Kid Stuff

...Roiphe that her fantasies retain a certain amount of restraint and dignity, and that her descriptions of life among genteel but hectic, literate but bourgeois Upper-West-Siders are possessed of a decent enough fidelity to second-rate truths...

...I am not in a high moral dudgeon about the criminal couple's getting away with their ill-gotten loot to carefree safety in Mexico, but I am disgusted with the great lack of artistry the gifted maker of The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs exhibits in this unimaginative, preposterous film...

...Her humdrum life is filled with drudgery and uncertainties about her marriage and identity...

...There is something truly repellent about the vicious, wounded gangster who gets a veterinarian to patch him up, then abducts the fellow and his kewpie doll wife whom he has just seduced...

...If so, this is a particularly sneaky way of having your happy ending and eating your words too...

...And, like Judge Roy Bean, the film promulgates in mythico-allegorical terms the notion that in today's violent, evil world only the tough, bloody and amoral man can carve out a quiet niche for himself...

...a rather plausibly managed Amazon exploration in the novel becomes a crude African adventure, psychologically inappropriate and not even funny...

...totally ignored by Paul, they deflate themselves back to their usual size...

...Having just once forgotten to insert her diaphragm before intercourse, she finds that she is pregnant again...

...If Zindel's script and Kershner's direction provide a fair share of meretriciousness and vulgarity, it nevertheless remains for Barbra Streisand to drag the film down to the bottom of incredibility and coarseness...

...As the movie presents her, Margaret is the exploited worm that finally turns and asserts herself...

...In anger, her face assumes shapes and expressions that turn a movie into a horror film...

...My quarrel is not with the author's anti-women's-lib orientation, but with writing that is essentially a slightly higher-brow version of women's magazine fiction...

...McQueen, who does not exactly act and is rather too genteel for his part, at least has a presence: an easy-going self-assurance that stops short of cheekiness...

...The film therefore becomes a piece of corrupt claptrap, ostensibly chronicling the rebellion of the ex-istentially short-changed housewife, only to make her capitulate in a Central-Park pastoral in which dialogue, photography and especially her brains grow soft and fuzzyand all for that one day off...

...The plot of The Getaway is lurid trash...

...M t was a bad day when the Western discovered its mythic significance and its allegorical potential...

...The mere fact that in a family milieu as militantly Jewish as that, say, of the Cantrows and Kolodnys of The Heartbreak Kid, Streisand should appear as a "Margaret Reynolds" already strikes a false note...

...Paul Newman's efforts notwithstanding, it remains poor stuff, undeserving of further comment...

...If Peckinpah keeps piling this kind of garbage on his talents, they, alas, will not emerge similarly unscathed...

...but Jeremiah Johnson, artfully directed by Sydney Pollack (whose They Shoot Horses, Don't They...

...Quite aside from her persona, however, I find Miss Streisand's looks repellent...

...The hero is your trendy dropout from bellicose, greedy society, pretentiously and improbably addressed as "Pilgrim," who, by devious and sometimes ironic ways, becomes as great a destroyer of men and beasts as anyone in the despised plains...

...She does not embody a part, she defies it...

...The Crow chieftain is forced to call a truce, and a weary, battered but unbowed Jeremiah has earned his right to being a great, white, unmolested hunter...

...was an important film), does bear some looking into...

...The Vietnam fantasy of the book is omitted as being, perhaps, too controversial...

...The only thing that escapes reprehension and ridicule is Pollack's ability to make individual scenes have an authentic look and feel to them...

...Worst of all, there is a lurid fantasy about an abortion clinic that our heroine spectacularly escapes to have her third baby, approved now by the very husband who previously inveighed against such irresponsible overpopulation...

...The very idea of representing such a hospital, in this day and age, as a den of iniquity where patients look abject or mentally unbalanced, and the head doctor is an ominous lesbian looking and acting like a stevadore in drag, strikes me as gross, reactionary propaganda...

...The movie vulgarizes away with a vengeance...

...for what registers on screen, New Jersey would have done as well...

...Unlike a real comediennejane Fonda, for instance she lacks the variety, modulations, little inventive eccentricities, ability to underplay that add up to genuine humor...

...At the screening I attended, people were laughing out loud at her delivery of dramatic linesrather like a grade-school pupil asking to be excused to go to the bathroom...

...Streisand remains arrogantly, exultantly ugly...

...The film hasn't a shred of believ-ability...

