On Screen

...or having fights...

...The song is entitled "Ode to a Screw," and consists of a catalogue of screwables such as "You can fuck the Russians/ And the English too;/ You can fuck the Germans/ And every pushy Jew...

...It began with a precredit sequence in which a teenage girl in a cowboy outfit played the guitar and sang some silly pop song in dread earnest...

...This apartment, incidentally, is decorated with a bad taste that seems beyond the reach of even the grossest parvenus...

...He cannot show us how she and her hippie musician make out, for it would be hard to turn the seduction of a barely nubile kid by a zonked zombie into a good thing...

...Loves of a Blonde, Forman's biggest international success, was an unbalanced little comedy with moments that were meaningful and affecting, and others that were obvious and crude...

...As they drive home through the night bickering and bemoaning their drab existence, the tail- and head-lights of other cars on the highway whoosh past them, sportive red and white disks, like motorized Moholy-Nagy abstractions...

...I pass lightly over the arty and pretentious--as well as preposterous--sequence of the S.P.F.C...

...but it is clearly meant to show the pictorial beauty that can be conjured up on screen for us in an otherwise crass, unlovely world...

...banquet, complete with grandiloquently ludicrous chairwomen, orators, members who are thoroughly enjoying this social occasion...

...There followed Firemen's Ball, a ponderous blackish humoresque about a bunch of firemen as dumb as any Keystone Kops, who, among other things, conduct a beauty contest wherein some painfully plain girls are scrutinized in merciless detail...

...Lynn is at the piano, while Larry gestures, struts, and blares away ridiculously...

...and Jamie repeats the figure, adding modestly, "Before taxes...

...consigns them to oblivion...

...Yet it is the people who made this film that are revealed as morally deficient and profoundly unlovely...

...Lockston is played by an aging Doris Day type, whose exposed body would really be an act of cruelty of the sort Forman keeps sidling up to, a touch of the horror he wants us to feel...

...Larry, who has had to resort to hypnosis to break himself, painfully, of smoking, now grabs for the nearest cigarette...

...not only did they eat up the whole film, they also carried on so orgiastically during this song that it seemed they were about to accord its precepts immediate application...

...And the Society of Parents of Fugitive Children, which takes up a good part of this film (originally titled S.P.F.C), not only carries on in much the same bumbling fashion as those firemen, but is, let me add, just as unfunny...

...I haven't even had a chance to mention the grotesque casting and acting...

...Lockston...

...This is again a cop-out...

...Finally, there is the dinner at the Tynes' to which Jeannie brings her hippie boyfriend...

...others have even decorated these buttons with beads and flowers, to make them look like high-class ex votos...

...Even more unpalatable is the scene in which the Tynes and the other principal couple, the Lock-stons, under the influence of grass, play a version of strip poker in the Tynes' apartment...

...Mutatis mutandis, it recurs here...

...meeting in an elegant upper-class apartment where the parents have their "first indulgence" (typical of their stilted language) in marijuana to find out what their children are up to...

...While the Lock-stons retain most of their clothing, the Tynes are reduced to nudity or almost...

...It is not easy to say just who is responsible for what...

...I cannot think offhand of any other movie as gracelessly, smugly and stupidly antihuman, as self-servingly and gloatingly superior to all humanity...

...Lynn: What did she steal...

...Next came another short, then Black Peter, Forman's best film to date, dealing with the conflicts of errant children and pompous parents, a theme taken up again, much more pompously and arrantly, in Taking Off...

...But some of his Czech films, though overvalued, were not without redeeming features, owing, no doubt, to such gifted collaborators as Ivan Passer...

...Guare is the talented young playwright whose absurdist stage comedies are not devoid of human feeling...

...members being taught how to turn on by a pothead version of Mortimer Snerd display collective cretinism to the point of asking questions like how fast are they supposed to count to 10 before exhaling...

...This is a studio process shot, cheaper than actual night photography...

...Forman actually steals a device from Camus' Caligula, whereby the main auditioner cuts off the applicants at an ever quickening rate, so that some poor no-talents have barely opened their mouths before the monosyllable "Next...

...If a woman is seen leaning out of a tenement window, you may be sure that she is the ne plus ultra of fatness and repulsiveness...

...Some of them gibber about the joys of drug-taking, some are cowardly, others are dolts, make-out artists and smart-ass operators, or Hell's Angels...

...At the banquet, the parents all wear pictures of their missing offspring on their elegant lapels, or hanging amid expensive jewelry...

...And surely there is something richly distasteful about the way the main theme of the film is treated...

