On Screen

...Harvey Hart's direction, though uneven, has moments of true incisiveness, and Georges Dufaux's cinematography is starkly, glaringly right...

...It deals, specifically, with the transformation of rather ordinary young men into pederasts and predators under the inhuman stresses of prison life...

...The underworld boss is a sadist who loves his arthritic mother, according to an old formula, as well as a homosexual who beats up his pimp boy friend before intercourse with him, according to a new one...

...The scenes of buggery may be overexplicit, but are nothing compared to the rape of Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, dismally set to rock music by Gait Mac-Dermot...

...The eponymous villain is played by Richard Burton, who increasingly resembles an overstuffed and exhausted bloodhound whose small remaining energies arc used up on keeping his eyelids from falling shut...

...The Anderson Tapes concerns a heist plotted under the surveillance of a number of public and private agencies that for one reason or another keep hidden television cameras and tape recorders trained on those planning the robbery...

...The agencies do nothing to prevent it from happening, though—in fact, they erase the tapes after the crinie is foiled, almost by accident, so that they will not become implicated...

...Even the most implacable gunman proves, his last hour upon him, an example of holy dying to gladden the heart of a Jeremy Taylor...

...If the criminals are merely somewhat more likeable than the right eous in this film, the scales are unhesitatingly tipped toward them in The Cop, the third film of the young French director, Yves Boisset...

...Indeed, almost all the perversity has been drained from the novel, typically transplanted from megalopolitan Chicago to rural Kansas...

...The other, embittered by the laxity and complicity of the law, takes justice into his own hands and becomes, in a just cause, as brutish as any brute...

...Like the play, the film is more convincing in its first half: It is easier to create characters and confrontations than to make change and development dramatically persuasive...

...Most amazing is Ralph Meeker's police captain, only every fifth of whose words emerges intelligibly from the mush he keeps stored in his mouth...

...In his sketch, rather better written than the screenplay (but, then, it wasn't based on a popular novel by Lawrence Sanders), Pierson tells us that out there in his "steel and glass and concrete box on the beach in Mal-ibu" he is "fighting to maintain a lifelong anti-establishment position from the inside...

...Fortune and Men's Eyes is a fairly faithful adaptation by John Herbert of his play about sadism and homosexuality in a typical prison...

...Worse yet, the framework keeps conflicting with the plot, the heist, which is further encroached on by a halfbaked subplot: the quasi-love story between the master criminal and his calculating girlfriend who, with leaden irony, leaves him for the more assured and respectable money of an oily businessman, thereby proving herself a true whore...

...The direction is uninspired, but the acting is consistently decent and, in the case of Michel Bouquet as the maniacal cop, sumptuous...

...A certain complexity does, nevertheless, suggest itself in isolated scenes or utterances, making the film a little more than a polished surface...

...moreover, the various trips of the camera outside the single cell of the play prove not all that necessary or desirable...

...Thus the critic of the New York Times admired the film's fascinating perversity, which is just what it lacks, the James Hedley Chase novel and its initial film version having been completely betrayed...

...The plot is paltry, rambling, hackneyed, and slackly directed by Michael Tuchner...

...and the plot, on top of its other shortcomings, is implausible...

...As the whore with the heart dreaming of gold, Dyan Cannon gives a performance for which "amateurish" would be too kind a word...

...Quincy Jones' score fails both as music and as accompaniment to the action...

...Martin Balsam gives a heavy-handed portrayal of a lighter-than-air homosexual, and the film's running gag, whereby the unlikeliest people refer to him quite casually as a "fag," is neither funny nor in good taste...

...Arthur Ornitz' color photography is, at best, primitive...

...DREARIEST of the lot is The Grissom Gang, a supremely clumsy remake of No Orchids for Miss Blandish by that measly director, Robert Aldrich, who basks in auteur status...

...And the humor, though profuse, does not blunt the keenness of the film's crusading zeal...

...Even the celebrated Burton voice is now seldom raised above a weary, raucous whisper that sounds rather like an old dog half-barking in his sleep...

...McShane, however, is fine as the pimp...

...And, like the best abysses...

