Junk Epics

...The school is saved, and there is hope even for those with short hair, as it turns out...

...And this despite location shooting and no expenses spared...

...Typical of this kind of filmmaking is the handling of the King's infatuation with Josef Kainz, who was a nobly cerebral actor?ein niebezauberter Bezauberer, an unenchantable enchanter, Hugo von Hofmannsthal was to call him?nothing like the insignificant stripling reciting himself hoarse for an imperious, insatiable sovereign as the movie would have it...

...Because Visconti is known also as an opera director, one would have expected at least Ludwig's nexus with Wagner to be portrayed with precision and solicitude...

...The saving grace most often cited is the film's sincerity, its genuine belief in Shoshone and Paiute mystical lore...

...The plot is hardly worth dwelling on...

...There is room here for a tragicomedy of psychological tremors and social repercussions...

...And Folk-er Bohnet is hardly the actor to impersonate Kainz, especially not when obliged to recite in awkwardly German-accented English...

...Wagner's music rattles around the soundtrack, but the implications of a sovereign's emptying the state treasury not for public welfare, not for warding off Prussian imperialism, but for lavish patronage of the arts, are never really gone into...

...Just as in The Damned, Visconti climaxes with melancholy shots of the aftermath of an all-male orgy, but his customary tightrope act between nausea and nostalgia lacks the honesty and incisiveness of art...

...So now Warner is giving it a big, heavily advertised premiere engagement in its second run...

...Surely, you might think, there is some consideration of how and whence that notorious madness came, and a cataloguing of the stages by which it grew...

...We are only for display, unless someone makes us seem important by assassinating us"-which is immediately followed by a flash-forward of her laid out, assassinated and mourned over...

...Even a mad king deserves sane examination...

...Billy Jack's staunchness and Jean's nonviolence combine into a true albeit modisnly muted victory...

...As they proudly proclaim in the published screenplay, Billy Jack has become "the greatest youth-culture picture of our times...

...This long, creeping film is such an overdressed vacuum that it affords the bored viewer a perfect opportunity for assessing how plod ?ding a director Visconti is...

...The film was coauthored by the husband-and-wife team of Tom Laughlin and Delores Taylor, stars both of them and was directed by Laughlin...

...Granted that Romy Schneider plays the young empress rather more boyishly than necessary, this explanation is as factitious as the romance itself is fictitious...

...How, if at all, was this derangement related to the king's homosexuality...

...this is to have done handsomely by the arts...

...So if the movie lacks a good sense of rhythm either in individual scenes or in their concatenation, if the camera angles and movements are as predictable as the performances are conventional, the fault is clearly the director's...

...To be sure, this aspect of the monarch's life concerns Visconti more, but even here there is no serious effort to see deeply into the problem...

...Whatever the intentions of this epic may be, it leaves us with only a few mouthfuls of snickers...

...The writing, directing and acting are as amateurish as they are tendentious, and obviousness and pre-posterousness are made to go happily hand in hand...

...Even those extravagant castles in the air that Ludwig managed to build on solid ground-castles combining every conceivable style into pure Disneyland-are not properly scrutinized: Why and how were they built, and what did they mean to Ludwig and the people of Bavaria...

...Nor does the film afford more than a glimpse of the fantastic Lindehof grotto with its underground boating lake and Wagnerian tableaus for decoration-madame Tussaud's, the Tunnel of Love and Capri rolled into one...

...But, in the end...

...To be turned into Ludwig, a three-hour film by Luchino Vis-conti, is to be repaid in niggardly, indeed scurvy, fashion...

...This combination mystic and superman can beat up a whole town when required and so save the situation...

...Sincerity a virtue...

...provided only that they do not think...

...But although there is a fair amount of footage on Wagner and Hans and Cosima von Bulow, Visconti puts his foot in it and stresses only the scandalous aspects of the affair or the irrelevantly grandiose ones, such as the famous musical birthday offering to Cosima that has nothing to do with the story of Ludwig...

...They would seem to imply that the 19-year-old, just-crowned Ludwig's rebuff by his cousin Elizabeth, who represses her feeling for him so as to remain faithful to her husband, Emperor Franz Josef, starts the teen-aged king on the road to homosexuality...

