On Screen

...It is preposterous...

...So patient and understanding...

...A mediocre writer's attempt at satire may well be the least digestible kind of writing there is...

...One example of each: A disappointing cmelet is eaten by guests at a party with insulting contempt spelled out and underlined on every face...

...isn't transcendence of the fickle lover by the noble beloved one of the great themes in literature...

...In the elevator, Jonathan Balser is telling his wife what to pack for him for a short business trip: the plaid suit from Sills...

...And there are the performances, also in part the work of the director...

...Since Albertine no longer appears in the final volume of Proust's work, we may assume that the Perrys' literary development stopped somewhere along Swann's Way...

...In the movie, Tina Balser is a perfectly normal little upper bourgeois housewife who has the bad luck of being married to a fatuous young man, a lawyer intent on climbing all scales—social, financial, intellectual—and who finds that, try as she may, she cannot please him, being too direct, unassuming, and authentic...

...He finally gets her, partly out of fascination with his unvarnished caddishness, but mostly out of pique against her husband, to come to his fabulous apartment overlooking the East River from her fabulous apartment overlooking Central Park...

...Now what is this...

...all into the oxblood suitcase from T. Anthony...

...Yet Richard Schickel raved about this film in Life, and, in the Times, Roger Greenspun spoke of "great movie making...

...You're getting too damned skinny . . .") and been unfaithful to boot, she erupts, "You're sick, sick...

...and frequent training of the camera on a large Franz Kline painting on George's wall, though apparently meant to tell us something, remains as uncommunicative as Kline's work itself...

...Unfortunately, the film aspires to the status of biblical or Greek tragedy, and, in trying for the inexorable, lapses into melodrama...

...who shot up above his head when he did not come back to them...

...When Tina compares her innate gift for pleasing a man in bed to the gift Proust ascribes to Albertine, George bursts into a fit of immoderate laughter and informs his "poor baby" that Proust was a homosexual and Albertine really a boy...

...There is no contest between different but equal partners, and the greatness of the little woman has to be taken on faith—the movies' bad faith...

...Well, so much for the compliments, but now what do we do...

...Finally, after George has tormented Tina in much the same manner Jonathan has ("You have a pimple on your arse...

...This housewife is not only not mad, she is a paragon of sanity, functioning despite her husband's nagging, needling, bullying and humiliating her...

...Perry wants to switch here to a moment of seriousness, but her seriousness is indistinguishable from her satire, and both are kitsch...

...Incredulity is our reaotion, too, from the very first scene...

...What do you mean...

...So good it doesn't bear thinking about...

...two voile oxford and two Sea Island cotton shirts...

...are you always that good...

...Then Perry cuts to the next scene (big laugh...

...And Tina obliges: "You're good...

...Here the churlish wooing continues, e.g., "Please don't start that ladida stuff with me, it makes me want to puke...

...Actually, the film, written by Norman Wexler, lias an interesting and important idea, which, for some three fifths of the way, is handled very commendably by all concerned...

...Swept off her feet by this love talk, Tina falls into George's bed...

...And as Richard Benjamin acts the part—and as Frank Perry directs it, and Eleanor Perry wrote it—it exudes exaggeration through every pore...

...She goes back to her husband, who confesses that he has lost all their money in a socially prestigious but financially ruinous investment, that he is in trouble with his bosses at the law firm, and that he has been having an affair with a girl named Margo...

...Jonathan's mistress, Margo, though not unimportant to the plot and listed in the credits, cannot be detected among the walk-ons by the most aquiline eye...

...At first unwillingly, but then with a certain grim delight, the Comptons become friends of the Currans, the two men united in a symbiotic relationship...

...She has a nice ephebic figure and extraordinary eyes, but decision on her acting must await further exposure...

...There is Jonathan upbraiding his wife, who is not really awake yet, for everything: for not being awake yet, for smoking, for not having enough vitality, for not shaping up, for being too skinny, for having straight hair, for—I can't remember what else...

...And he explains: "The thing it all hangs on is: can you have a straight sex thing or not...

...Perry's writing (and, most likely, Sue Kaufman's) simply will not do...

...says Jonathan to Tina, and, pronto, we see her in bed with George), gratuitously nasty details that don't shed light on anything (a department-store Santa Qaus picking his nose, followed promptly by two women wrangling over a taxi, only to have an insolent man steal it in front of their noses), a fair amount of arty lovemaking (e.g...

...How dare she complain, one of them shrills at her, when she has a husband, a lover, and an eight-room apartment...

