On Screen

...There Bobby dumps his girl while, as he says, he investigates the situation at home...

...I suppose I must not reveal the tricky ending...

...To what extent history is tampered with, if at all, I cannot judge, although there is enough bungling and stupid red tape on our side, and enough pride and fanaticism on theirs, to make it all fairly believable...

...Directed and cowritten by Schell, it has only one virtue and labors hard to turn even that into a vice...

...Tora...

...Or take the scene that is supposed to explain Bobby's flight from home...

...Philippe de Broca's Give Her the Moon, in which the charm and talent of Marthe Keller and Philippe Noiret are wantonly wasted...

...Even the score by the faithful Pierre Jansen is back to that erratic music-making that was his before he hit on the felicities of La Femme infidele...

...perhaps Rafelson does know how to handle some actors...

...It is rather like engaging Rodin for a banquet to do sculptures in carrots, radishes and whipped cream (I mix my comestibles, if not my metaphors, deliberately), with a result so gorgeous it makes your gorge rise...

...Starting with the exceptionally beautiful shot of the Japanese planes taking off from their carriers on their deadly mission as the loveliest of rosy-fingered dawns is beginning to show her fingertips, and all through every horrible, shattering, in some cases even ludicrous, detail of the Pearl Harbor attack, TTT proves to be tnt...

...Pretentious, too, is the color cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs, frame after frame looking like something destined for the covers of the photography annuals...

...He gets involved with the beastly culprit and various members of his family, has an affair with the beast's sister-in-law and becomes a father-surrogate to the beast's son, and--well...

...Still, Chabrol's film is a good deal better than some of the trash that has been hitting the fan and the fans recently...

...Yet this novelist-hero and champion of high art (Chabrol is the same thing, but less beautiful) will say: "Tu realises ce que tu dis...

...Something about a parallel between music and sex, art and life...

...Why does his brother's fiancee tumble into bed with him so readily...

...Take Bobby leaving the oil field at sunset: a low-angle shot with an elaborate cloud formation (cumulostratus, if I remember correctly), filters for greater color contrast, and the solitary hardhatted figure jutting into the sky...

...worse yet, can be palmed off as truth on the unthinking reviewers and audiences...

...When she praises his playing, he poohs-poohs her paean...

...Susan Anspach, an actress I have found thoroughly irritating on stage, is well used here in the role of the elusive Catherine...

...Yet what is this analogy saying...

...On Screen A MIXED-UP BAG BY JOHN SIMON Five Easy Pieces, also shown at the late lamentable New York Film Festival, is an attempt at making an American film adult and artistic as well as commercial...

...I particularly liked Lois Smith as the well-meaning but fuzzy Tita, Karen Black as the banal but pitiable Rayette, and Billy "Bush" Green as the hero's buddy...

...Promptly he starts seducing the ethereal yet sexy Catherine, and for her sake even sits down at the piano again, to serenade her with a little Chopin...

...his dowdy, scatterbrained, kindly concert-artist sister, Tita...

...Why should this rather mannered, affected creature even begin to seem the sum-mum bonum to him...

...as a finished film, rather less so...

...We are meant to feel some grand assertion or irony lurking in the title, if we could only seize it...

...This, alas, does not work out...

...And there is a truly global collection of accents--both those dubbed in by others, and those post-synced by the actors themselves, all equally tinnily--which almost makes you long for the good old days of the silents...

...This is the cinematography of Sven Nykvist, Bergman's brilliant cameraman, who shot A Passion in such superbly understated colors...

...And in the end he rejects, or is rejected by, both his worlds, only to run off north (Alaska, alas...

...The performances range from the grin-and-bearable to the militantly offensive, like that of the playwright John Osborne as the poet Maidanov...

...Once more Chabrol trots out his stable of trusted undependables...

...Thus when a provincial housewife tries to impress a visiting minor writer with her literary erudition, her benightedness and clumsiness are laid on with a trowel that might have been borrowed from Bob Rafelson...

...The very title, Five Easy Pieces, strikes me as a bit of attitudinizing...

...what is much more surprising is how often it is not, and you feel convinced and crushed by the reality of the film...

...To make things worse yet (which seems impossible in a film so stiltedly written, directed and acted, but never underestimate Max Schell...

...At a gathering in the Dupea home, an arrogant neighbor woman is spouting intellectual slogans and, at the same time, being offensively condescending to Rayette...

...Some critics try to justify this low camp as the art of the put-on, as if the put-on were a valid artistic form...