...I think it would be nice if at least Jewish filmmakers could stop caricaturing Jews in this fashion...

...I believe in beauty or in a performer's ability to make herself or himself attractive in one way or another even when lacking outstanding physical endowments...

...To put it bluntly, no one who can write "motherhood is always a greedy affair and eventually the suckling-off of the suckler"whatever the meaning of that opaque maxim may behas an ear for the cadences of English prose...

...Or there is an imaginary scene in which Margaret is awed into accepting a female professor's ongoing affair with Paul when it is couched in high academic terms...

...At night, they tie him to a straight chair (perhaps the only straight thing in the movie) and force him to watch them having intercourse in a comfortable bed...

...Is the implication that even the rosy resolution is just a pipe dream...

...He learns his trade by chance meetings with a couple of bizarre, experienced loners, and sobering encounters with various Indians and their victims...

...HereA little older, much more smug, and not typecastshe flounders, forlorn and simpering, and is somehow always beside the point...

...But she is undoubtedly a great inspiration to the legions of unsightly women whose banner she has carried to the heights of stardom and critical adulation that extends from Pauline Kael all the way to Rex Reed...

...Robert Redford portrays a soldier disgusted with the Mexican War who goes West to become a mountain man, a trapper who can ignore the vile contentiousness of the plains...

...In the novel, Margaret Reynolds is married to Paul, a brilliant young professor of history at Columbia...

...Roiphe's novel and find it rather less enchanting than the reviewers did in 1970...

...Perhaps this is my limitation, but I cannot accept a romantic heroine who is both knock-kneed and ankleless (maybe one of those things, but not both...

...She has a small daughter, a baby boy, and several elaborate reveries as she sits in the park watching the children in the playground...

...I have skimmed Mrs...

...Just how the busy teacher, researcher and author will manage the children is n# more explained than what the wife will do with her precious chunk of emancipation...

...The height of the ridiculous is that the African scene was actually shot in Kenya...

...The screenplay by Paul Zindel and the direction of Irvin Kershner, however, turn the movie into quasi-Nichols-and-May cabaret-style skits loosely linked into a sappy plot line and often collapsing into cheap farce...

...Thus the book's interior monologues margaret's ruminations expressing a vague discontent with her life that nevertheless end in acceptance of the wife and mother's traditional role become in the movie gab sessions with a farcical assortment of other bench-sitting mothers, ranging from bristling liberationists to adoring slaves and, of course, the obligatory black...

...Primitive art is still a humble form of art, but premeditated primi-tivism is pure sham...

...Roiphe has her confused heroine imagine her seduction by a Fidel Castro who is really a woman in disguise, the movie Margaret resists the female Fidel and keeps even her id spotlessly clean...

...Jeremiah Johnson, on the other hand, is a kind of Zen-Western, full of comic yet supposedly profound quirkiness, and ending with one more apotheosis of the justly murderous white superman...

...In big, emotional scenes, her accent goes Lower-East-Side and completely undermines the cultivatedness she is supposed to portray or the gentility she presumes to affect...

...short-waisted and shapeless, scragtoothed and with a horse face centering on a nose that looks like Brancusi's Rooster cast in liver-wurst...

...Though some of the minor parts are well played, David Selby, as Paul, is as stiff and stilted a performer as Miss Streisand is a garishly grotesque one...

...The man is half Indian, and the redskin whom the paleface turned into a homeless outlaw has every right to pay back the debt with moral anomie...

...Where Mrs...

...Also, it is no longer possible to avoid the notion that Peckinpah thinks of women as generally inferior beings who always attach themselves to the stronger and more powerful man, no matter what loyalties are betrayed, what lives destroyed...

...Whereas Allen is the beleaguered, repressed, self-depreciating little man, masochistically wallowing in his littleness, weakness, homeliness, Miss Streisand is the shrewd, aggressive shrew, domineering to the point of sadism, blithely unaware of her ugliness or bullying everyone into accepting it as beauty...

...but then her readiness to settle for a weekly day off from the kids and imminent saddling with yet another baby is a sentimentalization and falsification of the whole problem...

...But what can you say about a film that begins with a closeup of a baby's bottom and ends with a yellownay, golden cab carrying Barbra right through the middle of Central Park...

...after a couple of days of this, he hangs himself...

...The film is photographed in over-pretty, almost deliquescent colors by Gordon Willis, and in the abortion-clinic fantasy the camera and opticals run Ken-Russellish riot...

