Kid stuff

...Even more impressive than the performances is the technical excellence...

...Bellocq is as much a cipher in the second half of the film as he was earlier, making it difficult to keep from laughing aloud when he passionately proclaims "1 cannot live without her"—he seems barely alive to begin with...

...Naturally, Freed (Tim McIntire) heroically resists them and announces, "You can close the show, you can stop me—but you can never stop rock 'n-roll...

...On Screen KID STUFF BY ROBERT ASAHINA Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, a fictionalized account of an actual 12-year-old prostitute who plied her trade in New Orleans' notorious Storyville district before it was shut down in 1917, received a great deal of prerelease publicity...

...One very strong sequence, a car chase in the fog along Lake Michigan, manages to maintain a queasy balance between humor and terror—And culminates in a flashy machine-gun flurry that kills two men, plus an even flashier explosion that kills two more...

...Note, for example, the way that the principals mingle with the racetrack crowds and then emerge from the background of people when they are singled out by the hand-held cameras used by Ritt and John A. Alonzo, his director of photography...

...Smaller historical inaccuracies are no less annoying...

...Second—in contrast to Hitchcock, who prefers his gimmickry to precise acting—De Palma has a knack for eliciting powerful performances...

...Accordingly, he never panders to an audience...

...I find this hard to believe...

...But as if to unburden a lot of guilty consciences the movie overcompensates by making an up-and-coming black group, the "Chesterfields" (Carl Earl Weaver, Al Chalk, Sam Harkness, and Arnold McCuller), the most sympathetic on-screen figures...

...On the whole, though, Casey's Shadow is surprisingly enjoyable—the kind of movie that they aren't supposed to be making anymore...

...More specifically, the movie, directed by Floyd Mutrux and written by John Kaye, purports to be an account of the events leading up to the all-star rock 'n-roll concert at the Brooklyn Paramount theater organized by Freed in celebration of the music's "first anniversary...

...There is only one brief reference to the actual cause of the original Freed's downfall—the payola scandals...

...But unlike Hitchcock, whose cynical contempt for his material is made evident by the mechanical tricks employed to manipulate viewers, De Palma revels in working out the insane logic of his stories...

...Most of the action takes place within Madame Nell's (Frances Faye) decaying yet still elegant bordello, the living and working quarters of the child hooker, Violet (Brooke Shields), and her mother, Hattie (Susan Sarandon...

...I have never seen an actor with a worse sense of timing...

...Sven Nykvist's succession of languorously lovely scenes has the net effect of deadening, rather than exciting the senses...

...Freed agrees, "Neither did I." When the IRS impounds the box-office receipts, thereby making it impossible for Freed to pay his guest stars, Chuck Berry volunteers to perform for free and announces, "Rock 'n-roll's been pretty good to me—I think I'll do this one for rock 'n-roll...

...The fault is not all Piatt's, however, because no matter how poor the script, Carradine can always be counted on to deliver an even poorer performance...

...Apparently filmmakers and their audiences, after a decade of worshipping youth, are now conspiring to repudiate their former servility with a vengeance...

...For the sorry truth is that Pretty Baby is stupefyingly dull...

...It is the basic falseness of the entire enterprise, though, that rankles most...

...And the audience of the climactic concert has too many Afros and too much long hair...

...Playboy hailed it as a "breakthrough" in the "battle against censorship...

...If the plot demands it, he cheerfully eliminates "sympathetic" characters in as gory a manner as he does any villain...

...At first, I thought she was called "Tina Louise," whom Newman, regrettably, does not resemble...

...For instance, the script has Freed "discovering" La-verne Baker in 1959...

...The latest addition to the genre is Brian De Palma's The Fury...

...Nevertheless, we do take something away with us...

...But the place he inspects bears an uncanny resemblance to Southern California, not Scarsdale or Long Island...

...Unfortunately, he has aged much less well than either Berry or Lewis, which the filmmakers acknowledge by limiting his number to about 15 seconds—just long enough to confuse those members of the audience who never heard of him...

...Furniture, cars and especially people are destroyed in truly spectacular fashion...

...Several inconsistencies are the result of pure carelessness—or a limited budget...

...Mutrux and Kaye clearly are concerned about playing to audience nostalgia...

...The result is a revisionist account of the rock 'n-roll era that fails on several levels, including covering up a hardly untarnished historical record...

