On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen YOUTHFUL INDISCRETIONS BY JOHN SIMON NOTHING but youth movies this time round. Well, Woody Allen's Bananas is not exactly a youth movie—it is more of a retarded, or second-childhood...
...One is a brilliant apothegm by the Viennese sage, Karl Kraus: "Psychiatry is the sickness of which it purports to be the cure"—which can, with every passing day, be taken with fewer grains of salt...
...In the process of playing the games of summer—stealing sex books from parental shelves, awkwardly buying prophylactics, fooling around with adolescent girls—Hermie meets an older woman of 20, married to a soldier away at war...
...Woody is still building card castles out of one-liners...
...Let no one weep,/let no one say: I, so alone...
...Presently, however, we go from psychodrama to the dramas of the psyche: the quest for identity and the need for love...
...no sooner has he piled up a few than the next one drops dead and the whole thing collapses...
...A record is on the victrola, and after silently, forlornly, clingingly dancing to it, they end up, with hardly a word spoken, in bed...
...Against the attractive sylvan setting, these tearfulnesses of youth seem, not untrue, not preposterous, merely exaggerated...
...sometimes they go hungry...
...The grandest ones involve a psychotic, knife-wielding Chicano, a madcap sculptor building a Mt...
...and the superb color photography of Andreas Winding...
...When a big, strapping boy says, with tears streaming down his cheeks, that for inability to give or receive love he has been dead these 16 years, it is hard for me not to think of two texts...
...She lives in a distant beach house and Hermie carries her groceries for her...
...Hoarsely, he answers, "I don't know French...
...What about Hebrew...
...One evening he calls on her socially and finds her in a near-stupor: Her husband has just been killed...
...The fact is that intellectuals do not moonlight as stand-up comedians, and those that do have intellects that won't stand up...
...Finally, Michele becomes pregnant, they buy a children's book on childbirth and, helping each other, deliver the baby by themselves in their cottage...
...Why can't I show love...
...The cinematographer was previously stuck with wretched movies like La Prisonniere and Rider on the Rain...
...There he gets involved first with the Batistaish president and then with the Castroish rebel leader, and . . . But why go on...
...But what, I ask, was so marvelous about the early '40s that we should wax moony over them...
...There was an ugly war on, the fashions were unbecoming, the pop culture was all easy smugness based on the fact that God was on our side in the War...
...charming, but not adorable, and only occasionally cute...
...It is really a youth film junior grade, concerning two adolescents who run away from their loveless homes in Paris and set up housekeeping in a picturesque cottage in the Camargue...
...The boy confronts a world where Anglo-Saxons are bottom dogs, and, with two chums (one a tomboy who does, however, end up in the hay with him), has more colorful coming-of-age adventures than I have the space or palette to evoke...
...Well, Woody Allen's Bananas is not exactly a youth movie—it is more of a retarded, or second-childhood movie...
...If this had been written by someone like Colette, acted by a young Gerard Philipe, say, and a Joanna Shimkus, and directed by someone with sensitivity and imagination, it might have been touching and beautiful...
...The boy, 15 1/2, is the son of a rich Englishman working in Paris who is about to remarry...
...This is a decently but un-inventively directed film—Lewis Gilbert has, in the past, done as well as Alfie and as badly as The Adventurers—and it has two assets over and above the kids: the landscape around Aries, particularly the glorious Camargue with its extraordinary terrain and light, its elegant herons and untamed horses (remember White Manel...
...Robert Surtees' cinematography, built around a watery, vaporous turquoise, is enervating in itself...
...Next, we have a documentary about our troubled kids, Saturday Morning...
...The youngsters are mostly white and middle-class, but there are also some middle-to-lower-class Negroes, and one lively, no-nonsense Chicano, so we do get a mini-microcosm...
...Everything about the film is thin and contrived, and James Goldstone's direction could turn gold into stones...
...Benn, from the height of his success, recalls the seeming bitterness of his youthful poverty, and finds that it was not that bitter after all...
...Somehow I do not much care for the figure of the little schnook as great statesman and lover in spite of himself...
...Kent Mackenzie assembled 20 sixteen-seventeenish high-school students in a pleasant green shade somewhere in California and let them have a six-day group-therapy session...
...and the last scene, in which Woody, having himself become EI Presidente and returned to the U.S., finally marries his activist girl, with the wedding night televised again by Howard Cosell in the manner and terminology of a sports event...
...The new leitmotifs are "Who am I and who are They...
