On Screen

...Yet when all this is said, the film, with a script by Ernest Tidyman, is tough, witty, exciting, paced judiciously a little too fast for full absorption of its foisoning details, but not so frantically as to make astonished involvement impossible Even if its morality is suspect, it is full of good directorial touches that are not excessively arch, and it builds to several climaxes that are knowingly spaced and sensibly differentiated The performances are all good, something that does not often happen in American films these days, least of all in thrillers Most impressive is the bravura act of Gene Hackman as a fanatical, clever but outsmartable, rather repulsive but not unamusing detective, in whom stupid brutishness and inspired dedication are locked in continual, deadly alliance Roy Scheider is effective as his partner, and Fernando Rey, Tony LoBianco and Marcel Bozzuffi shine among the criminals Friedkin has used New York locations better than anyone else to date, and managed to keep the camera, appropriately, both fluid and choppy There is one chase sequence that both scarces the breath out of you and, at the same time, makes you smile at the wicked humor and sly comment it contains Owen Roizman's color cinematography, grainy and grimy, is a brilliant rendering of urban blight Roizman is particularly skillful at capturing a certain washed-out, bleary light of dawn among bridges and tenements, at recording a bluish equivalent of bone-chilling cold on winter evenings, and at rendering a spooky, greenish night illumination that may have some perfectly plausible optical explanation, but as surely symbolizes the virides-cent phosphorescence of decomposing rottenness...

...War, mostly German-made, showing what happened in the period between the two intercut films, and showing it from the point of view of a greater villain, the enemy and his quislings...

...The movie had a genuinely odd flavor, what with Makavejev hand-tinting the sequences from the athlete's film, until the sincere but awful photography, poorly preserved and eccentricaly colored, closely resembled the primitive paintings of a Rousseau or Bombois??or, better yet, the work of Yugoslav primitives like Janko Biasic or Ivan Generalic The naive core of Innocence Unprotected is then surrounded by such hypocritical self-righteousness as newsreels of a quisling's funeral or the racy naturalism of survivors reminiscing about old-time filmmaking and the dismal War years The crucial trouble with all this is that the various elements fail to comment on one another in a truly significant way, one is left chiefly with a sense of Makavejev as a jolly farceur full of provocative ideas that do not add up to a substantial whole The same, regrettably, goes for his new film, WR??The Mysteries of the Organism, an even headier mixture of components yielding more of a jumble than a complexity The WR of the title refers to Wilhelm Reich, whom Makavejev admires, part of the film is a documentary about the title and ideas of this strange disciple of Freud, to whom the term mad genius" may genuinely apply??the "mad" certainly If the film had stuck to reconstructing and memorializing Reich's interesting albeit misguided work, and his spellbinding and ultimately tragic life, it might have been a truly valuable achievement, but that is not the sort of thing that a master juggler, or jumbler, like Makavejev will limit himself to...

...Other curiosities are woven into the fabric, such as bits of old movies, notably passages from Mikhail Chiaureli's The Vow, in which Stalin appears even huger than life-size, only to be crosscut by Makavejev with the cast of the Screw editor's penis Similarly, crude treatment of mental cases??including shock therapy and worse, as well as a horrifying shot of a madman banging his head against a wall??is crosscut with lengthy sequences of patients receiving dubious but loving Reichian or neo-Reichian therapy (possibly too heterodox for conservative Reichians who have joined m condemning this film...

...The heart of the film, however, is a lusty, though rather slapdash and simplistic, tale of two Yugoslav girl-roommates One spouts Reichian sex-cum-socialism homilies at the populace but does not herself indulge very much, the other, without uttering one abstract noun romps around naked most of the time, sometimes servicing members of the Yugoslav Army, sometimes trying to seduce an earnest Russian skating champion, who spouts, alas, Communism-sans-sex homilies It is the two spouters who finally get together, but when the philosophical roommate persuades the Soviet rectilinear skating champion to copulate with her, she releases all that repressed fear and hate of sex that Reich diagnosed as the root of fascism and Soviet Communism The girl is decapitated by her lover with a skate, after he deposits three or four times the normal amount of semen in her vagina (the English subtitles escalate this into "four or five times'1"), but there is a posthumous, semihappy ending to this mildly scatological, or skatological, film...

