On Screen

...If the film peters out, it is at least rounded off, though not recouped, by a charming device at the end...

...There are weaknesses in the film...

...The Milky Way strikes me as an occasionally amusing but essentially slapdash, turbid, self-indulgent film, and I defy the hordes of enthusiastic reviewers, both high and low, to give a cogent interpretation of more than two fifths of what goes on in it...

...so, too, the film ends with the old and young tramps arriving at Santiago (Saint James) de Compostela, but being diverted by a whore (of Babylon...

...political and social symbolism which, rather than human realities, is made to determine the course of events...

...Now so mercilessly named a progeny can only be twin Antichrists...

...This sounds like something from the Book of Revelation, but, then, everything really pretentious and vacuously opaque seems to me to come from that source...

...In fact, the whole picture becomes a little too cute, too desperately calculating, and, finally, old hat and trivial...

...Though the operations and gore are not dwelt on unduly in the film, some people may find the red refrain disturbing...

...The film concerns two vagabonds, Pierre and Jean, who go on a pilgrimage from Paris to St...

...The Stranger then foretells that the pair are to beget upon a whore two children, to be named You-Are-Not-My-People and No-More-Pity...

...The film, in the tradition of those service comedies of which, for no particular reason, Mr...

...A thoroughly enjoyable, unpretentious film, on the other hand, is M*A*S*H-but because the spelling of its title falls flat on its asterisks, it will be hereinafter referred to as MASH...

...But the prime heavenly high road is the Milky Way, an emblem of Christianity's path through the ages...

...If subsidized and encouraged, he could make superb pornographic films...

...On the other hand, the comment of a youth who came out of the theater exulting that, because he did not have to avert his eyes, he felt he could go to medical school, seemed to me a trifle overoptimistic...

...I am not saying that ambivalence cannot be artistically fruitful, but Bunuel's constant tergiversations and ambiguities become, finally, exasperating...

...Bunuel, now older and more prudent, does not make his attitudes so obvious as that in The Milky Way, but, as I shall try to demonstrate further next time, his Christ is still a wolf in lamb's clothing...

...Thus most reviewers have seen in this film a ruthless satire on Catholicism...

...I am reminded of God's helping those who help themselves...

...The two are generally intertwined, and the result can be splendidly baroque and bizarre...

...and religious excess, often cruel, and usually viewed with irony...

...When he is playing an American, with some kind of Western-Hemisphere accent-as in The Dirty Dozen or MASH-he is very funny and just fine...

...James of Compostela in Spain...

...Pierre and Jean go off into the bushes with her...

...Irony may lurk here: Considering what God is like, would one want to be his people...

...and the silly chaplain, a joke from beginning to end, restrainedly acted by Rene Auberjonois...

...the gags are almost never lingered over (except that one potentially amusing pseudosuicide scene is allowed to drag on), and things are permitted to register on us without any leering, churning, or pushing...

...There is anachronism-people in the first decade of this century behaving in post-World-War-II manner...

...One is the unending influx of badly wounded, bleeding soldiers, a veritable red sea seeping through bandages, its waves parting only before jokes-wisecracks of any kind to keep oneself from cracking up...

...protects itself and survives whole...

...Katharine Ross, who is both improbable and bad as an Indian maiden, and Susan Clark, who, as a woman doctor from Radcliffe, is just plain bad...

...And, surely, if the analogy of the path of Faith through the ages and across the sky with that of the two representative present-day men is to hold, we must begin where every-things begins, on earth as in heaven, with the Trinity...

...In religion, Bufiuel seems to be striving desperately to rid himself of his Catholicism, perhaps even of all belief, but he just has no talent for atheism...

...When this young Canadian plays an Englishman or aristocrat, with the appalling accent he then affects -as in Joanna, Interlude, Start the Revolution Without Me-he is absolutely awful...

...from the shrine...

...The Stranger walks away, and suddenly is seen leading a bow-legged dwarf by the hand...

...The humor derives basically from two circumstances...

...Yet I am clearly reminded here of how another Bunuel film, The Age of Gold, ends...

...Yet to no less a critic than Stanley Kauffmann, the film is "a vision that lifts the history of the Church off the ground and sustains it through an idea of faith that is larger than any pettifogging theological pedantry...

...And, what is more important, the film is a trifle wrapped in a triple cloak of befuddling obscurantism...

