On Screen
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen FAILED FANTASIES BY ROBERT ASAHINA Afew months ago, Playboy ran a spread on "older women" that revealed not merely bodies but the very spirit of that "men's" magazine. Most of the...
...The same can be said of the outrage expressed by George C. Scott in Hardcore...
...Unfortunately, this post-Watergate paranoia contradicts the spirit of the Holmes mysteries...
...Thus during Andras' affair with Bobbie (Susan Strasberg), set in the context of the Hungarian uprising, we hear a voice-over narration that claims: "In 1956, Hungary was the place to be if you were young, romantic, and ready to die for freedom...
...About midway through the movie, the Yeager family fades into the background and Real Life starts concentrating on the filmmaker himself —that is, Albert Brooks...
...It begins portentously with a burst of psychedelic sound and a title reading " 1968...
...When he finally translates anger into action, his violence erupts crazily and spontaneously —in contrast to the artificially staged outbursts in a movie like When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder...
...He is too talented for such a second-rate project...
...Comedian Albert Brooks plays an egomaniacal comedian—named "Albert Brooks"—who decides to "make a motion picture about reality...
...Donald Sutherland as a clairvoyant...
...Scott plays Jake Van Dorn, a devout Calvinist and furniture manufacturer from Grand Rapids, who discovers that his runaway teenage daughter is acting in pornographic movies...
...Schrader's intolerance of ambiguity has the same deadening effect on two other potentially interesting characters...
...The camera work is particularly incoherent...
...Its claims to seriousness notwithstanding, When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder is just a tiresome trip back to The Petrified Forest, with Gortner as a thoroughly inferior successor to Humphrey Bo-gart...
...The entire film is riddled with confusions...
...It is a hackneyed plot, and the basic story situation—an extraordinary circumstance in which ordinary people are vulnerable to the ploys of a psychopath and quickly sacrifice their civility —is as contrived as it is trite...
...Seemingly the sole point of the entire enterprise is to show the greatest amount of violence with the least possible amount of "redeeming social content...
...if they can only be properly directed by an Intellect in the form of a romantic personality possessed by the scientific spirit...
...Based on Sol Yurick's novel, the film recounts the hazardous journey undertaken by a youth gang from alien territory in the Bronx to its home turf in Coney Island...
...One is Niki (Season Hubley), a young hooker who helps Jake plumb the lower depths...
...At the beginning of this adaptation of Stephen Vizinczey's novel, 10-year-old Andras Vayda (Tom Berenger) starts his sexual education under the tutelage of a middle-aged countess-turned-prostitute (Monique Le Page) in World War II Hungary...
...To be sure, producer-director Bob Clark and writer John Hopkins did hit upon the worthy notion of restoring some dignity to John Watson, who had become somewhat of a buffoon in screen adaptations of the Conan Doyle stories...
...Worse, the script forces the women to shed their clothes at almost every opportunity...
...the British police are well in control...
...Not since Shampoo has cheap sex been so ludicrously imbued with redeeming social content...
...Yet despite a lot of references to Vietnam, the end of American innocence, the absence of contemporary heroes, and so on, the film?like the Mark Medoff play it is based on—is simply a melodramatic psychological "thriller...
...In fact, the single clear thing about Real Life is the size of the comedian's ego...
...After abusing and humiliating them all—stripping them of their valuables and prompting a string of stagey character revelations—Teddy finally meets a violent end...
...Along the way it is set upon by rival gangs on roller skates and in hearses, slinging chains and swinging baseball bats...
...But the whole shtick, which has no relationship to the plot, is so stupid and obnoxious that it made me wonder whether Brooks was really conscious of its effect...
...Sometimes we "see" the action as if through the cameras in the Yeagers' home, sometimes from a neutral "third-person" perspective, and sometimes even from "Brooks'" point of view...
...Most of the models on view were in their late 20s or early 30s—older women only to Playboy's readers and editors...
...Or does he think that his audiences are idiots...
...The result is not merely a sleazy sex farce but one that doesn't even have the guts to stick to its sleazi-ness...
...As he advances in age his partners are increasingly younger, however, so that by the end, the title ceases to have any relevance...
...Far from a Pirandellian exploration of the relativity of reality, we get a testament to self-indulgence...
...The lengthy pre-credit sequence provides an indication of how badly Brooks, who wrote and directed the film, botched up...
...And the production is handsomely detailed in late Victorian regalia—right down to the gas lamps and hansom cabs...
...Take When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder...
...We keep waiting for her to evoke some response, to cause him to recognize something of his daughter in her, to suggest some of the lurid attractions of the world she inhabits...