...So he suddenly shows us an adipose nude girl playing the cello, Charlotte Moorman-fashion...

...exclaims the dapper Mr...

...The only truly positive value that Forman can offer us is himself...

...But they were also for something, whether it was the pudor they perceived beyond the nejas, or horses that were nobler than men, or gardens by whose cultivation one cultivates oneself...

...Adults shown in groups are even more disgusting...

...Larry: A Jap portable television set, Lynn (gulping with brand-name-conscious awe): A SONY...

...As if that were not enough, she is saying it in the most flirtatious, provocatively coquettish way...

...As a critic, I am a moralist, though not, I trust, in a narrow, petty, moralizing sense...

...or getting involved in various burlesque predicaments...

...And they know nothing, but nothing, about their kids...

...The kids, I repeat, are made into idiots, too...

...A dreary song is sung over and over again by aspirant after aspirant, each given a bar or two and continuing from where the last one left off, so that brevity of appearance and giddiness of montage combine to make these unfortunates even more pitiful than they are...

...The film ends as the parents favor the kids with a rendition of "Stranger in Paradise...

...thus, for example, Lynn Tyne's friend, Margot, played by the chin-less, fish-eyed Georgia Engel as a gaping or giggling imbecile...

...To equate mutism with virtue, though, is too easy...

...pot-smoking lesson in a fancy apartment where American primitives hang on the walls in prim black-and-white Colonial garb, and it looks at times as if the joints were being passed by austere New England patriarchs to their puritanically frowning helpmeets...

...There are far more absurdities and vulgarities in Taking Off than I could begin to enumerate here...

...Forman proves absolutely heartless here...

...Jamie answers quietly, "Last year I made 290,000...

...Some have made cute buttons out of the photos...

...This is rank self-plagiarism: but what in Audition was real and slightly touching (for example, Czech kids trying to cope with American songs), is in the present film pretentious, ugly and evil...

...At least 20 minutes of Taking Off are devoted to girl singers auditioning before an unlikely panel for an unspecified job...

...banquet with speechifying, and a smaller S.P.F.C...

...I consider Milos Forman morally deficient to the utmost degree, and, as usually though not always follows, a worthless imitation of an artist...

...Thus he shows a huge hotel ballroom during an S.P.F.C...

...Just looking for her has brought us together...

...At least longer or shorter scenes from it pop up throughout the film, and the music and singing from it is sometimes heard in voice-over during the so-called plot scenes...

...Moreover, Henry gives his customary soullessly exaggerated performance, and Miss Carlin merely repeats dimly what she did so lustrously in Faces...

...if two dogs are glimpsed, you may count on it that they are copulating...

...Now, of course, the great satirists--say, Juvenal, Swift, Voltaire--were also against most of what they saw around them...

...Taking Off begins with a precredit shot of teenage girls dressed in costumes based on the American flag, singing a pop song in dread earnest...

...Jeannie looks with quiet desperation at her parents' noisy one...

...There is a big S.P.F.C...

...There ensues a passing parade of bedizened parents who have exercised their ingenuity to make the children's pictures blend in elegantly with their haute toilette...

...It leaves us with the impression that only the filmmaker is a knowing, sensitive spirit, who has every right to jeer at a humankind unfit to tie his shoelaces...

...The S.P.F.C...

...They smoke too much, and make asses of themselves trying to break the habit...

...The girl turns out to be a friend who cravenly gave Jeannie's name as an alias...

...The Tynes drive on a wild-goose chase somewhere 300 miles upstate New York upon notification that their girl is being held there by the police for theft...

...Taking Off is the first American picture of Milos Forman, the refugee Czech filmmaker, whom I have always rated a highly overrated commodity...

...The adults are crude, baffled fools...

...The film is made out of total hate for man and beast alike...

...for example, Lynn Carlin and Buck Henry do not look like a married couple by the wildest stretch of the uncomic imagination...

...There was also a long closing sequence in Blonde involving the teen-age heroine's bringing her pop-musician seducer home to meet her folks...

...They screw too little, or too frenetically, and have to resort to risible devices to arouse one another...

...He turns out to be a cat so cool he is almost catatonic--it would be interesting to learn just what Jeannie sees in him, but the film does not deal in anything like insights or explications--and so out of sight that there is hardly a sound out of him...

...or discussing sex absurdly and grossly...

...Taking Off concerns 1514-year-old Jeannie Tyne, who runs away from her parents' affluently and militantly middle-class home and wanders into an East Village singing-talent audition that seems to be a nonstop affair...