...Let it be said at the outset that it is disconcerting to see a 25-year-old popular art form treated so reverentially—particularlv when many of the less attractive aspects of its history are fudged...

...A cabal of narcotics agents, policemen, internal revenue agents, and other unspecified government authorities are bent on closing down the concert and running Freed off the air, because they "don't like white kids and black kids boogey-ing together," and because the music represents a challenge to their standards of decency...

...Whether to sell magazines with salacious gossip or to spout fashionable claptrap about sexual relationships, the press has exploited Shields more cruelly than those people it has criticized for the handling of her career...

...Nor can I recall a performer more acutely self-conscious of his inability to articulate...

...Since The Exorcist (197'4), young people and even babies (It's Alive.', Demon Seed) have been portrayed as agents of evil in the world...

...The enlightened guardians of our children would be wiser to focus their attention on the horror films that have recently become popular...

...Matthau once again recreates the persona of the grouchy, lovable slob, but his performance is no less amusing for Being familiar...

...Indeed, the unnaturalness of Violet's career as a prostitute would have been better emphasized by showing how "naturally" it came to her...

...An even touchier subject—the record companies' practice of quickly issuing "cover" recordings by white groups of songs made popular by black groups—Also receives a hasty and very nervous allusion...

...First, his movies invariably exhibit a high degree of technical expertise...

...whatever their shortcomings, De Palma's films are not easily forgotten...

...I am much more disturbed by the media's dirty dealings in this case...

...In addition, the "Brooklyn Paramount" of the film looks like the L. A. theater done over for the occasion, which it is...

...There are vague suggestions that Bellocq's desire results from a concern for Violet's welfare after Hattie deserts her, and that his suppressed lust for the mother has been transferred to the daughter...

...Kaye's screenplay turns Freed into a noble martyr who sacrifices his career, and eventually his life, for the sake of the music he loves...

...It has lately occurred to me that like Hitchcock, to whom he professes a great debt, De Palma may be nothing more and nothing less than a gifted director of pop thrillers...

...Polly Piatt's clumsy script does not help matters...

...Nonetheless, his transition from passive to active involvement in Violet's life happens much too quickly...

...There are at least two good reasons for this...

...The interior shots are painstakingly composed: Whores loll about in lacy chemises, illuminated by golden bands of sunlight streaking through the shutters of the old mansion, or by the soft glow of Tiffany lamps...

...It has been argued that Shield's acting is not meant to be convincing, that her sensuality is supposed to be artificial to underscore the unnaturalness of her situation...

...Still, she cannot hold a candle to Tatum O'Neal or Jodie Foster, let alone to the young Elizabeth Taylor and the young Judy Garland—with all of whom she has been favorably compared...

...The time is the good old days?959, the year the "baby boom" first started to feel growing pains...

...While Rubin has a bit of trouble with his accent, supposedly a combination of Southern and Cajun, he manages his part well otherwise...

...Thus the primary dramatic problem is to make credible the obsessive desire of an adult male for a female child...

...Ms., more than a month before the premiere, condemned it as "propaganda for patriarchal values...

...In an amusing scene, Cassavetes does what looks like a deadpan imitation of Richard Nixon, post-Watergate: "All the bad things you heard about me," he tells Gillian after directly or indirectly causing a dozen deaths, "are just not true...

...The trouble with this sort of unrelenting commitment to the manufacturing of thrills is that the inherent nihilism, albeit viscerally stimulating, is psychologically wearying: The repeated jolts to the system have an unpleasant after-effect...

...Another film centered around teenagers, American Hot Wax, paints a much rosier picture...

...Other rock 'n-roll stars are represented by composites: The "Planetones" sing the hits of both the Del Vikings and Danny and the Juniors...

...a line that would be perfectly suited to a parody of bad melodramatic writing...

...A pleasant antidote to the sentimentality of American Hot Wax, the unsettling nihilism of The Fury and the kitsch decadence of Pretty Baby is Casey's Shadow, directed by Martin Ritt from Carol Sobieski's screenplay...

...From his onscreen expression, he appears as amazed as the audience at the weird, strangled noises that are somehow squeezed from his larynx...

...So does Screem-in' Jay Hawkins, who rises out of his famous coffin in voodoo getup to sing, "I Put a Spell on You...

...In The Fury, for example, the editing, by De Palma's long-time collaborator Paul Hirsch (winner of an Academy Award for his work on Star Wars), is absolutely brilliant...

