On Screen

...On Screen TWO FOR THE ROAD AND ONE FOR THE MONEY BY JOHN SIMON It is hard to decide whether films like Groupies and Gimme Shelter should be deplored or guardedly applauded For these are cinema-verite films (once upon a time called documentaries) on interesting topics that are now dead for other filmmakers, who might have done better by them On the other hand, other filmmakers might not have touched them, or been given the chance to do so, and perhaps we should be grateful for what we have Groupies strikes me as the more cogent of the two because, however perfunctorily, it does try to get at the backgrounds and motivations of its people, if only by lettmg them chatter on Gimme Shelter presents Mick Jagger and the Stones respectfully and superficially, in the manner of an official hagiography--which, in its way, the film was meant to be It was commissioned from the Maysles brothers by the Rolling Stones, and its sins, accordingly, are not of commission but omission It leaves every Stone unturned Groupies, of course, are the camp followers of the rock musicians, but they differ from earlier and most contemporary fans and stage-door hangers-on These girls (and, m some particularly maudlin cases, boys) are not stopped by the stage door or anything eke They tend to be ridiculously, pitifully young, and will often sleep with all the members of a rock group in rapid succession--including even their managers and entourage--afterward boasting to and comparing notes with fellow groupies They frequently work m teams, from a brace of roommates upward to a dim constellation The majority are outlandishly bedizened freaks, but quite a few could look very presentable, and some are beautiful and have genuine style These become supergroupies and are famous, one of them married Paul McCartney The typical groupie sports a characteristically garish look--that of a life-size rag doll made of cloths of shrilly clashing colors, and with hair out of imbricated polychrome Brillo pads Ron Dorfman's and Peter Nev-ard's film tries to show groupies of every stripe against diverse but typical backgrounds in rock emporiums, at home in weird pads, in dressing rooms, at disorderly parties They talk about their pasts to some extent, about their presents in full and obscene detail, about their futures with hopes of getting out of groupiedom or proudly persisting in it Many of them see their lite as a vocation, an end in itself, the escape from conformity and mediocrity--as if nonconformity couldn't be just as mediocre Some of them are not even aware of life styles other than their own And a few have defected from what they now consider a sick existence --though how they get along in more conventional circles is not examined in Groupies The filmmakers boiled down 80 hours of footage to the present modest length, and claim, probably with veracity, that nothing was staged for the camera Why should it have been9 These are staged lives to begin with, however random the scenes and aleatory the sounds that emerge The trouble, apparently, was that some of the most celebrated groupies were unavailable to the filmmakers, or their footage was too dull, or, in some instances, too sensational Thus the Plaster Casters (a pair of girls who orally arouse the organs of famous rock and movie personalities, then proceed to make plaster casts of them) were caught in action, but it was considered wiser to show them merely talking about their upstanding enterprise Also, the very competent 16-mm photography comes out rather grainy in 35-mm enlargement, and though it was relevant to show some of the rock groups at work, we may have been given too much of that and not enough audience reaction and idolization Otherwise, the film is effective and grimly instructive Audience reaction and star-worship of a dubious sort are the mainstays of the Maysles brothers' Gimme Shelter, which concentrates on the free concert at Altamont that ended the Rolling Stones' triumphal American tour It was here that the Stones engaged the Hell's Angels as their bodyguards, and that one of these knifed a pistol-wielding Negro youth to death Using the Altamont concert as a frame, the film shows scenes of a previous concert m Madison Square Garden, of the difficulties m obtaining a site for the free concert and the concomitant ruckus, of the preparations for that concert, of Mick Jag-ger and other Stones watching what happened on a Moviola, and of Mick and his cohorts flitting about Unfortunately, the fact that a real-life murder accidentally got itself recorded on film tends to overshadow everything else in Gimme Shelter, one's eyes are continually scouring the screen for the killer Angel and his less than angelic victim Still, what comes across clearly and unavoidably is the unruhness, the incipient and sometimes manifest savagery of the crowd, and, above all, the madness Not a momentary crazed condition, but fundamental and sustained dementia This surfaces in a variety of