...In Love Affair, the thesis was a series of illustrated lectures on sexuality and crime by a sexologist and a penologist, counterpointed with an antithesis consisting of a love affair ending in jealousy and murder But already the schema thickens Was the thesis, in fact, the theoretical matter, presented in documentary or pseudodocumentary form, and the antithesis the story, the plot'' Or was the thesis love and sex, and the antithesis crime and death9 To complicate matters further, there were political implications and Brechtian alienation effects in the film, which were to prove increasingly important in Makavejev's efforts Moreover, as the director has said, the point was not only to illuminate one element by another, but also to incriminate or ennoble it, to change values by juxtaposition and mutual irradiation This emerged more cleverly in Makavejev s next film, Innocence Unprotected Here the thesis was a pre-World War II picture made by a Yugoslav acrobat and strong man, whose specialty was hanging from a plane by his teeth Makavejev unearthed this lost film??a true primitive work about the acrobat spectacularly rescuing a maiden from the distressing hands of a villain and winning her for himself??and intercut it with a cinema v?¦rit?¦ film in which Makavejev, years later, interviews the original actors, all but one of whom had survived the War and its aftermath To this antithesis a third element is now added news-reel footage of Yugoslavia m the...

...On Screen LAUGHING VIOLENCE BY JOHN SIMON Dusan Makavejev, the Yugoslav filmmaker, is a curious blend of artist and prankster The earliest work of his I saw, Man Is Not a Bird, was a rather harsh, realistic film, containing some fairly daring sexual interludes for its country and its time It was with his next film, Love Affair or The Case of the Missing Telephone Operator, that Makavejev achieved his international renown Here the basic pattern of his filmmaking became manifest the balancing of two related yet contradictory elements so as to yield some tertium quid??a sense of incongruity, puzzlement, perhaps a Socratic aporia You might call it Hegelian filmmaking a thesis and antithesis yielding a droll or disturbing synthesis...

...The graver difficulty hinges on the phrase "of its kind," for The French Connection is typical of what might be called the New Brutality, a genre that serves up violence in loving detail not just with a dab or two of ketchup, but also with a large amount of relish Violent beatings and deaths are not only made extremely graphic, they are also treated with a nasty sense of fun Thus a Marseilles murderer breaks off and munches on a bit of the baguette his dead victim has dropped, then tosses the rest jauntily back on the bloody corpse And the blood-drenched victims of a fatal car crash are repeatedly scrutinized, almost anatomized, even though they are irrelevant to the main plot Some connective material was cut out of the film here, leaving those mangled cadavers particularly gratuitous and shocking...

...All these disparate theses and antitheses that jostle one another m sometimes studied, sometimes slipshod profusion, do not, in the final count, a synthesis make While the girl's severed head pontificates Orphically, and the rectilinear skater meanders around singing a bittersweet complaint of Bulat Okudzhava's, we are left merely with an image of Makavejev as a true erotomaniac ??surely much the most likable kind of maniac there is But whether Makavejev is an artist in an unfree country posing a a farceur, or simply a farceur pretending to be an artist, remains an unanswered question...

...An almost perfect film of its kind is William Friedkin's The French Connection, still, both the "almost" and the "of its kind" present problems The former is a matter of improbabilities and impossibilities, there is a goodly number of both in this story of large-scale dope smuggling from France into the USA, based on fact though it be But it must be conceded that as the story moves along swiftly and fascinatingly, we do not stop to ask questions, not even when a car, brutally and thoroughly torn apart by the police, is miraculously made whole again in a matter of hours...

...The second layer of the film presents views of a neo-Reichian lifestyle among New York's bohemia There is Tuli Kupferberg, the Fug "poet," running around New York as a clown version of a U S infantryman, in travestied combat dress with toy submachine gun, while the sound track features his feebly satirical poems and songs There is also Jackie Curtis, the notorious trans-vestite, talking about and living out his transsexual adventures, and one of the editors of Screw having a plaster cast made of his erect penis by an apt but unalluring "sculptress " Some erections, like some filmmaking seem to come a little too easily...