Greasy Kid Stuff

...On the one hand, we are invited to empathize with a group— the greasers—that was rejected 20 years ago and to retrospectively identify with its alienation from "square" conventions...

...Somewhere along this road, however, Peckinpah takes a detour, and his paean to the rugged individualist turns into merely another rural chase movie, like Vanishing Point, W. W. and the Dixie Dance Kings, Smokey and the Bandit, and White Line Fever...

...1 cannot see what all the fuss is about...

...The hero, Joe Pendleton, has been altered from a pugilist to the quarterback of the Los Angeles Rams—as well as a health-food freak and an amateur saxophone player to boot...

...Once again, the brave sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider, an otherwise fine actor who must have been paid handsomely indeed to prostitute himself so shamelessly) becomes An Enemy of the People when his warnings are ignored by a town council more interested in maximizing profits from tourism than in saving lives...

...Once again, the peaceful hamlet of Amity (actually, Martha's Vineyard) is menaced by a white shark of improbably large dimensions and appetite...

...its fenders are sheared off, its tires are shredded and it is eventually reduced to near rubble...

...Yeah," answers the Other, "six years...

...Specifically, Joe is reincarnated by Mr...

...Beatty has kept the bare bones, but the updating he has done is ruinous...

...Jordan (Claude Rains...

...A car race that is worth a few laughs has mistakenly been identified by some reviewers as an allusion to the "chicken run" in Rebel Without a Cause...

...How else explain the likes of Jaws 2, Grease, Convoy, and Heaven Can Wail...

...After protesting for years that he was a serious actor and not just another pretty face, and after taking chances on oddball films (Mickey One) and projects that were initially regarded with some skepticism (Bonnie and Clyde), he is now assuming the persona that he rejected for so long—the big-time Hollywood star...

...At one point, a police car, hot in pursuit of a renegade trucker, is caught between two giant 18-wheelers...

...actually, it is a not completely humorless parody of the chariot race in Ben Hur...

...In Jaws, the great white killer indiscriminately feasted on all manner of people— young and old, handsome and ugly, rich and poor...

...A somewhat graver problem is the attitude we are asked to take toward the material...

...All he has added to the genre is a series of cliches dredged up from old Westerns, including some of his own...

...Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of Stockard Channing, who appears to be twice as old as the part she is playing (Rizzo, the "bad girl" leader of the Pink Ladies...

...They eventually join him in a convoy that becomes a statewide truckers' revolt...

...Peckinpah has always delighted in the cinema of destruction, and a description of one of the characters in the film perfectly suits him: "No man is more dedicated to the single-minded pursuit of cheap thrills...

...The story, by B.W.L Norton, taken from the hit record by C. W. McCall, is a simple-minded fantasy about the romance of the road...

...Finally, coproducers Allan Carr and Robert Stigwood have made annoying and totally irrelevant additions: a disco theme song by Barry Gibb that belongs to another era, and an opening credits sequence, featuring Bambi and Thumper, Jules Feiffer and Marilyn Monroe, that belongs to another movie...

...How Beatty must have enjoyed living out this fantasy...

...The climactic dance contest, won by Danny to the music of "Willie and the Hand Jive," is incompetently staged by Patricia Birch to the point of seeming less like a competition based on skill than a marathon based on endurance...

...as she grows older, Arden looks and sounds more and more like Vincent Price in drag...

...Or rather, they are supposed to be teenagers, seniors at Rydell High School...

...There are some amusing moments, to be sure, provided by such old-timers as Edd Byrnes, Alice Ghostley and especially Eve Arden as Miss McGee, the principal of Rydell High...

...o one could ever accuse Warren Beatty of self-contempt...

...The unkindest cut is the familiar chase sequence in which a speeding patrol car is delayed by a slow-moving antique driven by a doddering old man and his equally ancient wife...

...There is, however, one major difference between the two movies: the shark's choice of victims...

...In the original film, Robert Montgomery played a boxer accidentally snatched up to heaven by a bumbling angel (Edward Everett Horton), and the mistake was rectified, in complicated fashion, by the head angel, Mr...

...Like Streisand's coproduction, A Star is Born, Beatty's is a remake —of Here Comes Mr...

...Other blunders can be attributed to simple confusion...

...In Jaws 2, by contrast, the monster is more discriminating, feeding on the firm young flesh of upper-middle-class teenagers...

...A couple of other scenes support my analysis of his motives...

...And once again, the production, direction (by an unknown named Jeannot Szwarc), writing (by Carl Gottlieb and Howard Sackler), and acting are about as rancid as a rotten fish...

