Cliches East and West
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen CLICHES EAST AND WEST BY ROBERT ASAHINA some movies are so shallow and schematic that it doesn't really pay to watch them any longer than the short time it takes to identify their...
...she wears jeans and teaches at a ghetto public school...
...Whatever his talents as a songwriter, though, Baskin cannot sing well enough to legitimize his frequent presence...
...cause Keith Carradine can sing, but is given too little chance...
...As the producer, Altman must bear some of the responsibility...
...The resemblance is not fortuitous: Welcome to L.A...
...After Ken Hood (Harvey Keitel) is shown being unfaithful to his wife, for instance, we know it is only a matter of time before she runs into Carroll Barber, whose primary dramatic function is apparently to service women searching for the meaning of life in bed...
...The continual presence of both characters throughout the movie is scarcely justified on dramatic grounds...
...Later, he tells us that he used an old escape route from his youth, and we have to take his word for it...
...For despite its Broadway run, Thieves was not a very good play to begin with...
...existence...
...He wears a three-piece pinstriped suit and is the principal of an exclusive private school...
...By the time we see these two dressed for work the next morning, it is clear that their marriage suffers from more than merely misplaced furniture...
...Thieves, a current example of this kind of predictability, begins unpromisingly with a slow pan up a luxury high-rise apartment building...
...And in case we want to decipher the title, Kaminsky helpfully declares that time is "the biggest thief in town...
...It's all gone...
...When Martin proclaims from his balcony, "There's a war down there...
...Many of the entrances and exits in Thieves are extremely stagy, too, lending a static feeling to much of what happens on screen...
...I should not have been surprised: Both films were successful stage plays before being adapted for the screen, and Broadway has rarely offered much in the way of original stories or characters...
...The musical score of Welcome to L.A...
...In search of his mislaid tables and chairs, Martin returns to his old neighborhood, and thus to his mislaid past...
...Welcome to L.A...
...Profundities like these deserve no comment except to note that Grodin and Corey are particularly ill-suited to utter them...
...This is especially annoying be...
...In the climax of the movie, for example, Martin returns to his old neighborhood, the Lower East Side, and breaks into Loew's Delancey Street theater...
...Only Lauren Hutton, who is as beautifully wooden as ever, and Viveca Lindfors, who imitates a feisty businesswoman by alternating between hysterical self-dramatization and groveling self-pity, are personally responsible for their wretched performances...
...How Grodin has managed repeatedly to be cast as a romantic lead is one of the great mysteries of contemporary theater and films...
...To give the tale that authentic Manhattan flavor, he is a cabbie as well as a self-professed dirty old man...
...At this point, about 20 minutes into the film, I realized Martin and Sally seemed so familiar to me because they were simply a more grown-up version of the newly—weds in Barefoot in the Park...
...Unfortunately, this pupil has failed to learn anything from his mentor...
...All these lame activities soon sink to the level of middlebrow melodrama...
...the survivors are up here," we don't know whether to laugh or cry at such cliches...
...On Screen CLICHES EAST AND WEST BY ROBERT ASAHINA some movies are so shallow and schematic that it doesn't really pay to watch them any longer than the short time it takes to identify their hackneyed plots and characterizations...
...The most careful handling would not have helped...
...takes it to the lower depths...
...Except for the bed they are fighting in, it is barren: The rest of their furniture, we quickly learn, was lost when they moved to this new address—an understandable source of irritation...
...are any evidence, nothing ever changes in the world of mechanical film making either...
...As if embarrassed, he has inserted self-conscious little touches like soliloquies delivered gazing into mirrors, or staring into the camerato demonstrate his seriousness...
...But there is nothing comparable in Welcome to L.A...
...The brief encounters that he attempts to flavor with existential angst turn out to be less meaningful than mechanical and predictable...
...In Nashville, this subtle technique was brilliantly displayed in a nightclub scene where Keith Carradine, as an arrogant and self-indulgent entertainer, sang a thinly-veiled sexual invitation, simultaneously, to Shelley Duvall, Geraldine Chaplin, Cristina Raines, and Lily Tomlin—his three discarded lovers and one prospective playmate...
...Kaminsky is wrong...
...to the artistry of Nashville...
...y( elcome to L.A...
...Most of the other performers are also misused: Rudolph seems determined to decimate the repertory company of players that Altman has carefully assembled...
