On screen

...It is Ann-Margret, as Bobbie, who is being hailed as the acting find of the movie...

...Most often Nicholson and Garfunkel are framed in as tight a shot as can accommodate both heads in front of a fixed backdrop, such as the Rockefeller Center skating rink or a corner of P. J. Clarke's bar...

...Carnal Knowledge concerns two Amherst students, Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Gar-funkel), the one a juvenile Don Juan in the making, the other a naively idealistic, timid but lusting virgin...

...The dazzling cliches or cunning hyperboles piled on top of one another yield sagging supercliches—without the individuality, unpredictability or aroma of the most mundane genuine character...

...But something is lacking: a performance...

...Otherwise, it perilously approaches the work of such masters of the bathetic as Pasolini and Chabrol...

...Nor is it informed by the love or hate that propels the jolly spoof or the biting satire...

...Still, there is cleverness in the film, albeit second-hand cleverness...

...But, of course, the film's aim is not carnal knowledge, but knowing carnage...

...Bergman also lacks language here...

...Jack Nicholson and Can-dice Bergen look like chaperones rather than freshmen at a mixer...

...the new breed, much more noxiously, tends to specialize in the latter...

...When they were merely living together, her slatternliness was a problem...

...It has only two good scenes, the opening and one where Miss Andersson tries on various outfits before her mirror...

...Jonathan is zestfully fornicating around town...

...and you do see, even if dragged in by their tails, a lot of interesting animals...

...That was in the late '40s...

...This character, platitudinous or not, always wrings our hearts, and since Ann-Margret's career seems in some ways to parallel Bobbie's, the performance should truly drench a handkerchief or two...

...His current Walkabout is the tragicomic story of two young English kids abandoned in the Australian outback and guided back to civilization by an aborigine boy on his solitary "walkabout" (rite of passage...

...He is, in fact, consumed by a welter of neuroses or worse...

...Back to Nicholson, who has directed his first film from Jeremy Larner's first script based on his first novel...

...But what is it all about...

...missing are the quivering insides...

...It is based, apparently, on a nice, straightforward novel...

...Finally, we are in the '70s: Jonathan has divorced Bobbie, whose alimony is bleeding him dry, though he is still living in high style...

...Sandy is, more or less happily, married to Susan (whom we do not see any more...

...Actually, a Kleenex can survive it...

...he has only three expressions—childish eagerness, childish fury, childish hurt—and he uses them as glaring primary colors...

...When, very rarely, there are three characters in a scene, one of them is usually a silent observer, so that the Feiffer scheme is not unlike Greek drama before Sophocles introduced the third actor —but a far cry from Aeschylus, for all that...

...All this might not be so apparent to a Swede...

...these, generally, represent two unchanging faces in a sequence of panels, with only the captions progressing...

...Carnal Knowledge could have been satirical...

...It is very revealing, for example, that neither Susan nor Bobbie is shown again after the premarital episodes...

...He is also apt to overact...

...Jonathan is involved with Bobbie (Ann-Margret), who has the immense breasts he has always craved...

...Jonathan tries to work out a swap, which drives Bobbie to attempted suicide and shames him into marrying her...

...Roeg has gimmicked it up with every kind of photographic and scenaristic pretentiousness, irrelevance, and puzzling opacity...

...The next few vignettes take us to the '60s...

...Not that the latest aspect of Nichols' eclecticism (to call it by the politest possible name), his Bergmania, is wholly fortunate...

...Still, the land is fascinating...

...Those often very funny routines worked on stage partly because live performers gave us the illusion of improvisation, of spontaneity...

...What should be apparent is the film's triviality and threadbareness, and the sadness of several great artists slushing about in this puddle...

...or they are gliding along at night, in a low-angle shot, against the summits of a row of lit-up skyscrapers along Park Avenue...

...Art Garfunkel looks youngish, inept and ridiculous, but he accomplishes this through being the type, not by means of any noticeable acting...

...The characters in the film are mere impaled specimens...

...market...

...In Carnal Knowledge, no character is fleshy and thick enough to blot out the smirk on the faces of his makers that is always?depressingly rather than funnily?visible...

...His voice is monotonous, his accent much too crude for an archeologist —in fact, one doubts that he could dig up a telephone cable...

...For, from what we hear or can guess about them, the women have changed...

...The latter manages to make something out of a scene in which Bergen and Gar-funkel are preparing for an outing and he, secret lover of the girl excluded from the event, follows their movements with the hostilely oscillating pupils of a spectator at a tennis match between two equally detestable players...

...Bergman moves his camera around with superb strategy, especially in those cramped spaces that some frenzied character criss-crosses like a panicky butterfly in a net...

