MIXED-UP MOVIES

...Perhaps from the official revolutionary viewpoint of the Cuban government, The Last Supper would have been too pessimistic without the uplifting ending...

...Yet this suggestion that the overseer, of all the characters, is somehow regarded by the Count as a Christ figure is too bizarre to be consistent even with the Count's deranged psyche...

...Worse still, Dear Detective is insufferably patronizing toward Lise, shown interrupting her hot pursuit of a lead to have her hair styled...

...His remarkable ability for comedy is especially evident in two sequences...

...After Don Manuel has been executed by his captors, for example, the Count asks the priest, "Father, what time did Christ die...

...It also destroys the otherwise carefully designed tripartite division of Body (Don Manuel), Spirit (the priest) and Mind (Don Gaspar, the French engineer who runs the mill...

...Regrettable, too, is Gutierrez Alea's failure to expand the part of Don Gaspar, the foreigner whose modern, rationalistic perspective might have been exploited to provide an ironic counterpoint to the allegory...

...The perfect actor for the role would have been a young Rod Steiger (in F.I.S...

...Last fall, Agnes Varda's One Sings, the Other Doesn't implied that the liberation of French women was about 10 years behind that of their American counterparts...

...The French film Dear Detective is imported junk, but it is adorned by a couple of fine performances...

...Philippe Noiret, stunning in The Clockmaker two years ago, is just splendid here as Antoine Lemercier, a mild-mannered classics professor at the Sorbonne, whose run-in with Lise sparks a comic middle-aged romance...

...After Kovak makes a deal with the mob for the "push" necessary to back up a strike, scenes of gangland intimidation are juxtaposed with shots of Kovak's wedding rehearsal-a crude quote from The Godfather...

...In one, he awkwardly tries to back into a small car while holding an ice-cream cone in each hand, and then gives up, throwing them to the ground in disgust...

...On Screen MIXED-UP MOVIES BY ROBERT ASAHINA The latest film of Cuban director Tomas Gutierrez Alea, perhaps best known in this country for his Memories of Underdevelopment (shown here in 1973), is The Last Supper...

...That is nowhere apparent in Dear Detective, and one can but hope that his latest effort will prove only a temporary detour...

...Moreover, the entire supper sequence appears to have been done in only a couple of lengthy takes, remarkable evidence of the strength of the ensemble performance and of the director's ability to generate a feeling of spontaneity and capture it on film...

...Second, his enunciation is so poor it is impossible to believe that Kovak is a charismatic public speaker...

...Christ humbled himself before his disciples," the Count reasons, "so a master can humble himself before his slaves...

...The slaves in turn execute their hostage, burn down the sugar mill and flee to the hills...

...Among contemporaries, only Harvey Keitel could have done justice to the character...

...The slaves grow increasingly bolder as he speaks, and soon lose their servile inhibitions...

...Equally obvious are Jewison's mechanical setups...

...T., the old Rod Steiger botches a cameo as the publicity-hungry Senator...

...The dinner scenes, illuminated by the soft glow of candlelight, are striking tableaux that mirror the frescoes used under the opening credits...

...T. out of the junkyard hasn't been born yet...

...Annie Giradot is marvelous as the heroine, Lise Tanquerelle, a police inspector and mother of a small child, who lives with her dotty mother and maiden aunt...

...The Last Supper, in short, lacks an intelligible point of view, and the director's intentions remain a puzzle...

...In addition, their lightweight love affair is not well integrated with the other half of the movie, the suspense thriller about Lise's investigation of the mysterious deaths of three members of the Chamber of Deputies in as many days...

...During the first truckers' strike, for instance, he lingers so long on the camaraderie and the solidarity of picketers singing union songs that we are scarcely surprised at what follows: a violent confrontation between the truckers, the hired thugs and the scabs...

...The Count tracks them ruthlessly, massacres 11 of his 12 former dinner guests, and then dedicates the site of the new mill with their severed heads...

...The man to fault for this sorry mess is director and coauthor Philippe de Broca...

...As the evening wears on, and the liquor and the talk flow ever more freely, the Count starts to confess his spiritual anguish and his moral ambivalence toward the plantation's brutal overseer, Don Manuel, who "commits necessary sins" to keep the slaves in line...

...Figuring out who is to blame for F.I.S...

...When the Count claims that the slaves "learned humility and resignation" at the meal, the priest notes that "They also learned to sit at the master's table...

...But F.I.S.T...

...Yet these blunders are as nothing compared to the casting of Stallone in the part of Kovak...

