On Screen

...or bring forward his Perier side, and appear sneaky, measly, ridiculous...

...The famous Russian actor, Ivan Mozhukhin, is impersonated by Dassin himself, but from his oily performance one would never guess that this was the man who introduced natural, restrained acting into the wildly gesticulating silent cinema...

...Three members of the Dassin clan act in the film...

...It is never so fast that you cannot follow it, and there are adequate establishing shots as well as a minimum of tricky camera angles...

...After they make love (or hate) under her black sheets, he does in fact casually slit her throat with what seems to be a Gillette razor blade...

...This is a tear-jerker based on Romain Gary's memoir about his doting Jewish mother and himself when young, which became the appalling Broadway play, First Love, and now this even fouler movie...

...Toward the end, the script gets a trifle unsure of itself...

...Dassin, who wrote the rickety screenplay that tries hard to be trendy with its seesaw time sequence, directed in his stodgily un-trendy, indeed antique manner...

...It starts with a slow-motion pre-credit sequence showing Melina Mercouri as Nina, i.e., mamma, and her nine-year-old Roman (later to be gallicized into Romain) disporting themselves exuberantly through a picturesque Leningrad winter...

...or whether he is himself groveling before authority, a mistress, or a Communist student he would like to get to accuse him of murder, Volonte keeps the character odious and frightening, but credible and, at times, almost pitiable...

...The only reason I mention I Love My Wife at all--another horror written by Robert Kaufman, who already offended us with Getting Straight--is that in it Elliott Gould once more demonstrates what a limited actor he is, and tries to capitalize on cutenesses that now seem as worn as an Indian-head nickel...

...At such times it is he who crawls to her, and his boasts and threats and imprecations against being called a child sound more like sorry wheedling...

...Herbert Ross has directed dully, and it took, apparently, no less than two color cinematographers to make Miss Streisand look her unfortunate best...

...The ease with which he does it is, of course, a great tribute to Gillette, though not physiologically convincing...

...Dassin...

...None of the excesses that made a A Quiet Place in the Country one of the year's most jarring and pretentious films is to be found here...

...Luigi Kuveiller's color cinematography is competent without being outstanding, but it does achieve the desired moody, indeed morose, atmosphere...

...Investigation, which Petri scripted with Ugo Pirro, a writer of talent, is not without its flaws...

...The relationship with the woman he murdered is told in flashbacks interspersed with the investigation and the Chief's assumption of his new job...

...as we find out more about the Chief's political personality, we learn more about his sexual problems as well...

...but it is a work of considerable intelligence, wit, and style...

...Repression is civilization," he proclaims in messianic tones...

...This strangeness does not lie in his predilection for films about high society and opulent living, even though he is an avowed Communist...

...Pirro and Petri, please note...

...The part of an attractive British Wren is enacted by Dassin's daughter Julie, who is neither attractive nor British in the least, and looks far less like a Wren than like an overstuffed turkey...

...The film concerns the Chief of Rome's Homicide Squad, who, on the day of his promotion to Chief of Political Investigations, kills his mistress...

...She is generally his victim, kneeling and trembling before his paternal authority...

...It is a great pity to find Jean Martin, so brilliant as the French colonel in The Battle of Algiers, wasted on the part of a feeble actor who can get laughs only by splitting his pants...

...Anyhow, on the day in question, the Chief arrives at Augusta's elaborately overfurnished Art Nouveau apartment, and answers her excited question about how he will kill her this time by saying he will slit her throat...

...The score consists chiefly of one haunting theme, with overtones of Weill and Nino Rota, but basically Morricone: sweet-and-sour, now jaunty or jeering, now sensual and insinuating, it is run through a number of variations and suggestive orchestrations, one of them sounding like a jew's-harp electronically amplified into a super-double bass...

...Though its impact is smaller than that of Rosi's similarly activist Hands on the City, it is a more complex and ingenious achievement, more fertile in its cinematic invention and more lasting in the memory...

...If nothing else, the film is a splendid study of madness at work, in an individual and in a society, the two forming a hallucinatory symbiosis...

...But since the humor is half-sentimental, the film is three quarters goo, and photographed in good-enough-to-eat colors by Jean Rabal...

...The score by Georges Delerue continues that composer's saddening decline from what was once a genuine eminence...

...Investigation can boast further virtues...