...only the Chicano and a very pretty but somewhat mannishly got-ten-up white girl maintain their cool...
...If you are willing to accept the fairy-tale premise of the film, though, the incidents in themselves are not without a certain verisimilitude, albeit highly lyricized in the manner of Paul et Virginie...
...The next day, the young widow is gone, having left a tender letter for Hermie...
...Paul and Michele themselves are likably conceived and enacted: pleasant-looking, but not beautiful...
...Things become progressively more inspired by the Great Psychoanalytic Soap Opera these kids are nudged into by every mealy-mouthed medium, from television to their parents' cocktail parties, from magazines and movies to what now passes for schooling...
...He sets the paternal house in order and enlists in the Navy...
...None of it makes for sense or solidly developing humor, and much of it is in bad taste...
...Both of these films depend heavily on nostalgia...
...The future remains conjectural...
...First, there are mostly enactments of little scenes involving dates and parents, problems of family living and understanding, coping or not coping with sex...
...here his sensitivity to color and light pays off exquisitely in a far-fetched yet endearing context...
...With Herman (formerly Hermie) Raucher's over- and underwritten script, Robert Mulligan's repetitious and floundering direction, the ordinariness of the supposedly sensitive Gary Grimes and the un-talentedness of the pretty Jennifer O'Neill, what comes out is mostly drivel...
...The wife despises the Spanish Americans, and slowly deteriorates between her mooching male cousin from Mobile and her decanter of sherry...
...And I think it is the end of any so-called intellectual comedian, be it Mort Sahl or Woody Allen, when he really begins to believe all that stuff about his intellectuality...
...Mother becomes marvelously understanding, and the tomboy will wait for him...
...Boys and girls, black and white, begin to lapse into tearful confessions, tiny breakdowns...
...But the therapists who goad Mackenzie's subjects—especially one fellow with a crew cut— do seem absurd and deleterious...
...They are now a happy family, but, in the last scene, detectives are about to snatch Paul away...
...bright, but not brilliant, let alone adult...
...Bananas concerns a little schnook who cannot make it for very long either with his odd job or his odd, revolutionary girl...
...Among the youth films proper, there is first of all Friends...
...The kids don't have an easy time of it: Michele has to keep house on very little, Paul has to take on odd and arduous jobs...
...Rushmore of his own, and the gun-toting, vengeful father of the two high-school whores...
...Thus the opening scene, in which Wide Wide World of Sports televises the assassination of the island's president, complete with instant replay...
...But the world of 1942 is recaptured with deadly accuracy, for which dubious achievement Albert Brenner gets one of the top credits...
...WE COME NOW to a brace of films about growing up in wartime: Summer of '42, about three boys lurching toward sexual initiation on a New England island...
...Red Sky at Morning is even less involving...
...If you are looking for credibility, for recognizable reality, Friends is not it...
...But a creeping pretentiousness spreads over their material, and pretty soon they are full of unfunny jokes about Kierkegaard and such, and instead of slipping on banana peels, they are making political satires about banana republics without knowing beans about their politics...
...Then the naval officer is lost at sea and the boy, whose maturing has progressed by leaps and bounds, now grows up at Keystone Kops tempo...
...Summer of '42 is the story, chiefly, of Hermie, who is emotionally ahead of his friends, although Oscy is bigger and more hard-boiled...
...The other text is a poem by the German poet, Gottfried Benn, entitled Keiner weine...
...He shot oodles of film, and in one year managed to boil it down to some 90 minutes of fitfully interesting material...
...The typical joke has Woody huffing amorously, "I love you," only to be passionately implored by the girl lying under him to say it in French...
...I tuned out on Allen after What's New, Pussycat?, and, tuning in again, I find that now as then nothing is new...
...and Red Sky at Morning, about a boy's coming of age in the New Mexico of 1944...
...Why have my parents never loved me...
...Still, the film does provide one with exceptionally chewy food for thought...
...A naval officer transplants his wife and son from Alabama to New Mexico, so they'll have a freer, healthier life while he goes back on active duty in 1944...
...He never sees her again...
...The cottage belonged to the 141/2-year-old French girl's father, now dead like her mother...
...He recognizes that only the transitory is beautiful—even poverty, in retrospect—and lauds that dull, hollow feeling that sobs without understanding itself: "keiner weine,/ keiner sage: ich, so allein...
...He goes on a vacation to the Caribbean island for whose liberation the girl has been collecting signatures and marching...
Vol. 54 • May 1971 • No. 11
