Glory Gone Tawdry

...Muchofthe dialogue between Finney and the dwarf, and the camera's concentration on the decadent atmosphere of the barroom, strikes me as misconceived...

...What is, in Lowry's hands, a hazardously coherent account of the self-destructive impulse—the will to fail as a demonstrable condition, rather than a psychological glitch—becomes, in Huston's, seedier and more leering: A Drunk's Last Dance...

...Heshambles about thetown of Cuernavaca and is treated with approximate deference by its inhabitants as they busy themselves with the rites of a religious holiday...

...The opening scenes of this movie, set to "Hall of Fame" trumpet music, are its finest...

...The almost hand-held quality of the camera, tailing Finney through the town in the manner of the pariah dog that follows him, creates a visceral sense of the Consul's isolation—his expatriate status, the foreignness that cuts him off from the pious Mexicans who are bewildered by his decamped espousa and nonstop drinking...

...Finney...

...The next time we see him he has grown into Robert Redford, and is on his way to New York with his coach...

...This is one of the few instances where the three characters give the impression of being involved with each other in a way that evokes a shared past...

...Of course, considering its intense literary source, it would be hard for Under the Volcano not to have force...

...The dialogue is extraordinarily meager, and what there is—"He picked me up when I was down"—should have been left out...

...The Consul's death, a gathering storm cloud, is harrowing when it eventually comes in aburst of bullets...

...The Natural may well be the first movie to be constructed solely around a metaphor, or around many metaphors piled on top of each other like tires...

...It adds to the overall poignancy...

...Many of the touches in the early scenes, where Huston and Finney seem to play off each other like the smoothest of teams, are just right: Finney, in starched shirt and bare ankles, tottering forward to make an unasked-for speech at the embassy dinner, suggests a louche glamour, theminorbitof glory that once was the Consul's...

...Only a handful of the students, as I recall, bothered to read what proved to be an unexpectedly dense "text" when we took it up in class...

...But the really egregious choice is Anthony Andrews...

...At the next whistle stop, before an audience of a few curious adults and a small crowd of straggly kids, Hobbes strikes out the Babe...

...It is undoubtedly commendable that Redford hasn't rushed off to a surgeon, but I think we should require him to emote a tad every now and then, simply to see whether he can be other than impenetrable...

...Firmin is an embodiment of Joyce's agenbite of inwit, a frailer Leopold Bloom...

...To boot, all the principal characters—the ballplayer Roy Hobbes (Robert Redford), the Bad Mistress (Kim Bassinger) and the Good Girlfriend (Glenn Close)—are blondes...

...Stop," heyells, "stop sleeping with my wife...

...His character is murky, as is Yvonne's, at least in comparison with the Consul's...

...Bisset is tentatively hopeful...

...and Andrews is wary, suspecting the idyll will blow up because the Consul will throw Yvonne's infidelity at her...

...He looks too effete to be persuasive as a rugged counterpart to Finney's Firmin, nor could I figure out what he was trying to do with the role...

...all the golden hues merely obfuscate the meaning of Malamud's images and finally render them tinny...

...In the Guy Gallo adaptation that John Huston finally directed, the spiderweb-bing technique Lowry used to spin his story has been pulled into a straightforward plot line, and the after-the-fall tone set by Laruelle, an onlooker-narrator similar to Nick Carroway in The Great Gatsby, has been lost altogether with the reduction of the characters to a triangle...

...Although Harriet's nuttiness would seem to be heartily apparent, even to a rube like Roy, he is promptly smitten...

...Firmin is accompanied by a friend, the town doctor, to a diplomatic dinner...

...Malcolm Lowry's novel had been squeezed onto the very bottom of a reading list for a modern literature course I took in my senior year at college...

...Finney is mercurial, turning on the idea moments after embracing it...

...Can I be the only one who is tired of reading about the lines on his face attesting to the character inside, as though we can't expect more of a man with his looks than a willingness to age...

...All lost souls are not interchangeable...

...No one appears to have any life beyond what we see on the screen...

...I don't know that Malcolm Lowry himself would have been happy to hear this, since he—and subsequently many others—dreamed of seeing his book turned into a movie...

...The first half hour or so promises a stronger film than the next hour delivers up...

...The slightly faded color tone Huston has chosen to shoot the movie in, aside from being less obvious, is more effective than black-and-white...

...Since the film version doesn't enable us to get a glimpse of Firmin (played by Albert Finney) in any guise other than the drunken, his bellowings about hell being his natural habitat, and his griev-ings over his cuckolded love for his ex-wife, Yvonne (Jacqueline Bisset), seem like one long segue into his next bout with the bottle...

