Short Takes

...bad direction and writing (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore...

...Theoretically, the very people interested in a new version of The Wages of Fear would avoid a Friedkin film promising a freaky time...

...Beck embodies the romantic lead in The Other Side of Midnight—a contemptible cad who loves 'em and leaves 'em—with a conviction that is reminiscent of the young Clark Gable and that only the fish manage in The Deep...

...Far from rescuing the film, director Martin Scorcese is the chief culprit...

...New York, New York is totally devoid of a consistent point of view...

...His previous movies have had good direction, writing and acting (Mean Streets...

...To be sure, the actor is burdened by Earl Mac Rauch and Mardik Martin's utterly incoherent script, but an equally mindless screenplay did not hinder him in Taxi Driver...

...Yet the complete absence of any motive other than the financial actually contributes to the success of this film...

...conversely, those who enjoyed The Exorcist would probably walk out of Sorcerer (as many did), and tell their friends to stay away...

...What scant suspense there is results from arbitrarily engineered situations, with plot holes big enough to sink all the ships that litter the ocean floor in the movie...

...Once she changes her outfit, we are forced to turn our attention to a shallow story that has something to do with sunken treasures and drug dealers...

...If some critics have already gone so far as to laud the film's "mixed moods and delirious dialectics," its "antiromantic ambiguities," this is undoubtedly because they are too polite or obtuse to use a more accurate description?a mixed-up mess...

...Nevertheless, when Minnelli donned mandarin jacket and tights—the trademark of her late mother—in the production number at the finale of New York, New York, I was tempted to apply for lifetime membership in Streisand's fan club...

...In his latest film, Scorcese has exceeded even Robert Altman in repudiating earlier achievements...

...Still, there are elements of New York, New York that must be treated seriously...

...Unfortunately, nothing else in The Deep is nearly so well developed as Bisset's breasts...

...There is little that is mysterious about the $5-million multimedia promotion campaign for The Deep...

...Nothing in The Deep, however, is as flat as Nick Nolte's acting...

...good direction and acting, and bad writing (Taxi Driver...

...In a four-page cover story, Newsweek recently proclaimed Bisset "The Screen's Most Beautiful Woman...

...On Screen SHORT TAKES BY ROBERT ASAHINA The theater where I saw Sorcerer was jammed with moviegoers presumably attracted by the title and by an ad campaign hinting that William Friedkin, who was responsible for The Exorcist, had produced and directed yet another supernatural shocker...

...In fairness, I suppose it is mainly a question of what I am being forced to endure at the moment: Streisand's stridency or Minnelli's mawkishness...

...Minnelli's aggressive vulnerability, toadying to all the necrophiliac yearnings of her admirers, is perverse in a way that makes Streisand appear positively wholesome...

...All the more ironic, then, that had the first hour been better edited, and had the product been more truthfully sold, Sorcerer might have been a genuine artistic and commercial triumph...

...It is no use pretending that the complexity of the characterization precludes an easy answer: The figure is simply muddled, as written and acted...

...Bisset and Robert Shaw, who have both exhibited talent elsewhere, seem to have chosen fortune, fame and glamour over serious acting, and they turn in uninspired performances...

...One would not be wrong...

...Foremost among these is Liza Minnelli, the one performer who can make me long for Bar-bra Streisand...

...Playing Bisset's romantic interest, Nolte has all the aplomb and sex appeal of the giant moray eel we see lurking inside a sunken treasure ship...

...One strategy might be to sit back and treat the movie with the contempt it deserves, as a camp fantasy—in the forlorn hope that humor will help alleviate the two-hour-and-33-minute tedium...

...On this evidence, one would guess that there was something amiss with his original conception of the project...

...But in bringing it to the screen without the slightest hint of condescension or irony, thereby preserving all the attractions that sold 5 million copies of the book, he did make it digestible and, if you like junk food, not unappetizing...

...Interestingly, the adept structuring of the film has rendered all of the nudity utterly dispensable, without damaging the story's continuity...

...For this, Marie-France Pisier deserves most of the credit, Beck's contribution notwithstanding: She brings to her role of a cold-hearted temptress the bravura of a young Bette Davis or Joan Crawford...

