A Sorry Season

...major announces at the beginning of the film to the Nazi General he's just taken prisoner...

...But most of the appeal of the movie (and its predecessor's) seems to be its good-natured portrayal of a certain slice of blue-collar American life...

...Once again, Philo Beddoe (Clint Eastwood), the mechanic and sometime bareknuckle boxer, meanders through a series of misadventures-fighting, drinking and loving...

...Williams tries hard as the pipe-smoking, spinach-chomping title character, and he has the sailor's little jig of a walk and squinched expression down perfectly...

...When Popeye wins his boxing match with an obese pugilist, there is a short shot of Swee' Pea in the ring, triumphantly pounding his fist on the chest of the fallen fighter...

...In fact, I think the vision of blue-collar existence in the contemporary West that Eastwood and his collaborators present is much more authentic than, say, the hyped-up Hollywood view in Urban Cowboy or the jaded intellectual cynicism in a movie like Ran-cho Deluxe...

...With his belly calling to mind the prow of a Zeppelin, Scott straight-facedly engages in the kind of heroics that are definitively spoofed in James Bond flicks...

...The loose plot centers on Philo's retirement from boxing and his last bout, arranged for big money by some greedy gamblers...

...Such foresight to see the emergence of multinationals...

...She's so straight and prudish that she and her boyfriend are planning to get married...

...Simply recognizing Philo and his friends is not enough...

...yet jealousy never seems to be much of a factor between the two sailors...

...Popeye's search for his long-lost father never tugs the heartstrings, and his conflict with Bluto (Paul L. Smith) is not well-motivated on either side...

...It springs from the laziness born of success...

...Men in sleeveless T-shirts brandishing huge tattoos, women in tight knit tops and even tighter blue jeans, truckers drawling over their CBs, hon-ky tonks overflowing with country music and beer, front yards filled with semi-demolished cars, main drags lined with hamburger stands and muffler repair shops-all these are recognizable, important parts of Philo Beddoe's world and, no doubt, the universe of the audience that has made the films such hits...

...But regrettably these are isolated moments...

...Sliding down the slippery slope, Steve Shagan, the producer of the film and the author of the hit novel on which it is based, compounds the improbabilities by inventing a series of ridiculous double- and triple-crosses that supposedly explain everything...

...And some of the faces in these films are as recognizable as the story lines...

...No less silly is Robert Altman's Pop-eye, a live movie (not lively, just using live actors) based on the adventures of the comic book characters and released in time for Oscar consideration...

...The film opens with a slow-motion precredits sequence showing her costar, Bo Derek, bobbing up and down in the nude in a hot tub with Anthony Hopkins, also naked but revealing much less of interest...

...And once again his faithful sidekick Clyde, the orangutan, manages to steal the show...

...Unfortunately, The Formula humorlessly defies us to try to figure out its absurd intrigues...

...The story has to do with an effort by the petroleum companies to suppress a secret formula developed by the Nazis at the end of World War 11 for a catalyst that allows synthetic fuel to be manufactured more cheaply than Arabian crude...

...Thus are bestsellers written, book buyers swindled, studio executives snowed, and movie audiences cheated out of their $5 admission price...

...We don't really need MacLaine's wrinkles to remind us that time has passed...

...And shedoes have a certain gangly grace...

...There is something undeniably ingratiating about films that are as relaxed as their characters appear to be (save for when it comes to fighting and drinking and loving, that is...

...An unfunny comedy that could have been written by George Axelrod, it is about an adulterous college professor (Hopkins), his co-ed mistress (Derek) and his frustrated wife (MacLaine), who surprises him and herself by taking a younger lover (Michael Brandon...

...I don't know how Alt-man managed that scene, but it has an exuberance and humor that are very obviously missing from most of the rest of the film...

...True, Any Which Way You Can is supposed to be a lark, not profound...

...Throughout, director Richard Lang and screenwriters Erich Segal, Ronni Kern and Fred Segal seem determined to play all the angles...

...now shecan be seen in/4 Change of Seasons, a Christmas release whose title could also be taken as a reference to its faded star...

...Such political sophistication on the part of an ordinary soldier...

...Nevertheless, this genial tolerance adds up to very little dramatically...

...With their insufferably coy jokes and innuendoes, comedies based on the dubious premise that adultery is hilarious have proliferated in the last year or so, almost as if the sexual revolution and the women's movement had never happened...

...But this is exactly the kind of masochistic fantasy you would expect from a middle-aged professor-turned-novelist-turned-screenwriter like Erich Segal: It must be a heavy burden to carry so many years and remain alluring to sweet young things...

