Games People Shouldn't Play
SIMON, JOHN
On Screen GAMES PEOPLE SHOULDN'T PLAY BY JOHN SIMON Let me say as little as possible about Sam Peckinpah's latest, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It has obviously been cut and recut by Jim Aubrey...
...There are several directorial tricks involved...
...self-serving?because Sondheim and Perkins, show-business celebrities, are touting the glamor of show-biz celebs...
...Ever since Major Dundee, Peckinpah has been denied the final cut for one reason or another...
...several elicit further killings requiring more unscrambling...
...A pop composer and singer, Alan Price, backed up by his group, is often heard, and fairly often seen, performing the film's score...
...The film is a kind of "How to Fail in Business Without Really Trying," with Mick enjoying numerous tiny successes that quickly turn into whopping fiascos...
...Some of them do not even register clearly, like the caritas Romana sequence, where I find it hard to determine what the vicar's wife feeding the hungry hero by suckling him is supposed to signify...
...But things have reached a point where I no longer care: The present film could not have been that much better in any version, for what is left is unremittingly trashy, obvious or pointless, defiantly irrational or doggedly repetitious...
...Thus the difference between moral acceptability and insufficiency is simply that between a successful and an unsuccessful criminal...
...Sense, I repeat, is scarce...
...the Broadway lyricist-co.Tposer, and Anthony Perkins, the movie star...
...At any rate, they are to reveal some ugly hidden facts about the players who, for inconceivable reasons, consent to play...
...The device proves wearying, particularly since only a couple of the songs have satirical and musical bite...
...Anderson must have been improvising the film as he went along, incorporating driblets of his composer's life as well as his star's, and goodness knows what else...
...Though I pass over most of it in silence, I must mention the appalling dual presence of Bob Dylan: on film, as a puny and expressionless nonactor...
...It started out at Cannes with a running time of 192 minutes, decreased during New York previews to 178 minutes, and wound up being released at 166...
...when, like Rudolf Wurlitzer in the present case, he is incompetent, the film will be a mess...
...Its class warfare is couched in inadequate satire, and its absurdism is never exhilarating...
...Even a concurrent low-budget film on the youth of Billy, by two ad men, Charles Moss and Stan Dragoti (the latter of whom directed) is more effective...
...pretentious-for we are to view maniacal game-players not as immature but as an intellectual elite...
...Ian McShane and Mason have a few better-than-average moments, and Richard Benjamin is surprisingly inoffensive...
...The big spring disappointment, however, is Lindsay Anderson's new film, O Lucky Man!, which has already had more phases than the waning moon...
...The desperate rushing from episode to disparate episode without developing anything would be justified only if the vignettes built up to some spectacular climax or punchline...
...entitled Dirty Little Billy, it has a somewhat simplistic debunking purpose, rather trying at times, but not outright boring...
...the rest of it should not have been perpetrated once...
...occasionally this is worked into the plot, frequently it is just there...
...the cinematographer is surely the Czech freeze's greatest gift to Western filmmaking...
...But at least in this film, unlike her two previous ones, she unveils only four fifths of her remarkably gross body...
...James Coburn is a sadistic producer whose mistress Sheila has been killed by a hit-and-run driver...
...David Sherwin's script offers no new insights into corruption, social strife, venality, obtuse-ness, mutual mistrust, the triumph of carnality over feeling, and other ill-assorted targets-far too many for anything more than random potshots...
...They are Richard Benjamin, a hack screenwriter, and Joan Hackett, his rich wife...
...An extraordinarily distasteful film, The Last of Sheila, marks the joint screenwriting debut of Stephen Sondheim...
...Ralph Richardson is not allowed to make more than a stereotype out of the rapacious nabob, and his other role amounts to nothing...
...O Lucky Man...
...By way of variation on the device, Helen Mirren, who plays Patricia, the spoiled heiress, always appears in the same part-which doesn't please me much either, since I find her singularly ungifted and unappetizing...
...Raquel Welch, a rising movie star, and Ian McShane, the gigolo whom she is keeping...
...Dyan Cannon is getting more repulsive with every appearance, James Co-burn more stuck in a tooth-flashing rut, and Raquel Welch more unable to cope with the rudiments of acting...
...There Alias was the collective name for Billy's victims, the same dancer dying and rising again, to symbolize the nemesis that Billy, try as he may, cannot wipe out...