specific symptoms, such as a youth's stripping himself to the buff and getting the crowd to use him as a volleyball Even more disturbing is the behavior of the front rank of the mob, those within whose grasp the performers literally are They stare at the Stones with an expression that could be described as stoned, zonked, glazed, but also hungry and somehow vicious--like a rabble that has just smashed the store windows and is getting ready to loot Greedy polyp-like arms stretch out toward Jagger and the rest, when repulsed, they tenaciously, tentacularly return to the task You feel that this crowd is a Moloch that would as soon devour its idols as listen to them Yet where the Maysles and Charlote Zwerm, then" editor now elevated to equal filmmaker status, err is with the Stones themselves To be sure, Jagger and his henchmen emerge as archetypal creeps to me (just as to the young they appear to be archetypal demigods), but the nature and background of their quiddity is not even cursorily examined Jagger, in his appalling way, is something to behold (not to hear, for the music is worthless, and so, doubtless, would be the words if one could make them out) whether he is performing or just existing, two conditions that resemble each other like allotropes The particular horror for me is his lascivious public enjoyment of his perfect androgyny as if his male self were having continuous, ostentatiously hp-smacking intercourse with his female self, thus piling narcissism and exhibitionism on hermaphroditism and topping it off with pelf--for all of this is designed also for conversion into an unending stream of cash Mick Jagger becomes a one-person Zeus and Danae act The Maysles, though, catch this less well than does even such a dreadful quasi-narrative movie as Performance There are incidental epiphanies m the film Among them I include the enshrinement of Melvin Belli as a legal superstar, he is a nonpareil of greasy self-display handling the negotiations for a stadium to accommodate the Stones His office looks like the bar of a cruise ship, his press conference is a "radical-chic" party given by socialites for militants, his own person is an oily amalgam of a Lindy's habitue, Hollywood agent, and Mafia overlord Not uninteresting, either, are the clothes worn by the Stones and especially Jagger, which clearly set the styles for the well-bedecked groupie But most fascinating is one single look in the movie, given by a Hell's Angel to Jagger in mid-performance a blend of amazement and contempt that intensifies into disbelief and disgust I cannot judge the photography, having seen it only on a small screen, where it seemed more than adequate In fact, it becomes quite lovely during a right-and-dawn sequence when the Altamont race track is being converted into an outdoor concert hall and, again, when zooming m on Mick Jagger's particolored shoes The murder itself is a bit of an anticlimax because, even in slow-motion replay and with stopshots, it unfurls hastily and skimpily--as these things do in reality without the services of scriptwriters and directors But the Maysles do not even probe the Stones' reactions to the killing beyond showing them watching the replay, and that has a staged look to it If some notable comments were grunted out on this occasion, they certainly escaped me From these films, and a few others we have seen lately, we get a curious insight into our youth culture It clearly apes adult culture without realizing it It has its aristocracy, the college students, its middle class, the dropouts who take on various more or less flimsy jobs, its proletariat, the street people who hang around college towns to scrounge off students and their facilities, its warrior caste, the blacks and other militants, its artists and philosophers, the rock musicians and self-styled gurus, its whores and courtesans, the groupies and super-groupies, and its madness, though manifested in different ways BACK now to the good old days, if such they were, in a film that purports to take place today, but capitalizes on old-fashioned sentimentality I refer to Love Story by Erich Segal, the young Yale Classics professor who has written on and translated Plautus, but whose heart belongs to show biz He has a few Broadway and off-Broadway credits, worked on the script of Yellow Submarine, and wrote the screenplays of The Games, which I haven't seen, and R P M , which, alas, I have Although Love Story began as a screenplay, before the film was ready, Segal turned it into a novella by the same title This tearjerker by our swinging Classics prof has established a sales record, and been a bestseller for more weeks than you can shake a caduceus at I have looked at the book (all I could manage), and I have now read the film I say "read" because this is clearly the ur-text, of whose writing Segal is said to be more proud than of his novelization, and because watching it is less a filmic experience than an exercise in mind-reading, where