On Screen

...A further minor though distinct horror is the presence of Rex Reed in the role of Myron...

...In addition, the Doctor's rival for Melinda's love (Robert Tentrees) has been reduced to a reject among dressmaker's dummies, an artfully unhappy ending has been faked in for greater "maturity," and Herbert Ross' dances (not his best, but still, a musical must have dancing) have been left out completely...

...Michael Same, the director, who already proved his lack of talent with Joanna, and who here also collaborated on the unspeakable screenplay, uses as a refrain clips from old movies that are meant to comment ironically on this supposedly new one...

...A whole montage of clips from bronco-busting to bursting dams is intended to explain what happens when Myra is buggering Rusty, whom she has strapped to a table...

...As the heroine, Kim Darby clearly belongs in a Walt Disney picture about high-school hi-jinks and the rest of the cast is not much more convincing...

...A much more spectacular film is Censorship in Denmark, whose one point is that there is virtually no censorship of any kind in Denmark, and, the sexual crime rate having declined there, isn't it a wonderful thing...

...Censorship in Denmark also features a lot of interviews with typical pornography dealers and consumers, as well as with tourists and curiosity seekers...

...I can only hope that Hagmann goes back to tv commercials, where his neo-baroque talents can be fully appreciated...

...At the gala preview of Myra, Mae was mobbed by thousands of adoring fans, some of whom brandished mae west fan club posters inside the theatre, while others tied up traffic, broke down police barriers, and smashed glass display cases outside...

...Yet it is a subject one cannot entirely avoid at a time when so many new films, directly or indirectly, touch upon it-????or, more often, burrow into it...

...No such luck...

...As for the film itself, it is the complete ruination of what little merit there was in the stage version...

...and cynosure of Bunnies seen bustling around him, the once justly admired critic stands every chance of becoming yet another unthinking Reed, a fall from eminence I would deeply regret...

...May it not prove seminal...

...I have not read Gore Vi-dal's novel, but, having read some of his more ambitious efforts, I assume sophisticated pornography would be just about his speed...

...Yet I had the feeling that there were people of all ages in that adoring throng who would have gladly crawled into bed with her...

...But I suppose it must have to do with her death-and-menopause-defying act, with the sweet notion that Americans might still enjoy the benefits of a full sex life in Forest Lawn, lucky stiffs that they are...

...in the film, nothing like that is actually done????one scene of instant fellatio as a reward for supposedly revolutionary activity was cut after the first New York screening...

...Thus, to put Dr...

...For the action takes place in a high-school gym-nasium-cum-auditorium, and this, along with the other locales in the film, is synthetic...

...Chabot not into his office but on top of the Pan Am Building when he is trying to will Daisy back to his experiments and his arms, means preferring visual flashiness to emotional validity...

...Whatever the novel may be like, it surely cannot be this sort of witless, lip-smacking, consistently inept cop-out...

...For that, the people and their passions must draw us in...

...Squirm for the sufferings of the victims, squirm for the joylessness of the tormentors, squirm for the moral superiority imputed to this Myra (that is not even carried through in the film), squirm for the filmmakers who imply that this is good unclean fun...

...even less will it turn on the most willing thrill-seekers...

...Reed's movements resemble Birnam's toward Dunsinane, his lines dribble from his mouth like moist mashed-potato mix, and his facial play is a permanent pudgy pout...

...The film makes you seasick...

...What we see was not staged directly for this film, but only recorded or rerecorded by it, thus diminishing its chance to stir up our healthy lusts and appetites...

...Vincente Minnelli, the auteur critics to the contrary notwithstanding, was always a mediocre director with some flair for tear-jerking, as in The Clock...

...These prove about as pale as the ones with the experts in the previous film...

...A mono the new films are two major sex-documentaries????or whatever the term is for the growing mass of films that purport, seriously or spuriously, to shed light on sexual problems, but depend for their success on the prurient expectations they can satisfy or, more likely, arouse...

...In the process of wanton cutting, one of Burton Lane's best tunes, "The S. S. Bernard Cohn," was thrown overboard, and what was worst all along, Alan Jay Lerner's book, was given greater prominence...

...The plot has been made more ridiculous, important story elements have been cut out (originally intended as a road show, the film has been whittled down awkwardly for continuous showings), and pointless extra characters have been added (the gifted Jack Nicholson in a no-account part...