...Her speaking voice consists either of a husky stage whisper (originated by Marilyn Monroe, another nonactress parlayed into an alleged comic talent by special pleading) or a terrible fishwife's screech...

...The deliberately mythic-allegoric Western is like a folk song contrived by a city slicker, a naive painting by a highly trained academician, or a sober man's attempt to recapture his drunken ebullienceit all comes out arch, brittle, contrived...

...But the moment you start analyzing anything at all, it falls apart...

...And she is no actress...

...her daydreams make up for this with gallant, thrilling adventures...

...Instead of the rather quiet events of the original the wistful speculations of a young mother who finally resigns herself to most of the donkey work her husband is sparedthe movie gives us coyly virulent in-fighting, outbursts of jealousy, garish family parties and sophisticated cosmopolitan soirees...

...He adopts a fatherless boy and accidentally wins an Indian maiden for a wife, and begins to settle into a facsimile of bourgeois family comfort in a nice log cabin amid God's plenty...

...Consider, for example, the episode where hero and heroine are sucked into a large garbage truck and have every kind of metallic and other waste hurled at and heaped roof-high over them...

...Miraculously, they are spewed out onto a dumping ground with only a small scratch on her and no mark on him...

...Then the Army calls upon him to help rescue a stranded wagon train and, in so doing, he is obliged to violate a sacred Crow burial ground, whereupon the Crows kill his familywhy them rather than him, the soldiers, or the wagon party makes no more sense than anything else in this movie...

...The sequences of daily living suffer even worse...

...The filmmaker relishes the sadism much too much, and his sympathies, very clearly, are not with the victim...

...Yet it must be said for Mrs...

...There is also a slew of lesser fantasies such as the one where Margaret's breasts, in competition with those of an admiring, bosomy female whom Paul flirts with at a party, suddenly puff up to cantaloupe dimensions...

...Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway is a sourly disappointing, ugly and unbelievable film...

...Think, for example, of those English leading ladies like Celia Johnson, Dorothy Tutin, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Rita Tushingham and a host of others plain women who, through makeup, acting ability or, most likely, a spiritual intensity that suffuses their faces, make themselves lovely...

...What makes the film so absurd is that while it strives for picturesque but ostensibly demythifying realism in showing its hero bumbling his way through to survival among genuinely harsh and even harrowing conditions, it nevertheless presents a white man who can ultimately outhear, outsmell, outwit, outkill, and outlive any old Indian...

...If we care about the principals, it is only because Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw look much better than anyone else in the film...

...On this unsavory character, see Pauline Kael's splendid expose in the January 13 New Yorker...

...The heroine's oppressively middle-class mother and relatives, whom the book is content to leave in a New Jersey limbo, are brought on the scene in stereotypical comedy situations, and Margaret is allowed some supposedly hilarious mots and tirades against them...

...Bean, despite a few amusing moments, becomes wearying with its relentless striving to be offbeat, and repugnant with its hypocritical celebration of the hanging judge as a moral hero...

...sometimes, too, the aim is for social significance replete with arty camera lyricism that touches the surreal...

...He becomes a Crow-slaying avenger, surviving countless attacks on him and killing innumerable braves...

...Bank robbers, after all, do get away with it on occasion, and sympathy for the outlaw is nothing unusual in the movies, especially those of Peckin-pah...

...John Huston's Bean starts out as a sort of absurdist Western and quickly deteriorates into cutie-pie blood thirstiness and bloodcurdling allegory...

...Miss Streisand comes on as fundamentally Jewish as Woody Allen, only she represents the other side of a stereotype that, like a coin, has two sides...

...W; are treated to a subplot in which the punk and the little woman, traveling by car and staying at hotels, variously taunt and torture the unfortunate husband...

...Yet, unfortunately, there is more to it...

...Miss MacGraw, we can tell now, was a fluke in Good-bye, Columbus, where she played herself and was convincingly pretty, spoiled and insecure...

...Yet he is glorified by faux-naif ballads that infest the soundtrack, and his progress is a series of seriocomic incidents that are kept cal-culatedly oblique, oddball, sardonic and, above all, random, so as to maintain an aura of cosmic irony...

...amazingly, the marriage is revitalized by this, exactly as in reams of women's fiction and hours upon hours of soap opera...

...the characterizations are devoid of humanity...

...Miss MacGraw cannot act at all...

...This is the problem of both The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and Jeremiah Johnson, both with screenplays wholly or partly by John Milius...