On Screen

...The movie unintentionally makes his struggle seem foolish, so much energy is spent dramatizing his takeover of the Morgan Museum that the provocation behind his extreme protest—the vandalizing of his automobile at the hands of some bigoted volunteer firemen—is reduced, by contrast, to tnviality The moral force is thereby undermined From beginning to end, in fact, Ragtime is a disaster Foreman's overstyl-lzed direction is inappropnate to the comic-strip story As in his previous Amencan work (such as Hair, also scripted by Weller), the Czech director seems quite out of touch with the material A more authentic home-grown enter-prise is Shark v's Machine, starring and directed by Burt Reynolds from Gerald Di Pego's adaptation of William Diehl's novel Reynolds is, along with Clint Eastwood, a quintessential American star, and he makes good use of an unexpected Amencan location, Atlanta, in this lively cops-and-killers thriller The film begins with the best shootout since the opening of Dirty Harry, and just as Eastwood did in that film, Reynolds utters some memorable lines as the classic tough-guy hero Confronting a hoodlum with a catalogue of crimes against society, Sharky winds up with what is to him the most heinous offense "And you're from out of state'" he sputters For the most part, Reynolds effectively alternates action and humor to keep the plot rolling ahead in the required steamroller fashion There are a few sluggish moments in the middle, when Sharky becomes infatuated with a high-class hooker (Rachel Ward) and takes time off for a romantic interlude that is a little too carefree for a pair supposedly being chased by the mob Still ov crall the pace is brisk, the stunts spec-tacular...

...DOCTOROW'S Ragtime was published a few years ago, there was much heavy-handed discussion of its fanciful mixture of fact and fiction In retrospect, the controversy seems to have grossly exaggerated the seriousness of what actually is little more than an entertaining commercial novel with a distinctly cartoonish quality The film adaptation, on the other hand, directed by Milos Foreman from a script by Michael Weller, exhibits precisely the pretentiousness the book was wrongly accused of, while lacking Doctorow's humor and inventiveness Part of the problem is time, or the dearth of it, like most novels, Ragtime contains much more than any film could cover So some elements of the book's plot are neglected, and others are thoughtlessly retained The subplot involving Emma Goldman, for instance, is discarded entirely, and the amazing career of Tateh (Mandy Patinkin) is presented in such a fragmented way that his progress from Lower East Side immigrant to Hollywood mogul is incomprehensible instead of incredible Simultaneously, Weller and Foreman waste an appalling amount of footage on the murder ot Stanford White (Norman Mailer) probably because it takes place in the opulent world of the pre-World War I decadent rich, a favorite tourist attraction for nostalgic modern viewers Perhaps to balance things out, the rest ot the tilm, contradicting the lively spirit and experimental form of Doctorow's narrative, grimly and narrowly concentrates on the nse and fall of Coalhouse Walker Jr (Howard E Rollins), the mythical Black Power militant avantla lettre...

...Since his only cnme is having the wrong relatives and being one of the straws the government is desperately clutching at, the government's pressure goads him into fighting back, and he attacks the authorities as well as the newspaper for revealing that he is "under investigation " Thus about halfway through, the film ceases to be about journalistic responsibility, or lack thereof, and turns into an account of how Gallagher wreaks vengeance on Carter, her employers and the manipulative prosecutors No doubt Luedtke, a former journalist, had to emphasize the melodramatic aspects of his newsroom drama to get the movie made in the first place Trouble is, the success of Gallagher's counterattack, which results in both the prosecutor's and Carter's dismissal, borders on fantasy and therefore casts doubts on Luedtke's perspective on the press In the wake of repeated First Amendment decisions allowing newspapers to print virtually anything, Luedtke and Pollack would have us swallow a whopper—that an ordinary citizen can triumphantly counter a superficially accurate story having unfortunate consequences in his private life At the same time, Luedtke may have missed the boat entirely in his condemnation of reportonal abuses He couldn't have known, of course, that the Janet Cooke scandal would break before he finished his screenplay In its wake, however, it would seem that readers as well as thesubjects of newspaper stones (unless they have the financial resources of a Carol Burnett) have less to fear from gullible journalists than from dishonest ones bent on simply manufacturing their scoops WHEN E.L...

