On Screen

...Her instinct of self-preservation and her common sense are so low that one wonders how she managed to survive this long...

...color photography is blown up to 35 mm...

...Recent cases in point are Groupies and Gimme Shelter...

...The grand finale is a rather too obvious coup de cinema but, because James Olson and Arthur Hill are intelligent actors, it comes out a little less hoked-up than it might be...

...It is to the discriminating eye what a mattress full of broken springs is to a sensitive back, and thus, I contend, unfit for distribution...

...Now he can start to plot his own widowing...

...Whether our entire planet will survive engages us very little in the cinema unless there is even one character in the movie about whose individual survival we can care...

...In fact, Wanda is portrayed--only partly intentionally, I think--as abysmally stupid...

...Although Henrietta's crooked lawyer tries everything to stop the marriage, it comes off...

...And, as almost always in sci-fi, the dialogue is devoid of interest...

...When she proves helpful to him in the initial phase of his first major crime, a bank robbery, he tosses her her first and only bone, "You did good...

...They are pursued by various policeman-robots, making for some mildly lively moments...

...Yet the problem is even more basic...

...The Andromeda Strain, Robert Wise's film from Michael Crichton's bestseller about a satellite bringing back a dread germ from outer space, is another case of bipartite division...

...This does the further damage of suggesting that Wanda and her burglar friend come from a long line of nonentities without a spark of intelligence, so that what distinguishes them is not their rebellion against brutalization, but a particular pathology superimposed on a yokeldom perfectly content to live in a waste land surrounded on three sides by coal and the fourth by television...

...George Rose and James Coco, as the butler and uncle, respectively, are better, even if not up to their very considerable best...

...His greedy uncle extends him a loan with a draconian time limit...

...For if audiences generally talk and bellow with laughter uncontrolledly at the movies, at the world's biggest and most touristy movie theater the laughter is more excessive, more delayed (the customers catching on to the first joke just in time to obliterate the second), the talk more persistent and unhushable than anywhere else...

...It came out roughly simultaneously with 2001, and many were the people who felt that Lucas had achieved more captivating effects on a shoestring than Kubrick with all his mammoth production values...

...She is the universal patsy, and it takes a very great artist to make that character likable...

...The Andromeda Strain is a tidy film, yet it completely fades from memory after its 130 minutes are over...

...But that is only the beginning of its troubles...

...The pro-Communist anti-Americanism of the Venice Festival management was always so eager to embrace movies that depicted lurid aspects of America that it actually saw fit to open one Festival with that motorcycle cheapie, The Wild Angels...

...Miss May is suing Paramount for cutting and re-editing her film and thus, allegedly, distorting and destroying it...

...Henrietta's servants, in cahoots with the lawyer, are robbing her blind...

...What I was left with was a mildly amusing, sometimes rather obvious, pleasantly inconsequential film, far from being a work of comedic art...

...for commercial showing, the result can be quite acceptable...

...at other times, the chain lacks events...

...I suppose that where human beings are shown as merely minds behind procedures and issues, no matter how grave, their humanity always ends up foreshortened, indeed short-changed...

...I should state that I saw the film at the Radio City Music Hall, which must be the worst place in the world to see anything, and particularly a comedy...

...The story, then, is trivial and confusing, and did not keep me from dozing off periodically...

...If the performer merely resists pathos, the pathetic effect is infallible...

...Or, more precisely, this away-from-home home movie...

...Wanda is the story of a slatternly wife in a house with a view of nothing but coal, who leaves her husband and children and drifts into a life of prostitution as a somewhat preferable alternative...

...Our hero learns of his girl's death, flees with renewed zeal, and when the pursuit reaches a cost greater than the individual's worth to the state, is allowed to get away...

...The former is an expanded version of a prize-winning student short that called attention to its maker, George Lucas...

...This involves a Grecian-style nightgown that Henrietta wants to be seductive in on her wedding night, without, however, knowing which part of herself goes through which aperture in the garment...

...From this relatively lengthy scene we are supposed to learn, I guess, that the severely tainted human being is a child at heart...

...It has been said that Barbara Loden gives a remarkable performance, and that the writing is wonderfully unsentimental...

...This is not in itself a bad thing, except that in its present form there is something a trifle random and flaccid about the film: Sometimes the events lack a chain...