...When the two couples play that card game, the director, typically, stacks the cards...

...the screenplay is credited to Forman, John Guare, John Klein, and Jean-Claude Carriere...

...He is a rock musician, and when Larry, merely to make conversation, asks him, "Make any money at it...

...But Forman does not stop at this...

...He throws in other phenomena of the pop-music scene, often without any rationale other than sensationalism...

...There is also a picture representing a ship, a face, or a vase with flowers, depending on your angle of vision: "That's remarkable...

...And I wonder whether Forman can be obtuse enough to regard the pretentious stuff some of these kids sing (or are made to sing) with anything but scorn: "I'm dying in a world that will die before death...

...at which the parent cries, "This is my son...

...Of course, it does not even have the courage of its moronic convictions, and ends with a cop-out: "But first of all fuck me...

...The girls at the audition are, with a couple of exceptions, some of the unsavoriest specimens ever assembled: From acne to obesity, from toilet-brush hair to sick-sheep expressions, every form of unsightliness is caught by the lighting, photography and editing in the most unflattering detail...

...Whatever the case, I declare Taking Off an anti-human film: mean, arrogant, and thoroughly destructive...

...Carriere is Bunuel's poorest scenarist, though I doubt that he had much to do with this, having been on the project earlier, when Claude Berri was supposed to produce it...

...By the way, I first saw Taking Off at an invitational preview at the Museum of Modern Art, with an audience littered with show-biz personalities and sprinkled with reviewers...

...Finally, there is that dinner scene...

...Don't go thinking, however, that youth comes off any better...

...the parents are again made fools of...

...The song contestants in Taking Off are also, for the most part, ugly and even freakish, and are similarly lovingly--i.e., hatefully--anatomized...

...And I think that the army of his admirers, whether critics or audiences, are, at the very least, dupes and fools...

...or he gets Tom Eyen to write a particularly noxious song in his well-known "dirty" manner for some funny-looking kid gravely to perform...

...or the two men who try to pick up Lynn at a roadside night club and drop hideous jokes and their trousers with equally improbable alacrity...

...These adults are almost always caricatured...

...one father has suspended from his lapel a series of neatly tiered snapshots of his large missing brood...

...Jeannie keeps coming home after brief disappearances, only to discover her parents drunk and disorderly and flee again...

...That's what I mean by a work of art...

...Almost, but not quite...

...So Forman appears to be the chief perpetrator in every way...

...They are asked to file past one particularly creepy girl who has just come back from a six months' underground escapade, and might recognize some fellow fugitives and provide clues to their whereabouts...

...moreover, even such comedy, as written by the absurdist playwrights, has implicit moral values, however unconventional...

...For black comedy, perhaps, but the film lacks the stylization, the gift for hyperbole, black comedy involves...

...Larry, incredulous, asks, "What did you say...

...John Klein I know only as co-scenarist of The Collector, an interesting and far from worthless film...

...Forman's first film was a short called Audition, a cinema-verite item about girl singers auditioning for a Prague band...

...The anxiety and despair of parents whose children are missing does not appear to be a fit subject for cheap comedy...

...But it is all much more horrible than it sounds...

...One mother of a fugitive daughter says to the father of another about her marriage...

...The parents, Lynn and Larry, are seen either searching for Jeannie, often in the company of equally inept friends...

...The scene ends with a characteristic gag: After repeatedly shaking her head, the girl finally says, "I've seen Apr...

...Decency, like short hair, is out of fashion...

...The single character seemingly meant to be positive is young Jeannie, but to Forman this means only forcing her eyes wide open with wonderment or dismay at the world around her, and allowing her no more dialogue than four or five lines in the entire film...

...And the fact that much of the audience and most reviewers have loudly endorsed this film almost proves him right...

...They drink excessively, and cannot hold their liquor...

...Linnea Heacock, as Jeannie, gives no evidence of acting ability, and the others, led by the already mentioned but utterly unmentionable Georgia Engel, are oafs...

...So here, when he has the chance to show his contempt for mankind, as it were, nakedly, fearless Forman chickens out...

...There are, for instance, two separate kinds of dried ferns or flowers, whose names I unfortunately don't know, but both of which are, significantly, dead...

...Trying to be broadminded and understanding, the Tynes have asked Jeannie to bring her Jamie to dinner...

...The experiment is meant to elucidate the kids' behavior, but the parents, after displaying stodginess and naivete beyond compare, promptly turn the occasion into fun and games, with stabs at adultery...

...the police sergeant is an idiot...