On Screen

...Indeed, he should have realized that the strength of the television series was not machinery but men —the relationship among Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and the human adventure of encountering strange new people and places...

...Roddenberry, who wrote for the original series, should have invested more in a good story...

...History is robbed, rather than distorted, in The Electric Horseman...

...And there are a lot of meaningless, albeit dazzling, special effects as the ship penetrates layer after layer of the energy field...

...It is a measure of his ego that Fosse's script (written with Robert Alan Arthur) is about his own (fantasized) demise...

...An even more disturbing confluence of fact and fiction is Bob Fosse's All That Jazz—the silliest, most pretentious, most boring film of the past year...

...This is not surprising, if unimaginative, since Sidney Pollack directed both films...

...Alan Dean Foster's story even invents a plausible reason for their reunion...

...Their love affair is supposed to be the center of the vast historical drama, a Hispanic Dr...

...When the earth is menaced by a gigantic, mysterious energy cloud that is devouring everything in its path, the Starship Enterprise is the last line of defense, and Kirk, who in the interim has been promoted to Admiral, is called back to active duty for the crisis along with his veteran mates, the most experienced crew in the fleet...

...His face appears on boxes and billboards across the land, but the lavish publicity and generous salary only drive him deeper into despair at what he regards as his complete emasculation...

...he even pans up slowly from the discarded clothing on the floor to the two lovers in bed for the first time...

...Perhaps Simon could only deal with his wife's death by concentrating less on his own feelings and actions than on his new spouse's...

...The only puzzle is why Redford would want to resuscitate the movie myth of the noble cowboy in 1979...

...The plot wheels begin turning when Sonny takes pity on Rising Star, a prize-winning stallion also put out to pasture as one of ampco's corporate symbols...

...All of this is presented in a style imitating Fellini—at his worst...

...I am afraid Roddenberry and Paramount have been led astray by the technological revolution that has taken place since the show went off the air...

...At its best, the television show succeeded as fiction, and only incidentally as science fiction...

...All that is set up in about the first five minutes of the film...

...After discovering that the horse is being physically abused and kept docile with drugs, Sonny kidnaps it with the idea of releasing it in the mountains of Utah, where the wild horses roam...

...his painstaking work as a choreographer and film director (of Lenny, called The Standvp in the movie...

...There are fantasy sequences, confusing flashbacks, recurring shots, and even one scene staged with mist rolling up from the floor...

...Coming from Simon's pen, that line is particularly funny...

...Nobody connected with Cuba seems to have had the slightest inkling that the Revolution has turned out to be considerably less than a triumph of freedom and human rights...

...Batista and his henchmen are portrayed as merely foolish and decadent, not evil, while the rebels are the kind of noble defenders of the oppressed who are seldom seen in the West, except in propaganda films from the East...

...The history is worse...

...What is surprising is screenwriter Robert Garland's shameless looting of past movies...

...No device is too trite for him...

...And Gideon's dance "masterpiece," supposedly too avant garde for the backers of his musical, is a laughably "daring" number, complete with bare breasts and simulated sex (both homo-and heterosexual), that would have been perfectly at home in a camp production like Oh, Calcutta...

...After a few minutes of witty conversation, she asks him, "Do you write the way you talk...

...There is some phony conflict between Kirk and Commander Decker (Stephen Collins), who had been slated to be the ship's captain (shades of Run Silent, Run Deep...

...In this season of big-budget bores, that is a lesson well worth remembering...

...In fact, two of his real-life paramours are on view—Anne Reinking as Kate Jagger, the director's favorite dancer, and Jessica Lange as Angelique, the mysterious blonde who apparently symbolizes death...

...McCoy, James Doohan as Engineer Scott, George Takei as Sulu, Walter Koenig as Chekov, Majel Barrett as Chapel, and Michelle Nichols as Uhura...

...When Jenny and George fly to Bermuda for their honeymoon, the movie dissolves into a montage of scenic wonders that appears to have been filmed by the local tourist board...

...The story, adapted from his Broadway hit, represents his serious side: He actually lost his first wife and, like his semi-autobiographical hero, married Marsha Mason...

...ear the beginning of Neil Simon's Chapter Two, Jennie Mac-Laine (Marsha Mason), a divorced actress, and George Schneider (James Caan), a widowed novelist, meet for their first date...

...there is the small matter of plot...

...The unsettling impression, though, is that he merely used the death as a plot device —or that the whole purpose of Chapter Two is to aggrandize Mason's personality and (undeniable) talents...