...Bergman, with the English soundtrack and a sure-fire American box-office star (as Elliott Gould looked then), was out to make a woman's picture, a heartrending love story, guaranteed to sweep the U.S...

...And of that, the basically little-boyish, clever but frozenly immature, talents of Nichols and Feif-fer are incapable...

...Thus Nichols, a steady Fellini admirer and emulator, has imported Giuseppe Rotunno, the cinematog-rapher of Fellini Satyrieon and the Fellini episode of Spirits of the Dead...

...Leaving with his nonverbal girl, Sandy condescendingly lectures Jonathan about the true love- and life-style he is missing out on...

...Furthermore, the Feiffer-Nichols approach is remarkably Procrustean...

...any Hollywood hack can do immeasurably more with it, precisely because he does not let larger implications seep in...

...but its causes, like those of the woman's alleged immaturity, are just barely adumbrated, certainly not examined...

...Yet it is not merely a question of ages: Miss Bergen cannot act any age even though, with every new film, she tries harder, which does make her a rara avis among no-talent actresses...

...now she is becoming a menace whom, as he says, he would even marry to get rid of...

...An utter failure at it, she retreats into longer and longer hours of sleep, and, like Cato on Carthage, keeps harping on marriage with her every pathetic peroration...

...Later, we see these breasts unveiled and jutting skyward even when their owner is supine: two uncollapsible, silly cones or globes, bespeaking man-made wonders...

...Jonathan is finally seen being ministered to by a middle-aged whore (Rita Moreno), who must always go through the same ritual, word for word, extolling his virility while servilely abasing herself, so as to enable the now practically impotent lecher to achieve a precarious erection...

...The old movies excelled at the former...

...The final difference, I suppose, between a cinematic confectioner and an artist is that the former simply manipulates his characters, whereas the latter is possessed, moved, manipulated by them...

...Jonathan feels the pride of potentially possessing such a girl...

...sooner or later, one or another satirical shoe fitted everyone, from Cinderella to goatfoot satyr...

...unfortunately for him, this aging good-time girl wants to get married and he is her choice...

...There are times when the girls become central...

...Susan must by now be both a stylishly glittering, efficiently coping wife and a disenchanted, wiser, skeptical or bitter woman...

...Sven Nykvist's color photography is as juicily, suc-culently ripe as in A Passion it remained intentionally sparse and austere...

...Sandy begins to experience a hankering, and is only consoled by Jonathan's prompt castigation of all his conquests as castrators...

...Jonathan shows them slides of all his past loves, with appropriately hateful comments about all...

...It takes the sexual quirks, skirmishes and squirmings of Jonathan and Sandy (and, to a lesser degree, of their women) and cuts off everything else...

...There is very little humor in it, however, and that is mostly concentrated in the college sequences...

...Similarly, the film is almost exclusively made up of colloquies between two less than mobile faces...

...The film is in insipid, sometimes slightly stilted, English (no credit is given to whoever helped, or hampered, Bergman with the language), although in any tongue, it would sound slipshod and banal...

...Meanwhile Sandy is having an affair with a sleek young career woman, Cindy (Cynthia O'Neal), as narcissistic a ballbreaker as you could not ask for...

...While Sandy and Jonathan remain the same under their changing surfaces, or change only in degree of ludicrousness or abjection, the women develop a duality...

...It chronicles, I guess, the rise and fall of an affair between a Swedish housewife in her early 30s and a German-American-English, Sweden-exploring (i.e., Wandering) Jew, who is an archeologist...

...And we see the slightly sagging face, in relentless closeup, looking worried while trying to seduce...

...Soon both boys are sleeping with Susan (though Sandy does not know about Jonathan's doing so), and, eventually, she must choose between Sandy's ingenuous, one-sided puppy love and Jonathan's loveless but satisfying carnality...

...More important, they were short and unrelated: A large number of anonymous prototypes was presented in rapid succession as outrageously and uproariously commonplace...

...Here he has done nicely by his director, especially in those closeups or two-shots where the texture of a wall or the fabric on a piece of furniture plays an important part—the sort of thing Nichols has, clearly, gathered from the films of Antonioni and Bergman...

...Type-cast hitherto as a sex kitten, and now grown too old for that part, she plays the familiar, heart-tugging role of the swinging bachelor girl who has become desperate for a husband and tries, with touching clumsiness and sloppiness, to keep house for her man...

...We get low-angle shots turning the naked buttocks into medicine balls, more suited to workouts than to amorous play...

...the '50s bring us a Sandy who is a doctor, a Jonathan who is a tax lawyer...

...This would-be drastic film is merely brattish...

...Carnal Knowledge, which garnered copious critical acclaim and is setting box-office records, is a fine example of a film that combines delusion of grandeur with delusion of honesty...

...To portray the more evolved Susan and Bobbie would require a measure of care, of probing awareness, of understanding if not affection—or, at the very least, of an antipathy that is analytical, not merely snotty...

...Gould is beneath contempt: His catfish mouth emits a cutesy baby talk...

...Both men are losers, pitiful or laughable...

...The lover, we learn, is far from being the open, outgoing carnal creature whose intensely dark hairiness contrasts so vitally with the Swedish blondeness and blandness...

...In short, there is no context...

...he has, moreover, a countrified, lower-class speech pattern that does not fit in here...

...When, for instance, he holds his camera on a face for a premeditatedly unendurable length of time—a risk you can take with a good script and the face of a Bibi Andersson or Liv Ullmann—he is stuck with a Candice Bergen or, at best, Jack Nicholson...

...besides, in our day, carnal knowledge is available and belongs to women as much as to men...

...We see the pushed-up breasts, framed by a low decollete, the veins eerily prominent...

...Sandy has gone hippie with a very young, frizzy-haired and zonked flower child in tow...

...The film too is a loser, on any number of levels...

...BIBI ANDERSON, by the way, is in trouble, too...

...First, the casting and acting...

...She is not helped by the screenplay...

...True, there are those pitiful exposures of a famous body going to seed...

...Yet whereas the sex life of certain insects having nothing except a sex life can be studied to the exclusion of all else about them, human sexuality is so inevitably and significantly tied in with other activities and concerns that this pinpointing reduces men to mayflies—mayflies not even free, but writhing at the end of a pin...

...Uneasily, she opts for Sandy...

...Rotunno, in better films than those, has indeed proved himself an artist...

...For the sake of her alimony, she cannot have become the guilty party...

...Under the complacent, seemingly content life of the woman, there lurks, we gather, sterility and frustration...

...Ann-Margret provides little more than the bulbous shell...

...Drive, He Said is so bad that both men should have their larner's permits revoked...

...Written by Jules Feiffer and directed by Mike Nichols, it carries the automatic cachet of the up-to-date, the with-it, the muckrakingly truthful...

...But he has no feeling for that wretched genre...

...yet she must have worn Jonathan down and driven him to divorce —though, at bottom, she must still be more pitiful than vicious...

...This cannot be excused on the count that the story deals only with Sandy and Jonathan...

...Andersson and von Sydow act, even in English, with unabated excellence...

...but here, again, the causes and consequences are dealt with in an infuriatingly illegible shorthand, or with maddeningly facile symbolism...

...But when Miss Bergen is called upon to laugh and laugh and laugh right under the camera's nose, we are not allowed ingress into a soul, we merely keep bashing our heads against a facade...

...To reintroduce the women in later episodes would have required a subtlety of palette quite beyond either a Feiffer cartoon or a Nichols routine...

...The duologues gradually become repetitious, claustrophobic and oppressive...

...They are comparing notes just above the Rockefeller Center skating rink, where a pretty blonde is pirouetting on the ice...

...There is no social fabric, no world of ideas, no history—except for the shallow one-upmanship of playing the right pop songs for the various periods, and getting the dresses and hair styles more or less correct...

...Nichols and Feiffer are probably proud of what they must consider their narrow, penetrant scanning of the sex lives of two typical American males, with no excess or irrelevancy of any kind...

...On Screen FLAILINGS OF THE FLESH BY JOHN SIMON THERE ARE two kinds of dishonesty: the kind that does not even care to pass for honesty, and the kind that implies or loudly proclaims it is telling God's truth...

...so is Max von Sy-dow and, worst of all, Ingmar Bergman, with the Swedish master's first mainly English-language film, The Touch...

...The dominant attitude is a sophomoric, smart-aleck, snidely superior smirk—and I use the nastily sibilant alliteration deliberately...

...ONCE you start conflating these Feiffer cartoons or Nichols-May sketches, and try to derive sustained characterizations and narrative development from them, they simply do not jell...

...As has been remarked by others, Feiffer has given us a series of his cartoons...

...To be sure, Nichols is sometimes able to infuse them with the old Nichols-May pizzazz, but even that does not really work here...

...the kids, black and white, delightful...

...Unlike Bergman, Nicolas Roeg, who made the horrible Performance, does not arouse expectations...

...And Bobbie, as wife and divorcee, must be a strange mixture of bovine lethargy and spiteful defiance...

...Sandy discovers Susan (Candice Bergen), a Smith girl, and falls for her...

...Nicholson, who was marvelous in a character part in Easy Rider, is less than ideal for a leading man: His somewhat whiny, high-pitched voice lacks range, and he tries to compensate with rant...