...In short, his acting is on a par with his writing...

...As for the film's last hope, the legendary Cecil Beaton's costumes, I can only quote an actor friend: "Even poor Cecil was asleep at the swatch...

...I had hoped that this campy butterfly and self-styled critic????who was cast, I am told, so as to make certain things about Myron obvious without the script's having to spell them out?would at least be able to portray himself on screen so that, on the strength of his success, we would be rid of him as a writer...

...Miss West, who is 78, but according to the Times "looks years younger" (well, maybe two), was bedizened with a couple of feet of platinum wig, yards of ermine and white silk, and more solitaires than you would think it possible to fit on ten shrunken fingers...

...Outrageous is confused with courageous...

...Among the filmed interviews, there is one with Kenneth Tynan in the London Playboy Club, and, as creator of Oh...

...I admire its ingenuity more than its achievement, though it does bring to our screen for the first time an ejaculating penis...

...The onus lies in the eagerness of the film (and, I dare say, the book) to make us squirm...

...What is it about America that takes a repellent, egomaniacal female impersonator????whose ostensible gift is belting or shrilling out songs, but whose real one is making love to herself on stage, screen and tv????so readily to its collective bosom...

...What makes it all genuinely pornographic is not the homosexuality, which most reviewers irrelevantly castigated, nor the bisexuality, which Vidal so proudly advocates...

...It is, I am afraid, hard-core pornography?which does not make me want to ban it, either, but does make me wish it were at least good hard-core pornography...

...Actually, it is as if Hagmann were giving the camera incessant hotfoots, making the poor thing leap like a demented creature and land in the unlikeliest places...

...I have no doubt that the police can be brutal, just as students can be stupidly provoking, but the execution of this scene, wallows in every kind of falsity...

...And if, as I believe, sex is not the chief cause of student revolt, films like this one are cruelly unfair and exploitative...

...Pornography can only work if it arouses our desire to get into the act...

...If the idea, however, is that student sexual hopes are, in fact, frustrated, the film equally fails to make that point...

...That kind of deliberately halfhearted????or, in this context, halfarsed????cleaning up is the real dishonesty, the real smuttiness of the enterprise...

...On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is not really obscene, except insofar as it foists upon us Barbra Streisand in a dual role, with accents that are exaggeratedly Yiddishy in one part and Britishy in the other, and with 18th-century costumes and wigs that make her look like everything from the Grand Turk to Fanny Brice as Oc-tavian during the presentation of the rose...

...The absence of a real university complex adds a topological unreality to the various other kinds the film flaunts...

...The great sequence to which all builds up is the police bust, staged and shot as part ballet, part Wal-purgisnacht, part bloody Invasion of the Body Snatchers (viz., pigs), and featuring such symbolic delights as club-wielding cops leaping out from behind an immense American flag hung over the proscenium of a stage...

...In The Strawberry Statement, we are always encouraged to envision the orgy just around the next turn of the reel, but all we get is puppy-love, puppy-politics, and Stuart Hagmann's, the director's, insufferable manipulations...

...Now if sex is the prime mover, or movementer, the subject should be explored with honesty and attention to detail...

...The story, as everyone knows, concerns Myron Breckinridge who, after a Scandinavian operation, becomes Myra...

...There is even a duet sung by two separate but equally obnoxious Barbras...

...And squirm for a director who thinks that actors as untal-ented as Raquel Welch and Roger Herren can do anything but further cheapen the proceedings...

...Alas, this married pair of worthy sexual enlighteners looks like a powerful argument for absolute abstinence, and the film itself is nothing but a collection of chats with still other experts, snatches of plays and paintings with sexual subjects, and clumsy enactments of situations where legalized prejudice harasses the innocent pursuits of lesbianism and intercourse with a ripe and willing 15-year-old...

...I believe that it is a collective inferiority complex, an overwhelming sense of anonymous submersion in an egoless mass society, from which the Giant Masturbator sticks out in what appears to be heroic defiance...

...Montand was once a singer but never a linguist, and he performs here as one who has forgotten singing and not yet learned English...

...Now I am all for no censorship, except in the case of children, and 1 am all for the decline of sexual crime (though the figures have not yet yielded unambiguous conclusions), but I am not at all for this movie...

