On Screen

...The musical genius gets himself defrocked for her sake, while she, for no good reason except to provide a dramatic ending, sets herself on fire...

...The birds, moreover, put the Indian sign on those about to be executed by crapping on them, and birdshit, visually and verbally wallowed in, becomes the film's favorite dirty joke--more infantile and unhygienic, alas, than daring...

...The only glimmerings of wit occur when Alex and his producer-to-be have lunch and dreams of glory together in the latter's office...

...Augustine, he explains, was the forerunner of modern existentialism, which is doubtful enough...

...The killings are apparently performed by Hope, a girl who works in a supermarket whence she steals food for Brewster, and who has orgasms all by herself while watching the boy do his body- or wing-building exercises...

...Birds are, apparently, the symbol of naturalness, decency, and freedom, hence Brewster wants to become one of them...

...The lesson of Brewster McCloud seems to be: Stay away from sex with flesh-and-blood girls and stick to Platonic but titillating nude bathing sequences with supernatural female beings...

...But typical of the prevailing lack of literacy is that Almond allows his learned hero to mispronounce sleight of hand as "slate of hand...

...If there are two countries in this world that cannot make a successful feature film, they are India and Canada...

...She has these orgasms under a blanket and seems to be simultaneously practicing her garot-ting...

...The creators of the deplorable Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice have done it again...

...Lady is disastrously directed, written (Eleanor Perry was one of the scenarists) and acted, and makes even so respected a cinema-tographer as Claude Renoir look obvious and crude...

...A differently but no less dishearteningly bad movie is The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, which, quite aside from the solecism in it, may be the worst title ever, surpassed in horror only by the film appended to it...

...And Donald Sutherland plays Alex again with that combination of sneering and sniveling for which the portmanteau word sneerveling may have to be invented...

...Brewster McCloud is a pretentious, disorganized, modishly iconoclastic movie which, in the manner of its Icarus-like hero, aspires to fly high and merely drops dead...

...Most of the other scenes are bits of waffling and woolgathering, much of it seemingly improvised in the hope of stumbling across some relevant truths but resulting only in aimless stumbling about...

...Her pet crow liberates captive birds and, together with them, defecates on evil people who are subsequently found slain...

...Exactly as in Bombay Talkie, not only the major characters, but even the supposedly colorful minor ones fail to work...

...And the lecturer, who is the most avian of men, is both ridiculous and creepy...

...Well, Bombay Talkie is rather like Bombay duck, which is not a duck dish at all, but fish...

...The whole thing is...

...Take India first...

...In a take-off on Steve McQueen's Bullitt, Michael Murphy vainly hopes to make his expressionlessness work comic wonders for him...

...it has a plot that weds the platitudinous to the preposterous--an unlikely marriage that, like the one in the film, ends in murder...

...and it features characters and dialogue that are simplistic to the point of stupidity...

...Members of the Mazursky family had best avoid sympathetic roles...

...And Almond doesn't even have the excuse of being a French Canadian...

...Particularly embarrassing are the numerous allusions to and pastiches of 8V2 and Juliet of the Spirits, which Mazursky and Tucker clearly admire, though their clownish adulation would drag down much better films...

...As Hope, Jennifer Salt is equally deficient in looks, personality and talent, and can boast only a famous actor boy friend and a successful screenwriter father...

...if she were furniture, she would be the very best Danish modern...

...Only Samantha Eggar, as the much set-upon heroine, manages to survive--not unscathed, but not quite cheapened either...

...Brewster is helped by Louise, a mysterious blonde guardian-angel-ish creature with wing marks on her shoulder blades and given to making nude appearances for the sole purpose of giving the film a Now look...

...The reasons are obvious...

...Yet the movie, all the while, assumes airs of superiority, and that is what gives it its ineffable aura of repulsiveness...

...It would be nice if filmmakers started with their English before going on to the higher metaphysics...

...In the part of his wife, however, Ellen Burstyn performs humanly and credibly, and Mazursky himself is not unfunny as the producer...

...Having been successful with their first movie (or second, if you count their script for I Love You, Alice B. Toklas), they have the nerve to see themselves in the position of Fellini after seven and a half important films, two of them masterpieces...

...The crowning absurdity is that the girl immolates herself in a deserted park with no people around to benefit from this one real positive act they'd never forget...

