On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen KANGAROOS, KILLERS AND KOOKS BY JOHN SIMON outback is a film that has a roughly equal amount of right and wrong things about it. This makes it hard to discuss without sounding like a...
...Much of the amiable bestiality comes across and culminates in two hideous, shattering kangaroo hunts, but the subsequent melodramatic twists and the hero's elaborate hallucinations lack conviction or dramatic necessity...
...He is standing in his apartment in front of the closed Venetian blinds, yet enough light filters through to reveal his darkened face against a striated background...
...It could have compellingly shown bibulous masculine camaraderie as the dehumanizing phenomenon it is for men and, indirectly, women...
...Another film more interesting than truly successful, Without Apparent Motive, is the second work of the young French cineaste, Philippe Labro...
...m eter Bogdanovich has followed up The Last Picture Show with another pastiche of past picture shows, this one evocatively called What's Up, Doc...
...There is less clever irony here than good coarse-grained fun, and taste for the absurdities of death and life...
...There is good acting from almost everyone, or, at least, good typecasting: Laura An-tonelli is disturbingly winsome as the neurotic woman behind it all, and Erich Segal makes a quack so unctuous and self-righteous that the audience lets out a jubilant whoop at his demise...
...For Christmas vacation, he takes a desolate old train to the nearest mining town????a capital of boredom known to its semicretinized residents as the Yabba...
...In the present film, Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aard-vark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun...
...Her speaking voice seems to have graduated with top honors from the Brooklyn Conservatory of Yentaism, and her acting consists entirely of fishily thrusting out her lips, sounding like a cabbie bellyaching at breakneck speed, and throwing her weight around...
...a rich dowager's jewels being stolen by a corrupt hotel clerk and house detective...
...I doubt whether this movie could have been a serious threat to Howard Hawks and the other expert screwballers even back then...
...The peculiarly American-style violence produces, against the more gracious and relaxed backgrounds of Nice, a piquant sense of depaysement...
...The acting is convincing, especially that of the townsfolk played by the citizenry of Broken Hill...
...Abstractedly, he puts the whistle to his mouth, but his concentration is so poor, or his throat so dry, that only two or three wheezing half-sounds dribble out...
...in this one, he sticks as close to the originals as he can, thus eliminating the slight frisson of introducing a drop of the new into the old wine in old bottles...
...Ryan O'Neal, a personable and hard-working young man, is leagues below Cary Grant's league, and as for Barbra Streisand as that lovable kook, the sort of part that Hepburn, Lombard and Jean Arthur made famous, she comes less close to the delights of Jean Arthur than to the debacle of Port Arthur...
...The face shadowed from without and within, the stripes behind it suggesting so many methodically drawn lines to cancel out the world beyond, the daylight nonetheless refusing to be wholly denied, and those pitiful, aborted sounds trailing off into the somber silence????the director who etched this vignette bears watching...
...In the end, the film runs out of steam and the last shred of creditibility...
...This makes it hard to discuss without sounding like a New York Times reviewer, one of those professional equivo-cators specializing in double-bottomed paragraphs or sentences, whose ends carefully contradict their beginnings...
...The comic car chase is probably more lavish than it would have been in the old days????and here, indeed, the film scores most of its less than frequent comedic effects????but otherwise everything looks, sounds, feels and, if the word is permissible in this context, thinks 1937...
...and Donald Pleasence again does one of his strident, nasal grotesques, this time as a cynical alcoholic doctor?by Conrad out of Chekhov????who becomes both the good and evil angel of the schoolteacher...
...A young teacher is languishing at his job in a one-one room school-house in the barren Australian outback, a thousand miles from Sydney...
...And the characters have become very French (whatever they may have been in the McBain original), like the aging playboy who stuffs his bathing briefs with a large handkerchief in lieu of a codpiece...
...and revealed aggressive xenophilia as yet another form of xenophobia...
...Chips Rafferty, the veteran Australian actor, is properly drab in his very kindness as a local constable...
...It purports to be a straightforward account of a dreary and harrowing experience, but it spills over into sensationalism and trickiness, which, given the unusual yet universal subject, is a great pity...
...today it merely seems a heavy-handed attempt at nostalgia...
...Yet Outback holds our attention most of the way...
...But Labro has assembled some fascinating physiognomies, and he has both a good sense of rhythm (though his cross-cutting in the early sequences gets to be a mite ostentatious) and a nice eye for detail...