...Part of the problem is Robert Moore's direction...

...Spock, DeForest Kelley as Dr...

...The choreography is especially embarrassing: A deathbed number that tries hard to be a Busby Berkeley parody winds up a self-parody...

...The real falseness, however, lies in the script...

...T JL...

...Sean Con-nery plays Robert Dapes, a former English officer hired as a mercenary to (rain the Cuban Army to put down the rebellion of the Fidelistas...

...The movie begins with a lyrical sequence of a stallion running through a field—nearly identical to the shot that opened They Shoot Horses, Don't They...

...Through his barely fictionalized persona, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), he gives us an almost autobiographical account of his childhood, spent laboring in sleazy bars...

...Unfortunately, familiarity is not enough...

...Since these days writers can no longer invoke traditional obstacles —familial disapproval, strict social standards, religion—to provide dramatic tensions, Simon drew upon his own life and made George's guilt and sorrow the chief barriers to an involvement with Jennie...

...and particularly his compulsive love affairs...

...If you have a feeling of deja vu, just reverse the sexes and put Clark Gable in Fonda's role, and Claudette Colbert in Redford's, and you have It Happened One Night...

...After we have been reintroduced to the crew and to the newly refitted Enterprise, and head out toward the killer cloud, virtually nothing happens...

...The success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind demonstrated the appeal of high technology science-fiction films, and the pre-existing audience of "Trekkies" loyal to the original television series virtually guaranteed the box office...

...The Electric Horseman is a passable entertainment, but it is almost totally pointless...

...Richard Lester's Cuba, a romance set in the last days of the Batista regime, is equally depressing...

...The studio reportedly spent $40 million on the movie, and most of the budget seems to have gone to John Dykstra (Star Wars) and Douglas Trum-ball (Close Encounters) for the special effects...

...Most of the old team was reassembled for the movie, including Gene Rod-denberry, who created and produced the original show...

...no real people ever talk the way he writes...

...True, unlike most Simon creations, the characters here do not all sound as if they could earn a living as gag writers...

...What began as a story of how two people come together, despite their painful pasts, thus turns into a tale of how one of them courageously shoulders the burden of drawing the other out of his shell...

...Eventually, we do discover what is responsible for the energy cloud, but the explanation strikes us as all the more ridiculous because it is so long in coming...

...William Shatner returns as Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Mr...

...The only problem with his plan is the persistence of a fast-talking television reporter named Hallie (Jane Fonda), who manages to track him down (although the FBI, the state police, and ampco's army of investigators could not) and becomes first his less-than-welcome traveling companion, then his confidante and finally his lover...

...There is a mysterious bald alien, Ilia (Persis Khambatta, a former Miss India), whose presence on board and supposedly disruptive sexual allure are left unexplained...

...his physical trials and tribulations, including alcohol and drug dependence and heart surgery (shown in needlessly graphic detail...

...Fosse could have learned something—about both death and dancing—from Martin Brest's Hot Tomorrows, which ends with a funeral take off of Forty Second Street...

...Brooke Adams stars as his long-lost love, Alexandra, now married to the scion (Chris Saran-don) of an old tobacco and sugar-cane empire...

...he motive for making Star Trek is a lot more obvious: profit...

...Zhivago, that sweeps both (hem and us in its wake...

...Instead, the film is a ridiculous soap opera, with Connery looking distinctly uncomfortable as he tells Adams, "I did not know so much passion could exist in one so young...

...Seriously lacking, though, is the good-versus-evil conflict that created the excitement of Star Wars, or even the hokey mysticism that resulted in the feeble suspense of Close Encounters...

...Even with the benefit of a hairpiece, he looks more like her father than her lover, and the lines, intended to explain the disparity in their ages, only emphasize it...

...Or replace Redford with Kirk Douglas and you have another yam about a contemporary cowboy and his horse on the run from the organized forces of civilization—Lonely Are the Brave...

...Nevertheless, Chapter Two is every bit as artificial as his comedies...

...Yet once George presumably overcomes them and the two finally wed, he turns into a passive hulk—and his guilt and sorrow reappear, simply to keep the plot rolling, as barriers for Jennie to surmount...

...The story concerns a former rodeo champion, Sonny Steele (Robert Red-ford), who has become a public representative of a cereal company owned by ampco, a huge conglomerate...

...Obviously, all have aged in the 11 years since the program went off the air, yet it is a little like rediscovering long-lost friends to see their faces once again (although their continuing presence in the endless reruns of the series on local television channels guaranteed that they were never too far from either sight or mind...