...instead, we get Ludwig gazing yearningly at some bathing groom or sleeping adjutant and occasionally conducting a dialogue fraught with ambiguities...

...And what are we to make of this advice to Ludwig when his homosexual inclinations begin to surface: "It happens to most young men-to all when they are so sensitive-but usually they get over it with help...

...it has something in it for both sincere purists and sincere impurists...

...Almost all successful trash is as paved with sincerity as the road to hell is with good intentions...

...Elizabeth will pontificate prophetically: "Rulers like us have nothing to do with history...

...This gives them that vulgar charisma that reeks of sincerity, wherever on the scale between Miss Susann and Grandma Moses it pitches its tent...

...Trevor Howard, thoroughly British as he is, does make Wagner into a believable, complex figure, and that, in this context, is quite an achievement...

...The fact that this is the film's only obvious flash-forward makes the scene even more incongruous and clumsy...

...Adriana Asti, still listed in the credits, was cut out of the film altogether, unless perchance I slept through her appearance...

...Sometimes the telepathy gets short-circuited, though, and Jean gets raped and a nice Indian boy murdered...

...It concerns Jean, the plucky mistress of a super-Montessorian school for dropouts on a Southwestern Indian reservation, and the hatred her long-haired pupils who are acquiring a do-it-yourself education inspire in the silent-American population of the neighboring town...

...But the script itself is never far from ludicrous...

...Just about scuttled by Warner Brothers back in 1971 when it failed to impress the New York critics, Billy Jack has since been sweeping the country, has become a youth-cult film, and is well on its way to turning into one of the all-time box-office hits...

...Are we to be wowed by the profundity of this or roar at its absurdity...

...Thus Billy, in a solemn ceremony, becomes Brother to the Snake by allowing a rattler to bite him repeatedly...

...We just want him and somehow he shows up...

...Instead, an unhappy, frustrated romance is dreamed up by the scenarists, Visconti, Enrico Medioli and the ubiquitous Suso Cecchi d'Amico...

...Even more problematic is the counsel of Ludwig's chaplain and confessor upon hearing that the King would break off his engagement to a princess he does not love: "In the darkness of your room you will realize that the warmth of one body is the same as any other's...

...In fact, you do not even obtain as good an idea of what Neu-schwanstein looks like from the film as you can from a German travel poster...

...Yet a number of critics, including Pauline Kael, have given this sorry mess their more or less guarded approval...

...He does, however, look as pretty as anyone in the film, which is not hard, considering that his most serious competitor, the usually lovely Silvana Mangano, gives a disfiguringly hammy portrayal of Cosima von Bulow...

...As Jean puts it, "We just contact him Indian style...

...Helmut Berger plays Ludwig earnestly and haughtily, except when overcome with reverence for Elizabeth or Wagner, or with tantrums that never grow up into rages...

...Although Armando Nannuzzi's color cinematography is at best competent, the rest of the technical staff is first-rate, and Ruggero Mastroianni is a master editor...

...Billy Jack is mostly Grandma Moses but with a sufficiency of Susann...

...Jacqueline Susann and her ilk succeed precisely because of their sincerely naive belief in their message and genius...

...But all we get is something about its running in the family: a scene or two showing Prince Otto, a younger brother, going off his rocker...

...The couple previously gave us a very successful motorcycle movie, Born Losers, but it is with Billy Jack that they have hit upon the kind of archetypal trash that will make you wealthy and famous...

...Whenever the townspeople become too vicious to the pacifist teacher and her gallant brood (many of whom are Indians, Chicanos and blacks), Billy Jack, an indomitable halfbreed Indian, appears on the scene...

...He survives thanks to boundless faith and an Indian antidote, and, under the influence of his brother's venomous bite?though not with his brother's forked tongue—proceeds to preach a mystical doctrine of universal brotherhood...

...The King's subsequent homosexual affairs with various youths in his service are treated with similar superficiality, without exploration of how they affected Ludwig's psychic and political status, or what it must have meant for these youths to shed the royal uniform for the royal pleasure, and all this in an illiberal Catholic country...

...Instead of aging as the film progresses, he merely becomes more slovenly, and though, from overindulgence in candy, his teeth become more rotten, his performance remains pretty-much the same...