On the Road and on the Make

...On Screen ON THE ROAD AND ON THE MAKE by marcia cavell w Y V e know director Paul Mazursky for his fascination with Los Angeles, freaky lifestyles, post-mantal sex, and individuals just old enough to be bored and rich enough to try doing something about it (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Blume in Love, and / Love You, Alice B Toklas, for which he wrote the screenplay) But his latest picture, Harry and Tonto, opens with music that is wistful, rye, faintly elegaic, and shots of old people on the streets of New York's Upper West Side Harry (Art Carney) is 72 years old, and he appears on screen humming "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" to the other half of the film's title, an orange alley cat What's happened to Mazursky9 Nothing, we discover The setting may be new, yet the sensibility is the same Plot, personality, ambiguity, and shadows are of no interest to Mazursky Situations are, particularly situations so complicated that trying to recount them is like pulling out the bottom can from the supermarket stack Characters are dropped onto the screen, they don't develop from the story And whereas motives sometimes trigger events, caprice—Mazursky's—has the upper hand Harry himself is a contrivance The production notes describe him as a man who is real, cranky funny " He is funny, but his crankiness isn't, and his reality is less Mazursky's creation than the gift of Art Carney's presence We quickly learn that Harry is a retired English professor and widower who cares about his cat, his self-respect, life, people in general, and particularly his friends, with whom he passes time on the benches of Broadway talking about being old He informs Jake (Herbert Berghof) that he's planning a protest because his apartment building is marked for a parking lot and he's about to be evicted Harry is a fighter who can't tell which battles are worth the energy He also blows up at a reckless driver, and when a kid asks him if he's got a quarter he answers Yes, but that he's not gomg to give it to him This preference for minor self-assertions over survival is a little foolish Still, we are with him this far—even New Yorkers who love their city are at war with it, and Harry rages for all of us against the daily assaults on our dignity After being carted down the stairs of his building by police as the wreckers start to demolish it, Harry moves in with his son's family, a solution that clearly won't work "A man needs his privacy," he announces, and proceeds to find his own apartment As he is about to sign the lease, though, the landlady discovers he has a cat We expect Harry to look for another apartment, to go on saying No to panhandlers, to protect his integrity at all costs Instead, he surprises us by deciding to visit his daughter m Chicago Were I to take the story seriously, I would conclude at this point that Harry's desire to be independent is a self-delusion and that his choices are more accidents of circumstance than he would like to think But I don't It's obvious Mazursky merely wants to push Harry out of New York to step up the action He's right-—the audience is getting restless Harry plans to fly to Chicago, changes his mind when the airline insists on examining Tonto's case and takes the bus But the world continues to thwart him, for Tonto refuses to soil his already wet litter and won't relieve himself (Mazursky gets an easy laugh with this, yet the absurdity is in the script, not the actuality Anyone who has been around cats as long as Harry knows to carry extra kitty litter ) Harry persuades the bus driver to stop so Tonto can have a bathroom-break It isn't hard to figure out what's going to happen next Tonto runs away long enough for the driver to lose patience and abandon Harry in the middle of America, Harry resolves to see the sights be never had time for, and the pair is launched on a journey to the other side of the continent Mazursky says "I write about real people in social situations The humor comes out of real situations in which the characters find themselves' Nonsense Tonto is a plot device, and the humor results from the contortions of the narrative Nevertheless, there are enough funny lines and other virtues in this film to prevent us from being immediately aware ot how mechanical it is and I admire Mazursky for managing to hold our interest with a relationship as unpromising as that between an old man and a cat Harry and Tonto is a kind of Easy Rider turned upside down and going the other way That picture's motorcycbst-heroes went East and became innocent victims of a country run to violence—the vision, for good reason, of a lot of '60s films Harry and Tonto has a happier view of contemporary America The old can be younger than the young, and ours is a land that, true to its dreams, embraces all types The odyssey here is of an old man going West traveling along the wastelands of a wintry Illinois, through tawdry Las Vegas, across the Arizona desert, and finally to Mazurskyland, Southern California In the process, Harry comes to life, and so does every national cliche new and old A macrobiotic kid (Harry's nephew) and a traveling salesman (who gives him a ride), a Jesus freak (a hitchhiker Harry picks up as soon as he's acquired a car) and an Indian chief (with whom he spends a night in jail), even a happy hooker (the credits list her that way) The film is greatly aided by Mazursky's fine eye for detail—the picture of Meher Baba over the nephew's bed, the "Coffee-host" machine in a motel—and faultless casting Ellen Burstyn gives an understated, moving performance as Harry's daughter, recovering staunchly from her fourth divorce, Geraldine Fitzgerald as Jessie, his first love, is marvelous m a scene that is worth the entire movie Harry decides to visit her after these many years and tracks her down to an old-age home Jessie is senile She reminisces about her days as a dancer with Isadora Duncan and moves in and out ot the present, sometimes mistaking Harry tor her husband, sometimes recognizing him and accurately recalling their mutual past Harry tells her she's as beautiful as ever, and although she's wrinkled and fat, her luminous expression makes it true "I want to go to the shore," she says "Will you take me to the shore'" They waltz together, and Jessie with her head on Harry's shoulder looks as soft as a young girl in love Yet Mazursky is a superficial social commentator, too easily satisfied with showing us the obvious The difference between the scene with Jessie and the sentimental shot that ends the movie—Harry on the beach making friends with a child?is a measure of his willingness to settle tor the cheap effect It's too bad—he has almost made a good film about growing old in America Taken from the novel by Mordecai Richler, Ted KotchefFs The Appi enticeship of Duddy Kra-vitz wastes a lot of acting talent and some beautiful scenery on a movie that recommends itself only to masochistic Jews Early on, one of Duddy's rivals says, "It's little money-grubbers like Kravitz that cause anti-Semitism"—a dangerous falsehood that the film seems determined to make us believe, not only through the character of Duddy but all the other Jewish stereotypes it exploits Duddy (Richard Dreyfuss) is an 18-year-old whose father is a Montreal taxi driver and a pimp, and whose brother is an invisible good boy, willing to get ahead the slow way through medical school "A man without land is a nobody," Duddy is told by his grandfather who has himself settled for a scrap of a city garden As a waiter at a hotel in the Canadian mountains, Duddy discovers a beautiful lake where he dreams of creating Kravitzville, a luxury resort with a summer camp for children and a home for his grandfather Since the farmers who live there won't sell to a Jew, Duddy has his French-Canadian girlfriend, Yvette (Michehne Manctot), buy the land, piece by piece, as it becomes available Duddy cheats, betrays, torges checks, and risks people's lives to make it, which he does at the cost of his grandfather's respect and Yvette, who is eventually disgusted by him But the losses count less than his superlative moment ot triumph "You see, Daddy, you see1" Duddy exclaims at the end when the counterman at his father's favorite luncheonette gives him credit tor the first time In his frantic desire to be somebody, even recognition by local bums will do Duddy's apprenticeship is presumably either to success or to lite If the first, then he makes the guild, if the second, then the title of the film is an unexplored irony or a he, for Duddy learns nothing worth knowing Were he a funny moral dunce or a charming one, the movie might at least be entertaining But as Yvette says to him at the start of their relationship "You're always jumping and moving and running and scratching" It's an unpromising beginning, for her and for us, and things only get worse...