...Yet if you look at the film without preconception, you notice that Jesus, as played by Bernard Verley, is a smug young chap with a shifty, downcast gaze, who often sounds smart-alecky...

...in fact, the dramatis personae can be divided into jokers and patsies, though with a certain upward mobility, so that the commanding officer and a nurse major rise in the end (not quite convincingly) from patsydom to jokerhood...

...We are treated to a series of religious-picaresque episodes in which past and present run parallel, or vaguely connect, or seem to correspond to each other...

...Two more clearly identifiable characters of the film are Christ and the Virgin Mary...

...Donald Sutherland, as the prime farceur of the three surgical musketeers, is a curious actor...

...But, as I have written before, the Hollywood Ten were all of them less than artists of consequence, or even of any kind, and it took blacklisting to make them important...

...She tells them there are no pilgrims to beg from there, ever since it has been discovered that the buried body is not that of the Apostle, but of the heretical Bishop Priscillian, and that they should instead beget on her two children, You-Are-Not-My-People and No-More-Pity...

...Ring Lardner Jr.'s script, based on an obscure novel, is urbane in its approach to gi humor, which is broad and corny...

...The title is an abbreviation of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, and there is an objet-trouve humor in that baleful anagram which is in official use...

...Then, as Christ and his followers rush on, the beggars are shown, but only up to their knees, groping on with their canes, practically stumbling into a crevice...

...The two hallmarks of a Bufiuel film are peculiar, often sadistic, sex...

...A text there identifies Christ emerging from a castle as the Duke de Blangis, one of the heroes of Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, who, with three fellow libertines, tortured, maimed, and horribly killed a seraglio of beautiful girls and boys along with other victims of this criminal lust...

...who is eventually driven berserk...

...Polonsky, on the strength of an acceptable gangster film he directed ( Force of Evil), and a quite good boxing movie he wrote the script for (Body and Soul), became an auteur, so that his current return to film is being celebrated as if it were a major artistic, even historic, event...

...slurring or skipping of large chunks of plot in the interest of grand, mythic effects...

...and so the film also dips into the past, to depict incidents from the lives of famous Christians, anti-Christians, and heretics...

...At the very end of the film, the bums having given the whore the rush, two blind beggars get their sight restored by Jesus...

...To tie the two levels together, a prefatory narration tells us that the Milky Way is known as the Road of Saint James in many European languages -not exactly true, but let that pass...

...Indeed, Christ, looking supersanctimonious, is shown finishing off a not-quite-dead girl who tries to stagger out of the castle...

...Bufiuel is good in patches-marvelous patches, to be sure-that can crop up even in such basically unsound films as El...

...a star is once supposed to have guided pilgrims to the tomb of the Apostle James, buried there, and the two men follow that stellar trajectory...

...and the mixture of suavity and Rabelaisian-ness pays off handsomely...

...whereas his best work, like Viridiana or Simon of the Desert, though more consistently good, may lack the bravura of the lesser films...

...Indeed, it is almost as if the tone of the movie had been derived from it, for the film is full of something that falls just short of gallows humor, and might perhaps be termed scalpel humor...

...Tom Skeritt does a neat job of the Southerner, without turning on any excess charm...

...His love-hate for the religion he thinks he has sloughed off has a way of assuming ludicrous, convoluted and, as in The Exterminating Angel, infantile forms...

...But all the performances are funny, and, what is especially gratifying, re-laxedly so...

...But even when a meaning is deducible, Bunuel's evaluation of its tends to remain inscrutable or ambivalent...

...But what a Trinity...

...begotten at God's behest by hobos on a whore, they will be pitiless scourges of a humanity that refuses to be the people of God...

...I myself see Church, Christ, and even God attacked in this film, but with a hate that, like Lord Alfred Douglas' love, dare not speak its name...

...his mother, as played by Edith Scob, looks like a sentimental, mass-produced Saint Sulpice figurine of the Virgin...

...Be that as it may, without the bloody scenes there would be no movie...

...Bunuel does not show their faces in this last shot, so that one might think that these fumbling, blind feet belong to somebody else...

...Right at the start, the tramps encounter a mysterious and commanding figure, whom the program identifies as "the Stranger," and Kauffmann calls "a prophet...