...Typically, the plot (derived from a novel by Nicholas Blake, a pen-name of the present Poet Laureate) keeps uneasily shifting between contrivance for purposes of suspense that is never very suspenseful, and attempts at high seriousness, social commentary and art that are mostly showy posturings...

...There is, of course, a middle ground to which This Man Must Die belongs...

...And when Imperial Russia is made to be with-it, you had, I think, better do without it...

...Bobby himself does not play more than two of those piano pieces, however, and Tita finds one of the others anything but easy going...

...I think with especial distaste of James Bridges' coyly mawkish The Baby Maker...

...and grandiosely flashy shots such as those of the inactive machinery of the oil field looking, at nightfall, like a combination petrified forest and Calvary...

...This makes him pass for an artist among those who read the mixture as cinematic art combined with psychological profundity...

...Schell must have told him to produce colors that would outswoon the luscious spectrum of Elvira Madigan, and the colors of First Love--to say nothing of the fancy camera setups--very nearly do...

...He meets again his patronizing concert-artist brother, Carl...

...A film that has been rather unjustly reviled is Tora...

...the exiguity of its semblance of a plot...

...It is most unfortunate that Fox lost the collaboration of Akira Kurosawa on this movie, but what has been achieved by Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku is by no means contemptible...

...For everyone in these Warhol or Morrissey films is a glorified walk-on, improvising on-camera mutterings and cavortings that are supposed to represent not just the games of feeble minds, but a true and faithful rendering of our Terrible World...

...And, cynically, immorally, their success proves these Warholian frauds right...

...the insolent technical mess...

...The film certainly keeps our senses occupied as we watch and listen...

...We do not even get to appreciate his human potential with whose waste we would have to commiserate if the film were to have serious merit...

...I certainly can't see him playing any piece less easy than "Chopsticks...

...and an almost equally mute, uniformed male nurse...

...Jean Rabier comes up with the usual misty proto-pastel effects, and a limited palette that wants to look subtle but ends up looking washed-out...

...Goin' Down the Road, with which Canada once again demonstrates its inability to make a decent feature-length film...

...Rayette emotionally blackmails him into taking her along, and the journey is full of colorful little incidents--a pair of lesbian hitchhikers fleeing pollution and headed for Alaska...

...Surely this is meant to be Tired, Suffering Man Against the August, Uncaring Heavens, a noble capitalizable commonplace...

...but here as elsewhere the film fails to deliver...

...As a program, this is admirable...

...we never know whether we are watching a soul in torment or a set of jangling nerves...

...where realises is a thoroughly nasty bit of franglais...

...drinking and wenching forays with one's married buddy...

...What matters, however, is the action...

...When he learns that his father, paralyzed and struck mute, is close to death, Bobby decides to drive up to the family house in the woods of northern Washington...

...Bobby's friend at the oil field, though apparently an escaped robber, presents the lower-class concept of the good life in similarly oversimplified terms, and though Bobby rejects it, we are asked to feel a basic sympathy for his buddy's position...

...Other flaws include obvious transitions, like that from a couple about to have intercourse to a ball in a bowling alley racing toward an orgasmic scattering of pins...

...Though Bobby says and does things that indicate his rootlessness and discontent, there is no real getting inside him...

...there is the obligatory rock score by Mark London...

...For Bobby, whose full name is Robert Eroica Dupea (Tita is really Partita, Carl is Carl Fidelio), seems never to be satisfied...

...Another film coated with surface glitter is Chabrol's This Man Must Die...

...The opening reveals an oil rigger, Bobby Dupea, living with a waitress, Rayette, in a Southern Californian oil town...

...resentment of one's pregnant and nagging girl friend with her dreams of becoming a pop singer...

...The scene is vulgarly written and grossly overdirected and overacted (by Irene Dailey...

...a few, excellent...

...Carl's newly acquired student concert-artist fiancee, Catherine...

...Chabrol sticks in a cute in-joke when, after listing her preferred nouveau-roman-writers, the woman hesitantly adds, "Even Gegauff . . .") Help ing a young student with his homework on the Iliad, the hero pontificates: "Kafka is, in a way, the same thing, but Homer is more beautiful...

...Everything seems ordinary enough: the displeasure with one's work...

...to escape the pollution that seems to be as much inside as around him...

...Almost all the performances are good...

...Stanley Kramer's R.P.M., which adds to the usual Kramer ineptitudes an exasperatingly pseudoliterate script by Erich Segal...

...Something about everything in life being, or seeming, too easy for the disaffected person...

...points of view, and an attempt is made to relate it all with documentary accuracy while maintaining a modicum of human interest in some individual characterizations...