...More than by the heroine's ability to make flowers grow miraculously, I was struck by the sprouting of Barbra's ego, which starts as a single giant cactus and ends as a one-woman rain forest...

...In the present case, only one musical number, "Come Back to Me," can be said to come off, but only at the cost of desperate trickery...

...After seeing On a Clear Day, I went back to listening to Barbara Harris' renditions of the songs in the original-cast album...

...Add to that cutenesses and clevernesses of every kind, like a high crane shot of the singing students seated and swaying in a perfect Busby Berkeley circle, and you have true visual obscenity matched by the glaring vulgarity of a bad rock soundtrack...

...I cannot, so shortly after struggling to analyze Miss Streisand's appeal, be expected to undertake the analysis of Miss West's...

...In the case of Freedom to Love, this consists of the script, direction and on-screen presence of the eminent sexologists, Drs...

...Censorship gets around our censors by being ostensibly a documentary about Denmark...

...His maniacal use of the zoom lens makes that instrument second in hatefulness only to a dentist's drill...

...The movie turns all this into a dream, and cleans up the comically lewd incidents by reducing comedy to oafish ness and lewdness to suggestive smirking...

...Inside and out, they did their best to knock the old lady, already insecure on her pins, completely off her feet...

...I also believe that any pronounced member of a minority group????negro, Jewish, Indian?who basks in its real or presumed characteristics, captures not only the benevolence of that group but also much guilt-induced applause from the oppressive majority...

...After Barbara, what is missing from Barbra is not only an a, but also everything from b to z. w w W ith Myra Breckinridge, however, we are in mid-obscenity...

...These scenes are exquisitely stomach-turning, but, unfortunately, not without several grains of truth to them...

...The sundry changes Lerner made for the screenplay are not so much rewriting as rewronging...

...Equipped with physical beauty, knowledge from within of both sexes, and expertise in Hollywood lore, she sets out to capture both the men and the women of filmland today, and tomorrow the world...

...When it is not zooming, the camera seems to be passed back and forth between a spastic dromo-maniac and a whirling dervish...

...his alleged talent for directing film musicals never registered on me...

...Despite its well-intentioned and ill-delivered narration full of statistics and impious platitudes, the film will convert no one to anything...

...furthermore, a conventional plot about a rather dopey student romance was added...

...If I call these two films major, it is because of their greater eclat...

...Calcutta...

...Eberhard and Phyllis Kron-hausen...

...Both in execution and in concept (and here Vi-dal must claim his share of the glory), this scene marks the latest nadir in major-studio bad taste, a record previously held by Candy...

...Yet perhaps the saddest thing about the film is Yves Montand in his first English-singing role...

...Come to think of it, none of this should prevent him from plying both trades with equal kudos...

...For the sexual acts are now performed by half-clothed Barbie dolls with carefully castrating camera angles, and if the dirtiness is not for real, it must be for dirty...

...Such a film is The Strawberry Statement, based on James Simon Kunen's book about the student revolt at Columbia University and with a screenplay by Israel Horo-vitz, the respected young playwright...

...What is worse, the performers recorded look, at best, average and perform (or indulge) without genuine passion...

...vulgarity becomes the incarnation of the people's dream (let us not forget that the word comes from vulgus, people), and shamelessness the overcoming of our natural national timidity...

...Because the film could not be made in its natural habitat, it had to be transferred to San Francisco and a mythical institution...

...There are even some films around that have hardly any overt sex in them but manage, nevertheless, to generate a subliminally pornographic atmosphere...

...Still another dimension in horror is the casting and display of Mae West, fully clothed and perfectly mummified, as a nonstop sex talker and performer, playing endless sexual prologues and epilogues with young men who allegedly service and even desire her...

...What makes the film especially repulsive and, in a sense, pornographic is the steady suggestion that perhaps the principal reason for which students join the Movement is to get laid, a theory we are already acquainted with from that pioneer work, Getting Straight...

...Suddenly there was feeling for the words, sensitivity to the character singing them, and no attempt to shatter icebergs, break glasses, or pierce eardrums...

...It treats us mostly to views of pornographic stills, the shooting of pornographic films, and the enactment of live pornie shows...

...As the film now stands, what little sex there is in it occurs outside the revolutionary context...