On Screen

...The shoestore harridan and sausage foreman are, alas, absolutely right in their demands on the irresponsible girl, and do not deserve the caricaturing they get...

...She is defiant about being a lady, about the scorn heaped on "interra-cials," and about her morality: Though she has had lovers of all colors, her creed is one race at a time, and she abhors "free love...

...And since Jean-Luc Bideau and Jacques Denis are such undistinguished and charmless actors, we are not won over by the performances either...

...His attitude toward Rosemonde is a mixture of feeble good-will and ineffectual exploita-tiveness, and there is nothing like his mental, moral and even sexual limpness to leave us unsympathetic...

...He runs into trouble with all three devices...

...Houston's direction goes to pieces in the last scene, where Tully watches some bums gambling behind a glass partition...

...or as irony, in which case it is callow and unfunny...

...And this is where the direction fails to come to the rescue...

...That rolls off the tongue and sticks in the mind...

...The film deals with some not very promising young ring hopefuls, and with some aging unhopefuls who nevertheless try to hang on: ex-fighters, fight managers, trainers, women of unclear vocation...

...To make things worse, Tully now waxes philosophical, and utters the supposedly clinching line: "Before you ever get rolling, your life makes a beeline for the drains...

...But they are now really involved with her and, indirectly, with her part-time boy friend who is a petty criminal...

...She is altogether too cute...

...Not even a Civil Defense inspector would pick his nose with one hand while ringing a doorbell with the other...

...And we see Paul and his little girl standing expectantly at the wood's edge...

...Pierre and Paul's mock-heroic philosophizings (e.g., "There are too many people to whom the liberty to be in their own skins is systematically refused") are neither funny enough to be taken as jokes, nor meaningful enough to be considered seriously-yet that, apparently, is what Tanner wants us to do...

...We were not even shown very clearly what it was he saw behind the glass partition, and the enormous effect of it on him and the entire film is unearned-sheer rho-domontade...

...But it seems effective-the poor, put-upon girl...

...There are others-those various marginal, atmospheric characters-tand while they are credible, they do not capture the imagination the way a gravely ill Mexican fighter does, or a young black hopeful who delivers an outrageously inspirational tirade about why he will always win and proceeds to be knocked out forthwith...

...a sanitation workers' strike, passengers on a trolley car who remain stolid in the face of harassment, a sausage-factory foreman who objects to Rosemonde's potentially unhygienic hairstyle, the shoestore owners who are humorless about their salesgirl's pranks, and, above all, that petty bourgeois uncle with his moralizing...

...One of a large brood of impoverished country folk, she had gone to work as a maid for an uncle in Geneva who cared for her subsistence and schooling...

...Would that it were so...

...Paul, who is married and has a small daughter, prefers not to meet Rosemonde...

...As Rosemonde, Bulle Ogier is a little more interesting...

...They accompany her on a midwinter visit to her village to get to know her parents and background...

...One day, his gun went off and hit him in the shoulder...

...And smack in the middle of the fanciest writing, Tanner will fall into a piece of fran-glais such as realiser for "realize...

...he gives up altogether...

...California, was quite good...

...Pierre, a struggling journalist, and Paul, a less than prosperous writer doubling as a house painter, undertake to write a TV documentary about Rosemonde, a girl who recently made the tabloids...

...That image simply does not work...

...The apathy of the streetcar riders is perhaps mere self-control, and their implied xenophobia seems, at worst, minimal...

...Pierre tracks down Rosemonde and starts taping interviews with her and those who know her...

...No less acclaimed critically than La Salamandre was Fat City, a film that is supposed to mark the return of John Houston to his former mastery...

...There is no feel of Stockton, of the relationships of different social strata and the way neighborhoods interlock, of the state of mind expressed through topography...

...Is this meant to be taken seriously, as a lyrical hyperbole celebrating Paul's poetic soul...

...can we still take...

...the sherry-guzzling drifter who forgets about her jailed black lover long enough to let Tully move in with her, she is your typical proud, alcoholic kook...

...Not only do individual scenes tend to lack that specific impact without which there is no cumulative one, but also there is no dovetailing of scenes into one another, no sovereign sense of where to begin one scene or end another...

...For example, after the uncle tells about his wound's still hurting him in a strong wind, we hear the following from the smug female voice that speaks the narration: "Unlike Rosemonde's uncle, Paul very much liked the wind...

...Compare with this the Arab's motto in Saroyan's The Time of Your Life: "No foundation...

...they should have called her boring...