...While this generation gap is widening, we are entertained by yet another free spirit who is being quashed by her uptight husband?a role that goes a long way toward establishing Geraldine Chaplin as the reigning crazy lady of the screen, although why she would want to succeed Sandy Dennis in that position is a mystery...
...Martin and Sally are not the only recognizable faces in Thieves...
...Not that it mat-ters—too much...
...He belongs to the establishment...
...The real thieves are the pickpockets who hope to profit from this picture...
...Finally we arrive at the apartment of Martin and Sally Cramer (Charles Grodin and Mario Thomas...
...Everybody's loking for some nice new good old days," Kaminsky tells him, and Martin muses, "I've been away so long I'm not even sure I was ever there...
...It is hard to say whether this failure to "open up" the action of the stage production—we see next to nothing of the neighborhood—resulted from the poverty of director John Berry's imagination, or of the producer's budget...
...He sticks out much as Corey and Elizondo did in Thieves: We are always conscious that he is less a character than a dramatic device...
...Mario Thomas appears much prettier and less cute as she grows older, but she still looks uncomfortable on a screen larger than 19 inches across...
...And when Sally chides him for "selling out" by reminding him that he was once idealistic enough to march in a Fifth Avenue antiwar demonstration, we can do nothing but squirm at this crude contrast...
...Their lines mostly offer running commentary on the progress of the story, or verbally establish the physical setting of scenes—legitimate functions on the stage, but irrelevant in a film, with its variety of visual resources...
...she is a free spirit...
...The rhythmic intercutting of their responses to his song ("I'm Easy"), in delicate counterpoint to the music, resulted in one of the most impressive moments in recent cinematic history...
...one wonders if any of his troupe will ever consent to work for him again after being this cruelly wasted...
...Once again he proves irresistible to women—here played by Sally Kellerman, Lauren Hutton, Viveca Lindfors, and Geraldine Chaplin...
...When the police come to arrest him for illegal entry, he makes a flashy getaway—by simply vanishing (or so it appears...
...also seems familiarin fact, it looks like what was left over from the editing of Robert Altman's Nashville...
...Rudolph tries to use the songs performed on screen by Richard Bas-kin (who was responsible for much of the music in Nashville) for continuity between sequences...
...By the fourth or fifth bedhopping, it is obvious that Rudolph has nothing illuminating to say about alienation, West-Coast style, besides repeating over and over again the rather insignificant observation that impersonal sex reflects the emptiness of L.A...
...If Thieves and Welcome to L.A...
...Rudolf's complete failure to integrate the music with the drama demonstrates that he learned nothing from the Nashville nightclub sequence he so slavishly copiednot even that Carradine is a fine talent...
...At one point in the movie, a character sighs, "Nothing ever changes here, not even the weather...
...On rare occasion Rudolph seems to be aware of the banality of his contrived situations and cardboard figures...
...Worse yet, that symbolically lost furniture turns out to be the key to the message of the drama...
...But these sophomoric gestures merely sink the movie further...
...Once again, Carradine is a smug, singing seducer—here named Carroll Barber and recently returned to the West Coast after three years in England...
...There is also the cranky downstairs neighbor (Hector Elizondo), who complains about the noise from above?another role from countless plays set in apartment houses...
...Altman's distinctive talent is his ability to weave a complex tapestry of story lines by relying on atmosphere rather than on conventional narrative methods...
...The characterizations in Welcome to L.A...
...Her father, Joe Kaminsky (Irwin Corey), is one of those lovably eccentric curmudgeons who exist nowhere but in the minds of playwrights and the pages of the New Yorker...
...sure enough, Carroll never sings for his dad...
...As for Corey, his suitability for the role of wise fool seems to be grounded primarily in his undeniable ability to act foolishly...
...is so derivative a work that its plot has virtually been lifted from that one sequence...
...was written and directed by Alan Rudolph, a former assistant to Altman, and produced by Altman himself...
...As the camera ascends, we hear anonymous snippets of conversations through the darkened windows—an imitation of the opening sequence of Divorce American Style, made 10 years ago...
...At times, the characters seem to come out of and disappear into nowhere...
...Carroll's conflict with his father, played by Denver Pyle, is straight out of Robert Anderson...
...Martin eventually makes the momentous discovery that you can never go home again, announcing to Sally that "Loew's Delancey is closed . . . and Bogart is dead...
...are so ridiculously drawn that everyone, including talented actors like Keitel and Sissy Spacek, are made to look silly...
Vol. 60 • February 1977 • No. 4
