The Nebbish and the Shark

...The jargon is his substitute for a singular vision, comic or otherwise, of the weighty matters he confronts, but love and death are still strictly targets for that machine gun...

...The movie is set in the Russia of War and Peace, although one might easily mistake the locale for Bellevue...

...That, I suppose, is an occupational hazard in the front lines of the comedy business...

...Most of the best humor in all of Allen's films is founded upon this 5' 6" bundle of neuroses...

...Combined with Spielberg's sure instinct for suspense-and the very special effects of Robert Mattey-Butler's teasing camera lulls us with false alarms only to jolt us with the heart-stopping suddenness of a scream on a midsummer sea...

...As in Peter Benchley's dreadful novel, Moby shark is the 25-foot star attraction and aversion of the film...

...Love and Death has no life of its own...

...Love and Death, you wait for the gags that may make you laugh...

...Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat .. A-joke-a-joke-a-joke-a-joke-a-joke...

...In his new collection of writings, Without Feathers, Allen is also funniest in the brief takes from the New Yorker, least successful in the longer one-act plays, "God" and "Death...

...Still, neither in Love and Death nor in Brooks' recent hits is there an attempt to maintain a consistently high standard of comic art...

...There is a token subplot: Will the town fathers close the local beaches and save lives, or will they keep them open and make money...

...In this movie, the bull's-eyes are not very frequent, and the central Allen character is not as fresh as he used to be...

...Roy Scheider, playing the police chief of an Atlantic summer community traumatized by several deadly shark attacks, gives a solid if stolid performance...

...perhaps he should leave both to others and apply his inventive energies to creating comedy, which he does better than anyone else...

...in Jaws, you wait for the shark that may make you gag...

...When Allen says of his brother, "I love him like a brother," you know he isn't working terribly hard at his craft...

...nor will you...

...As assembled by Benchley and co-screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, the framework for the jaws in Jaws could have been any one of a hundred others and served just as well...

...Whether he is panning over a placid ocean at dusk, focusing through murky underwaters on the unsuspecting kicks of holiday swimmers, or setting his lens at sea level so that the waves lap at midscreen, cinematographer Bill Butler captures not water but fear...

...Richard Dreyfuss' growing stature will be enhanced by his portrayal of a young oceanographer and shark mavin...

...This movie exists merely to answer the question -When will the great white shark strike next...

...Who cares...

...the bits that really work have little to do with either, and everything to do with Woody Allen as he has presented himself to us through the years in essays, films and talk shows...

...He (and we) learn enough to be suitably chilled at the first shadow of a fin slicing the ocean's surface...

...Whenever the film strays from shark attacks, or from the long, climactic shark hunt in which only Scheider, Shaw and Dreyfuss take part, the screenplay and the characters who clutter it are all but expendable...

...And since there is no plot worth mentioning between the one-liners, Love and Death, a short movie, seems like a long one...

...Napoleon, for instance, is first seen rushing to perfect his pastry before Wellington can come up with his beef...

...Sometimes Allen fills the spaces with the verbal and visual jargon of the Serious world-a Bergmanesque dream here, some Thomas Aquinas there...

...The other, on water, throbs with the tension and terror once removed that most of us seek in a movie like this...

...Whereas Allen has been establishing himself as nebbish, Peter Sellers (with Blake Edwards' help) has been working on an equally inept (and equally heroic) figure-Inspector Clouseau of The Pink Panther, A Shot in the Dark and, most recently, The Return of the Pink Panther...

...As always, he admits to a few eccentricities: "I won't eat any food that begins with the letter F." Of course his self-inflicted wit is most merciless when it takes on his sexual ambitions and activities...

...Allen the fumbling Romeo, Allen the compulsive coward, Allen the seeker of inside cosmic dope...

...When Allen leans over in their wedding bed and starts to touch Diane Keaton, she snaps, "Don't-not here...

...Bon appetit...

