A Flat Quintet

...I have the uneasy feeling that Bolt, the long-suffering husband and purveyor of scripts to the capricious Sarah Miles, is giving us a piece of encoded and perhaps therapeutical autobiography here, but that does not make it better for the rest or us...

...Jon Finch is improving with each performance, and his William Lamb, albeit not outstanding, is dignified and persuasive...

...There is, of course, a trick ending, but after all that trick beginning and middle, it hardly registers...

...In the present case, the heroine is haunted in her isolated hunting lodge-or perhaps hounded in her haunting lodge-by the ghost of a dead lover and the presences of a weak husband and an overbearing would-be lover...

...That has become the stock answer of filmmakers to that type of question...

...As the tempestuous Caroline, Miss Miles tosses off the most pasteboard performance of her upsy-downsy career, and is outfitted with the most condignly pasty make-up ever-as if the whole woman were made of stale marzipan...

...Tati tries to evoke the absurdities of the highway life for the most part, but the subject has been rather exhaustively covered from, say, Dino Risi's The Easy Life to Godard's Weekend...

...The life story of this 19th-century lady who managed to be both a scandalous eccentric and a dullish bluestocking is not without interest...

...an important client whom he sets up with a favorite call girl has a heart attack in mid-sex before he could put in an order...

...In a truly epic bottleneck, whose dimensions, intricacy, choreography and only slight exaggeration lift it into the realm of the surreal, a Volkswagen with its hood snapping open and shut like some monstrous shark or crocodile pursues one of its wheels that has come off and seems to be escaping for dear life...

...It is somewhat cruel fun, but it does bring into amusing focus the girl's superficiality even in grief...

...He looks back upon his fighting at Anzio as the key event of his life, but the hippie girl with whom he spends a night has never heard of our being at war with Italy, And though he repeats old baseball scores to himself as if they were Holy Writ, a bunch of happy kids in the park exclude him from their ballgame...

...These figures get confused in her imagination, so that sometimes a real person is seen by her as an unreal one, sometimes an unreal one is real, and sometimes, for all her paranoia and schizophrenia, a real one is unpleasantly real...

...it cannot make its hero's disappointments and predicament unshiny or, at the very least, exotic...

...Save the Tiger can abjure neither sentimentality nor glamor...

...It is playacting that hurts one in every part, especially the teeth-even if they were as false as the performance itself...

...Still, I cannot really blame them, though I must admire Alec Mc-Cowen for transcending his surroundings and turning into a credible and lovable figure the prissy, avuncular nephew whose life is glamorized by becoming attached to an eternally youthful, reckless and totally extravagant aunt...

...The screenplay by Jay Presson Allen out of Hugh Wheeler is unmitigated claptrap, and the mise en scene has that horrid look of cut-rate lavish: glossy, gaudy, cluttered but not elegant, opulent, sumptuous...

...highly capable actors like Robert Stephens and Lou Gossett perform here as if they were criticizing the material rather than embodying it...

...For the story is a wry, essentially ludicrous, anti-romance, even unto her death in early middle age after an attack of madness triggered by encountering the funeral cortege of the poet with whom she had had a liaison that was more publicity than passion, and most of all mutual recrimination...

...And in Los Angeles, where success has a way of looking like failure, it is hard to come up with a failure that does not resemble success...

...A number of England's finest actors and actresses are drowning in this film...

...Nevertheless, she comes out ahead of Richard Chamberlain, whose Byron is simultaneously so rotten and ludicrous as to make one wonder about the more recent permutations of the casting couch that used to be shoved under bosomy and willing starlets, but seems now to have wandered off in other directions...

...The writer-director's game is to keep the audience guessing which of the three possibilities obtains at any given moment, the sort of game I find just a little less absorbing than tag...

...The author of that very respectable play, A Man for All Seasons, and of the dishonest but impressive script for Lawrence of Arabia, has become a sentimental hack...

...Naturally, everything goes wrong with the trip, particularly because Hulot is being preceded or trailed by a sexy and dizzy press agent in her little sports car-a young woman with a genius for creating, no matter what the snarl-up, additional trouble...

...One works: The color cinematography of the astute Vil-mos Zsigmond is a romantic enough rendering of the Irish countryside for the camera to have been nurtured on early Yeats...

