On Screen

...No, we have to see her show off to Alex all her formica furniture from the Eisenhower period...

...Nevertheless, the technical quality of Yanks cannot redeem its literary shortcomings...

...Right at the beginning, the film announces, "This is a true story," but historical truth is not the same as dramatic truth, and as drama, The Onion Field fails on several counts...

...Laura (Blanche Baker, who plays Joe Tynan's teenage daughter, too) is undergoing her own kind of readjustment: Separated from her boyfriend (to whom she pledges to write postcards regularly), she embarks on a grim tour of every one of the "212 important sights in the Michelin Guide" and nearly suffers a nervous breakdown...

...Above all, the screenplay lacks focus...

...Nor is it surprising that Meryl Streep registers a strong performance, even in a role that seems like a male fantasy of a liberated woman (as aggressive in her profession as she is dynamic in bed...

...This bit of dialogue gives a pretty fair indication of the quality of Colin Welland and Walter Bernstein's script...

...Joel (Miles Chapin) comes to France because his parents and his counselors have convinced him the experience will broaden his horizons and look good on his records...

...Dick Bush's photography makes the Yorkshire countryside look properly lush and moist...

...With her short-cropped hair and her bony, rangy figure, she projects just the right amount of vulnerable sensuality...

...When Tynan and Traynor first meet to discuss strategy, she tells him, "Senator, I think you're the most exciting political figure in this country, and when I think of what you could do with this [the information she gives him] I get weak in the knees—and it's the right thing to do, of course...

...But rather than eliminate, he simply compresses...

...Jean (Lisa Eichhorn) is the daughter of a shopkeeper in the small Yorkshire village invaded by Matt's regiment...

...After the initial shock of hearing "Do You Believe in Magic" sung in French wears off, one begins to ask questions—such as whether that particular song can still be heard on radios in Paris more than a decade after it was a hit in the United States...

...He answers in kind, "Things are building up pretty fast now," as he gropes for her...

...Considering how often I have been caught napping by Harris (as in Nashville), I guess I should expect the unexpected from her—with pleasure...

...and Richard Rodney Bennett's score hits just the right sentimental and rousing notes...

...Wambaugh simply does not have enough time in the movie to cover everything in the book...

...While he climbs into the bed where she is waiting demurely clad in her nightgown, she asks a question that will be remembered in the annals of screen writing: "How soon will it be before the invasion...

...Chapin and Grant have a certain awkward charm that is perfectly consonant with characters who are going through that most awkward period...

...To Welland and Bernstein, all the English have upper lips that are stiff from coping with the bad manners of those Americans, who are as brash as they are naive...

...And, like Harris, she is just offbeat enough to keep you on your toes...

...Yanks could have been an interesting look at the strained relations between two countries whose common language and military alliance masked vast cultural differences...

...Harold Becker has directed The Onion Field moderately well, and all of the principals turn in credible performances...

...The result is elliptical, episodic and shallow...

...The bad writing is compounded by the inept casting...

...Further, in his zeal to cover every base, Wambaugh has included episodes that neither advance the story nor flesh out the character of the murdered officer...

...But the real charmer is Quennessen, who manages to be incredibly appealing without being pretty in any conventional way...

...Wambaugh probably included both episodes out of a dedication to the facts and the correct sentiments...

...One of them is Marie-France Pisier, a delightful comedienne...

...It is not surprising that Alda comes off well...

...In addition, the movie acquires whatever tension it has from the familiar wife-ver-sus-mistress conflict—again slightly updated, for both women have careers of their own that inevitably clash and coincide with the Senator's ambitions...

...The evil characters —Greg Powell (James Woods) and Jimmy Smith (Franklyn Seales)—simply are infinitely more fascinating...

...That remark cannot be construed as a satire of the cynical links among ambition, sex and political power, since the drama depends on their having an affair and on our believing that he really is as exciting as she finds him...

...The Onion Field is similarly hollow at the core...

...Some good acting and not very good writing are also to be found in The Seduction of Joe Tynan...

...The English actors fare somewhat better, although Vanessa Redgrave does not convince us that her character, an aristocratic Englishwoman, would have anything at all to do with a jerk like John...

...But the Anglo-American collaboration has yielded only crude cliches...

...she is as good here as she was in Tynan, two very different roles...

...Unfortunately, the film fails to develop its potential...