...On Screen SORTING OUT THE FILM GLUT BY ROBERT ASAHINA EVERY YEAR'S END there is a rush of new film releases, presumably to qualify them for the Oscar nominations Surely a strange ritual, since it is rare for this fare, even when passable, to be of award-winning quality Following are a handful of examples from the most recent crop Ghost Story is a horror film for people who don't want to be frightened There is a haunted house, a series of grisly deaths and a real live ghost (or one that walks and talks and breathes, atanyrate),butnotonegenuinely scary moment throughout The story, adapted from Peter Straub's best-selling novel, concerns a bunch of old fogeys known as the Chowder Society Ricky Hawthorne (Fred Astaire), John Jaffrey (Melvyn Douglas), Edward Wanderley (Douglas Fairbanks Jr) and Sears James (John Houseman) For some reason they gather every week to tell spooky tales, and one day they start getting killed off like the victims in their own ghoulish yarns Enter Edward's son, Don (Craig Wasson), whose brother, David, fell or jumped or was pushed to his death from a skyscraper Enter as well Alma Mob-ley (Alice Krige), a woman with an eerie resemblance to Don's ex-fiancee (and his dead brother's after him), and also to a mysterious lady who had bewitched the Chowder Society 50 years earlier John Irvin and Lawrence D Cohen, the director and the screenwriter, toss these people into a plot that periodically requires distracting, ad hoc flashbacks to explain matters The resulting concoction—whose main ingredient is a murder covered up by the four gents half a century ago—is less a hearty chowder than a thin hash bereft of believable action and characterizations Jack Cardiff s atmospheric photography and Albert Whitlock's fine special effects can be credited with the one shock that nearly works as it should At the very beginning, David turns to what he thinks is his fiancee in bed, only to see a rotting corpse After that initial jolt the filmmakers tiresomely set up all-too similar situations, until out of sheer repetition the cadaver, like Bruce the Shark in Jaws, becomes less rather than more terrifying A horror tale of a different kind is Taps, one of those well-intentioned projects that usually appear as made-for-TV specials For some reason this one wound up on the large screen, where its shortcomings are all the more evident Darryl Ponicsan and Robert Mark Kamen's script, adapted from Devery Freeman's novel Father Sky, focuses on a student demonstration that gets out of hand The protestors—cadets at the fictitious Bunker Hill Academy?are arch-conservatives, not radicals They forcibly seize their school after learning of the administration's plans to close it and sell the land to real-estate developers ready to replace the institution with a condominium complex The leader of the activists is Cadet Major Brian Moreland (Timothy Hutton), a straight arrow inspired by General Harlan Bache (George C Scott), the academy's commander Neither the director, Harold Becker, nor the screenwriters betray any awareness of the ironies inherent in what they are dramatizing They seemingly have no sense that the military ethic so proudly pursued by the cadets has been, to put it mildly, called into question by the events of the past 20 years Perhaps the filmmakers thought they were making a statement relevant to the conservatism now abroad in the land If so,they have badly misjudged their characters and their audience A tired war horse hke Bache, for example, is so obviously over the hill and full of empty platitudes that the cadets' adoration of him is rather dubious One doubts, too, that any teenagers are innocent enough to embrace martial values without a hint of self-consciousness Their environment may be hermetically sealed during the academic year, but some cadets must go home on vacation and run into kids listening to rock music, taking drugs and hanging out at video game parlors Even if the characters were believable, the plot would still be drearily predictable To no one's surprise save the cadets', their occupation of the academy leads to bloodshed, leading me in turn to wonder why Hollywood can't find any other kind of ending for "message mo vies," especially since the message in question—that violence never solves anything—isn't worth the cost of a telegram, much less an entire film Moreover, the script's shallowness doesn't permit Moreland the least hint of moral development, he's just as naive and idealistically insensitive at the end, after needlessly causing a couple of deaths, as he was at the beginning Absence of Malice, directed by Sidney Pollack, is another didactic film that would have fared better on the tube Once again, the "problem" is signaled with all the subtlety, if not the speed, of Western Union How much responsibility, asks Kurt Luedtke's script, does a journalist have toward the people in a newspaper item'' Can a superficially accurate story be unfair, or ultimately untrue...

...Although these are hardly esoteric questions, they only gradually occur to Megan Carter (Sally Field), an ambitious, curiously unworldly reporter for a Miami paper She uncritically uses information about a government investigation leaked to her by a prosecutor (Bob Balaban), who hopes the resulting publicity will put the squeeze on a local businessman, Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman), with very tenuous ties to organized crime The smear jeopardizes Gallagher's business and his reputation, causing a close friend (Melinda Dillon) to commit suicide...

...the dialogue snappy I haven't had such a mindlessly good time lor a long while...