...Robert Blake and Robert Redford give decent, but not extraordinary, performances as an Indian who kills in self-defense and a sheriff who admires him but must, for reasons of political pressure and hysteria under the Taft Administration, hunt him down...

...But Willie Boy, despite its minor virtues, remains a mediocre film, trying hard to imbue its clipped statements and portentous gestures with existential and symbolic significance, and not succeeding very well...

...The other circumstance is the absolute need of the Army for trained surgeons, who know that they are irreplaceable and permit themselves the most outrageous behavior off and even on duty...

...The reason the film is fussed over, however, is that it was made by Abraham Polonsky, one of the victims of McCarthyite blacklisting, who was kept from work (other than some anonymous, and probably inconsequential, script collaboration) for 21 years...

...The action takes place in such a hospital during the Korean War-a second-class war, and, we are led to believe, a second-class hospital, too, at least as far as the prevailing discipline is concerned...

...Thus a four-letter word has to be brought in for comic effect during a funny, but not all that funny football game, and though the device proves startling, in scriptwriting, unlike in athletics, there is no great glory in becoming a four-letter-man...

...Robert Altman, a director who comes from television, has directed the film at a good comic-revue clip...

...In a sense, then, MASH is almost an edifying movie, celebrating as it does the resourcefulness and resilience of the mind, which, by an almost inhuman sense of humor if need be...

...He has not even given us a single film that is, in itself, a major achievement...

...The one has become three: a harsh father leading a stunted son who lets go a pointless pigeon-the triune God...

...the latter, equally out of nowhere, releases a white dove...

...Roberts seems to have become the archetype, deals with the adventures of three surgeon-captains: a Southern cracker, a Yankee eccentric, and an ethnically less defined practical joker...

...I recommend MASH to those who can enjoy it without expecting a political satire or devastating antiwar black comedy...

...Jesus, by the way, is never accorded his dozen disciples, only a desultory three or four, and at the marriage at Cana things really become ludicrous...

...The film is no more antiwar than it is anti-surgery, but it is rich in irreverent laughs that will echo loudly from both cliff walls that constitute the generation gap...

...She looks sticky-sweet, talks with a simper, has at least one other child (contrary to Catholic doctrine), and when she tells Jesus not to shave off his beard because he looks so much nicer with it, I fail to see how this can be taken as a pious tribute...

...The two biggest fools in the movie are the decent, devout, obtuse major, well played by Robert Du-vall...

...for all their shenanigans, these surgeons and nurses try to do their best by the patients...

...The odious nurse, Major "Hot Lips," brilliantly played by Sally Kellerman, turns from a horrid female into a regular guy, as, in the end, does Roger Bowen's doltish co-again, no fault of the actor...

...as things are, he feels obliged to bring in perverse sexuality surreptitiously or marginally-as a dream, an allusion, a surreal fantasy-thus dissipating much of its power and even reducing it to maundering private symbolism...

...This powerful personage refuses alms to the tramp who says he has no money, but richly rewards the one who shows that he has some...

...Kauffmann thinks them portrayed with beauty and reverence, in the colors of the Piero della Francesca frescoes at Arezzo...

...What makes MASH a landmark, however, is that it is the first Hollywood film to be openly and uncompromisingly against religion...

...Actually, all three of them are jokers...

...He has not made a single film that can honestly be pronounced un-flawed, or as near to it as mortal skill can come...

...This is as far as the credits will go...

...it tends to lack the directness and force of such swift kicks in the rear as are administered in MASH...

...The dialogue has a laconic bite to it, the framing of shots is sometimes quite nice, Conrad Hall's color cinematography (actually color and black-and-white superimposed) achieves disconsolately bleached-out hues for the daytime desert, and a truly ghostly quality for the night sequences...

...It is a western that is in some ways a little above average, and in other ways rather below...

...While Jesus tells a quasi-Biblical parable that is in fact a most un-Christian paean to usury, his mother watches him raptly across the table and dotingly exclaims, "Isn't he marvelous...

...of all filmmakers who can lay claims to being major, none is so hard to evaluate as Luis Bufiuel...

...But, in both his favorite realms, Bufiuel has a way of bogging down...

...Elliott Gould is also good, but a certain dopiness that is his basic comic resource, useful in other parts, does not work so well here...

...contrasts between Indian lovers (natural, good) and white American lovers (unnatural, neurotic), driven in with a sledgehammer...

...The debits include every kind of lack of probability...