...He wants to prove that, despite all the signs pointing toward him, he will not be apprehended because of his state of being divinely above suspicion...

...The atmosphere is that of heterosexual Genet or AI-bee, and not even all that heterosexual: The Chief's laying of hands on subordinates or accused men may be an expression of authority--or something quite different...

...yet she can also swing over into becoming his tormentor, jeering at him for his infantilism, sexual inadequacy, and alleged policemanish odor...

...No less coruscating are such humorous tidbits as a disquisition on Rome's graffiti, whose nature and number mirror both the changing tides of politics and the changeless ocean of human absurdity...

...Insospettabilita, as the Italian has it, in seven resounding syllables that he spouts with relish...

...The truly peculiar thing is the qualitative difference--indeed, chasm--between such strident claptrap as The Tenth Victim and, much worse yet, A Quiet Place in the Country, and such very honorable films as We Still Kill the Old Way and, even better, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion...

...Promise at Dawn is a grisly tale of mother love gone amok, told half sentimentally and half humorously...

...But I like the ending, left open as befits a film that invites reflection rather than glib assent (even if, in its secret heart, it may yearn for easy assent as well...

...Whether he is manipulating people by their ears, jowls, or scruffs of the neck, like so many sheep amiably patted toward slaughter or a brief stay of execution (for, to him, all are guilty...

...and "we must keep this Law immutable, sculptured in time...

...I greatly admired also Gianni Santuccio as the Police Commissioner, the suave embodiment of sane, respectable corruption--as opposed to the Chief's insanely fanatical one--enthroned in his office among Etruscan art treasures subverted from the nation's museums...

...The effortlessness with which Volonte slips from one aspect of the Chief into the other is thrilling to watch...

...The Chief (he remains unnamed) is, to be sure, a character derived from the Police Chief in Genet's The Balcony, and it is from there that the parallel between oppressive political power and sexual impotence is taken...

...His Chief is a performance as full of stops as the organ at Notre Dame, and though he plays splashily, he is not ham-my...

...Romain--as child, boy, young man--is played equally ineptly and unprepossessingly by Francois Raffoul, Didier Haudepin, and Assaf Dayan...

...Typically, the one person whose face does not get distorted in these Weegeesque shots is Nina, alias Melina, alias Mrs...

...Only the production design of Alexandre Trauner and the costumes by Theoni V. Aldredee manage to imbue the film with some authenticity...

...he may, after all, be helping to undermine what he depicts and deprecates...

...where men are condemned and executed despite their obvious innocence...

...What she cannot accomplish by mere physical repulsiveness, she achieves through the ultimate in aggressive yentaishness...

...The speech is full of statistical data used to subserve fanatical conclusions, and manages to make totalitarianism sound almost rational...

...He is equally double in his relationship with Augusta...

...Even in the madness of this man there remains some vestigial self-control...

...There follows the title sequence, with a mother gorilla and her baby carrying on in similarly frolicsome fashion, which on apes, somehow, looks better...

...I have finally caught up with The Owl and the Pussycat, which, as a student of Barbra Streisand's development, I could, alas, delay seeing no longer...

...According to the allegedly true story, when Romain was flying with the Free French in World War II, he and his mother exchanged weekly letters--and the movie treats us to copious excerpts...

...From this point on, the Chief plays a queasy double game illustrative of his split personality: He keeps giving the police clues that will condemn him, but he also throws dust in the investigators' eyes, either by making others look, at least temporarily, suspect, or by destroying some of the most incriminating evidence against himself...

...Then, as the film ends, the scene the Chief has been imagining begins to take place in actuality, but stops before we can find out whether life will corroborate criminal fantasy...

...Those seeking a follow-up to Love Story, I can direct to Jules Dassin's Promise at Dawn...

...Dassin indulges in a reciprocal trick, however, consisting of shooting a group of Polish woman customers furious at Nina (with some justification--she has more or less swindled them) in funhouse-mirror distortion...

...It is also of interest to note that Pauline Kael of the New Yorker proclaimed this non-singing, non-acting and nonlookable-at exhibition by Miss Streisand as the best feminine performance of the past year...

...On the evidence of this work, the young Romain Gary must have been feebleminded...

...Particularly effective is the use of the garish orange glass that serves as partition for the police computer rooms, and that makes the people inside them look like sufferers from jaundice basking in a particularly fruity sunset...