...but nastiness of a peculiarly smug and condescending sort is absolutely omnipresent...
...It has obviously been cut and recut by Jim Aubrey (who deserves to be made an honorary or, rather, dishonorable member of the cinema editors' union), and no less than six names are credited with the film's editing...
...James Mason, a movie director on the skids, and Dyan Cannon, a maliciously wisecracking talent agent...
...Mick Travis, the youthful hero, is a sort of working-class British cross between Candide and Sammy Glick, albeit not quite benighted enough for the former nor yet cunning enough for the latter...
...Malcolm McDowell is adroit and winning as always, but Mick is a dimension-less and predictable booby with whom our patience wears out quickly...
...from near-victim of a mad scientist to lover of the feckless daughter of an unscrupulous multimillionaire...
...As the movie fluctuates between class hatred and all-around misanthropy, naturalism and wild hyperbole, bitter earnestness and jaded nonchalance, the sense of pointless accretion becomes oppressive and finally smothering...
...He invites the suspects to his yacht off Cannes for a week of exacting games that are supposed to unearth the truth...
...Rachel Roberts has had the third and best of her bits cut, and Arthur Lowe can do little with three meager roles, one of them (by today's standards, rather objectionably) in black-face...
...Again, the leading actors keep popping up throughout the movie in different parts...
...Some of it Peckinpah has done very much better before...
...Every relationship shown is based on petty or sadistic mutual humiliation and cruelty, and the final good takes the form of blackmailing the murderer out of his millions, letting the creature dangle forever at the end of a string, and royally screwing the rest of the world...
...probability nonexistent...
...when Mick asks what there is to smile about, he is gruffly coerced into smiling...
...The film concludes with an open call for actors in an audition hall, presided over by Lindsay Anderson himself...
...He plays a supposedly mysterious character named Alias-a clumsy steal from Eugene Lor-ing's ballet Billy the Kid to Copland's score...
...When his scenarist is good, the results can be impressive...
...but they don't...
...Some quite notable character actors do their level best with even more sparse and thankless parts...
...Here the name and character of Alias are beyond comprehension...
...Both scenarists are devotees of games and puzzles, and the entire film is a series of involved charades, double- and triple-bottomed conundrums, some of which may make sense but are impossible to keep up with, others of which can be followed but do not make the slightest sense...
...is pretentious and excruciatingly monotonous...
...from prison to the movie studios...
...on the sound track, as the fabricator of abysmal lyrics and tunes...
...The idea for the film comes from its star, Malcolm McDowell, on whose early misadventures several episodes are based...
...moves from heightened realism to disheveled surrealism and back again, until it ends-this time not with a bloodbath, but with one of those Felliniesque copouts...
...The audition turns into a ball-laughter, shouting, dancing, and balloons (getting to be the dreariest of film platitudes) going off merrily, while the entire cast of O Lucky Man!, the picture that is about to be made, gleefully rampages away...
...Like Anderson's last film...
...from being that mogul's secretary to becoming his fall guy...
...The direction by Herbert Ross and the acting by an all-second-rate-star cast (except for James Mason, who was once first-rate) ranges from slick to inept...
...It is all attitudinizing-for we are to consider these characters horribly fascinating, whereas they are merely mildly clever bores...
...Some reviewers found this doubling fascinating...
...Yet there is worse: a genuine ugliness and unhealthiness...
...Sometimes the scene is a recording studio, sometimes the rock group's digs, sometimes the van in which the musicians travel...
...Good actors get little opportunity to act here...
...it strikes me only as arbitrary...
...He tells Mick, who catches his eye, to smile...
...Each, it seems, is modeled on a real-life person, and an additional unsavory game is for the audience to figure out on whom...
...I am forced to conclude that Peckinpah is a man lacking taste and perhaps intelligence, but gifted with a fine cinematic sensibility...
...and hopelessly trivial-because not even a decent thriller comes of it...
...Though I saw the middle version, longer or shorter are meaningless terms where at best only 30 minutes are salvageable...
...Several of these games are supposed to solve a mysterious death...
...He goes from coffee salesman to spy suspect...
...If . . . (it also has the same scenarists and cinematographers), O Lucky Man...
...But the hollow ostentation and epicene bitchi-ness of The Last of Sheila more than make up for that...
...Only Miroslav Ondricek's color photography works to perfection...
Vol. 56 • July 1973 • No. 14
