AN ILL WIND AND A GOOD FORTUNE
FENTRESS, CALVIN
On Screen AN ILL WIND AND A GOOD FORTUNE BY CALVIN FENTRESS A title as bad as The Wind and the Lion could do justice to few films; this is one of them. It is not, as you might guess, yet...
...Beatty, who takes a job as a car salesman, can't sell cars...
...As Beatty's hired hand in a murderous fund-raising scheme, he shows the wild side of those high comic gifts he first displayed in Easy Rider...
...U.S...
...asks one...
...The Fortune is no exception...
...and Nicholson can't even sit in the sun without his chair collapsing...
...Two lingering hours later, without having lost a false eyelash of her ladylike ways, she and her two small children (another adjustment) have taken on a battalion of U.S...
...Nicholson cavorts on the wing of a plane in midair...
...Brian Keith's Teddy Roosevelt is a macho for all seasons-pugilist, archer, warrior, lover of man and beast, killer of same...
...When Candy Bergen has been released many hundreds of deaths later, a Presidential adviser says happily, "There's no question of the election result now...
...And hostage Perdicaris, who was an older man at the time of his kidnapping, has undergone a sex change and is portrayed by Candice Bergen...
...Marines in hand-to-hand combat, conquered them, taken on some German soldiers, conquered them, and freed her former abductor from prison, knocking off several heavies of assorted nationalities in the process...
...He whines, he pouts, he plots, as elaborate yet unpromising strategems whirl in his pinball eyes...
...Instead, the Marines-with the Navy Band right behind them-are ordered into Tangier where they promptly slaughter the Sultan's palace guard at point-blank range...
...In The Wind and the Lion, writer-director John Milius has taken the incident, usually the subject of no more than a few paragraphs in most Roosevelt biographies, and made some...
...Like his adversary across the sea, he kills in the name of the higher-up...
...Looking something like a manic Art Garfunkel, he plays a fumbling embezzler who would like to be sinister if only he could figure out how...
...he asks in sickened disbelief...
...At film's end, Raisuli writes to Roosevelt, "You are like the wind and I the lion," at least clearing that up...
...Jack Nicholson has starred in so many movies lately, one can no longer forget that it is Jack Nicholson, actor, one is watching...
...Whether he has Beatty trying to "accidentally" drown their heiress in a three-inch-deep bird bath or struggling in vain to compose a proper suicide note, Nichols is interested here only in the fun of it...
...Under pressure, only one thing is certain: They will collapse...
...Later, Presidential news secretary Ron Nessen cracked, "We've found our Patton...
...Neither Nichols nor screenwriter Eastman (who also wrote Five Easy Pieces) are above some cheap laughs: Channing is the heiress to the Kotex fortune...
...Is it supposed to be kind of sssslithery...
...But these are exceptions, and The Fortune is in no danger of becoming a cult film among 4-10-year-olds (as, deservingly, has Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein...
...Raisuli has become "the last of the Barbary pirates," a benevolently homicidal giant in the Clint Eastwood tradition...
...surroundings, Channing makes the acquisition of a pet chicken seem like the only logical remedy...
...No, the film is being promoted as "A Spectacular Salute to the Bicentennial Celebration...
...It is not, as you might guess, yet another version of The Wizard of Oz...
...In a communal spirit, Channing, heiress and would-be victim, is teaching herself how to cook, and Nicholson has just sampled her initial effort...
...As the bandit Raisuli he kills dozens of men, usually in a rather bloody, personal way, never making so much as a pass at captive Bergen-apparently out of honor, not preference...
...In Stockard Channing, Mike Nichols has discovered an actress with precisely the flair for oddity that this film requires...
...I had nothing to do with the outcome," says Roosevelt, "I had God on my side...
...adjustments...
...Roosevelt, in a wire read to the Republican national convention then just getting under way, told the Moorish government that he wanted "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead...
...Vietnam and Watergate notwithstanding, it all makes for a pretty cynical view of the American experience, or so it seemed to me...
...For Nicholson, however, as for the other two, "planning" is completely beside the point: During one of several "perfect" murder attempts, Beatty blandly assures Nicholson, "We will proceed exactly according to plan"-which is ridiculous, since the plan is unraveling at least as fast as he can concoct it...
...Carol Eastman's screenplay, cheerfully ignoring its implausibility, serves as an ideal showcase for Nichols' zany streak and for choice performances by Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and a winning new actress named Stockard Channing...
