Limited Endeavors

...Davis' soliloquy, for instance, is nothing more than overwritten, artificial anguish-a jarring contrast to the language of the other inmates, which has the casual texture of improvisation...

...Happily, no amount of clumsy direction can jeopardize the fine performances of the three leads...

...Shawn Eliott is wonderfully menacing as Paco, the maniacal hustler, and Nathan George is appropriately cool as Ice...

...Particularly noteworthy in this group is Joseph Carberry, who brings a barrel-chested toughness to the part of Murphy (Sylvester Stallone never looked so tough...

...nonetheless, it is uncharacteristically obvious...

...On the positive side, Short Eyes benefits from the able direction of Robert M. Young...

...with a peculiar prop-a pair of thick-rimmed eyeglasses, so huge and ugly that they continually distort the appearance of her face, making her look severe, for instance, in a romantic scene, when she should supposedly look soft...

...The strengths and weaknesses of A Woman's Decision are attributable solely to the direction of Krzysztof Zanussi, a Polish filmmaker, who also wrote the screenplay...

...As for the professional actors, Jose Perez is predictably competent as Juan Otero, though New York theater audiences have possibly seen him once too often in the role of a street-wise, philosophical Puerto Rican...

...The weakest part of the play-a postscript that has the prison authorities trying to cover up the murder-has been omitted from the film...

...Whatever symbolic value this little episode has is obliterated by the audience's sense of being manipulated...

...Young's careful craftsmanship is evident as well in Short Eyes...

...One small matter detracts from her delicate portrayal: She is unexplainably saddled (by Zanussi...

...Piflero has a house of detention serve as a perverse microcosm of society: The black prisoners hate the "Ricans," both groups hate the whites, and all loathe the newcomer, Clark Davis-a white man and a child molester (or "short eyes" in prison slang), a most despised offender even among criminals...

...Her friend replies that she feels Marta is continually trying to blackmail her with decency, thus revealing Zanussi's astute awareness of how honesty can be used to manipulate others into a guilt-ridden complicity...

...The presence of two new white inmates has the net effect of weakening the contradictory feelings of racial solidarity with and disgust for Davis that plague Murphy, originally the only other white prisoner...

...No doubt the writer employed the device fot dramatic underscoring...

...Yet while Franczewski and Piwowski provide depth to what are basically supporting roles, the movie really belongs to Komorowska...

...Marta is neither a passive victim of her male-dominated environment nor an unrealistic paragon of emancipated womanhood...

...Not since black chain gangs broke out into spirituals has the screen witnessed such silliness...

...the subject matter seemed to call for black and white...

...Young elicits strong performances from his cast...

...Marta complains, "Even if I find the courage to be dishonest with [my husband], how will I find it to be dishonest with myself...

...Her Marta, indecisive as she is, never slips into shallow self-dramatization...

...She is a real woman caught in a recognizable quandry...

...It has now been made into a movie that was featured at the 1977 New York Film Festival before opening a regular Manhattan run...

...Piflero has added several roles to the movie version, too, and since he himself plays one of them, it is difficult to resist the suspicion that his ego overcame his judgment...

...Unfortunately, the playwright has also added sequences that merely pad the running time...

...Before being killed, though, he had confessed his guilt to inmate Juan Otero, the one person willing to listen to him...

...The decision she faces is the choice between Jan (Piotr Franczewski), her husband, and Jacek (Marek Piwow-ski), her new-found lover...

...In contrast, Director Zanussi is generally heavy-handed...

...On Screen LIMITED ENDEAVORS BY ROBERT ASAHINA Migul Plnero's Short Eyes, winner of two Obies and the New York Drama Critics Award for Best American Play of 1973-74, was overpraised when it was first produced off-Broadway-perhaps because in the wake of the Attica and Tombs riots critics exaggerated the virtues of a drama about prison life written by a convict doing time in Sing Sing...

...Two other previously nonexistent parts are filled by singers Curtis May-field (who wrote the score) and Freddy Fender, in what can only be explained as a shameless ploy to attract larger black and Hispanic audiences...

...The inmates gang up on Davis, eventually murdering him with the tacit approval of a guard...

...Similarly, Jan, whose emotions are tightly under control, is always photographed indoors, in lighting that would be suitable for a funeral parlor...

...The script's single lapse occurs about 10 minutes before the end, when a dream-like flashback to an earlier scene leads the heroine to make her decision (she opts for her husband...

...At first, I was a little surprised that the film was in color...

...Although his television documentaries have won Pea-body and Emmy awards, he has just one feature film to his credit: He co-produced, coauthored, and photographed Nothing But a Man (1964), an unpretentious, intelligently made character study of a black railroad worker...

...both the writing and the photography are at odds with the naturalism of the rest of the film...

...And although Wojciech Kilar's score is surely someone's idea of a joke, Zanussi must bear the blame for its use...

...Marta (Maya Komorowska), an accountant, labor-union leader and apparently happy wife and mother, is the woman referred to in the title...

...Mayfield and Fender combine talents in the film's single most embarrassing scene, when they give a soulful, "impromptu" concert in the dayroom of the ward...

...About half of the main characters are played by the original Shakespeare Festival cast, members of a theater workshop called The Family that was organized at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility...

...Whatever their justification (if any), they are undisputably distracting...

...Despite the play's undeniable strengths, its weaknesses have become even more egregious in the transition to the screen...

...One can only hope that these eyesores, unlike the ghastly spectacles Diane Keaton affected in Annie Hall, will not become fashionable...

...If only the screenplay had as much integrity as the acting and direction...

...Yet the institutional greens and blues, captured so well by director of photography Peter Sova, render the impersonal sleaziness of the prison in a way that would have been impossible for stark black and white...

...Too often, however, his ear fails him...

...Of course, the scene ends with the hapless insects squashed when they swarm beyond their confine...

...Writer Zanussi presents the age-old dilemma of the marital triangle in a refreshingly honest and sensitive fashion, free from the kind of women's liberation cant that has corrupted many recent films...

...An example of Zanussi's insightful characterization is the scene where Marta confesses her temptations to one of her coworkers...

...In a trick ending, the prisoners are told Davis was a victim of mistaken identification...

...For instance, during Marta's and Jacek's first embrace, the violins actually swell...

...Piflero, both as a playwright and a screenwriter, realistically recreates the kind of pressure-cooker atmosphere that causes verbal sparring-bantering, bickering and baiting-to lead inexorably to actual violence...

...His rival, Jacek, a sports-loving free spirit, is consistently filmed in the great outdoors-on a picnic, in a sailboat-in shots that add up to a brightly colored travelogue extolling the scenic delights of Poland...

...Actor Bruce Davison (best known for Willard) is saddled with so many ludicrous lines that he can never convincingly portray the tormented Davis...

...This kind of ham-fisted exaggeration works against the script, and I think Zanussi rather than director of photography Slawomir Idziak should be held responsible for it...

...In one of these, inmates wager cigarettes on the outcome of "horse races"-cockroaches running on a cradboard track...

...The dialogue propels most of the action...

...Since Marta doffs and dons the glasses throughout the film with no apparent dramatic rhyme or reason, it could simply be that Komorowska wears them in real life...

...Outside of a few gimmicky crane shots that tend to work against the script's naturalism, most of the technical work is meticulously executed and harmonizes with the play's artistic intent...