On Screen

...A particularly handsome segment, confidently edited by Billy Weber and stunningly photographed by Nestor Almendros, begins with the onset of a slightly too symbolic plague of locusts...

...As arranged, Hicks delivers two kilos of uncut heroin to Converse's estranged wife...

...Zerbe, with his beetle brows and snide manner of talking out of the corner of his mouth, comes across like a cheap villain from a B-movie...

...Goodbar...

...For example, in the book, Converse writes for a trashy tabloid edited by his father-in-law, an embittered Communist refugee from the '30s...

...The novel presented Marge as no less nihilistic than her husband...

...Days of Heaven concerns a couple on the run as well—unmarried lovers, posing as sister and brother, who conspire to swindle a rich Texas wheat farmer in 1916, kill him in an unplanned act of violence, and flee across the Panhandle before meeting a predictably unhappy end...

...True, he has the easiest role: Playing a man of action like Hicks is not as difficult as playing a disaffected intellectual like Converse...

...On the other hand, the .voice-over narration, also used in Badlands, has "plot device" written all over it, as does the basic idea of a rich young man living alone on a vast estate, ripe for plucking by two con artists...

...The precise direction, handsomely detailed production and lovely photography merely highlighted the moral and emotional vacuum at the center of the film...

...Nolte plays Hicks with all the conviction of a young John Garfield, perfectly expressing the savage strength of the proletarian hero, the archetypal soldier of fortune who has a sensitive heart beating below a tough skin...

...Stone thus juxtaposes the New Left with the Old and also explains the underlying reasons for Marge's disillusionment with politics...

...Given this bucolic obsession, some of his Felliniesque touches here seem even more grotesquely arbitrary than they might otherwise...

...Herb Jaffe, has made the astonishing admission that he bought the story on the strength of a front-page review in the "Book Review" section of the Sunday New York Times—so it is also not surprising that the movie almost entirely misses the point of the novel...

...More egregiously, the title of the book refers to Indian braves who operate outside of even their tribe's martial conventions—just like the principal characters in Stone's amoral universe...

...The key character of Converse is very poorly played by Michael Moriarty, who does his by now familiar imitation of an effete wasp, bumbling around with his pasty complexion and hornrimmed glasses...

...One can only regret that Malick, in his concern with the visual, left her no room to act...

...A raven-haired beauty named Brooke Adams plays Abby, Bill's "sister...

...An astonishing exception to the bad acting is Nick Nolte as Hicks...

...Nonetheless, Weld herself is completely incapable of conveying the drug- and guilt-repressed sensuality that underlies the character's simultaneous revulsion from and fascination with the brutal Hicks...

...He clearly meant to give us an allegory of the '60s' decaying dreams, not simply an action thriller about an abortive drug deal...

...The script is superficially faithful to the material, most of the cuts are understandable considering the running time and much of the dialogue has been preserved intact...

...A JL...

...Instead of nihilistic, Moriarty's Converse is merely ineffectual...

...In a bloody and climactic shootout, Converse is finally confronted with his better and worse halves...

...Richard Gere is passable as Bill, the young murderer, though he generates none of the excitement of his Tony in Looking for Mr...

...Like its predecessor, Malick's second feature is technically superb...

...Arbitrary, too, is a scene where the farm is visited by a flying circus consisting of a dwarf, a belly dancer and an Italian aviator dressed in a monkey costume...

...Matters are not helped by the casting...

...Yet in Who'll Stop the Rain we witness one of those rare cases where an actor's ability and ambition are ideally suited to the part—as with Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, or John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever...

...Nevertheless, the heart of the novel is not the plot or the dialogue...

...As a result, her behavior and especially her dialogue often appear entirely unmotivated...

...The deal rapidly begins to fall apart, however, with the sudden and violent appearance of Danskin and Smith, two ex-convicts in the employ of a crooked narcotics agent named Antheil...

...In less than a decade, integration gave way to separatism in the struggle for racial equality...

...it is the psychological and cultural context of the story, provided by the author's lengthy and often ironic descriptive passages...

...The story revolves around a disillusioned Vietnam war correspondent, John Converse, who surrenders to his growing nihilism by joining a conspiracy to smuggle heroin from Saigon to San Francisco...

...Although Stone is credited as the co-writer with Judith Rascoe of the screenplay, very little of his intention emerges in the film...

...Stone described the character as looking "rather like a sympathetic young dean at an Eastern liberal arts college...

