On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen DANGER FROM BELOW BY JOHN SIMON The Hellstrom Chronicle is a documentary of the lives of various insects—chiefly ants, bees, termites, wasps, moths, butterflies, mayflies, spiders and...
...It is all there in grim, awe-inspiring detail, and never in your life have you felt so sorry for some huge snake or hideous basilisk-like or tarantulan creature, driven mad before being ingested piecemeal...
...McCabe (Warren Beat-ty), a likable, penny-ante gambler, becomes the casino-cum-bordello operator of Presbyterian Church, a rising Northwestern town...
...Sometimes there is sheer loveliness, as when an ugly larva turns into a spooky chrysalis, which, in turn, becomes a master-painterly butterfly...
...the human sequences, showing Dr...
...One of those shamefaced, grudging, antiverbal romances—naturally— springs up between them and all goes well (albeit unconscionably slowly and ramblingly) until big mining interests try to muscle in...
...On the allegorical level, we must perceive certain disturbing parallels to murderous and suicidal human behavior, despite the script's affirmations to the contrary...
...After seeing this film, you will want to dump the azaleas, geraniums and African violets from your flower pots and switch to Venus flytraps post haste...
...Note the play of Miss Fonda's febrile hands when she is sweating it out with her therapist...
...The movie keeps stressing their superiority, which, ultimately, should lead to the worms' turning and inheriting the earth...
...As John Klute, a provincial cop distinguished less for imaginativeness than doggedness, he emerges so simplistic, one-sided, stolid as to make me wonder whether Bree wasn't better off with some of her kinkiest lower-case Johns, provided only that they belabored her with cloth rather than leather belts...
...Miller, a film about the non-Spenglerian decline of the Old West...
...indoors, a special process meant to resemble daguerreotypy merely looks like badly blown-up 16 mm...
...But not all the text is overwritten and overde-livered, and it is based on scientific facts...
...Klute takes us into the world of a New York call girl, and is very good while it sticks to simulated documentary filmmaking...
...Is it, then, wrong to find parallels between man and insects...
...But if Jane Fonda is Bree, Donald Sutherland, as the small-time investigator who uses, befriends, and finally loves her, should be Limburger, not Klute...
...Some are tinged with bittersweet loveliness, as the mayflies' living, mating and dying within one short day, all in the form of a frenzied, delirious dance of life...
...It shows the heroine, Bree Daniel, at work and leisure: turning tricks, facing her analyst, trying to break into show business, neurotically resisting genuine feelings for a man...
...The Brownian motion of the plot should now rise to the excitement of a showdown...
...But there are similarities...
...at a river crossing, thousands of ants forming a living bridge for the others to cross over, with those drowned immediately replaced by other blindly willing volunteers...
...hundreds of worker ants providing a living chariot to drag the enormous queen along...
...The movie is remarkably pretentious, its basic unit being neither a scene nor a shot, but a heavy hint or an arch symbol...
...Walon Green was co-scenarist with Sam Peckinpah on The Wild Bunch, whose opening sequence could easily have fitted into The Hellstrom Chronicle—except that in The Wild Bunch scene the crudest were neither the scorpion nor the ants, but the children who finally killed both with fire for sheer fun...
...The musical score by Lalo Schifrin is impeccable...
...Such statistics may not impress on paper...
...The Hellstrom Chronicle invents a young entomologist, Nils Hellstrom, played with often irritating flamboyance by Lawrence Pressman, who frequently has to utter words bordering on bombast that are supplied by the writer, David Seltzer...
...Writing, direction, acting and cinematography combine to make this first half of the film convincing and full of quietly ominous fascination...
...Everything is done with a carefully calculated offhand-edness: Dialogue is not heard but overheard...
...Truly this is one of our most valuable, loveliest young actresses— very possibly the most accomplished of them all...
...In spellbindingly inexorable detail—dramatic because a vegetable substance suddenly appears possessed of predatorily animal, or human, skills—we watch these plants lure, lethally embrace, and consume their insect prey...
...What is the lesson of this beautiful, terrifying and absorbing film...
...Vilmos Zsigmond's color photography is fine outdoors, though even here it must always be lowering, inclement weather...
...The poor continuity is given conclusive disruption by the constantly recurring bal-ladeering of Leonard Cohen, the Rod McKuen of the pseudoliterate...
...the faint seismic tremors of her facial play, indicating turbulences valiandy repressed...
...But, alas, the movie then veers toward a rather conventional and contrived love-and-murder story, complete with a regeneration of the prostitute that would have made Alexander Kuprin wince and should make Erich Segal exult...