...Curiously, the two never even quite connect...
...For instead of allowing Mast to present the gray areas between his starkly conceived black and white alternatives, Schrader practically writes the character out of the script halfway through the film...
...Four years ago, he made an excellent albeit little appreciated Charles Bronson vehicle, Hard Times...
...But for the most part writer-director Paul Schrader has limited the character of Jake to two flat, totally unaccounted for, dimensions—religious piety and obsession...
...Clark and Hopkins involve the fictional Holmes in the real-life Jack the Ripper case—a lame idea that is not even original (it was last done in .4 Study in Terror, almost 15 years ago...
...She never does—because Schrader, like Jake, sees her only as a means to the movie's violent end...
...For different reasons, Murder by Decree, the latest Sherlock Holmes mystery, is also less than satisfactory...
...the stories are entertaining precisely because the reader can rest assured that "Law and Order have not tottered a moment...
...Evidently, by "older" the filmmakers really meant something like "unappealing...
...A similarly adolescent attitude pervades In Praise of Older Women—a movie that, not coincidentally, was also uncovered in a recent Playboy pictorial...
...Nor do we understand the resources he draws on during his lengthy quest to "rescue" his daughter...
...In The Warriors, Hill once again demonstrates an admirable sense of pace and a confident mastery of action sequences...
...As Edmund Wilson noted, Conan Doyle's England has the "atmosphere of 'avy peril...
...The idea was promising: to satirize the kind of intrusive and inherently falsifying cinema-verite that found its most publicized and egregious example in An American Family, a 12-hour series broadcast on PBS six years ago...
...He never emerges as anything more than a joker to Jake's straight man...
...At a deserted diner in New Mexico, two tourists (Hal Linden and Lee Grant) and three locals (Pat Hingle, Stephanie Faracy, Peter Firth) are menaced by a murderous drug dealer named Teddy (Marjoe Gortner) and his moll (Candy Clark...
...The Warriors, by contrast, is so clear in its modest aims that it is practically transparent...
...What all these shifts mean—if anything—is unclear...
...several strong performers bring their considerable talents to relatively minor roles (Genevieve Bujold as a hapless servant girl...
...Does he think that "Albert Brooks" is an idiot...
...Phony significance, of course, is not limited to soft-core porn flicks with pretensions to being comedies of manners...
...To his credit, Scott does manage a couple of extremely powerful moments...
...The execution, though, is another story...
...Schrader has, in short, created a genuinely disturbing moral quandry for his protagonist, but he has also unnecessarily circumscribed Jake's possibilities for moral development...
...Does Calvinism somehow provide a shield to protect him from scheming prostitutes, bullying pimps, conniving por-nographers, and murdering low-life thugs...
...Played with panache by James Mason, the good doctor now emerges as urbane and witty—a sophisticated foil to the laconic detective (Christopher Plummer...
...The hero launches into what is supposed to be a parody of a stand-up routine...
...He is less a moral agent than a moralistic cipher...
...While we are repeatedly told by Jake and others how devout he is, we never perceive the slightest difference that faith makes in his life...
...For along with the simulated intercourse the film takes arbitrary and laughable stabs at political commentary...
...Further, with the exception of Plummer, the actors are very good...
...Since in the director's Manichean world-view there exists only self-righteously narrow-minded Good and rottenly self-indulgent Evil, at the end of the movie Jake is exactly as we found him at the beginning...
...All the loose ends of every episode are tidily picked up and tucked in...
...Little is noteworthy here except the director, Walter Hill...
...come disturbing issues are also raised in Real Life...
...When he first sees his daughter on screen, for instance, he combines precisely the right amount of horrified fascination, self-disgust, anguished impotence, and parental grief...
...Nevertheless, the conception is flawed...
...The second is Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), a somewhat disreputable private detective who tries to aid Jake...
...With the cooperation of the "National Institute of Human Behavior," Brooks selects a typical American family, the Yeagers (Charles Grodin, Frances Lee McCain, Lisa Urette, and Robert Stirrat), and embarks on what he expects will be a yearlong effort of filming practically every aspect of their daily lives...
...In addition, the filmmakers account for the Ripper's murders by resuscitating a far-fetched conspiracy and a politically-motivated coverup that reaches almost to the very foot of the throne...
...By politicizing Sherlock Holmes and his universe, Clark and Hopkins have turned him into a bore...
...Although undoubtedly justified, Holmes' moral indignation is hardly entertaining or dramatically interesting...
Vol. 62 • March 1979 • No. 6