...The U.S., for instance, now starts a little war over the kidnapping...
...Beatty and Nicholson are after her money and maybe her life, she retaliates by furiously attacking them with-what else?-a bag of bird seed...
...so far, Candice Bergen seems unwilling or unable to do the same...
...But the kind of intelligence Connery usually brings to the screen betrays him when he is required-as he is here-to speak perpetually in pseudoaphorisms and to play it straight...
...Channing around all the time...
...and later a Navy officer exultantly announces, "We carry the biggest stick...
...The filmmakers should have let TR and the rest loose in a boys' locker room to compare sticks and snap towels at the grizzly...
...Foreign Service types continually browbeat foreigners...
...The American grizzly must always be portrayed in a fighting stance," he shows and tells his resident taxidermist...
...Sean Connery almost always comes across as a cool customer in his films, and if in this one he had only played a mute, he might have pulled it off again...
...This is no fun," he cries out at one point, "and I'm not planning on putting up with it...
...In his new film, The Fortune, Mike Nichols is after just one thing that he gets and deserves: laughs...
...That was about it...
...TR now bellows his "alive or dead" message from the back of a campaign train...
...She can't cook...
...whereas near-panic is a way of life for Nicholson, Beatty eases into it with each passing fiasco, a riverboat gambler on a losing streak who won't quit...
...The Republicans loved that, Roosevelt was nominated for a full term of his own, and a month after the -kidnapping (and after American and other warships appeared at Tangier) the local Sultan-in-Chief granted all of Raisuli's ransom demands to secure Perdicaris' release...
...Julie Christie began to risk her beauty for her acting at some point in her career...
...but he possesses intelligence, originality and a primal force that lends authority to almost every film he's in...
...But that it were...
...At the end of the movie, he and the bear are united in triumph, symbols both "of the American character...
...The three set new records for collective ineptitude...
...In The Fortune, he portrays a character of utterly misplaced self-confidence...
...The blood of the prophet lives in me and I am but an instrument of his will," says Raisuli...
...Until she is kidnapped, life's biggest problem for Bergen's Perdicaris is what wine to order with lunch...
...To the extent that she makes his ordeal in the desert ours in the theatre, she is triumphant...
...With the exception of the grizzly, few Americans emerge from TWATL as having much character at all...
...The movie is "based" upon the 1904 kidnapping near Tangier of an American citizen named Jon Perdicaris by a Moroccan bandit named Raisuli, and upon Theodore Roosevelt's Presidential reaction to that effrontery...
...Part of Beatty's growing appeal is that he has learned to project the vulnerability of the super-stud he inevitably seems on the screen...
...Were it not so Disneyesque, the movie might more appropriately have been called The Grizzly and the Lion, for Roosevelt maintains a bizarre if platonic relationship throughout with a dead Ursus horriblis...
...Growing lonely in her new L.A...
...Whether she's holding a wine glass or a Winchester, the performance remains vintage Bergen throughout: Her glorious face is never shadowed by a stray thought or emotion, her eyes betray no secret pain or pleasure, her voice gives nothing but the lines she is reading...
...Maybe so, yet this salute so ravages American history that it could have been edited by Chuck Colson...
...I will go to any extreme to get attention," he warns, and he does...
...Have you ever heard of the big stick, Sultan...
...But at a preview of the film in Washington that coincided with the end of the Mayaguez affair, President Ford was reported to have been delighted with it, laughing "heartily" when TR refused to "spoil the beauty" of his own invasion "with legality...
...It is the 1920s, and they have fled to Los Angeles to start a new life together...
...Nicholson is a fugitive from sanity, and no wonder, with Beatty and Ms...
...No message, no knowledge, carnal or otherwise, just a stylish package of splendid lunacy almost sure to make you laugh...
...Discovering at last that Messrs...
...Roosevelt is quick to invade another country in pursuit of "an issue to hang his campaign on," and to defend the propriety of his action with the comment, "Why spoil the beauty of a thing with legality...
...They sound like our present Secretary of State confronting the National Security Council...
...The American grizzly bear embodies the spirit of America," the President informs some reporters (none of whom asks a follow-up question...
...Events have been moved from late Spring of 1904 to October, thus avoiding the necessity of an expensive convention scene...
...Although this is not a child's play, it is also not the icy, acidic satire that has marked previous Nichols films...
Vol. 58 • June 1975 • No. 13