...About the first, The Anderson Tapes, I would like to say something favorable, if only because leafing through the 25th Anniversary Report of my Harvard class (1946), I found the picture and autobiographical sketch of Frank R. Pier-son, the film's scenarist...

...it simply takes evil for granted and chronicles its exploits with unabashed relish, then slaps on a moralistic ending where justice triumphs —until the next time, that is, when another criminal marches forth toward glory...

...Actually, the new tendency is to make morality, justice, the law look worse than the criminal and his crime...

...There is some sardonic criticism of our bugged society intended, but neither the scenarist nor the humorless and flatfooted director is able to get much mileage out of it...

...In one form or another, this motif appears in all five of the following films...

...Despite a no-account part and being made to look less good than in My Night at Maud's, she is such an insinuating presence and so exudes warmth and womanliness as to raise the temperature and quality of any film single-handed—or single-faced...

...Clearly now, she was type-cast in the earlier film and, equally clearly, the movies can manipulate an inept performer into what looks like a highly accomplished performance...

...The criminals fall into two classes: those who are indeed vile, and those who are as brave, honorable and chivalrous as only criminals can be...

...The movie version also melodramatizes what in the play was kept within the bounds of valid drama...

...That is the film's basic trouble: The ambiguities of the law are ach-ingly palpable, whereas the outlaws are scarcely ambiguous at all—they are good or bad, not good and bad...

...The appeal of the stuff to our most primitive needs is obvious enough...

...Murder of crime bosses, escape from prison, entering into the homes of dreaded criminals seem to be matters of extreme ease, and such questions as why people engage in a criminal career, or suddenly give it up, are barely considered...

...in true populist fashion, morally superior to both the police and the heartless rich...

...One is hopelessly naive, and lets himself get needlessly bumped off...

...Sidney Lumet, surely the worst of the so-called better directors, has made the film choppy, diffuse, flabby, and wholly lacking in the good, unclean fun it wheezingly strives for...

...Villain, a crime film from England, is criminally bad...

...But the typical crime film, like most crime fiction, is not interested in that...

...Bouquet possesses that mirthless irony, smoldering soft-spokenness, and bridled fanaticism that can seize on the most trivial words or actions and intimate an abyss lurking behind them...

...Sean Connery is dullish in the lead, with a muffled accent neither British nor American, and unable, thanks to the vagueness of the screenplay, to create a smidgen of character...

...such good stage actors as Christopher Walken, Janet Ward and Anthony Holland do poorly...

...There must be a moral here—either that it is hard to fight the Establishment from within, or that people who live in glass and concrete boxes should not throw bombs...

...Here almost the entire police department, like the government in back of it, is tinged with corruption, and there are only two honest cops on display...

...In Aldrich's movie true love blossoms between the lovable idiot abductor (a doling fellow when not knifing fellow gangsters) and the heroine, whose haughtiness seems more like sexual immaturity, and who remains throughout her physical and spiritual ravishment an only slightly rumpled innocent, derived less from Temple Drake than from Shirley Temple...

...As Kim Darby looks and plays her, she would, besides, be more likely to induce impotence than to cure it...

...Most of the acting, particularly that of Michael Greer and Zooey Hall, is fine, and only Warren Burton remains weak and unbelievable in the central role...

...Yet much of the film is felt and powerful...

...As a bonus, the film offers us Francoise Fabian...

...With the exception of Alan King, who does a surprisingly commanding impersonation of a high-class mafioso, the supporting cast is rather unsteady...

...In the novel the jaded heiress comes to crave the kinky, near-impotent lovemaking of the loathsome gangster who abducted, beat and raped her...

...Another trouble is that the film (also based on what must be a cheap novel) is more interested in showing the clash of various police and underworld points of view than in seriously treating the fine points of character, motivation and credibility...

...The studied sadism has been changed into coarse brutality softened by an admixture of sentimentality, and the agrarians turned criminals are...

...less obvious is that morality and righteousness, by popping up as a facile, contrived conclusion, become farce, made to look as bad as the company they keep...

...Bouquet's intimations are seemingly bottomless and hopelessly beyond scrutiny...

...This is interesting only in view of the seeming excellence of her work in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice...