On Screen

...There is no real insight into or comment on the situation, no attempt at analysis—only a lengthy parade of commonplaces about synthetic existences...

...The direction and lion's share of the screenplay are credited to Enrico Maria Salerno, a fairly respectable Italian character actor, who might as well have changed his name to Enrico Maria Segal and the film's title to Storia d'amore...

...Jeff Young's direction is consistently un-noteworthy, and the two main parts are poorly filled...

...Because some reviewers have very early deadlines, previews are often held several months ahead of openings...

...when he does try for an effect, it usually misfires...

...Yet what Paul Sylbert, the art director turned scenarist and film director, has concocted here is a stew of every cliche of the "now" movie (for many of whose most successful previous specimens Sylbert had supplied, so to speak, the crockery...

...but people who liked The Graduate might even like this...

...Benjamin plays both parts (and all others) exactly alike—with that glazed, complacent smile, that slippery, somewhat rancid voice, and that face of a condescending Pekinese...

...What is left...

...These crashing nonentities are viewed sympathetically, as examples of a slightly premature case of existential ennui and not, as they would appear to anyone outside L.A., as lobotomized anthropoids...

...Stockbroker was directed by Lawrence Turman, the associate producer of The Graduate, and if there is such a thing as associ-ate-producerial mise en scene, this, alas, is it...

...The wife and the couple's son are now living in Ferrara with a sympathetic older man...

...quite literally, walking platitudes: A youngish couple who have broken up for typically cinematic nonreasons relive their past in a day of wandering and recriminating all over Venice...

...The film marks the filmmaking debut of Frank D. Gilroy, whose first stage play, Who'll Save the Plowboy?, seemed to me extremely deserving, even if his later dramas left me cold...

...But what happens if a film is neither of those things...

...The color cinematography, again by Urs Furrer, is undistinguished...

...Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me was made from the autobiographical novel by the late Richard Farina, one of the earlier hippie musician-writers, who was killed, characteristically, in a motorcycle accident as he was returning from the publication party for the book...

...It is a curious thing that films about the quiet desperation of California life almost never appear to be about their subject so much as by their subject—as if that giant boredom itself had made the movie...

...but when that place, in an overhead shot, is merely a piece of asphalt past which the car carrying the principals has driven, the result is ludicrous...

...Facing it anew would be even harder than remembering it...

...this might work for small character parts, but coming from a lead it is stultifying...

...But even in the novel the characters tend to be less than absorbing, a little too perfunctory or stereotypical, and their small to middling miseries are accumulated a mite too methodically...

...Women like the Misses Bolkan and Shimkus are far too rare and valuable to be condemned to jerking unsheddable tears or forcing un-coughable-up laughs...

...This problem came up again in connection with The Steagle, a movie that seemed so bad to me that I was hoping Joe Levine would have the decency not to let it open at all...

...Sadly, the lovely, piquant and gifted Joanna Shimkus is wasted as the stockbroker's wife, who, from sheer boredom, seems constantly on the verge of petrification...

...We get the obligatory raucous rock score and dull color cinematography by Urs Furrer...

...In The Steagle, Benjamin acts out crazy end-of-the-world fantasies while being a respectable father and Sarah Lawrence professor...

...If the film is important or deserving (not always the same thing), one can always rush over on opening day for a refresher viewing before putting pen to paper...

...Marcello Gatti's color cinematography is only adequate, but Venice is superb...

...As for Shirley MacLaine, she has not only lost her always questionable cuteness, she is also unable to suggest a woman with an active inner life...

...Jim McBride's Glen and Randa is yet another end-of-the-world fantasy —so bad that one fears the end of film may be even nearer at hand than the end of the world...

...As a further unsavory ingredient, he has served up Richard Benjamin in the lead, which makes the film about as appetizing as a can of Bon Vivant vichyssoise...

...Stockbroker is based on a novel by Charles Webb, whose previous novel was the source of The Graduate...

...As a director, Gilroy is pedestrian...

...the husband, a somewhat feckless musician, has summoned the wife back to Venice to reveal that he is dying of one of those typically cinematic brain tumors...

...Seeing it is like visiting a worthy but dull relative in the hospital: It is the thing to do, but, my, is one glad when it is over...

...The film is a case of too little, too late...

...And none of the actors in the main sympathetic roles has the requisite charisma: Kenneth Mars, Gerald O'Laughlin, Sada Thompson, Jack Somack—all are faintly creepy or grubbier than strictly necessary...

...I have no idea what the novel is like, but the film is, regrettably, exactly what you would expect: conflicts between the hip and the straight at an unnamed college (presumably Farina's Cornell) in the late '50s, just before the outbreak of student activism...

...The witlessness of this film should make admirers of The Graduate reconsider that one...

...in Stockbroker he is a California customer's man married to a pretty but confused girl, bored with his job and marriage, and seeking release in, of all things, voyeurism...

...The weary, half-witted and, for all I know, typically Southern-Cali-fornian couple of this film are manifestly the hero and heroine of The Graduate a few years later...

...particularly confused and unpersuasive is the final episode in Cuba during the first stirrings of Castroism...

...A more serious fault, in the movie at least, is that the heroine does not stand for anything, does not convince us of her worthiness, and cannot make us feel that her world is particularly worth preserving...

...By the time a last-minute worker like me with a relatively late deadline gets around to writing his review, a film may have just about faded from memory...

...All of it strains doggedly to be atmospheric, "period," and clever, but the results are only routine when they are not, in fact, anachronistic...

...Desperate Characters is an honorable effort on everybody's part, and has a valid, indeed urgent, theme: the creeping breakdown of urban (and also, to some extent, rural) life, ordinary human decencies being progressively swallowed up by corruption, meanness, brutality, sickness, and insanity...

...It is unfortunate that Gilroy saw fit to simplify Miss Fox's work by omitting any cultural references, underlining the obvious, compressing events excessively into set pieces, and cutting out the last chapter of the book altogether...

...The hero, a "beat" named Gnossos Pappadapoulis, undergoes all the standard confrontations: with his good black friend and some stuffy fraternity types, with square and liberal faculty and a wise faculty wife, with freaks and coeds...

...Desperate Characters is a film whose intentions are far better than its achievement...

...Though The Anonymous Venetian is a hoary and whorish tearjerk-er, it does afford us the most extensive unguided tour of Venice ever to be put on screen...

...It is a ghastly film, but no more so than The Marriage of a Young Stockbroker, also starring Dick Benjamin, who has made an acting style out of smugness and snottiness sea-soned with callowness and fatuity...

...The Italo-American actor, Tony Musante, is unconvincing as the dying husband, and certainly lacks the charm that might redeem the dead banalities he has to utter...

...THE ONE MOVIE in this batch that can lay claim to serious consideration is Desperate Characters, based on a novel by Paula Fox that skirts slick-magazine fiction yet maintains, on the whole, a higher level of veracity and sophistication...

...The important topic: the insidious undermining of our habitats and happiness...

...Although the marriage is clearly on its way from dilution to dissolution, it is promptly saved when the husband, in the linen closet of an exclusive country club, applies the precepts of an illustrated sex manual to his now delighted wife...

...Another fascinating young actress, Florinda Bolkan, comes to grief in The Anonymous Venetian, in which the two maundering characters are...

...The Steagle is adapted from a novel by Irvin Faust that I have not read, though I admire some of Faust's other fiction...

...The true victim here is Florinda Bolkan, the fiery Brazilian actress who was so exciting in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion...

...Some kinds of perfection being too much for me, I could not then and cannot now...

...Barry Primus is incapable of winning over anyone not presold on it to Gnossos' cause, and Linda De Coff, the newcomer who plays his girl, is not so much a find as a loss...

...He has, for example, learned from Bresson and Antonioni the device of keeping the camera on a place after the actors have left it...

...I did receive a call after the screening from his press representative to the effect that what was shown was an imperfect print, and could I please come back to see the perfected one...

...Since the platitudinizing dialogue does nothing to divert our attention from the city, the film makes a pretty fair travelogue, enhanced at times by a graceful oboe concerto of Benedetto Mar-cello on the soundtrack...

...The result is instant botulism...

...Typically, the liberal faculty member and guru turns out to be a fink who sends Gnossos off on a bad acid trip, and the respectable rich girl from Chevy Chase, who claims to be a virgin, proves a reactionary bitch who also infects our hero with the clap...