...Jack Lemmon's acting is good most of the way, but cannot encompass the deeper moments...

...The all-corners-cut appearance extends to the very casting and acting...

...When I asked Altman whether he had been influenced by Repulsion, he said he had not seen it when he made Images...

...I haven't read Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt, which sounded as bad as other recent Greeniana, but I doubt if it could have been as poor as the film George Cukor made from it...

...It is a film with good, serious intentions, and thus a somewhat touching failure...

...Much of this stuff has been done appreciably better in Roman Polan-ski's Repulsion, although I did not care for that film, either...

...there are troubles with various associates and employes...

...After lour de fete (1948), Mr...

...The acting is good enough for this sort of charade, though I wish that Marcel Bozzuffi's English were more penetrable and that Susannah York had not picked a moment of fairly advanced pregnancy to show herself in the nude...

...In its quiet way, the scene is about as repulsive as can be...

...Why is it so damned hard to make a grown-up film in America...

...Images shows us Robert Altman at his most trivial...

...In fact, the last scene, in which a still young Lady Caroline is eulogized for having died of a (hold on to your hats) broken heart, is a sequence to be enshrined in the Museum of Cinematic Absurdities, along with such duck's-egg-sized zircons as the ending of The Red Shoes and the Sarah Bernhardt sequences from The Barkleys of Broadway...

...For the rest, Traffic is stalled all the way...

...only Laurence Olivier and Margaret Leighton manage to keep their heads above all that watering down...

...The film again features Tati's comic persona, the officious but bumbling Hulot, who, this time round, must get a newly designed French vehicle to a motor show in Holland...

...I wonder, don't they see any movies, or are they just fibbing...

...Hulot's Holiday (1953) and My Uncle (1958), the French comedian and filmmaker seemed to run out of steam until 1967, when he made Playtime (not yet shown here), and now Traffic...

...The other funny scene concerns the PR girl's pet dog, hidden by some hoodlums who leave in its place a cleverly improvised mock-up of the dog's cadaver...

...Biggest among these smaller letdowns is Jacques Tati's Traffic...

...His wife goes to New York and he is lonely...

...Whether it is because Miss Smith is too young and cannot play this older woman without patronizing and caricaturing her -or for whatever other reason?almost every one of the actress' gestures, intonations, tricks is hollow or pasted on, artificial without the conviction that would make it artistic...

...while he can still turn out an occasional neat epigram, it won't sustain us through layers and layers of platitudinous-ness and posturing...

...The movie covers a day in the life of a Los Angeles Jewish garment manufacturer, one part magnate, one part idealist, and two parts desperate man barely ahead of bankruptcy, compelled to rig his books and hire an arsonist to burn down one of his factories for the insurance money...

...But Robert Bolt has turned this into a soggy romance, a super-Ryan's Daughter, and since he has now taken over as director as well as scenarist, there are no dime-fiction holds barred...

...The film, quite poorly photographed, gets so desperate in the search for humor that it devotes a goodly sequence to showing how various drivers, while waiting for the traffic light to change, pick their noses: furtively, maniacally, absent-mindedly, etc...

...and an all-important fashion show produces a temporary nervous breakdown...

...writing and direction are a bit slick and predictable...

...Save the Tiger was written by Steve Shagan and directed by John G. Avildsen, who made Joe and, regrettably, Cry Uncle...

...To be sure, Altman decks his film out with all sorts of fancy, indeed pretentious, auditory and visual trappings...

...Sadly, however, the film strikes me as almost totally unfunny...

...The film is a psychological thriller about one of those rich young women who can apparently afford the most extraordinary hallucinations and outbursts of violence without being put away...

...Her marriage to the thoroughly decent William Lamb, who was to become Lord Melbourne, and her brief, sterile (and, as has recently been suggested, possibly unconsummated) affair with Lord Byron, could have made a nice, sardonic film...

...About Lady Caroline Lamb it takes a supreme effort of the will not to remain speechless...

...Twice Traffic rouses itself from its feebleness...

...These spectacular aunts a la Mame have a way of ringing as theatrically rigged as fairy godmothers (pun, alas, intended), and Maggie Smith gives an absolutely shocking performance as the current one...