...His enter-prisingness is complemented by the shrewdness of his partner, Mrs...
...Others would seem to be tragic: the black widow spider devouring her male after mating, or two young potential queen bees having to fight it out to the death, so that the fitter will rule the hive, while other queen bee larvae provide a succulent banquet for the workers, lest there be internecine competition for the throne...
...the dartings and hesitancies of her voice, with its sudden leaps and falls of temperature...
...the camera is not trained on events, it stumbles on them or catches them out of the corner of its eye...
...Prostitution, amiable skullduggery, and the viciousness of Church and Big Business are the subject of McCabe & Mrs...
...On the moral level, we may conclude that the absence of morality is precisely what makes the insect a more efficient form of life than man—even if optimum efficiency in nutrition, housing and reproduction may not strike us as a worthy substitute...
...what do we care if a marching column of driver ants is a mile long, 20 million strong, and devours or destroys whatever crosses its path...
...PROSTITUTION past and present is examined by two new Warner Brothers offerings...
...McCabe resists them, and three varmints are dispatched to the town to dispatch him...
...The supporting cast is uniformly evocative, as well chosen as the New York locales, tastefully photographed by Gordon Willis...
...A quintessential femininity is caught in transition between a badly dented girlishness and a nascent womanliness as innocent of its past as a butterfly of its larva...
...under Robert Altman's direction it is a slowdown, a kind of low-comedy High Noon finish where—this is the twist—all are losers...
...The direction of the insect sequences by Walon Green, who also photographed several of them, is flawless...
...The film's thesis is, simply, that the insect is in most ways fitter to survive than man—being, for example, the only creature that can endure atomic radiation, develop immunities to pesticides, and reproduce at a rate that would make even the present Pope reconsider his position on birth control...
...Nevertheless, for its atmospheric and incisive first half, Klute is to be commended and even, guardedly, recommended...
...Blind though they are, they overcome all manner of much larger beings: scorpions, giant lizards, serpents...
...Hellstrom at work and ponti-fication, are under the flawed direction of Ed Spiegel...
...Indeed, one should view this film on the four levels Aquinas posits for interpreting scripture...
...Thus on the literal level the film is a prodigy of color cinematography executed under extremely difficult conditions...
...They drag their prey down from tall trees and devour away, tiny maws chomping in manifold magnification, revealed by the microlens as they truly are: mighty and dreadful...
...There is a perfect blend here of shrewdness, acerbity, toughness with anxiety, and vulnerability...
...Among other things, we learn that in the time it takes a single human embryo to develop, the coddling moth can reproduce 401,306,000,000 times...
...On the anagogical level, we must recognize soullessness as the very means of insuring immortality for the species, though at the cost of making the individual totally expendable...
...Not all the episodes are that brutal and horrifying...
...What a malodorous actor Sutherland has rapidly become: When he is not insanely overacting, as in Alex in Wonderland or An Act of the Heart, he is equally maniacally underacting...
...But, as the film repeatedly, almost fanatically, insists, these insects proceed without thought or emotion in the human sense, and thus are both inferior and, from the standpoint of adaptability and inexhaustibility, superior to man...
...Jane Fonda, as Bree, is as irresistible as a surfy beach in July: Her performance washes over you like a tartly cooling, drolly buffeting liquid benediction, bringing wave after wave of unpredictable, exhilarating delight...
...In one sequence we are shown a number of insect-eating plants like the Venus flytrap and the cobra plant at work— or, rather, at dinner...
...The driver ants then form an encampment and go forth on forays...
...various in its composition and orchestration, it conveys the import of insect activity without crude aural redundancy or musical editorializing...
...Miller (Julie Christie), as good a whore-mistress as England ever exported...
...Alan Pa-kula has directed more flexibly than in his one previous film, The Sterile Cuckoo...
...On Screen DANGER FROM BELOW BY JOHN SIMON The Hellstrom Chronicle is a documentary of the lives of various insects—chiefly ants, bees, termites, wasps, moths, butterflies, mayflies, spiders and locusts, though many others have crawl-on or fly-on parts...
...If only the initially able screenplay by Andy and Dave Lewis had eschewed the obvious, the film could have been thoroughly mature, and the boys could have rated billing as Andrew and David...
...A plague of locusts covers 400 miles and consumes 80,000 tons of food a day...
...film...
...But if we see these sightless creatures marching, they impress us profoundly: soldier ants guarding the column's flanks...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 14