...everyone is trapped inside its frames and only begins to breathe when the light is lambent...

...Having said that, I think it is also fair to say some reviewers have tended to treat the movie that has now been drawn from Malamud's Serious Novel deferentially, as though lineage mattered...

...the next minute we are watching him as Lear succumbing to those sorrows, refusing to pray to "the Virgin for those who have nobody with" yet keeling before his need for Yvonne, down on his knees howling "I wan 'er...

...Among those who witnessed his pitching feat is another passenger, Harriet (Barbara Her-shey), a mysterious beauty...

...he is fluently, mellifluously, pained...

...Red-ford's hair is so yellow it glares, Bassinger's is a cool platinum, and Close's is a honeyed shade...

...being in over her head?—and depends a lot on narrowing her beautiful green eyes to indicate the gamut of emotions with which Yvonne responds to the hopeless situation she finds herself in...

...One minute we are watching Firmin as Lear's Fool, ribbing his own sorrows away...

...The movie bearing the same name that Universal Studios has now released confirms my feeling that certain novels, no matter how many screenplays they have been ground through, resist celluloid...

...He has forgotten to wear socks inside his patent-leather dress shoes, but he is considered important enough to introduce to the new German Consul...

...It is The Day of the Dead, 1938...

...It is this very innocence that Hobbes, because he has bared his talent, is about to be robbed of forever...

...The political machinations leading up to Firmin's death are otherwise given scant attention and would be lost on anyone who had not read the book...

...The lad's grip is strong, his aim sure...

...she is also something of a savior, arriving in Cuernavaca a day or two after the Consul has received notice of their divorce from her lawyer...

...The result of the shifts is not so much a bad movie as an oddly small one...

...Its force is of a decidedly different order than the novel's—less cumulative, more honed—and the passions that rage through it ultimately seem a bit trumped-up...

...A boy, with a head of hair to match the surrounding wheatfields, pitches some balls to a smiling father...

...I can readily see how a "good read," a Gone With the Wind, can be transformed into a grand motion picture, yet it also seems clear to me that there are novels whose achievement is inherent in their form...

...Hobbes, pricked by the pro's mocking dismissal of his coach's boast about his prowess, offers to pitch against the star hitter...

...This stems, I think, from the liberty Huston has taken in allocating an inordinate amount of time to the bar scene leading up to the Consul's death...

...Andrews exudes a stilted quality that does not fit in with the inchoate material of the movie, and his scenes with Bisset alone are utterly devoid of any dynamism...

...Levinson and his screenwriters (Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry) seem to have taken Malamud's already romanticized images of Success, Corruption and Integrity, and attenuated them even more...

...She invites him to her hotel room in New York City, he shows up, and he is shot by one of her infamous silver bullets...

...And I had always thought of Under the Volcano as one of these— sui generis, tamper-proof...

...That the Consul is a great ruin of a man appears to interest Huston less than the fact that he is a ruin...

...The Nazi envoy, while mistaking Firmin for the real thing, quickly realizes that his best embassy manner is being wasted on this colleague—that rather than a proper Englishman, Firmin is an independent type whose thick-lipped cadences do not quite mask his sober assessment of the German threat...

...The audience I saw it with hissed at each increasingly wicked turn of Kim Bassinger's character the way people used to respond to evil characters in old serials...

...I am not certain he believes in the Consul's malaise as anything other than a symptom, like his alcoholism...

...Huston's eye is that of a natural cynic, not unsympathetic but firmly disengaged...

...Had someone asked me, I would have said that Bernard Malamud's vision is too gloomy for the movies...

...Indeed, according to the producers, over the years 100 treatments of Under the Volcano have been done...

...Hugh is a bantam cock, a journalist drawn instinctively to the Big Events— such as the Spanish Civil War—who lacks the stamina to see them through...

...Shorn of what he once was, he could be any fast-talking drunk...

...Yvonne is something of a siren, having had a brief affair with Hugh (and, in the book, with someone else as well...

...Hobbes reappears out of the mists and is ready to play...

...Yet Huston leads us toward that kind of simplified linkage...

...We seem suddenly to be in a different movie altogether, The Day of the Locust perhaps...

...It is with the arrival of Yvonne and Firmin's half-brother, Hugh (Anthony Andrews), that the movie goes thunderously wrong...

...Finney, left to himself again, is remarkably moving in the final scene...

...To discover, then, that this most complex, most literary of fictions was being filmed, by however adroit a director, threatened my sense of how things ought to be...