...Yet the men who pick her up, judging from the main sample given, treat her badly, paying her little or nothing and abandoning her in the middle of nowhere...

...But that is not exactly news, and Zola's unvarnished truths are today's moldering platitudes...

...I cannot pronounce on this issue, but her apparent persistence in her suit despite the rave reviews the released version, and she herself with it, received, suggests someone with character and artistic integrity whom I cannot but applaud...

...When she does discover a new genus of ferns, she names it after her beloved husband instead...

...It is as if Grandma Moses had attempted to paint like Goya...

...It is unfortunate that A New Leaf was saddled with an inferior cinematographer, Gayne Rescher, who contributed so unhandsomely to Rachel, Rachel...

...here there are scenes that do not build properly, notably the last, which desperately lacks suspense and hardly makes us care about the outcome...

...So I am likely to have lost a fair number of funny lines...

...the actor simply lacks comic resources...

...As for Miss Loden's performance, one cannot go wrong playing a dumb, stolid creature who, struck by one blow after another, simply blinks her eyes and hardly knows what hit her...

...on the other hand, I may be crediting lost dialogue with wit it does not possess...

...There is, for example, a scene where the man drunkenly climbs on top of a parked car and waves his beer can at a small plane performing aerobatics not far above his head...

...Even the various futuristic gimmicks are only moderately diverting...

...Now there is a plot that, while simple, manages to be both obscure and pretentious...

...Her life's ambition is to discover a new leaf or fern to which she can bequeath her name and thus acquire immortality as a footnote in the botany books...

...Such rural amateurs can be used in countries like Italy, where the people have a natural dramatic flair, but these American hinter-landers deliver their lines like dropouts from talking-parrot school...

...I was not particularly impressed by either film, but the new, full-length THX 1138 is rather different from its ancestor...

...But Henrietta is every bit as generous and loving as she is wealthy and klutzy...

...I refer to Elaine May and A New Leaf...

...Finally, even her pocket-book is stolen in a cheap movie theater...

...The film is palpably pieced together out of comic bits, Nichols-and-May numbers that have turned into Matthau-and-May, or whatever two characters happen to be on screen...

...But, clearly, a Henry and a Henrietta are mated in heaven...

...Here the idea and treatment capture the mind, and one finds oneself puzzling along with the desperate scientists...

...He emerges on the earth's surface--we now realize that all this took place in its bowels--and faces an uncertain destiny...

...Here, again, his colors tend to have a washed-out quality, rather like bad reproductions of paintings in a cheap art book...

...Miss Loden uses a number of local types in small parts, and the readings these people give surpass anything I have ever seen in sheer ineptitude...

...But Wise and his scenarist, Nelson Gidding, have not only come up with the usual cliches, they even stumble on stereotyped ways of trying to avoid stereotypes...

...Not a one in this script...

...Henry fires them...

...There is then, as in Bonnie and Clyde, a sense of bad going to worse, rather than of good going to waste...

...Although the robber is a bit of a psychopath, and Wanda suffers from a strong case of apathy, that hardly renders them more interesting or meaningful...

...All this to the accompaniment of dialogue that, though I could not hear it from the roaring of the Radio City plebs, somehow looked funny...

...The technological part is arresting: The difficult, wearying, and often dangerous tests to establish the nature of the lethal substance and the race against time to find a way to neutralize it...

...The humanizing touch has not been found...

...Together, they drift into a life of penny-ante crime, though the fellow treats her scarcely better than her previous Johns used to...

...what we really see is just an obnoxious, ineffectual sot indulging himself...

...We are in an evil, totally computerized Utopia, where people have clean-shaven heads, are sedated out of all desire to make love (which is a crime), and bear not names but serial numbers, like THX 1138, the film's protagonist...

...The chief device here is to present a world of white on white: mainly white-garbed people against predominantly white backgrounds...

...But the man is gunned down by the police, and Wanda reverts to prostitution...

...One episode is genuinely amusing...

...But William Redfield contributes a delightful bit as Henry's lawyer, and Matthau and May do a very neat job of humanizing their highly exaggerated material...

...A couple of years ago, she took herself, the actor Michael Higgins and the cinematographer Nicholas T. Proferes into the coal country of Pennsylvania, and there, in 16 mm., they shot this home movie...

...The movie, finally, reminds me of a primitive painting (that is what its images often resemble, anyway), albeit a primitive painting that lacks ingenuousness...