...The creators also had a potentially interesting main character: Johnny Kovak (Stallone), a Hoffa-like, charismatic organizer who rises through the ranks to the presidency of the Federation of Interstate Truckers, establishes it as the most powerful union in the nation, and then meets his downfall when he is called to appear before a Congressional committee investigating the Federation's ties to organized crime...

...He will be punished by someone higher than I am," the Count asserts to assuage his conscience...

...To their surprise and to the horror of the local priest, the Count responds by trying to crush the incipient rebellion with a savage show of force...

...Finally, his single-minded intensity, impressive in Rocky, is inadequate to the character of a complicated and ambitious conniver...

...To judge by Dear Detective, the figure is closer to 20...

...Similarly, the beautifully photographed scenes of the Hungarian and Lithuanian neighborhoods of Cleveland (by Laszlo Kovacs), do not become an integral part of the movie: We never understand what role they are supposed to play in the formation of Kovak's character...

...On the other hand, the final sequence of the lone survivor racing through the hills, lyrically composed and intercut with slow-motion scenes of running horses and roaring streams, is not only a fantasy completely at odds with the naturalism predominating in the rest of the film but seems to put the director squarely on the side of the slaves and of a future rebellion...

...It is an allegorical tale about an 18th-century Cuban count who, in a guilt-ridden imitation of Jesus' last meal, invites 12 of the slaves on his sugar plantation to eat at his table on Holy Thursday...

...Jewison in particular is responsible for some very clumsy touches...

...Nevertheless, the film as a whole is much less than the sum of these two parts...

...In the other, he and Lise are caught in the rain after he sings in an outdoor choral concert, and he gallantly tries to shield her head with his limp sheets of music...

...But their resistance merely encourages the overseer's brutality, and they are forced to overpower him, hold him hostage and ask the Count to weigh their grievances...

...Instead of exploring the complex relationships marked by ethnicity, radical politics and union activism during the '30s, the filmmakers remain content to hint at them, mostly to provide a "colorful" background for one more flawed diamond-in-the-rough...

...Joe Eszterhas and Sylvester Stallone, authors of the screenplay, and director Norman Jewison had the material for an important movie about an important subject-the struggle of the labor unions from the '30s through the '50s, and the largely successful integration of working-class ethnics into the mainstream of American life...

...Since subsequent events tend to support the padre's views, it appears that the story is to be construed as a cautionary tale to slave owners about the danger of letting the field hands into the plantation house...

...Still, the actor who could have hauled F.I.S...

...While the films that established his reputation ranged from the amusing (That Man from Rio) to the simple-minded (King of Hearts), de Broca in the past nonetheless exhibited a sureness of touch-a confident, albeit commercial, command of the whimsical...

...In the first place, his accent is out of Rocky and South Philly, not Cleveland...

...Gutierrez Alea, however, founded and still heads the ICAIC (the Cuban film institute), so one must assume that he was in full control of the production, and therefore was responsible for all the film's faults...

...The movie ends with the sole survivor of the master's perverse ritual running for his life...

...This very hour," the padre responds...

...It would be tempting to interpret this finale as evidence of ideological tampering or censorship...

...Although The Last Supper is his first feature in color, Gutierrez Alea and cinematographer Mario Garcia Joya display a firm control of the medium, particularly in the interior shots...

...fails to score any telling blows...

...After all the frothy comic banter between Lise and Antoine, it is somewhat disconcerting to see blood bubbling from the mouths of men who have been stabbed in the back with awls...

...So the next morning they defy Don Manuel's whip, claiming that the Count would not approve of their working on Good Friday...

...By the end of the meal, they are convinced of the depth of their master's religious torment -or at least of his psychological vulnerability...

...The mainspring of the comedy-Lise's desire to keep Antoine, a Left-wing, ivory-tower academic, from discovering how she makes her living-Is simply too weak to generate many laughs...

...Thus Catholicism exists mainly as an object of derision rather than a real force in F.I.S.T., and the entire question of "Bolshevik agitators" (as one character calls them), who posed a substantial threat to the integrity of the unions of that time, is treated as a joke...

...Likewise, Kovak and his bride-to-be, Anna Zerinkas (Melinda Dillon), are always wearing white, presumably to allow us to pick them out of a crowd of more conventionally attired workers...

...Unfortunately, good technique by itself cannot make for a satisfying allegory, and the screenplay by Gutierrez Alea, Tomas Gonzalez and Maria Eugenia Haya is simply too muddled for the tale to be effective...

...T. would require greater powers of exegesis...