...Nevertheless, owing to some good writing by Wexler, able direction and cinematography by John G. Avildsen, some very assured acting by a little-known cast, and one letter-perfect, larger-than-life, unforgettable performance by Peter Boyle as Joe, the film achieves dignity and urgency...

...After the act, George resumes the courtship: "Baby, you are a terrific piece of arse...

...but even heightened realism cannot walk on such fallen arches...

...I have not read, nor wished to read, the Sue Kaufman novel on which this film, written by Eleanor Perry and directed by her husband, Frank, is based...

...Rather than go on summarizing this glamorized soap opera for illiterate sophisticates, let us get to the point...

...Carrie Snodgress has charmindy bewildered or ironic gazes at her command, and a voice that harbors not just one frog but a whole family of batrachians to delicious effect, though it is a little weak when fortissimos are called for...

...Now in the novel, I gather, he is a tough sort of writer in his early middle age, a Mailer or Styron, all bumptious sexuality and hypermasculine aggressiveness...

...Of course, Tina's little girls are obvious changelings, imps of the perverse...

...And she endures and endures, virtually without protest...

...the shoes—not the new ones—from Peal's...

...Isn't achievement of self-awareness a valid topic for art...

...the casual amorist runs after her enraged, suddenly hurt where he is most sensitive...

...despite his tyrannical demands on her time, attention, energy...

...We've had other kinds of superiority before: dinner at Elaine's, an opening at the Feigen Gallery (always with the real names duly dropped) of a pop sculpture show by Allen Jones, about whose quality Mrs...

...He woos Tina with "Tell me, does screwing appeal to you...

...As they leave, the elevator operator stares after them in dismay...

...Even if, in the end, it misses by a mile, in its earlier passages, Joe cuts close to the overheated heart of the matter...

...You're a fine human being, Tina...

...The last scene shows Tina in group therapy, being upheld by a couple of fellow patients and savaged by several others...

...Yet everything is played for laughs, so that Tina's suffering loses all dignity: The tenor is both more pseudosophisticated and genuinely callous than when Olivia de Havilland or Bette Davis had to suffer for the three-handkerchief trade...

...Carrie Snodgress is good at reacting pain-edly, with an expression half re-proachfulness, half disbelief that anyone could be as beastly as her spouse...

...despite his being the kind of domineering yet also whining ass from whom any judge would grant her a divorce on sight...

...But, I learn, the autobiographically tinged housewife of the book's title was really mad: angry, exasperated, in psychotherapy throughout...

...Jonathan gets beastlier...

...Tina in her conjugal bed trying to get at the bottom of this by reading The Past Recaptured...

...or, patronizingly, as the helpless victim of her passions—by some male scenarist or director...

...But where the director truly errs —over and above the casting of Langella as Prager, which makes the supposedly shocking revelation about him come as the slowest anticlimax this side of the New Haven Railroad—is in the consistent over-stressing of what needs to be merely shown, omission of what might be of interest, and attempts at making something out of nothing...

...If, as in the book, we were given the first-person narrative of a heroine in psychiatric treatment, the film might make sense as Tina's distorted view of the situation...

...That, you see, is the best a distinguished writer can come up with when wounded to the quick...

...He shakes her furiously and shouts, "Hey, wait a minute...

...Or is the point that she is a masochist...

...But, either way, the sensitive little woman at the apex is a cliche—once a heroic-pathetic cliche, now a wryly patronizing one —and the men at the vertices are oversimplifications of machismo or muttonheadedness, of one kind of immaturity or another, above whom our heroine rises, melodramatically or comically, to self-realization...

...It is obvious and heavy-handed enough when she deals with children (David and Lisa, T.adybug Ladybug, Last Summer), but when she undertakes adults who are meant to be devious or pompous or crude, she hits us over the head...

...The audience laughs heartily at this, and the dishonest film ends with a predictable cop-out as Tina's eyes stare at us in mysterious closeup...

...But early in the film we have evidence to the contrary...

...But she puts up, shuts up, waits on him hand and foot...

...But Perry casts in this part Frank Lan-gella, an actor of not inconsiderable talent but inconsiderable virility, with a rosebud mouth that Betty Boop might have envied...

...The litt'e daughters are two cuts below the Katzenjamnicr Kids, and minor characters like a Bronx baby-sitter and a bitchy, aging actress are overdone to a turn of the stomach...

...Doubly preposterous...

...But in the "woman's picture," old or new style, the woman is always seen complacently as basically superior to the men—by some female scriptwriter...

...As Carrie Snodgress is misjudged and mistreated by her pompous, social-climbing lawyer-husband and clever but destructive novelist-lover, the matter is one for sophisticated nods, knowing snickers, and condescending chuckles...

