On Film

...As it happened, Jerry Lee appalled the nation by his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, andhis career was flattened...

...What we remember about his films is not their flaccid pacing but the inspired gags no mainstream script hack would attempt: the two halves of the missing map in Lust in the Dust, for instance, revealed to be complementary tattoos on Divine's and Lainie Kazan's derrières...

...Scenes and devices pulled whole from domestic screwball comedies of an earlier age are here givenaflip, and played very, very deadpan...

...If Juan wins, he comes away with big bucks...

...Since his initial film, Private Parts, Bartel's crass sensibility—while not endearing him to the major studios—has helped him overcome uneven writing and misfit concoctions of erotic confusion and knockabout comedy...

...It is a pity that no matter how he juts out his jaw and scrunches his eyebrows while lip-syncing Lewis' recordings, he cannot conceal the powerful innocence of his wide eyes and big smile...

...After about an hour of domestic strife the film threatens to slow to a halt, but Wang's utter lack of manipulation and one character's shocking act of revenge keep it vibrantly alive...

...Next came Dim Sum, whereheportrayed them as family men and women trying to reconcile the dicta of Chinese ancestor worship with contemporary American attitudes about parents and children...

...Belvedere through the action in the company of his "favorite chien sauvage...

...Not since Joan Micklin Saver's Hester Street a decade ago has there been so rich and unsententious an American film about immigrants and their new lives...

...They run the gamut from "yes ma'am" to "no sir," but on both sides there is the opportunity for erotic exploitation, thepromiseof hanky-panky...

...Even at its best, Scenes is not the high drollery to which it aspires...

...Most such films have failed miserably...

...Meanwhile housemen/chauffeurs Juan (Robert Beltran) and Frank (Ray Sharkey) have wagered to sleep with each other's bosslady...

...Not much...

...Offsetting Woronov's underwritten part and the undercast Bisset (who never fills her role with the camp relish of, say, a Joan Collins), newcomer Amelia Walker steals the show as To-bel, the high-rollin' black ex-porn queen married to Lisabeth's brother (Ed Begley Jr...

...All are men whose fantasy selves are set on a crash course with the limitations of real life...

...He never makes himself look quite as sneaky or as downright white trash ignorant as the real Jerry Lee Lewis, who demanded cash payment for his recordings, not knowing what to do with a check...

...What more can (or should) be written about the elegantly tooled megahit Batman, the shallow, disappointing Star Trek V, or the high-octane frenzy of Lethal Weapon2, whose heroes outBond Bond himself in Licence to Kill...

...Propelled by a series of coincidences just shy of Georges Feydeau, Scenes might creak were it not for the portly Bartel himself as Doctor Van de Kamp, Clare's "thinologist," strolling like Mr...

...members of the two families all too leisurely start bedding down with one another...

...themoviecould easily have been subtitled Sex Games of the Rich and Famous...

...A source close to Cinecom reveals that the producers, in a fit of homophobia, deleted it from the videocassette version...

...By concentrating on Lewis' confusion of his self-image as a reg'lar fella with his public image as an invulnerable rock-' n' -roll devil who leers at little girls and tells them a"Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and ain't it gonna be fun!, McBride has produced a weird and novel hybrid...

...This approach is useful and provocative...

...Such ugly details as bad marriages, drug addiction, alcoholism and sudden death do inevitably appear in these films, but their treatment is devoid of candor and invariably infused with a revivalist-like hysteria and melodrama...

...Although it offers another of McBride's tantalizing treatments of a self-conceived, larger-than-life personality, it has, alas, largely been a bust at the box office...

...When a rapid inspection of the life they intend to document reminds them of this, they have as a rule chosen simply to sidestep the hard work, grasping ambitions, and down-and-dirty career moves that made all but the most virginal overnight successes (if indeed they have ever existed...

...In Paul Barter's latest farce, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, the hanky-panky runsriot...

...She is sure all of this will be blown up by a "big fathydrogen bomb...

...The honorable failures—in other words, where the character is exploited for a nobler end than is usual—include Luis Valdez' La Bomba (the story of short-lived Chicano teen idol Richie Valens, retold as a tale of triumph over ethnic prejudice) and Karel Reisz' Sweet Dreams (about country singer Patsy Cline, whose success is depicted as her reward for suffering a sexist husband...

...Quaid, playing a man pumped up in order to fill his own public persona, is better than any other leading man at conveying the fury and barbarity of a nostops country hellion...

...Yet McBride takes the characterization a step further by making Jerry Lee into a kind of tragic comic-book figure—as he did Jesse, the drifter wanted for manslaughter in Breathless, and Remy, the iconoclastic New Orleans detective in The Big Easy (also played by Quaid...

...Like Remy he is cocksure of his ability to prevail by bending law and public opinion his way...

...But for this kind of insight one would do better to turn to Rolling Stone...

...The three films are, in the end, tales of comeuppance...