...For the rest, Jules Feif fer's meandering script and Harry Nilsson's lifeless songs reduce an alleged musical comedy to a tuneless bore...

...We ought to be able to care about them, too...

...Except for some genuine laughs, though, there isn't much point to the film...

...Swee' Pea (18-month-old Wesley Ivan Hurt, Altman's grandson) reacts with precisely the right expression to the childish goings-on of his elders...

...Since the cartel is one of those malevolent entities whose top man, the bespectacled Brando, can pick up the phone and order practically any evil act, from blackmail to murder, it is never believable that its schemes could get so out of kilter when someone as insignificant as a Los Angeles police detective throws a wrench into the conspiracy...

...No one possibly could have the time, however, to untangle the thickly knotted plot strands...

...But he looks and moves much better than he sounds...

...We're also meant to be amused by the couple's college-age daughter (Mary Beth Hurt), who is outraged by her parents' promiscuity...

...Spindly Olive Oyl (Shelley Duvall) awkwardly pirouettes with stiff appendages and sings off-key when she falls in love with Popeye...

...Still, the bareskin and some ostentatiously dirty dialogue are pretty much the only indications that the movie was made this year and not two decades ago...

...But the real star of the film is Hurt, who is a natural ham and scene-stealer...

...If you can believe that an over-the-hill cop well into his 50s is capable of dodging bullets, of making love to one of those beautiful double agents found only in second-rate films and novels (Marthe Keller, mimicking her roles in Black Sunday and Marathon Man), and of scurrying from Los Angeles to Berlin and back to expose a worldwide conspiracy of the oil producers against mankind-without ruffling one of his fast-disappearing hairs-then this is the movie for you...

...Popeye (Robin Williams) literally winds up his fist, for example, so that it will unscrew as he punches his opponent in a boxing match...

...Such total silliness...

...Duvall is at least, and at last, perfectly typecast: What other actress would be skinny enough for the part...

...Along the way, Shagan desperately wants to say his piece about our ravaged environment and the rapacity of the oil companies, but his highmindedness is merely laughable...

...They never spare us the chance to see Derek in the raw...

...halfway through she takes up with Popeye...

...The war's over," a U.S...

...George C, Scott plays an equally improbable middle-aged man in The Formula, also a released-for-the-holidays throwback-this time to an earlier era of international thrillers...

...Add to this Manichean nonsense an even more corpulent Marlon Brando, as the top conspirator, and you especially regret that you are not watching a slapstick spy caper...

...But comedies can be-should be-pointed, and I find the aimlessness of the enterprise annoying...

...And the mystery about how the fishing village of Sweethaven is kept under the thumb of Bluto (acting on the orders of the mysterious Commander, who naturally turns out to be the long-lost Poopdeck Pappy) seems like something plucked right out of The Formula...

...Indeed, there is little interaction between them until the very end...

...Shirley MacLaine, for example, who batted her eyes through a score of cutesy roles 20 years ago, seems to be making a comeback of sorts playing a slightly worn version of her younger self...

...The world's going to be one big corporation-no more enemies, just customers...

...Once again he is aided and abetted by the loyal Orville (Geoffrey Lewis), plagued by the fickle Lynn Halsey-Taylor (Sondra Locke), menaced by a comically evil gang of outlaw bikers, and harassed by his nutty old mother (Ruth Gordon...

...To be sure, seeing human beings behave like animated cartoon figures is somewhat interesting...

...a whole little skit is built upon the embarrassment all parties concerned supposedly feel when Hopkins discovers MacLaine and her underage stud frolicking with little on...

...I don't mean to sound condescending...

...The prospect of seeing MacLaine and one of the male actors nude, though, is intended to be side-splitting...

...Imitating the hoarse mumble of the animated movie figure, he is often unintelligible...

...This fall she appeared in Loving Couples...

...It is easier to give your audience what you know it wants-especially around vacation time-than to challenge it...

...At the beginning of the story, Olive Oyl is supposedly engaged to Bluto...

...but that's not supposed to be funny, just sexy (or at least appealing to the prurient...

...You see, the humble cop was unknowingly a part of the plan from the very beginning...

...She even prances around in a scanty towel¡ªa gimmick that I thought went out with Brigitte Bardol...

...There is laughter aplenty in Any Which Way You Can, the sequel to last winter's success, Every Which Way but Loose...

...The fashionably downbeat ending does have the wife finding happiness (not with her young lover but an older man), while the husband is abandoned by his mistress because of his hypocrisy...

...Some joke...