...She is a jolie /aide whose face changes continually from quite appealing to downright homely, making her rather more of a chameleon than a salamander...

...But the praise lavished on it from most sides makes it a film crying out for critical scrutiny...

...People call me lazy, wild, hysterical," she says...

...His plot is humdrum and uninvolving: The three principals are as dull and, in the men's case, unattractive as can be...

...Although 1 have some doubts about his former mastery, they are as nothing to my doubts about this film...

...One hopes not...

...Rosemonde has engulfed us," Paul pontificates...

...I wish the world would stop bugging me," exclaims Rosemonde, and we are expected to sympathize...

...She is the salamander, which, according to legend, lives mischievously in the fire without getting burned...

...Amiable braggart and fuzzy dreamer, he is always a decent, dull man who fails to command our concern...

...Collectively, they are meant to convey the chicaneries and frustrations inflicted on one by a society unredeemed by Marxism...

...The jury was hung and the case, finally, dropped...

...So Tanner's case against Switzerland is as unpersuasive as his case for his trio of principals...

...To the film companies, cutting is what leaches were to medieval medicine: a cure for everything...

...It is society, Switzerland, bourgeois capitalism that are to blame for this sad state of affairs, they tell us...

...Gradually, both men become more implicated with Rosemonde and, eventually, sleep with her...

...If the thing strikes him as amusing or sonorous or just odd enough, in it goes regardless of appropriateness...

...They have lost their objectivity...

...and also as a piece of filmmaking that takes over where the New Wave left off and continues the work of Go-dard and Truffaut in interesting newer directions...

...but it makes the man absurd and unappetizing, and those are good enough grounds...

...What a lot of setting up for a paltry payoff...

...But she is not a great actress, and the shallowness of the part finally reduces her to redundancy...

...Though Tanner is sometimes witty in his lampoons, he fails to make them convincing...

...All the way down the line...

...Rosemonde manages to get herself fired by lewdly caressing the customers' feet, and finds herself once again jobless, free and, for the moment, euphoric...

...But where is "you...

...More importantly, she can act, and infuses the routine part of the fecklessly footloose girl with a certain piquancy that verges on pathos...

...Promptly, Rosemonde mutters: "Here we are in this dump of a valley...

...After this strategy has been repeated a few times, as the car with our threesome approaches Rosemonde's village, the narration declares: "They arrived in a very lovely valley...

...But we don't...

...When she is in trouble at her new job, as salesgirl in a shoestore, they try to help her keep the position...

...There are episodes involving a Civil Defense investigator who badgers innocent citizens, a landlord's emissary who threatens foreclosure (after four months of arrears in the rent...

...Why undercut him...

...I also hear that Columbia Pictures considered Gardner's screenplay and Houston's film too downbeat, and cut a lot of it out...

...He thinks the girl shot her stodgy uncle, although there were many extenuating social circumstances...

...suddenly, the soundtrack goes mute and the camera comes in tight on Keach's face frozen with horror...

...Yet there was evidently friction between the solid bourgeois uncle and the girl who had become a dropout, mother of an illegitimate child, and a drifter from job to job...

...The landlord's clerk is made gratuitously ludicrous by stepping into something on the sidewalk that he has difficulty scraping off his shoe...

...Nor are we in the least convinced that we have been told anything about Switzerland, the evils of our society, or anything else...

...so let's have it...

...And the film is shot in that dreary home-movies type of wishy-washy grey and greyer photography that reminds me of Godard's own early and dismal Genevan film, line Femme coquette, photographed by himself on a-no doubt grey-shoestring...

...He sings when he is unhappy (i.e., makes up inane melodies to infantile verbalizings), and loves his craft so deeply that he would rather work as a house painter than as a literary hack...

...On Screen DRIFTING IN DREARINESS BY JOHN SIMON Had La Salamandre received the short critical shrift it deserves, it could have been dismissed as a not absolutely untalented little film with its head and heart resolutely in the wrong places...

...Stacy Keach does not convince me of being a lower-class semidere-lict: He has a certain softness and gentility built into his appearance, manner and speech that are too civilized for Tully...

...As for Susan Tyrrell, her Oma is no performance at all, merely a self-disembowelment with the performer spewing up her inner chaos, guts and all, untrans-formed by art or even self-control, for the delectation of idiot viewers and reviewers who cannot tell the difference between creation of a character and embarrassing, unwholesome self-display...

...But Fat City is like that awkward trope: unable to snap into place and incapable of reverberating in the memory...

...How many variations on the lackadaisical, hedonistic kook who says things like "Why can't people accept me as I am...

