has come up with the most Hitch-cockian of thrillers...

...Thus when Jeff is rejected by his ostentatiously liberal wife, he rushes to the apartment of a pale blonde Norwegian secretary, who has yearned for him from the moment he turned black...

...Fighting off age is, more literally, the problem of that once remarkable director, Rene Clement...

...The actors have a way of getting lost in the script or in the directing, and many of them look so similar or are seen so briefly that they certainly lose you...

...The Beatles, by the way, have not changed the appearance of Mrs...

...And Gershon Kingsley's score settles on the film like saccharin on dust...

...Marlene Jobert turns the heroine into a blob trying very hard to act pixieish, and makes me think back sadly to the glories of Danielle Darrieux and Micheline Presle in similar roles...

...and there is much middling music-making and muddled Smalltalk...

...After a mad night of many-faceted sex, Jeff discovers that the girl's feelings are only black-skindeep...

...The girl's parents, who are supposed to typify bourgeois crudity, seem perfectly right to consider him a halfwit...

...The subtitles add their own irresponsibilities, translating "Et puis je men fiche" ("What's more, I don't give a damn") as "And then I ran away...

...Korn...

...the ad is for Pristeen, a product describing itself as a Feminine Hygiene Deodorant Spray...

...Again, we are shown that the insurance business is an unsavory racket...

...True, he is a madman...

...but all we get is a sullen, liquid-eyed bore...

...or the scene in a greenish corridor where Yossarian hesitates before breaking the bad news to the dead Nately's whore...

...I note a forced gaiety in Paul and John, a bemused quizzicality in Ringo, and downright gloom in George...

...Which brings us to the central point of the film: that the Beatles, visibly, are not that young any more...

...And with the help of his versatile cinematographer, David Watkin, Nichols has made everything look sun-bleached, dust-bitten and, above all...

...Again, the U. S. colonel, played by Charles Bronson with his customary beefy cuteness, speaks the most flawless literary French, yet pronounces it in the worst American tourist manner...

...Nichols combats this by making the fantasies and the story blend indistinguishably, by using certain incidents as recurrent yet mutually contradictory refrains, by dislocating the narrative sequence, and by fast cutting...

...The scene in which Yossarian is struggling in the water toward a raft has, as executed here, no visible purpose except to display Paula Prentiss naked, her beaver gleaming even blacker against an artfully whitened background...

...That sleuth is a U. S. Army colonel in civvies who finds it necessary to pose as a sadistic blackmailer to get the truth out of a mere housewife, and, naturally, ends up falling in love with her...

...Jeff quits, only to start, with what seems to me shaky capital, his own insurance business in Harlem, and, presumably, bleed his customers in ways not unrelated to those of his ex-boss...

...This would be of small importance if one generation, at any rate, were not determined to emulate their example, and if the spectacle were not touted by adult reviewers...

...Crist neglects to do...

...seriousness, perhaps even humanity —repeatedly trips him up...

...Jeff sneers at her for not loving him for his soul...

...He now calls her a bigot and keeps provoking her until she insults him and yells "Rape...

...Gait MacDermot, the composer of Hair, once told me during an interview that he expected rock to be a passing musical fashion, and I wonder whether it isn't about time for it to pass...

...As if sensing this, they disport themselves with a certain lassitude...

...Or we get a swift, modish survey of the horrors of nocturnal Rome (read: the World) as Yossarian staggers from observing instant fellatio in one doorway to a masturbating faggot in the next, from tots rolling a drunk on one street to a drayman viciously flogging a fallen white horse on the next...

...Particularly grubby are John Lennon and his worse half, Yoko Ono, who sits, smug and possessive, almost always within touching distance of him...

...Crist, as you can verify by checking a two-page advertisement in the women's magazines that features eight pictures of the lady...

...It is a delight," she writes of this movie, "not only for its music but for its closeup...

...But there is also that carelessness which permits the heroine to be raped in the nude, only to be seen, in the aftermath, dragging herself about with a pathetically half-fallen stocking on one leg...

...In other words, exaggeration has been reexaggerated, the satirically distorted turned into the swinging surreal, and the black humor of the '50s upgraded into the psychedelic humor of the late '60s and '70s...

...What is most wrong with Catch-22, though, is that it tries to look so dedicatedly different that it turns difference into another kind of predictability...

...Let It Be is a collection of audio-visual nail parings, but not without a certain morbidly sociological interest...

...When an attractive young girl, equally inexplicably, falls for and seduces him, he remains the same calf-eyed, taciturn oaf...

...Here he has carried off a number of scenes with considerable wit, and others with a nice sense of visual shock effect...

...Strangelove, and perhaps rather less radical than that film, has been forced into the Richard Lester (How I Won the War...

...But very little of this transcends the mass-culture, pop-music level, for all the hard days' nights the Beatles may have put in studying the sitar or Stravinsky...

...He draws quite proficient academic sketches of the inmates, especially of the eloquent face of an old woman, Rachel, with whom he has a deep involvement that remains unprobed by the filmmakers...