...For all they could tell from the charred remains that keep blazing away (only the Library of Alexandria may have burned longer than this wisp of a girl), she could just as easily have been hit by lightning, like Justine at the end of Sade's novel...

...Miss Eggar is beautiful in an understated, intelligent way--let us say the Lauren Bacall rather than the Rita Hay-worth mode...

...Thus when the camera is not lingering over blazing fireplaces, ardent voices hymn away, "By your gift, O Holy Ghost, we are set aflame...

...The film, to be sure, is quite talky enough, but it is a fishy attempt at satire by people to whom wit comes as easily as breath to an asthmatic...

...Here all the characters, including the dead ones, reappear as clowns and other circus figures, and only the fallen Icarus remains dead...

...But, unfortunately, the culturemongering grandioseness of Hollywood producers is a vein that has scant ore left in it to mine...

...Ray has declined steadily from his questionable eminence, and the new Indian "master" is not even Indian but American...

...Not much better is the new film by Robert Altman, whose M*A*S*H was a true albeit alloyed delight...

...She is some sort of visionary mystic--or, less kindly put, a suicidal neurotic--who has an affair with a swinging Augustinian monk...

...Even more pretentious and unbelievable, but at least not aspiring to wit (which, considering its total humorlessness, is most fortunate), is Act of the Heart, by the Canadian filmmaker Paul Almond, and starring Genevieve Bujold, his wife...

...The third female in Brewster's life is Suzanne, a heavily made-up teenybopper guide at the Astrodrome, with whom the youth has his sexual initiation despite Louise's warnings to stay away from women and sex...

...Together with his regular producer, Ismail Merchant (an Indian), and scenarist, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (an American married to an Indian), he now gives us Bombay Talkie...

...I think especially of Clouzot's La Prison-niere, a film that reveled in similar excesses of showy interior decoration and sexless sexual perversion, and of Clement's Rider on the Rain, based on a novel by Sebastien Japrisot, who also concocted the book underlying Lady...

...Both the thought and the diction of that sentence epitomize the worst kind of triviality, the one that takes itself seriously and brandishes a moldering platitude as though it were a momentous insight...

...What it comes down to, I think, is a basic humorlessness in both the Indian and Canadian consciousnesses, coupled with pretensions to old cultures, British or Indian, that are either illusory or faded...

...This is the work of Anatole Litvak, and is typical of a number of recent pictures in which aging directors--some of them men of former talent--have tried to hobble on the mod bandwagon...

...Oliver Reed and Stephane Audran, on the other hand, reveal their inability to transcend bad writing and directing, while John McEnery, the revolting Mercutio of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, here finds his own...

...It is also sloppily directed and badly cast, with Brewster played by Bud Cort, possibly the most spineless and gutless juvenile around...

...He plays a professor of ornithology who in the process of lecturing on the habits of birds, himself slowly turns into various birds...

...So, too, is the social relevance that is roped in to give the film seriousness and class: a Negro uprising with bloody street fighting (ineptly staged) in which Alex imagines himself grieving over the body of his daughter...

...But the thrashings of an allegedly sensitive soul in the spider web of Hollywood success is a rather tenuous subject if indeed it is plausible at all...

...The screenplay by Doran William Cannon concerns an innocent boy who lives hidden in the bowels of Houston's Astrodrome, where he is perfecting his body along with a pair of artificial wings for flying off into a better world...

...The lecture serves as a frame for the film and illustrates its muddle-headedness...

...Yet the lecture, deliberately or inadvertently, makes birds sound absurd and ludicrously human...

...The Astrodrome may be a fine symbol for our denatured world, but only if you are faithful to your symbol and play out the whole film inside this dome, and refrain from transferring the action to the outer world, as the film does most of the time...

...In fact, what the movie lacks as much as a sense of direction is a sense of style, going as it does from the good old Alec Guinness comedy routines to the mod pseudo-satire of the Michael Winner swinging-London films, from the Three Stooges to the trendiest black humor...

...As Suzanne, Shelley Duvall is the worst and homeliest thing to hit the movies since Liza Minnelli...

...Esalen, marital double standards and infidelities, orgies among friendly couples are topics that are very much in the air and provide both filmmakers and audiences with something palpable and close to home...

...Alex, the young hotshot whose first film is not even released yet, already has problems not only with his next film and its potential producer, but also with buying a house, placating his wife, mother and children, dodging his friends' good advice, and, most of all, with his teeming brain, which won't stop spewing forth sophomoric reveries about future films...