...In his last film, Bogdanovich at least added some elements that its prototypes were not allowed to show or say...
...particularly effective is his sudden mirthless smile that bares his teeth as mechanically as if he were a horse offering itself for sale...
...I am flattered, but since the character is both a Yugoslav and a plagiarist, I suspect that only deep-rooted modestv prevents Bogdanovich from admitting him to be a self-portrait...
...During the night, however, he falls prey to the Yabba's two chief entertainments: beer-guzzling and penny-pitching for large sums...
...If the transitions were handled less brusquely, if the milieu were examined more thoroughly, if the weaknesses of the hero's supposedly civilized psyche were traced more cogently in their affinity with and surrender to the ambient vulgarity, if a heterosexual encounter did not have the dice loaded against it and a homosexual one were not dragged in too glibly????if all this did not lead up to some rather purple violence, it could have been a devastating indictment of well-meaning meaning-lessness...
...Though she has good eyes and a nice complexion, the rest of her is a veritable anthology of disaster areas...
...It has a strain of Gallic sensuality running through it, however, as well as a certain innocence????as if it could not quite believe such a series of murderous snipings to be possible in one of the happy cities of the Riviera...
...The natives, amiable brutes, extend a helpful, beer-can-bearing hand, and he is reluctantly but ineluctably sucked into a mindless, soulless companionship of boozy bravado, boorish conviviality, and grubby sex...
...The film's heavy, Hugh Simon (poorly played by Kenneth Mars), is said by Bogdanovich to be modeled on me...
...Gary Bond is adequate as the teacher...
...but by then we have had our share of fun...
...and four identical suitcases in which these goodies or some rather less desirable articles are lodged...
...Jean-Louis Trintignant gives one of his better performances as the detective protagonist...
...This thriller is based on an Ed McBain novel that Labro and his coscenarist, Jacques Lanz-mann, have transposed from our West Coast to the Cote d'Azur...
...Even her singing has become mannerism-infested, and a brief attempt at a Bogart impersonation may be the film's involuntary comic high spot...
...It is an imitation "screwball comedy" in the manner of Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday, and, once again, it cashes in on Bogdanovich's aptitude for looking backward...
...The valises keep changing hands, even as the shy hero keeps changing heads, depending on whether he is with his bossy fiancee or with the (supposedly) charming kook who is out to get him...
...The film is basically an hommage to the type of American movie epitomized by The Big Sleep...
...Miss Streisand is to our histrionic esthetics what the Vietnam war is to our politics...
...With the help of three screenwriters, Bogdanovich has concocted a totally zany, but far from totally funny, farce about rival musicologists competing for a $20,-000 grant...
...Outback, based on a novel unknown to me, could have epitomized the appeal of the mud, the frailty of culture and fastidiousness dumped in a jolly pigpen...
...It is shorter yet on performances...
...To be sure, most things, movies included, tend to be mixed bags, but that is no reason why reading a review of them should be like walking on rugs that are continually being pulled out from under you...
...He has also created a humorous atmosphere that is unusual in recent French cinema, precisely because it is humor rather than wit...
...Outback, however, does its own double-dealing...
...Unhappily, the McBain material is deeply improbable and, in some ways, downright preposterous...
...The movie is short on funny lines, even with the jazzy trio of David Newman, Robert Benton and Buck Henry on script, although the audience at Radio City Music Hall laughed up a storm at the most pitiable inanities...
...Among the others, only Madeline Kahn as the fiancee and Liam Dunn as a judge show true comic sparkle...
...a man with purloined top-secret documents being chased by a secret service man...
...From here, next morning, our hero is to catch a plane for Sydney and his sexy girl friend...
...Nevertheless, both have underlying merit and moments of real power...
...The screenplay by Evan Jones is unfortunately given to oversimplification, even as Ted Kotcheff's direction leans toward overdramatization...
...Labro can create memorable images, such as that of the tough, intrepid inspector, whose mistress has just been killed, absent-mindedly fingering a whistle she once playfully gave him ("If you want me, just whistle...
...Only Dominique Sanda continues to be the glaring nonactress she is, though Labro does much to cover up her debility...
...the dialogue, admittedly sprightly, is not dazzling enough to blind us to logical blemishes...
...He loses all his money...
Vol. 55 • April 1972 • No. 7