...His narrative transitions are awkward and arbitrary, and what might be politely called his eclecticism is actually a frantic jumbling of styles in the absence of any coherent vision...

...It was bad enough when Peckinpah used such tired devices in his earlier work (such as Junior Bonner...

...Slow-motion sequences capture the brawlers in what are supposed to be hilariously undignified positions, and there are even brief shots of scrappy little women furiously punching and then being punched by big men...

...Thus the satirical effect of a song about a "Beauty School Dropout" is undercut by its being staged as a campy, Busby Berkeley-like fantasy, complete with an obsequiously grinning Frankie Avalon, bedecked in white-on-white satins...

...Hence when Rubber Duck and Lyle meet for the first time we get that meaningful Moment of Recognition: "It's been a long time," the one says...

...That chariot race "quote" shows up in another new film, Sam Peckinpah's Convoy...

...Kris Kristofferson plays a truck driver known as the "Rubber Duck," the "living embodiment of the American cowboy tradition," whose battles with the sinister Arizona sheriff Lyle Wallace (Ernest Borgnine) make him a folk hero to an ever-growing band of independent owner-operators...

...to now see him repeating himself repeating others is unbearable, a sign of contempt for himself and for his audience...

...N Jl...

...ms year's crop of summer releases confirms my suspicion that the studios and distributors not only know from past experience that audiences will endure anything to escape the heat for a few hours in an air-conditioned theater but take full advantage of the situation...

...And like Streisand's egomaniacal enterprise, Beatty's spectacle is a crashing bore...

...Director Randal Klei-ser, another 30-year-old unknown, seems totally lost...

...Worse still, we find one of those barroom brawls, set to twangy country music, complete with reaction shots of an old-timer calmly eating amid the confusion and a flustered waitress saying, "I don't have to work under these circumstances...

...But his former teammates, who of course do not recognize him, give him no help and even cooperate in making him look foolish...

...Once again, Brody single-handedly destroys the beast in a wildly improbable climax...

...Convoy features enough spectacular car crashes, explosions and sheer technological mayhem to enrapture a mad bomber...

...in fact, they look well into the more mature years...

...It is ironic that Beatty, of all people, should make such a fool of himself...

...Grease, a musical about the allegedly good old days of the '50s, also is filled with teenagers...

...So he pleads with them for just one honest chance—and then delivers, making the play as promised and winning the respect of the doubters...

...The sequel is every bit as stupid and boring as the original was...

...The fleeting funny moments, though, are scarcely enough to make Grease worth seeing...

...Similarly, when Danny is (temporarily) dumped by his girlfriend, Sandy (the insufferably cute Olivia Newton-John), he sings a mournful ballad at a drive-in movie and the effect is immediately undermined because the screen lights up behind his head with an advertisement for the refreshment stand, featuring a dancing hot dog and bun...

...On the other hand, we are asked to regard it and the entire period with a certain amount of condescension...

...But it is difficult to believe that a pro quarterback, typically paid more than most corporation chiefs, could be so inept in money matters...

...This renders implausible some later plot developments...

...only a football star (or a politician, perhaps) could rival Beatty's own real-life status and renown...

...At one point Joe, in his new body, is forced to try out again for the Rams...

...Then there is that ponderous, closing-of-the frontier theme: "There ain't many of us left," the Duck pronounces...

...As for the rest of the movie, it is worthless...

...Jordan (James Mason) in the body of a millionaire industrialist, Leo Farnsworth—and proceeds to make a shambles of Farnsworth's multinational corporation...

...The temperature this summer has already been raised by a lot of journalistic hot air about how Jaws 2 suffers by comparison to Jaws (1975...

...John Travolta, for example, is about eight years too old for the part of Danny, the greaser hero...

...This ambivalence is clear in the film's treatment of the musical numbers...

...Like Barbra Streisand, this actor is so full of himself that he has made himself the coauthor (with Elaine May), co-director (with Buck Henry), producer, and star of a movie: Heaven Can Wait...

...Apart from noting that Hollywood tycoons are sometimes referred to as sharks, I leave it others to interpret this switch in gastronomic habits...

...Jordan, a 1941 film that won Oscars for best story and best screenplay...

...Beatty's narcissism can be blamed for this transformation of a fighter into a glamorous athlete—boxing would be too lowly a profession for a matinee idol...

...But the star of Saturday Night Fever gives himself enthusiastically to the role, making the age discrepancy less egregious...

...Indeed, the shark spends nearly the entire second half of the film terrorizing a raft full of impossibly awkward adolescent males and impossibly nubile pubescent females, all of whom seem to have been cloned from some suntanned Cal-ifornians...