one follows every twist of Segal's conning the customers into programmed exhilaration, heartbreak, and catharsis I suppose the plot is by now as well-known as that of War and Peace, but in case some of you have forgotten both, I will sum up at least one of them Oliver Barrett IV, a Harvard jock and scion of a rich and social New England family, loses his heart to sassy, talented but poor Jenny Cavillen, Radchffe music student and daughter of a Catholic baker from Cranston, R I Though the Barrett estate is bigger than the Cavilleri girl's state, the kids marry, only to have Oliver III cut off Oliver IV without a cent Jenny teaches grade school to put her husband through Harvard Law School, and he does brilliantly Upon graduation he lands a munificent job with a venerable old New York law firm handling civil-rights cases, and this permits the formerly struggling young couple to live in lavish style Alas, Jenny develops some unnamed blood disease (presumably leukemia, but we do not go into any embarrassing details—Oliver doesn't even ask the doctor for a specific diagnosis) She dies beautifully, and m last speeches patterned after the heroine of A Farewell to Arms, urges Oliver IV to be a merry widower and to he on top of her once more before she departs Oliver III arrives to declare that all is forgiven, and the final shot repeats the film's first Oliver IV in front of the snowed-in Central Park skating rink, hunched up and grieving His words, as near as I can bring myself to remember, are "What do you say about a girl who was brilliant and beautiful and loved you and died at the age of 259" I think you say, "Very lucrative " The film is so bad that for all its taking me back to some of the most enchanted locales of my youth --I too stood tremulously waiting for my date in the lobby of Briggs Hall, etc, etc--and for all that I too loved a girl who died prematurely and tragically, it never once moved me In fact, the one thing that did move me was Ray Mil-land's appearance An actor whom I saw only yesterday, it seems, as a handsome matinee idol was so diminished of hairline and augmented of chinline as to be barely recognizable That was sad The success of Love Story, as book or film, was as predictable as it is despicable You take a boy who is rich and aristocratic and you make him an ace hockey player and have him fall out over a poor girl with his stuffy father (whom, m this day and age, he addresses as "Sir"--Segal, thou shouldst have lived in another hour1) thereby endearing him to those who resent wealth and social status Then you make him into a brilliant lawyer who works on civil-rights cases Perfect not the ivory tower, but not a base or humdrum or useless occupation either Next, you bring in a Catholic girl Very good a minority group, but the oldest and most respectable of all--furthermore, she is a lapsed Catholic, so we have it all three ways Her father is a baker Splendid working-class yet clean Oh, the smell of good, fresh-baked bread--and in Rhode Island, not Alabama or the Bronx' Besides, the wench is dead right about the Kochel number of any Mozart composition and plays the piano charmingly And in an age of casual sexuality these kids go m for puppy love and monogamy, they can count on the silent majority to shed rapturously inarticulate tears over them This exquisite Jenny could have studied m Pans with Nadia Boulanger, we learn Any film with Kochel numbers and Nadia Bou-1 anger is Culture--especially for people who don't know a Kochel from a streetcar number and who think that Nadia Boulanger is a French school of cordon-bleu bakery Arthur Hiller has directed the film with a certain cleverness Young lovers gambol in the snow rather than m flowery meadows, and a disastrous family dinner is cunningly intercut with its aftermath, when Oliver and Jenny comment on it while driving back to school Ray Milland does nicely by the stock part of the boy's posh father, but John Marley, as the girl's Catholic father, comes across rather like Segal's--a Brooklyn rabbi Ryan O'Neal seems absolutely right in every way as Oliver, but Ah MacGraw looks too old for her role and has to work overhard at being Jenny and very young Moreover, she looks considerably less good than in Goodbye, Columbus, or is photographed considerably less well In fact, Dick Kratina's work is unusual in this day of almost invariably competent color cinematography His hues manage to be predominantly sickly The Harvard Yard, for instance, comes out an unwholesome purplish shade, as though it too were dying of leukemia Francis Lai's score is suitably syrupy I am told that Segal's book on Plautus is fine, I shall want to read that one, one of these days I think it is very nice to make millions from one's work But unless Segal is a Jackie Susann in academic drag, and a hopeless case, I issue this Horatian warning to him "Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori /Caelo Musa beat " Let us not betray the Muse merely to amuse...