...Paul, on the other hand, is supposed to be a real writer, as demonstrated by the fact that he is married to a poetess who, when he tells her he has been unfaithful, gently reads him a Heine text from Reisebilder that has nothing whatever to do with unfaithfulness...

...What reason is there for a scene, brought in out of nowhere, showing a villager sexually molesting Rosemonde...

...Pierre is accorded a certain cynical wit, but since there is no evidence that he has the slightest skill as a journalist or any cognitive or imaginative faculties worth attending to, the wit comes out as mere smart-aleckiness...

...The answer, I think, is that Tanner is a true Godardian, and does not care...

...As for Oma...

...I hear that Leonard Gardner's novel about a down-and-out prizefighter hitting the skids in Stockton...

...he bases his script partly on Pierre's researches, but more on his writer's intuition and imagination...

...Outside it was pitch dark," the voice will say, whereupon a character will announce, "It's pitch dark outside...

...Although Houston, who himself was once involved in boxing, has staged and shot one long, obstinate, harrowing fight with great conviction, and has done well enough by the boxing atmosphere in general, the movie is not pulled together into a compelling whole...

...We have to shift from a "you" that is rolling to a "life" that is making a beeline-as if you were traveling by car while your life rode on a bee's back-and, next thing, life is in the drains...

...At least as released, the film is sadly disjointed...

...Why doesn't she become an underwater go-go dancer, thus solving her problems and letting us go home...

...The trouble with this background part of the film is that the number of changes it can ring on petty failure is limited as well as limiting, so that the film itself seems to become a drifter confusedly wandering in search of significance...

...The metaphor is nonvisual and slightly mixed, and the rhythm is off...

...Conrad Hall's camera work is, once again, tricky-as when it puts a gratuitous halo around Reach's head in the penultimate scene...

...It assumes a tone of arch knowingness that does not work on any level...

...The Civil Defense investigator, for instance, is made to pick his nose-a far too facile way of making him repulsive...

...But Tanner and his coscenarist, John Berger (the English Communist art critic and novelist), insist on spurious social significance...

...The work of a relatively young Swiss director, Alain Tanner, it presents itself as a sharp comment on life in Switzerland and, by extension, in any capitalistic society...

...Ernie, the ambitious young fighter whom he takes under his wing, has a classic stupidity that is almost endearing, but his problems -such as being manipulated into marriage by a scheming little virgin whom he has dully deflowered-are finally too humdrum or too flatly presented...

...The voice continues: "Paul waited for two days, but the wind did not come...

...Did she encourage him...

...Tully, the fighter broken by a terrible defeat and his wife's desertion, is a likable and believable enough figure, but Gardner, at least in the movie, fails to make him interesting enough...

...Where did he come from...

...Only Jeff Bridges, as the stolidly well-meaning young Ernie, is just right...

...Broke, Pierre goes to Paris to try his luck there, and Paul returns to house painting...

...With very few exceptions, dull incident has been heaped on dull chatter, and when we find out that the girl did shoot her uncle or that the TV script will have to be scrapped, we could not care less...

...Besides sex, her chief pleasures are floating in a pool and wildly swaying to rock records...

...Even when it turns out that Paul was right, that Rosemonde, in exasperation, shot her uncle, the boys cannot come up with a script...

...but all that has engulfed us is two hours of boredom...

...In true Godardian tradition, Tanner constructs his film out of plot elements, simulated cinema-verite, and a rather sententious narration between one fairly static scene and the next...

...But if it is a joke, it is on Paul, who is supposed to be the finest person in the film...

...He is in an all-night beanery where he has dragged Ernie for some talk...

...he believes her to be innocent...

...in court, he claimed his niece tried to kill him, while she maintained it was an accidental, self-inflicted wound...

...Barflies and sporadic fruit-pickers, they are inhabitants of a prosperous burg whose affluence eludes them in real life, while, in their dreams, they inhabit Fat City...

...One wonders just how these babes in the Alps would make out under a Communist regime...

...Least tolerable, though, is the narration...

...Again, when the narration comments on the garbage collectors' strike?nothing less than order and civilization was threatened"-are we to take this at face value, in which case it is grandiloquently melodramatic...

...And what of the silly little games with the voice-over narration...

...There is, however, no indication that he is a genuine writer, or that he has any talent except for clowning, which he does incessantly...

...The many short, geographically scattered scenes do not coalesce, do not give us a sense of passing time, do not create a feeling for place...

...After she quits her job in a sausage factory, they aid her financially...

...The film's hero believes in it until, in the end...