...But among the luxuriant riparian vegetation, a fine specimen of the fern that has given him eternal life catches Henry's eye...

...I can see no more performance here than I can see writing...

...Still, there is a certain beauty as well as horror in all that super-gadgetry at work, giving the film some esthetics as well as melodramatics...

...but there are also visuals that I found almost always absorbing, indeed exhilarating...

...From what I have been able to gather, her version developed the characters more fully, had rather more serious overtones, and was less of a concatenation of blackout sketches...

...When superior 16 mm...

...A very different actress likewise makes her film-directorial debut...

...I am not sure Wanda is the worst picture that ever won in Venice--Visconti's Sandra, for example, has no less powerful claims to that distinction--but it is in almost every way dreary and inept...

...only the faces, like great flesh-colored flowers, are vainly thrusting up through this chilling blanket toward a spring that will not come...

...Apprehended, he is tried and jailed with two other misfits, one of whom is a Negro but also an inadvertently materialized television image (whatever that means, and whatever it implies about the future of television), and the other Donald Pleasence of the already hairless head, and thus seemingly type-cast...

...THX, if I may refer to him thus familiarly, is rooming with a shaven-headed lass whose number I forget, and who desedates him sufficiently for them to have sex...

...On the one hand, technology and science--everything from computers to microbiology...

...It is a strange prison without walls, out of which our trio walks rather than breaks...

...Several possible heiresses having proved, on closer inspection, impossible, Henry settles on Henrietta Lowell (Miss May), a gawky, homely, utterly clumsy botanist: very rich, very unworldly, and presumably easy to murder--for that is Henry's plan...

...On an excursion to the Adirondacks, Henry gets his chance...

...Miss Loden came to our attention suddenly as Maggie in Arthur Miller's After the Fall, directed by her husband-to-be, Elia Kazan, and then vanished from our purview with equal celerity...

...What, after this apparent defoliation by the studio, remains of Leaf...

...There remains the color photography by Dave Meyers and Albert Kihn which, combining with the ingenious set design, is not only visually thrilling but even, as it were, challenging to the intellect...

...For whatever reason (it may have to do with film stock), Wanda has blown up dreadfully, and the entire film gives the impression of being superimposed on a documentary about the Carnival at Nice when the downpour of confetti reaches its peak...

...It is a visual metaphor that is coextensive with the entire film, and whose fascination never palls...

...Walter Matthau plays Henry Graham, a rich wastrel who finds himself suddenly bankrupt...

...Even though I enjoyed the film's jaundiced views of government, politicians, the military, all that is routine stuff, slickly but unoriginally handled: The whole nonlaboratory part of the film is written and directed on the level of middling journalism...

...Richard H. Kline's color cinematography is decent, the special effects are efficient, the music is appropriate...

...but before that term expires, and he is deprived even of his clothes, Henry hopes to realize his butler's suggestion and marry an heiress...

...He rescues Henrietta and even accedes to her dearest wish: Despite his detestation of work, he agrees to teach history at her school, so that every day in the school cafeteria they'll be lunching in midday marital bliss...

...Miss May's direction is hard to judge without seeing her version of the film...

...Has anyone, for instance, seen a production of Mother Courage in which the mute daughter, Kattrin, did not shine...

...It is as if snow had covered all these indoors, all these lives...

...She wanders into a bar just as it is being robbed, and the petty crook finds it expedient to escape with her...

...Science fiction reaches us with two extremely different films, THX 1138 and The Andromeda Strain...

...Their canoe capsizes in the rapids, and Henry swims ashore while Henrietta is about to drown...

...on the other, people and politics...

...The cast is good, on the whole, though Jack Weston's conniving lawyer strikes me as too obvious...

...She gets Gordianly entangled, and Henry, trying to help, only loses himself as well in that labyrinthine nightie...

...Wanda is too close to muck to try its hand at muckraking...

...Michael Higgins' performance, in fact, is rather more noteworthy, with its combination of mulish ungivingness, plaintive little tics, and a crazed bravado, all of them belied by the general air of a modest country schoolmaster or an overworked shipping clerk...

...The film tells us that life in the coal towns is brutish and turns people into crass, ugly automata, so that even a career of crime looks like a welcome relief: more rewarding, more colorful...

...It was written and directed by Barbara Loden, who also plays the heroine...