...So now she is getting it both from an egomaniacal, exploitative husband and an egomaniacal, sadistic lover, with whom she has—again in his brilliantly writer-ly words—"pure and incredible sex," a line Langella delivers like a slightly overripe mango...

...Hell, it's sanctity...

...Yet even that does not make sense: She has been married to him long enough (their daughters are aged, roughly, eight and six) to have long since left him, murdered him, or acquiesced...

...But Joe merely wants the friendship of one whom he admires and whose act he wishes he could emulate...

...she has every kind of servant and household trouble...

...Now comes the obligatory intellectual superiority bit...

...No...

...Modishly enough, with nervous camera movements in confined spaces, ironically commenting cuts ("Why don't you go to bed...

...You've got to put on this big virile act because you're really a fag...

...An advertising executive, whose hippified daughter is living with a pusher in the East Village, finds the girl freaked out on speed and, in an access of righteous fury, accidentally kills her lover...

...Sanity...

...Perry is careful not to commit herself...

...And how has husband Frank directed Diary of a Mad Housewife...

...This comes as news to the poor baby, who was not taught it at Smith, though everyone in the audience who is going to get the point at all is presumably familiar with what the late Stanley Edgar Hyman called the Albertine Strategy...

...Why is this such a formula...

...When Joe later summons Bill Compton, the executive, to a meeting, the latter fears blackmail...

...One has the feeling that Mrs...

...No, because she is clearly shown not enjoying playing Psyche to her oafish Cupid, even being mildly horrified by it...

...underneath blue bed covers, with arms and moans protruding), and many exposures of Miss Snodgress' vestigial breasts—quantity over quality, the perennial Perry formula for everything...

...The way Langella enacts him, one doubts that George could...

...APPEARING BRIEFLY in the last sequence of Housewife is Peter Boyle, an actor who makes Joe into a startlingly insightful cinematic experience almost single-handed...

...and similar well-turned phrases, not to mention an erection which, right in the middle of a party, he rubs against her groin...

...To recover, he goes into a bar, where he betrays his guilt to Joe Curran, a prejudice-corroded foundry worker who has been fulminating drunkenly against all minority groups, hippies in particular...

...Tina, guilty herself, takes it all in her stride, whereupon Jonathan exclaims gratefully and platitudinously (once again, we do not know whether this is satire or just bad writing): "Oh, Tina, you're wonderful...

...Think of Rilke's mighty Beloveds, "die gewaltigen Lieben-den," who "while they called out to him, jutted over the lover...

...Incensed, George pushes her around a bit?rather gently for the sadist he is supposed to be—and turns her out for good...

...Richard Benjamin is allowed to turn Jonathan's priggishness into piggishness, and give one of the least restrained performances even in a Perry film...

...When Tina, angry at last, yells at George, "Save that for your bloody awful books...

...the robe from Turn-bull & Asser...

...So it is one-upmanship for the half-baked, or halfupmanship...

...This becomes a paradigm for the unholy coalition of the upper-class Buckleyite Right with the know-nothing reactionaries of the chip-on-the-shoulder, hard-hat-on-the-head lower middle class...

...It is ineptly derived from Mary McCarthy's The Group, although there at least the boring brand names were an attempt at reconstructing a bygone era...

...I guess it's both: satire and bad writing...

...and then—then!—she meets this famous writer, George Prager...

...I thought you were good for a couple of screws, but this may get out of hand...

...I have already cited the absurd catalogue of items Tina was to pack for her husband: Absurdist humor (which was not intended, anyway) zooms around more fancifully...

...Do you think we can pick up the pieces and maybe have a better marriage than we ever had...

...On Screen MARRIAGE AND WORSE COALITIONS BY JOHN SIMON Diary of a Mad Housewife is the updated version of the "woman's picture," in which the trials and tribulations of a misunderstood wife who turns into a misunderstood mistress no longer soak the female audience's handkerchieves as they did in the days when Joan Crawford and Joan Fontaine were being misunderstood...

...Meanwhile Jonathan is full of self-praise, and Tina doesn't demur at that either...

...Take that back...

...socks—provenience unspecified...

...The Sun Also Rises filtered through The Wind in the Willows...

...If the dialogue is Miss Kaufman's ditto for her...

...Again the cinematographer is Gerald Hirschfeld, and, as in The Swimmer, he gives us his typically savvy but uninspired fashion-magazine color photography...

...Is she going to change, or is she just going to pieces...

...Well, such words are irresistible and Tina falls in love with George, and spends her afternoons with him whenever he deigns to have her...