Successful Recycling

...Except "outside" in the spooky atmosphere of t he moon, where t he gravity is one-sixt h that of Earth and sounds barely travel...

...Moreover, in the past even when he was not cast against the grain-As in Sidney Lumet's The Hill-he tended to substitute bluster for emotional power...

...Would it have been so hard to introduce the avaricious Ida a little earlier...

...As Sheppard, Boyle gives another one of his effective portrayals of cackling, crazed evil...

...Everyone else seems to think the incidents are unremarkable and quite understandable, considering the austere existence on Io, but O'Niel digs deeper and eventually uncovers a drug ring that stretches across the solar system to the top echelons of the remote conglomerate...

...Arthur Sunshine (Ian McShane), a hilarious caricature of a quack shrink...

...thus it takes a while to understand what's going on with Ida and Stanley Bracken (Rose Marie and Jack Gilford), a divorced and battling couple who eventually play a key role in literally tying the knot between Dekker and K.D...

...In short, although Cheaper to Keep Her has a certain obvious topical interest, this is the perfect setup for one of those fast-paced screwball comedies of the '30s...

...Similarly, his "I'm-doing-this-because-I-have-to" conversation with Lazarusisanicelynuanced, frank and understated acknowledgment of his limitations...

...The weary cynic's role here is given new life by a change of gender: The doctor's predictable exhortations to the Marshal to quit bucking the system, and invitations to go drinking instead, have a different ring coming from a woman...

...At the same time, he has retained a hulking physicality that makes O'Niel's heroics at the end of the movie believable...

...he was often all sound and no real fury...

...It seems that the director of the Io operation, Sheppard (Peter Boyle), has been getting the miners to produce impressive quantities of titanium by keeping them dopedupwithasuperamphet-amine...

...The most recent example of making old material work is Outland, written and directed by Peter Hyams, who gave us Capricorn I a couple of years ago and Busting a few years before that...

...In addition to giving the men plenty of energy to work, though, the drugs turn them paranoid and homicidal/suicidal after the high...

...Davis and Feldshuh, on the other hand, are the perfect marriageof oppo-sites...

...Davis, by contrast, is open and flippant, all wisecracks and leers that burst forth like the wild curls around his cherubic face...

...But in these lean days both the man and the movie are worth noting...

...A new deputy, Ballard (Clarke Peters), soon chickens out...

...the utter lack of privacy in communal lavatories and enclosed dormitories that make army-barracks look like resort hotels...

...the oppressive, artificially-controlled indoor climate...

...In Outland, at last, he projects a range of feeling that makes poignant, rather than merely pitiful, the visible aging of both the character and the actor...

...and always the grinding noise that is almost unendurable and inescapable...

...He has not been this good in years...

...Along the way he loses his wife and child, who decide to return to Earth, and gains the aid of the colony's battered veteran physician, Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen...

...It is a delight to watch Feldshuh...

...O'Niel stubbornly persists in tracking down the drug connections on Io, however...

...Imagine Amanda Blake as Doc instead of Kitty...

...The time is vaguely in the future...

...True, the other recent entries in this category have been duds...

...Throughout the film, too, Ken An-nakin's direction wobbles uncertainly between slapstick and satire...

...Dekker is a private eye...

...Another reworking of an old vein is Cheaper to Keep Her, an odd comedy that sneaked into neighborhood theaters and seems destined for early obscurity despite its (admittedly modest) virtues...

...To be sure, most of this film's charm cannot be credited to its makers...

...Then there is the institutional drabness...

...We know, for example, that since Dekker and K.D...

...Sheppard, for the most part, stays one step ahead of the Marshal...

...But Outland really belongs to Sean Connery...

...the petty mechanical annoyances (locker doors that squeak, inaccessible storage areas...

...In the very first scene, we are plunged into the workers' claustrophobic universe: the bitching in the mine and the locker room, the deafening blare and blinding lights of giant machines...

...When O'Niel confronts Sheppard, he merely laughs and asks why the Marshal is so intent on playing hero-why he can't just relax and look the other way in return for a piece of the action...

...He manages to wine out a drug runner O' Niel has imprisoned and one of the deputies, Montone (James B. Sikking), who O'Niel learned was on the conglomerate's payroll...