...In the title part of a village slavey who becomes the successful local whore and gets even amusingly with the villagers who exploited her, Bernadette Lafont gives a poker-faced, surly performance that is nevertheless affecting and fun to watch...

...One of the very best things about the film is the music by Ennio Morricone, who, when he does not go wildly electronic, is by far the most interesting composer now working in films...

...The fact that, playing opposite Barbra, George Segal can occasionally look sexually aroused, should be reckoned as a major acting triumph...

...Not wishing to break her promise to him, that she and her love would always be near, she wrote, on her deathbed, 150 letters to her son, to be dispatched to him one a week by a faithful friend...

...Among others, there were in the course of the past year, we are told, 11 graffiti for Herbert Marcuse and one against, as well as two for "a certain Sade," as a mystified policeman reports...

...Petri, I repeat, collaborated on the screenplay, and his and Ugo Pirro's dialogue is not only urbane and sardonic, it can also exude a sinister spell, as in the Chief's inaugural address as head of the political police, when he exalts repression as a vaccine...

...Now for some less happy matters...

...The Chief imagines himself exculpated despite his obvious culpability--a kind of fascist farce that is the counterpart of Communist farces (as chronicled in The Confession...

...The Chief proceeds to leave every kind of fingerprint, bloody footprint, and other telltale evidence, reports the murder telephonically to the police, and takes a couple of bottles of champagne from the refrigerator for the office party celebrating his promotion...

...The tougher parts of the book, such as the anti-Semitism that hounded Romain from Poland to France, come in for considerable soft-pedaling...

...Even the extreme closeups are much more sparing than in We Still Kill the Old Way, and there is an excellent sense of the genius loci in such places as the police files or wiretap listening room...

...There is, as noted...

...His looks are a cross between Laurence Olivier and Francois Perier, and he can at will become intense, brooding, dashing--like Olivier...

...When Romain returns to Nice at the end of the War, bearing the medals Nina dreamed of, he finds that she has died of diabetes some years back...

...This supposedly hard albeit comic look at modern marriage is superficial, trivial, and monumentally unfunny...

...It would take a bit of an idiot not to notice certain discrepancies between his own letters and answers to them written two years before...

...There are marvelous supporting performances, notably from the voluptuous Florinda Bolkan (who, if she weren't a Brazilian bombshell could easily be a Bolkan tinderbox), beautifully conveying the pathetic childishness at the core of Augusta's sophisticated perversion...

...A Very Curious Girl, the first feature film by Nelly Kaplan, a French documentarist and movie critic, is a not unpleasing though slightly rough-edged throwback to the old Fernandel and Raimu comedies, somewhat more explicit sexually, but also less well made...

...She plays little games with the Chief: recreating notorious sex murders, photographing them, enacting the suspect and the investigator in a brutal police grilling, and so, unwholesomely, forth...

...Somewhere in between falls Petri's episode for the film High Infidelity...

...The equation is rather glib, and probably just a fantasy on the part of those who justly but impotently oppose excessive police power...

...The woman, Augusta Terzi, is a sadomasochist thrill-seeker, married to a homosexual and implacably promiscuous...

...Scarcely less accomplished is Elio Petri's direction...

...Augusta's swooningly oppressive love den contrasts tellingly with the airy, sparsely furnished, sterile apartment of the Chief...

...Unfortunately, she plucks at those heartstrings with a grappling hook, and tickles those funny bones with a poker...

...Miss Mercouri, whose Nina is a rather desperate performance, simultaneously clutching at every heartstring and belaboring every funny bone...

...While the cutting is fast (the editor was the brilliant Ruggero Mastroianni), this is not meant simply to dazzle us, but to accentuate the nervousness of the people and, as it were, the situation...

...Bill Manville's mildly repellent play has been turned by Buck Henry into a genuinely distasteful script, its deadly vulgarity matched only by the mortality rate of its jokes...

...though I can hold out little hope for the first and the third, I have seen young Haudepin do quite nicely on the Paris stage...

...but it is worth speculating about, and it does give that dazzling actor, Gian Maria Volonte, a chance to display his many-sided talent...

...Some episodes are unduly dragged out, and one or two are rushed over...

...but let that pass...

...I am more inclined to think that Nina was writing those epistles directly from the grave...