...True, she is only 12 years old and Pretty Baby marks her movie debut...

...McIntire does project the properly sleazy appearance of a hustler on the make, yet he is constantly fighting the sentimental inanities of the script: "I never had anything till I found the music," claims Teenage Louise (obviously just another crazy, mixed-up kid...

...One might suppose that any actress would look good opposite Carradine, yet Shields is almost equally lifeless...

...But there is no urgency animating the cinematography...

...the young Carole King, who wrote several songs for black groups in the early '60s before going on to a singing career of her own, is represented by the rather toocutely named character of "Teenage Louise" (Laraine Newman...

...Thanks to Piatt's thin conception, these remain merely hints...

...his "shadow" is the quarter horse that he trains under the watchful supervision of his father, Lloyd (Walter Matthau), and his older brother, Buddy (Andrew A. Rubin), and that the middle Bourdelle boy, Randy (Stephan Burns), rides to victory in the million-dollar Ail-American Futurity at Ruidoso, New Mexico...

...A child raised in a brothel, who even as a virgin participated in "mother/daughter" acts with customers, would scarcely be so awkward and stiff with her own "fancy man...

...Destruction for its own sake seems to be The Fury's rai-son d'etre...

...Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis appear as themselves...

...Although Violet is the key to the plot, the chief character is really her "fancy man," the photographer Bellocq (Keith Carradine), who falls in love with, and then marries, her...

...Ritt, a devotee of Jean Renoir, is a master of Renoir's "deep-focus" technique: The dramatic action in Casey's Shadow is propelled not by the editing and juxtaposing of different shots (as in The Fury), but by the movement of characters along different planes of depth within a given shot...

...his lines misfire spontaneously, like firecrackers gone mad...

...Kirk Douglas (Robin's father), with his bare-chested heroics, and John Cassavetes (Childress, head of the evil goverment "Agency"), with his maniacally cackling laugh and wildly rolling eyeballs, are both hammy but hilariously effective...

...And while she has been a professional model from the time she was 11 months old, she has very little screen presence...

...to his credit, he actually did that five years earlier and her music here sounds, as it should, five years out of date...

...Hershewe is just precocious enough without being obnoxious, and Burns projects precisely the right amount of adolescent jitters...

...Nine-year-old Michael Hershewe plays Casey Bourdelle...

...As long ago as last September, a New York magazine cover story called it another "Lolita, only in period costume and much more explicit...

...It is a story of a boy and his horse that, remarkably enough, is related without a hint of condescension...

...This is dealt with by having Nell sneer, "I've seen it a hundred times before," but nothing that we see happen can convince us the "love" affair is genuine...

...The place is Brooklyn—the land of bobbysox, of DA haircuts, and especially of Alan Freed, the legendary WINS disc jockey credited with "discovering" rock 'n-roll and with coining the term...

...In fact, the film depicts as entirely normal one of the most questionable practices of his career: his intimate involvement in nearly all stages of the record business—from scouting talent, through working in the sound studio, to promoting the product on his radio show...

...At another point Bellocq and Violet are arguing, and Piatt's script forces him to shout, "So this is how you would repay me...

...To be sure, for the opening half of the film, Bellocq is kept deliberately sketchy: When he first comes to Nell's to take pictures of the whores, he is supposed to be a voyeur, a spectator instead of a participant (just as Toulouse-Lautrec immortalized the underside of 19th-century Paris in lithographs, the real-life E. J. Bellocq captured the low life of Storyville in photographs...

...I once thought of De Palma as a brilliant director piddling away his talents on unworthy projects...

...The screenplay by John Farris, based on his novel, tells the tale of two teenagers, Robin (Andrew Stevens) and Gillian (Amy Irving), blessed (or damned) with psychokinetic powers, and linked to each other by telepathy, who are being used by the government as human secret weapons...

...At one point, Freed considers buying a mansion in the New York suburbs...

...Now that the movie has finally opened, one wonders what all the fuss was about...

...Like Stanley Kubrick in Barry Lyndon, and, more recently, Ridley Scott in The Duellists, Malle has confused photography with direction...

...As for the somewhat perverse nature of the film, I cannot summon up any righteous anger...

...Now, Chuck Berry might actually have done Freed such a favor, but I truly doubt he used such a corny line to proclaim his intentions...