...as though the vitality of this story, like the Consul's very breath, is seeping away even as we watch...

...This has to do, I think, with the two men whose visions the book and movie, respectively, reflect...

...Sent by a talent scout to redeem the fortunes of the New York Knights, our hero is made to suffer the necessary indignities—mainly foisted upon him by the inflammable but fiercely devoted Knights' coach (Richard Farnsworth)—before he proves himself, martyr-like, worthy of the game...

...On the interior curve by which I measure the relative impact of works of art—and I have still to be convinced that each medium does not require its own scale of evaluation—great novels are to great movies like ships that pass in the night: Once you granted that they sailed along on a similar current of impulse, the one had little to do with the other...

...The Natural begins elegiacally and stays on that note all the way through...

...As if to compensate, Finney resorts to wiggling his face around like a rubber mask whenever the three are on screen together...

...The slow motion and backlighting that Levinson overdoes elsewhere actually perform a function here, suffusing the scene with a genuinely tender atmosphere, a feeling of rural innocence...

...Facing the gun of the sneering police chief, he sways in the wind, ever drunk and ever defiant, bellowing his last protest at the violation of life...

...If Finney later heightens his performance to a theatrical pitch verging on the ham, in these opening sequences he calibrates so well that we shuttle back and forth between the Consul's moods as they occur...

...Barry Levinson, who directed the charming Diner, here seems to have gotten the notion that symbolism is best handled by scattering gold dust in our eyes: Nine out of 10 scenes are shot in a relentless amber light, with soft focus and slow motion thrown in for good measure...

...Lowry's desperation is implicit in every remarkable and bemused passage he puts in the mouth of his main character—the former British Consul in Mexico, Geoffrey Firmin...

...Despite a screenplay where everything else has been snipped and hurried, Huston basks in the shadowy, lingering among the careful selection of grotesques with whom he has peopled the pulqueria Geoffrey Firmin stumbles into: one dwarf, one transsexual, various prostitutes, a demented American boy, and members of the Mexican police...

...But Levinson' s is a reverse Midas touch...

...The extreme blurryness of perception that is the primary problem of this movie may well be the fault of the less than lucid material on which it is based...

...Robert Redford doesn't bother to act...

...I juggled descriptions of hair color in my mind, like a Clairol copywriter, to entertain myself during the movie's languid stretches...

...Newsweek: "The good lines are in his face now, and they reflect experience knowingly squinted at...

...The Consul and Yvonne are still in love, or believe they might be if only they could get away...

...The shape of Under the Volcano on film is pointier than the oval I've always imagined the novel to be...

...Glenn Close, the childhood sweetheart who reappears in the nick of time, acts suitably, if uninspiredly...

...Their fantasy ofalife in the woods, just the two of them and a cabin, is discussed over lunch at an amateur bullfight, with Hugh as incredulous observer...

...Chatting across his hedge with a John Bullish neighbor who protests the nightly mewling of Firmin's cat, the actor conveys his character's disdain for the instilled British virtues with a stunning gesture—by draping his bow-tie and jacket over a handy branch...

...Cut to 15 years later...

...Ilovecon-tests for skill," she tells him, eyes smoldering...

...The professor wasn't entirely convinced that the novel's artistry overcame its chaos, but for me there was no question: Under the Volcano had hit me like a revelation...

...All queries about his past are met with a stubborn evasiveness, conveyed by Redford's setting his square jaw even more squarely...

...Although my reaction may have had an elitist aspect to it—an unease about the popularization ethic that had brought Picasso and Matisse into the card-and-gift shop arena—its real origins were more personal...

...Finney has the screen mostly to himself and manages to wedge in a few subtle bits of acting—a passing look of delight at his own keenness in the midst of anguish, a waggish thrust of the neck that signals the Consul's indifference to proprieties...

...Most of the time, however, Bisset acts scared—of Huston...

...The film's terms are so limply dialectical as to become mindless...

...I must further confess that the mythologizing of baseball in Malamud's early novel, The Natural, never really stirred my interest in the way that the presentation of another sport (football) as icon worked for me in Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes...

...The Natural is an awesomely unsuccessful film...

...Moreover, Lowry surely did not intend us to think they are...

...Traveling on the same train with them is a team owner, a sportswriter (Robert Duvall), and the legendary Babe Ruth...

...They are the weakest links in the book, too, but there we have the Consul's interior monologue to sustain us...

...I continued to ponder its power when I decided to research Lowry' s life in graduate school two years later, and to this day I can think of few other novels written in this century that strike me as masterful in the way that, say, Middlemarch is great...