...Sally Kellerman, as Louise, is beginning to repeat herself dangerously...

...These films require more of a gerontology than a criticism of the cinema...

...Suzanne coaxes Brewster's secret out of him and becomes the instrument of his undoing...

...As a character, or even as a symbol, she makes fully as little sense as Louise...

...It is arch and smarmy acting, with that inimitably obnoxious way Sutherland has of talking in an effete, smug whine--a condescending rather than plangent whine, issuing in a languid falsetto...

...Right there the clumsiness of the filmmakers overwhelms us...

...Dreary, too, is a whole new shipload of manure about middle-class sex and drugs, not to mention a number of older and even drearier stereotyped Jewish jokes...

...Since Almond, who wrote as well as directed, cannot make the girl believable, he tries at least to prepare us for the weird ending by introducing numerous plants--enough, in fact, for a well-stocked hothouse...

...Most absurd, next to the heroine, is the mod monk, given a relatively minor role, and dreadfully played by Donald Sutherland--a genuine Canadian, but a very specious Augustinian...

...There are also bits of dialogue, like this one, vaguely cribbed from Shaw's Saint Joan: "Maybe people need an example: one real positive act they'd never forget.--But they've had that.--who--Christ.--Oh, they've forgotten that...

...The film vacillates between abject boredom and frantic splashiness, as when the girl and the monk consummate their affair right at the foot of the altar, which, aside from being improbable, is rather uncomfortable...

...John Dank-worth's music tries hard for the pulsating catchiness of an Ennio Morricone film score, but falls semiquaveringly short...

...It is full of undisciplined, unintegrated, unfunny incidents and running gags, including the supposedly comic murders of wicked people, the humiliation of a cool supersleuth from the sfpd, the exposure of a pseudorighteous political bigwig, the incompetence of policemen and ultramodern methods of detection, a car chase that is so cute and interminable as to be more of a drag than a drag race, and, worst of all, a running gag involving Rene Auberjonois in one of his most outlandish performances...

...The character might make sense, but remains unexplored...

...This is the ponderously arbitrary tale of a country girl struggling along in Toronto...

...Do not for a moment think that the film is even as neat as this partial outline suggests...

...once again, reduced to cabaret skits sloppily tacked together, but unlike B&C&T&A, Alex in Wonderland is not even vulgarly, not even intermittently funny...

...He is James Ivory, who made Shakespeare Wallah, The Householder, and The Guru...

...The color photography in both films is quite respectable...

...And that, I am afraid, is the essence of Mazursky's and Tuoker's "art...

...below-sea-level level...

...This business of having it both ways proves more disorienting than devastating...

...There is, needless to say, the obligatory rock score, complete with lyrics that desperately pretend to be saying something...

...True, there is, or was, Satyajit Ray, who looked promising--though less so to me than to other critics...

...Fellini's own brief appearance in Alex is neither good nor bad, but Jeanne Moreau --looking rather sadly ravaged --is foolishly and demeaningly dragged into two scenes that are tasteless and depressing...

...in Act of the Heart, the able French cinematog-rapher, Jean Boffety, though not up to his best, carries off a few bravura effects, notably a moment of dejection the heroine experiences on a street corner during a heavy snowfall...

...Only William Windom comes across neatly as the Agnewish politico, but the part is easy and obvious, and I rather think that Windom has been playing it all his life...

...Almond, who did somewhat better by his spouse in Isabel, manages to make that lovely and gifted actress look plain and awkward here...

...The key line in the film is, "He's happy and sad like everybody--now why can't that be a movie...

...Though this is partly an hommage to Fellini, it is an even greater homage to themselves, or perhaps to their lack of ideas, which they parade across the screen in complacent detail...

...The ending is a spurious variation on the standard Fellinian cop-out, in which everything turns into a dance or parade or procession--as in 8 1??2, B&C&T&A, etc...

...But his daughter, Meg, is horrid as Alex's elder child...

...There is something clean, efficient, elegant about both her performing and her looks...

...In other words, they felt entitled to make an unstructured, improvisatory, self-aggrandizing film about a successful Hollywood director looking for his second film subject...

...judging from Sutherland's performance, he was, even less credibly, the precursor of modern hippiedom...

...in fact, Paul Mazur-sky and Larry Tucker have outdone themselves with Alex in Wonderland, for whose hero they have a perfect smart aleck in Sutherland...