...Their world may be as small as a bowl of tea, but they drink deeply from it...

...and he knows Shirley Maclaine...

...Based on the novel by Louis Chu and shot almost entirely in Hong Kong (although set in 1949 New York), the film's television techniques—constant close-ups, claustrophobic two-shots—capture the insularity and cramped intimacy of Chinatown...

...The only class struggle to be found in Beverly Hills lies in interchanges between white masters and (mostly) Hispanic servants...

...It's Bartel's funniest work in years...

...It is canny on the subject of Jerry Lee's distaste for Southern sanctimony (his cousin is Jimmy Swaggart), and on his recognition that the hip-grinding, sex-and-grits drive in black rhythm-andblues had the vitality the tamer white kids' rock-'n'-roU lacked...

...So let me provide a sampling of three of the summer's less commercial offerings, their virtues so eclipsed by the blockbusters that you may even be spared waiting in line...

...But in a dry year of comedies the likes of Weekend at Bernie's, Major League, and the unbearable Troop Beverly Hills, it seems, in To-bel's words, "just a freaky little act of God...

...Yet it is cartoon anguish and cartoon comfort and it is where Great Balls of Fire breaks down...

...McBride has perhaps done himself no favor in attempting to graft his own thematic preoccupations onto the most difficult pop-movie genre, the popular singer biography...

...For months Jim McBride's Jerry Lee Lewis story, Great Balls of Fire, starring Dennis Quaid, has been hyped by Orion Pictures as a major contender in the summer sweeps (it is by far the most mass audience oriented of the three films discussed here...

...Wayne Wang's Eat a Bowl of Tea, produced by PBS' American Playhouse, is a welcome exception to the customary public television-inspired torpor...

...This concession to convention, though, sits uncertainly with what it was about Lewis that attracted him to the project in the first place...

...we are presented only with broad strokes of photogenic popart desire, akin to the balloon captions in a Roy Lichtenstein canvas...

...The plot is a sly variation on an old gambit (most recently used in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels...

...In Wang's first feature, Chan Is Missing, he represented Chinese-Americans as spiritual entities—unpredictable, undefined and enigmatic (not to be confused with "the inscrutable Oriental...

...The pressures he puts on his son to succeed, to rise to a position of respect in the community, and most of all to provide grandchildren have a crushing effect, as Ben struggles to cope with problems at work, sexual insecurity, and Mei Oi's affair with one of the "uncles" in the local Family Association...

...We do not once in the film glimpse a feeling befitting a life-size human being (its second half veers toward outright burlesque...

...Like Jesse, Jerry Lee reads comics and identifies with Superman: Indeed, his flamboyant '50s rockstar outfits make him look the part of a superhero...

...To-bel's best lines are too raw to be quoted in these pages, but her parvenu zest is captured in her description of the new hubby: "He spends and spends...

...The movie, cowritten with Jack Baran, is based on the memoirs of Jerry Lee's "child bride,' Myra Lewis...

...McBride is not so madly visionary an artist that he would deliberately court commercial failure: His film ignores whatever it actually took to put over Jerry Lee as Sun Records' honkytonkying sensation of 1957-58...

...Bartel is lazy about setting his libidinous roundelays in motion...

...In Eat a Bowl of Tea Wang's characters are creatures of passion, often reacting to each other in hot, primal outbursts...

...if Frank wins, he gets a night with Juan, whom he fancies...

...Filmmakers are all too aware that a commercially successful movie is an upbeat one, but forget that the lives of singers (or, for that matter, of most entertainers) tend not to be very cheery...

...Scenes was released with comparatively little fanfare, but it has stayed around by tickling enough moviegoers with its startlingly rude dialogue—which may sound raunchier than it actually is after much of the tepid Hollywood smart-aleckry of the '80s...

...Two profligate and eccentric households are thrown together when ex-soap star and sex-starved widow Clare (Jacqueline Bisset) takes in the family of her next-door neighbor Lisabeth (Mary Woronov), whose home is being exterminated...

...Life in the cold-water flat that U.S.born Ben Loy (Russell Wong) occupies with his newly arrived Chinese bride, Mei Oi (Cora Miao), is closely monitored by Ben's father, Wah Gay (Victor Wong...

...Great Balls of Fire is not altogether worthless as a chronicle of a musician's life...

...Winona Ryder, as the barely teenaged Myra, reveals her emotional range when she tearfully tells Jerry Lee her vision of them together in "a pink house with a blue door and a baby in a highchair...

...You don't watch a Jim McBride film for diluted cultural commentary but for the extreme stylization of his pulsating production design (the only technical asset Great Balls lacks is Cinemascope), and to observe his protagonists trying to come to terms with their daydreams...

...The bisexual twist appears only in the film's theatrical release...

...The creation of a hero in terms of his pictorial impact and kinetic appeal helps keep a subject lively...

...Jerry Lee comforts her, with naive grandiloquence, in a beautifully composed series of shots by a highway overpass...