...Also, an account of Hicks' training on a commune under a drug-dealing Zen master is entirely omitted, making the character appear more mysterious than he otherwise would...

...certain emptiness at the core is also evident in Terrence Mal-ick's second feature, Days of Heaven...

...Further, after suffering through Nolte's embarrassing exhibition in The Deep, I was almost tempted to praise him for the same reason Dr...

...These cultural transformations have to date not been satisfactorily illuminated in a work of fiction, but a recent near miss was Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, winner of a National Book Award in 1975...

...In fact, Who 'II Stop the Rain is most akin to a Depression-era crime thriller...

...Malick shuttles among remarkable closeups of single insects devouring individual stalks of grain, middle-distance shots of the farmhands flailing at the swarming locusts and then trying to smoke them out of the fields, and long-range takes of the crops exploding into flames as the fires get out of control...

...On one level, Dog Soldiers is a sometimes crude yet generally effective crime melodrama, particularly in its harrowing scenes of violence...

...Tuesday Weld is worse as Marge...

...In the absence of this background information on screen, the brief appearance of the old man (David Opatoshu) serves no apparent dramatic function...

...Since I have enjoyed her work in television series (most recently, Family) and in a few bad made-for-television movies, I was glad to see her make the transition to the big screen...

...But the producer of the film adaptation...

...Marge, in Berkeley1...

...His first, Badlands, which he produced, directed and wrote in 1974 at the age of 29, established him as a filmmaker of promise...

...Because their roles are minimally fleshed out in Malick's script, it is difficult to assess adequately the performances of the two leads...

...Richard Masur and Ray Sharkey are effective as Danskin and Smith, but Anthony Zerbe is totally out of place as Antheil...

...It is not surprising, therefore, that the rights to the book were almost immediately sold to Hollywood...

...Under Malick's intellectual-ized guidance, Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek played the killer and his companion with such a lack of affect that it was difficult to understand why we should bother watching a movie about their lives...

...And expanded consciousness shrank into narcissistic withdrawal...

...From the evidence of his two features, Malick apparently believes that great expanses of sod in the Midwest are enough to drive anyone to violence...

...I found her skittish, out-of-synch reading and her constantly bewildered, kittenish expression most annoying...

...The movie has turned the character into an almost passive victim of circumstances...

...After Hicks and Marge flee to New Mexico with the drugs, Converse returns to the States, where he is plunged into a paranoid's nightmare of torture and betrayal when Antheil forces him to trail the fugitives...

...Johnson praised the walking dog...

...In all fairness, the script leaves Weld little to work with...

...The chief failing of Badlands, based on the Starkweather killings in the Midwest 20 years ago, was its frigid es-theticism...

...It has been splendidly photographed by Richard Kline, whose career could only go up after his work on King Kong...

...Wrenched from the cultural concerns of the '60s that made the book worth reading, the film succeeds at the modest level of one of those Garfield/ Warner Brothers melodramas of the '30s...

...The filmmakers, perhaps wary of evoking unpleasant associations with the Vietnam war, made the puzzling last-minute decision to call their adaptation Who'll Stop the Rain, after a popular song by Creedence Clearwater Revival that recurs only intermittently on the soundtrack and has still less to do with the novel...

...But once again all this technical mastery is in the service of drama that is simple-minded when it is not simply confused...

...He enlists as a courier an old friend, Ray Hicks, the embodiment of the decade's paradoxical mixture of mysticism and street sense...

...Stone drew heavily on Conrad to picture the relationship between Converse and Hicks (a quote from Heart of Darkness serves as an epigraph to the book), and on B. Traven to dramatize the effect of greed on men's souls...

...Pacifism yielded to violence within the antiwar movement...

...The sexual revolution gave birth to the new chastity of women's liberation...

...With her wide-set eyes, raspy little voice and pouting mouth that droops at the corners over a pointy chin, she looks like a lovely petulant child...

...The movie is competenty directed by Karel Reisz, hero to the auteur critics and director of Morgan.', Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Gambler (but not, as Penelope Gilliatt recently claimed, of This Sporting Life, produced by Reisz and directed by Lindsay Anderson...

...His sure sense of cinematic rhythm and bold orchestration of a staggering variety of large-and small-scale effects make this one of the most vivid individual sequences in recent memory...

...Regrettably, his latest is not a step forward...

...She has consistently received the same kind of patronizing adulation for her serious acting that Diane Keaton enjoys for her comedic performances...