...Yet somehow the combination of eerie science fiction sets and a bizarre eponymous killer/monster (not to mention Ridley Scott' s well-paced direction and the intelligent acting of the cast, particularly Tom Skerritt and Sigour-ney Weaver) lent a fresh and horrifying twist to the musty "and-then-there-were-none" plot...

...Finally, Sheppard decides to shuttle in some company assassins from Jupiter, while O'Niel vainly strives to enlist the support of the Io residents against their crooked director and his faraway bosses...

...Timothy Harris and Herschel Weingrod's script is neither straightforward enough to make good sense, nor sufficiently complicated to have that breathless nonsensicality that is so characteristic of such '30s films as Bringing Up Baby...

...Where Alien succeeded because of the juxtaposition of the old and the new, this Nigh Noon in outer space clicks because of its attention to mundane details that together make for an uncannily familiar imaginary world...

...When O'Niel's wife leaves him, we can believe that the glint that the camera catches in the Marshal's eye is really the beginning of a tear and not just glycerin...

...For instance, Alien, one of the big hits of 1979, was little more than the haunted-house story done in a spaceship...

...We are often caught between subplots...

...Connery fleshes it out admirably, partly because he has fleshed out himself, both physically and histrionically...

...He is at once faced with two apparent suicides as well as an apparently deranged miner's attempted murder of a prostitute very matter-of-factly employed by the conglomerate...

...It is futuristic enough to fit the story, yet instantly and appallingly we are aware that such places could be found today on Earth...

...A great deal of this genre's pleasure comes from realizing precisely what will occur and savoring the way the inevitable is made to seem the result of comic serendipidity...

...But they didn't have Tovah Feldshuh and Mac Davis...

...Interplanetary travel is still relatively slow: Weekly shuttle flights from Jupiter to Io take about three days, and the voyage all the way back to Earth costs the passengers a year in suspended animation...

...Once again, the locale is extraterrestrial-lo, Jupiter's third moon, wherethe League of Industrial Nations has leased the titanium rights to an earthbound conglomerate that has launched a giant mining operation and constructed a space colony to house the workers and their families...

...And Sternhag-en, known from a host of supporting roles (most recently in Starting Over), plays Lazarus with a no-nonsense middle-aged toughness that would have done Milburn Stone of Gunsmoke proud...

...His firm having been shut down by his wife's attorney, he has hired himself out to another lawyer and is now in the uncomfortable position of doing unto his fellow divorced man what he loathes having done unto him—uncovering the "hidden assets" that alimony-burdened men are wont to hide from their ex-wives...

...Hyams, Production Designer Philip Harrison and Art Director Malcolm Mid-dleton have made the Io mining colony a startlingly realistic workplace/domicile...

...The epitome of a coarse Scotsman, Connery was miscast as James Bond, the suave Englishman...

...The role of a second-rate law enforcer doing a dirty job no one cares about, simply to prove something to himself, is in its barest elements a whopper of a stereotype...

...As the clock ticks away and the shuttle bearing the killers draws closer to lo, the marshal has to prepare to deal with them alone in the search-and-destroy climax of the film...

...With his brow growing ever craggier and his jowls ever more lined, he really looks the part of an over-the-hill lawman...

...He is so engaging and relaxed that he can steal a scene with the slightest of grins...

...Locke(Tovah Feldshuh), herself separated from her spouse, Dr...

...Her tight little pointed features-on a big square head resting atop a tiny body -Gradually loosen up as K. D. struggles to maintain her dignity and disguise her duplicity, while falling for Dekker against her will...

...I don't mean to suggest that Connery delivers an Oscar-winning performance, or that Outland is anything more than a solid entertainment...

...The title might well be the motto of the protagonist, Bill Dek-ker (Mac Davis), a man discovering that no matter how unhappy he was married, he is now even unhappier divorced and paying alimony...

...are thrown together in such trying circumstances, they must be instant antagonists, and that since they "met cute," they must fight before finally noticing that they are really in love with each other...

...A new Federal District Marshal, O'Niel (Sean Connery), arrives on the moon...

...Though hardly distinguished, Cheaper to Keep Her is the kind of comic romance that supposedly cannot be made successfully these days...

...To compound the irony, his new boss is a woman, K.D...

...K.D., who is contemplating divorce, orders an investigation of her husband without telling Dekker about her relationship to the object of his inquiries...

...Like the setting, the characters rise abovethe hackneyed, even though their credibility is ground in being immediately recognizable...