...As in so much of his other work, Allen is armed not with a rifle but a machine gun...

...Though he plays Matt Hooper in a much lower key than he did Duddy Kravitz, his engaging energy and intelligence is no less apparent...

...The concept is fine and funny, yet with repetition the cutting edge of the individual jokes is dulled...

...I shall dwell in the house of The Lord for six months with an option to buy...

...His is the strongest performance in the movie...

...Jaws, say the ads, "may be too intense for younger children," and while that is a come-on, it is also a warning that should be heeded...

...I practice a lot when I'm alone," he explains...

...The producers certainly didn't...

...Explaining why he is reluctant to go to war, he points out, "I slept with a light on in my room until I was 30...

...Preparing to make love with him, a countess asks if Allen would like some wine to put him in the mood...

...Woody Allen Without Feathers The man can be so damn funny, and there are several moments in his new film, Love and Death, when he proves it again...

...History, literature, religion, philosophy, and reason are all certified disaster areas in Allen's wake...

...Increasingly, his acting and directing seem self-indulgent...

...Beyond these three, there is none worth mentioning, primarily because almost no one else had anything worthwhile to do...

...Of the two characters, Sellers' has held up better, partly because his has had less exposure than Allen's, partly because Sellers is the better actor, but mainly because Sellers is more patient, more willing to construct an individual of some depth, more willing to let his jokes simmer for a while...

...After an hour and a half of straight Allen, a nonprofessional can do the same thing...

...But as with Latin America in Bananas or the future in Sleeper, Russia and the Napoleonic wars are incidental here...

...With his unspeakable briny memories and his contempt for the sophisticated "sharkin' " gear of modern science, Shaw offers us a character who could exist outside this flimsy plot, a character-as the shark happily discovers-of flesh and blood...

...I have a friend, a professional comedy writer, who instantly sees the formula in every joke...

...A transplanted New Yorker, he (and thus the audience) is subjected to a continual stream of shark lore-Sharks 101...

...The pace of these scenes, culminating in the high adventure of the final hunt, is exactly right...

...Keaton, Allen's perennial leading lady, seems to have most of the good lines in Love and Death, but this may simply be due to her delivery...

...Although Woody Allen is a special talent, a national resource, he should be taken in small doses...

...Woody Allen's genius is that sometimes he can put together a long string of bull's-eyes, and that is when you can see grown men weep...

...As an obsessed shark hunter hunting the shark of a lifetime, Robert Shaw brings to Jaws an uncertain accent and the sense of furies barely subdued that consistently marks his appearances on screen and stage...

...I've been in the mood," he tells her, "since the 1700s...

...In fact, Jaws is really two films...

...First came the series of plays dealing with anguish, despair, dread, fear and loneliness (the comedies...

...Three examples from this hour and a half: "If Jesus was a carpenter, I was wondering what he charged for book shelves.' "I want a miracle from God-a burning bush or my Uncle Sasha to pick up the check...

...It is an impressive job of audience manipulation, one sure to resonate the next time an unknown something brushes past your leg in the ocean of your choice...

...But the sight gags and the zany one-liners never gather enough momentum to amount to anything more than another platform for Woody Allen sight gags and zany one-liners...

...There is, for example, something depressingly reminiscent of Mel Brooks throughout Love and Death -not so much Brooks' sense of humor as his incessancy of humor...

...One, on land, could fittingly be paired with Beach Blanket Bingo as a drive-in double feature...

...Later, she declares him the greatest lover she has ever had...

...Once released around the country, Jaws paid for itself in three days...

...Allen's material often is sharper when performed by people like Keaton or Gene Wilder, who retain a center of credibility that Allen lacks...

...That sort of thing...

...Commercially, that is enough...

...To the credit of director Steven Spielberg and editor Verna Fields, the waits are shorter in Jaws...

...Unlike the book, the picture presents a few Homo sapiens worth noting...

...larger ones, whether on film or in print, are simply too much of the same...