...There are, expectably, moments when the process photography is rather in evidence...

...a roadside cafe waitress as domineering as she is obtuse--until they reach a motel near the Dupea house...

...Tora...

...What, more than anything, saves Five Easy Pieces from triviality is the acting...

...Let me ignore the unclean, unappetizing qualities of the film and its participants (that, after all, is smelling it like it is...

...Yet Bobby's two worlds are seen only superficially, in images approaching and often achieving caricature, and his apostasy from his cultivated background is neither shown nor sufficiently explained...

...besides, the life-styles of these Warholian whores of pop-publicity are so much a put-on that it seems more correct to reject their very lives as an artistic and human failure...

...I only wish it could also make a deeper kind of sense...

...Monte Walsh, a maundering western that similarly wastes Jeanne Moreau and Lee Marvin...

...At the other end of the scale there is a film that just rolls in artiness like a pig wallowing in mud: Maximilian Schell's First Love, which traduces Turgenev's novella to the screen...

...but most of them are just nonexistent, like those of Schell as the father, and of Dominique Sanda, Bresson's untalented discovery, as the cruel fair around whom this tempest in a fake samovar is brewing...

...The film was shot in Hungary, whose Catholic ritual is supposed to pass for Russian Orthodox--but in every other way, too, time and place are absurdly tampered with: the action takes place before, during, after the Revolution, as well as right now, sometimes successively, sometimes all at once...

...the mute, motionless father, a former concert artist and teacher...

...Trash--the title is both an eponym and a built-in critique--was produced by Andy Warhol, and shot and directed by his long-time aide-de-camp, Paul Morrissey...

...even as rock it is dreadful...

...When Bobby gives it to her, we are clearly meant to side with him against these smug, superior upper-crust eggheads...

...A recent Claude Chabrol retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, though incomplete, sufficed to confirm me in my opinion that Chabrol possesses a mixture of slick technical facility and a mind preoccupied with human stupidity, perversion, and madness...

...Bob Rafelson, the director and co-scenarist with Adrien Joyce, tends to do things by doubles or by halves...

...It refers primarily to the five pieces of piano music performed at various times in the film (two Chopins, two Mozarts, one Bach), although I cannot affirm that they are really easy pieces...

...Jack Nicholson, as Bobby, has some searing moments, but though I can believe him as a tough worker, he (or at least his voice and accent) cannot convince me as belonging to an intellectual and artistic milieu...

...The really ghastly thing about Trash is its assuming that this abysmal, self-important parading of the mindless, tasteless, pointless shenanigans of exhibitionists improvising before a semiparalyzed camera has something to do with truth...

...you may well find this--especially the bitter bottom half--your cup of TTT...

...De Sica's Sunflower, which makes stinkweeds of Loren and Mastroianni in a banal and preposterous script signed by such good names as Zavattini and Guerra...

...The screenplay, as so often, is a collaboration between Chabrol and Paul Gegauff, who again parades his feeble literary jokes...

...It features the usual Warhol "superstars," who could more aptly be termed his star supers...

...and, worst of all, Trash...

...all of them resisted the script's and director's nudging toward obviousness...

...But let me grant Chabrol the unpredictability of unevenness, enabling him to make movies as awful and imbecile as, for instance, Ophelia, Leda, and The Third Lover, and also, at least once by some lucky accident, La Femme infidele...

...restlessness in one's rented mobile-home quarters...

...Yet even these have been lauded by our inane reviewers...

...even if there are two fine performances, one on each side of the Pacific: Soh Yamamura's Admiral Yamamoto, and George Macreadv's Cordell Hull...

...But this series of typicalities is impinged on by another series of sprouting signs pointing toward Bobby's being really a displaced person, a refugee from upper-middle-class musical circles, and himself a not unskilled pianist...

...Do not believe what you read about it in Vincent Canby and Pauline Kael...

...A parallel is presumably intended with the five women with whom we see Bobby making out: Rayette, two small-town hookers, one pickup in Los Angeles, and Catherine...

...It is the story of a man tracking down the hit-and-run driver who killed his son...

...Thus there are two traffic-jam scenes, two overlong sequences with a psychotic lesbian hitchhiker {played unsubtly albeit to great critical acclaim by Helena Kallianiotes), but almost nothing about what drew Bobby to Rayette in the first place, or how he discovers that things, as he puts it, have a way of going bad on him...

...The story of the events leading up to Pearl Harbor is told from both the Japanese and the U.S...

...Along with oversimplification, we get pretentiousness...