...What is surprising is Barbara Harris' (Ellie Tynan) performance, so eccentric that it radiates authenticity...

...She supplies him with the crucial information that enables him to lead the opposition to a Supreme Court nominee and thereby rise to prominence within the ranks of the Democratic Party...

...But he suffers cultural shock and satisfies himself with watching reruns of Star Trek, in French, until he is rescued by Toni (Valerie Quennessen), a local girl...

...Gere, on the other hand, seems so ingenuous that he merely looks vacuous instead of sincere...

...In French Postcards, by contrast, a lot more has to be spelled out, and it is—annoying-ly...

...Tynan (Alan Alda) is a made-for-television politician, a liberal Senator from New York who is "seduced" by power and by an attractive attorney, Karen Traynor (Meryl Streep...

...For example, the guilt felt by the surviving policeman, Karl Hettinger (John Savage), is insufficiently developed...

...For one thing, the episodic style that worked m American Graffiti is not appropriate in this case...

...I^had high hopes for French Postcards, a film written by Gloria Katz (who doubled as producer) and Wil-lard Huyck (who served as director...

...We never see what leads his subconscious to seek punishment for his partner's death...

...And their relationship is infinitely more interesting than the conventional bond between the taciturn Hettinger and his stoical partner, the Scotsman Ian Campbell (Ted Danson...

...we only watch him inexplicably begin shoplifting and then hear a psychiatrist's analysis of his motives...

...he wrote the script...

...Moreover, despite the fact that Hettinger is meant to be a sympathetic character, and that half of the story is devoted to his plight, we lose interest in him fairly quickly...

...Baker displays her range...

...Nothing, however, can overcome the built-in weaknesses of Wam-baugh's writing...

...John Schlesinger's direction is, with a few exceptions (such as a literally hysterical dance hall sequence), competent and unobtrusive...

...The same team was responsible for the screenplay of American Graffiti, and their material here is equally rich in dramatic possibilities: the adventures of three American college students spending their junior year in Paris...

...Powell is totally amoral, a sociopath with the ugly power to manipulate events and people, particularly the weak-willed and latently homosexual Smith...

...At one extreme, William Devane—as John, Matt's commanding officer—swaggers about with his toothy grin, a perfect caricature of the Ugly American...

...Take me away," she implores him about halfway through Yanks—and he does, to a hotel in another town where she decides to make the ultimate sacrifice for him...

...as Madame Tessier she is scheming without being unsympathetic and sexy without appearing undignified...

...Thus a scene in which Campbell and his mother discuss his decision to become a cop instead of a doctor is irrelevant, as is another at the end of the movie, in which a young bagpiper at the Highland Games in Los Angeles reminds the mother of her dead son...

...Worse, The Seduction of Joe Tynan seems to have been intended to aggrandize its leading man...

...Nevertheless, the film is not without its pleasures...

...Yet The Seduction of Joe Tynan is actually little more than an updated version of A dvise and Consent, the Allen Drury novel that similarly concerned the Congressional confirmation of a Presidential appointment...

...But the road to boredom is paved with earnestness...

...The characters and cultural conventions in the earlier film were already so much a part of our collective unconscious that most of the screenwriters' work was done for them...

...In it, Wambaugh told about an actual kidnapping of two policeman by a pair of smalltime crooks, the ensuing murder of one of the officers in a deserted onion field, the guilt of the surviving officer, and the murderers' paradoxical legal victories in the longest criminal trial in California history...

...Perhaps because he was too close to his own material, Wambaugh apparently forgot he was writing a script...

...We are not allowed, for instance, to infer that Madame Tessier is something of a hypocrite because she secretly favors American popular culture and its artifacts while merchandising French high culture to her students...

...Alex (David Marshall Grant) has come to Paris looking for the sort of adventure he finds in the arms of Madame Tessier (Marie-France Pisier), who runs the "Institute for French Studies'" with her husband (Jean Rochefort...

...The story has garnered some praise for being about the everyday politics of governing, and not the extraordinary politics of campaigns and elections...

...she is probably the best young actress on screen and stage today...

...This failing is a little puzzling, since the screenplay was adapted by Joseph Wambaugh from his own book of the same title...

...Another problem is that the soundtrack is not effectively integrated into the story...

...This is hardly a trivial complaint, because the soundtrack did a lot of the work for Katz and Huyck in American Graffiti, and without its help they stumble badly...