...And should we be embarrassed at all the arty affectations (a solitary saxophonist playing under the light of a streetlamp...

...That is hardly surprising...

...Cultists are likely to praise New York, New York as an hommage...

...Like a criminal returning to the scene of his crime, or a neurotic on the analytic couch reliving his childhood, Scorcese compulsively sought out the movie musicals of his youth...

...Yet there is no movie genre more childish than the musical, nothing more infantile than Scorcese's obsession with the cinematic past, and nothing more melancholy than his senseless squandering of talent...

...Shaw, who once had pretensions to being a novelist and playwright and had acted in a string of artistically worthy but commercially unsound features, has become the king of the big-production Hollywood thriller...

...To make matters worse, the characterizations are shallower than the story...

...or good acting, and...

...Similarly, while both films are big-money spectaculars based on best-selling books, The Other Side of Midnight succeeds in rising far above The Deep, and nearly transcends its commercial intentions...

...After just 10 minutes, though, the crowd grew restless—not only because there were no horrors in sight, but because what it saw on the screen was hopelessly confusing...

...In The Other Side of Midnight we see another side of her—or rather, almost all sides of her: Practically every inch of her body, with the grossly delicate exception of her crotch, is exposed to the camera...

...We cannot help noticing the cardboard skylines and the sound-stage streets and buildings, but we don't know how to react to them...

...With New York, New York, he has finally put it all together: Each component is execrable...

...Not until these strands finally converge an hour later do we realize that we have been skillfully plunged into the jungles of the Dominican Republic, and into a well-done remake of The Wages of Fear, the 1953 classic directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot from George Ar-naud's novel...

...Extraordinarily, this blatant regression has been hailed by Molly Haskell as "an exception to the melancholy trend of infantilism" she sees in films like Star Wars...

...The attempt to cash in on the popularity of Jaws is as transparent as the wet T-shirt that reveals much more than it conceals of Jacqueline Bisset in the film's opening 20 minutes...

...But even after I had solved the mystery of the title (it was lifted from a name painted on one of the trucks, shown in two brief and wholly insignificant shots), the question of the misleading promotion lingered...

...Unlike The Other Side of Midnight, which has the naive feel of a '40s production, Martin Scorcese's latest epic was self-consciously and artificially intended as a "remake" of a '40s musical...

...In an interview, Scorcese has admitted, "I was so ingrained with movies that I had to go back and recreate that world...

...a couple silently dancing at a subway station...

...Sidney Sheldon's novel was garbage worthy of Jacqueline Su-sann, and producer Frank Yablans apparently recognized that he could never lift it out of the esthetic trash heap...

...Roy Scheider and Bruno Cremer are particularly good in the roles originated by Yves Montand and Peter Van Eyck...

...In New York, New York, we keep wondering whether the jazz musician he plays (De Niro reportedly spent several months learning the saxophone for the role, and acquits himself passably on the instrument) is a jerk or a prince...

...One scarcely knows whether to credit this achievement to the writers—novelist Peter Benchley, Tracy Keenan Wynn and Tom Man-kiewicz—or to the players...

...Nolte's lack of ability does serve one useful purpose: It distinguishes him from John Beck, his mustachioed lookalike...

...Following a new narrative convention (recently seen in Marathon Man) that has quickly become as hackneyed as the flashback technique it was intended to supplant, Sorcerer begins by presenting four parallel story lines...

...One need only waste the price of a ticket to New York, New York to understand what I mean...

...Such scenes are box-office bonuses but broadcast drawbacks, and their judicious placement was obviously made with future television sales in mind...

...Then there is Robert De Niro, who delivers the worst performance of his brief, distinguished career...

...in short, he has become another Peter Bogdanovich...

...Hiring him to grunt opposite Bisset in what are meant to be love scenes is a classic case of casting swine before pearls...

...Friedkin breathtak-ingly renders the harrowing journey of four truck drivers transporting nitroglycerine to fight an oil-field fire...

...Pisier was last seen here as the neurotic wife in Cousin, Cousine, a character she portrayed with a wicked wit and shrewdly comic timing...

...In truth, it merely patronizes the past...