Movies: I Say It's Spinach

...Not surprisingly—and despite enormous data-processing errors that made it difficult for many people to get tickets even when they were available—the AFT is a financial success...

...they are for "civilized people in Stamford...

...That you prefer raw sex to a love story...

...No one is suggesting that movies are perfect as they are, but a heavy dose of highfalutin culture is just about the last thing needed...

...The "civilized" people, the carriage trade, will appreciate these films and realize that they are intrinsically better than mere movies...

...Film is an artistic stepchild, incapable of any success on its own and useful only as a conduit for transporting the more rarefied atmosphere of the theater to culturally deprived hamlets from coast to coast...

...The schedule included Alan Bates in Butley, directed by Harold Pinter...

...And I believe that the American Film Theater fulfills that need...

...Americans, at least from Henry James's time on, have tended to couple a disregard for their own best products with an embarrassing lust for "Culture," and an unwholesome eagerness to like what others say they ought to like—an attitude to which the AFT shamelessly panders and which caused, I'm afraid, my feeling of guilt that cold December night...

...The musical Lost in the Stars was so embarrassing that many people left before the end...

...all the other films I saw were flawed in one way or another...

...But unfortunately, they are rarely offered films to think upon, that deal with the essentials of the human condition . . . [AFT] is an affirmation of my fundamental belief in the good taste and good sense of millions of people who have abandoned the movie-going habit because of their present dissatisfaction with pornography and violence...

...Lee Marvin in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, directed by John Frankenheimer, and many other goodies...

...Furthermore, the AFT is encouraging contempt for mass-appeal entertainment films—for movie-movies, if you will—by suggesting that people who have not seen plays have missed out on an intrinsically more valuable experience...

...On first announcement, the AFT's plans seemed, if not "the best thing that's happened to movies since popcorn and Technicolor," as Rex Reed felt, at least a good solid idea...

...Now that the AFT's 1973-1974 season has come to an end, however, the scorecard of its productions is, at best, mixed...

...Unfortunately, some would like to take the medium of film away from the unap-preciative masses and intellectualize it into a more manageable and acceptable form—people like the English professor who haughtily wrote to The New York Times that AFTs producers "are not trying to reach the typical adolescent audience for Hollywood productions...

...That you find pleasure in violence presented as art...

...At their best they are vital, urgent, brash, and vigorous, featuring such scenes as Jimmy Cagney squashing a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face...

...Zero Mostel in Ionesco's Rhinoceros, directed by Tom O'Horgan...

...In The Homecoming, too many portentous "cinematic" camera angles served only to point up the film's lack of immediate bite as compared to the stage production...

...I think most people want and expect more...

...Deftly played by Bates, Butley is a grand master of devas-tatingly brittle sarcasm, and the delightfully tart play to which he lends his name is a witty crowd-pleaser...

...Rain pounded down, my head ached, and the AFT's attraction for the evening, Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield in Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance, had received a nearly unanimous critical shellacking...

...Why not, in conjunction with American Express, film a series of great plays with ace actors and directors and sell tickets to them on a subscription basis...

...It is an attitude that permeates all the AFT's public pronouncements...

...the project is set up as a Sir Lancelot operation that stands nobly in the breach against the waves of trash which normally fill our movie screens...

...In another, the AFT is called "an achievement unequaled in the history of the theater/' while in a third, Harry Weinstein, AFTs vice president for creative affairs, notes that his group "permits great theater to be produced on a sustaining basis...

...He is the co-author of "Sinema: American Pornographic Films and the People Who Make Them,f (Praeger) and "Vd Rather Be Wright: Memoirs of an Itinerant Tackle" (Prentice-Hall), both to be published this fall...

...The series as a whole has not come close to justifying the AFTs fondness for congratulatory rhetoric, and its stentorian self-preening seems absurdly inappropriate...

...What was going on here...

...Hogwash...

...In fact the assumption angers me...

...On two days every month, 500 theaters across the country would Kenneth Turan is both a film critic and a staff writer for Potomac, The Washington Post magazine...

...The legitimate theater is perhaps the most prized and respected of the performing arts," boasts one promotional release...

...And so on...

...Whenever film happens to be mentioned, it is as an afterthought, for the apparent assumption behind the American Film Theater is that there is something wrong with movies that plays can remedy...

...Obviously it was silly to go out that evening, but as that decision was reached, instead of feeling disappointment or relief, I found myself feeling guilt of the type generally associated with not doing your homework or leaving spinach uneaten on your plate...

...Please, fellas, don't fence movies in...

...Put simply and plainly, the AFTs holier-than-thou attitude makes me sick...

...That an escapist film is preferable to one that stimulates the mind...

...These failings, while regrettable, were not really damning...

...People are waiting to be mentally stimulated, to be culturally provoked...

...AFT films are not for everyone, Landau grandly admits when pressed...

...I knew the right thing to do, some part of my mind was telling me, and I would be sorry if I didn't do it...

...The AFT attitude boils down to, "This is what you should have been liking all along if you had any taste and knew what was good for you," and that, for me at least, is much too much to stomach...

...What was the American Film Theater doing to my mind...

...This unctuous bias is visible in almost every piece of promotion the AFT has issued...

...It all seemed so neat that I quickly signed up and waited impatiently for the series to begin...

...Our films are not typical movie fare for typical movie audiences," sniffs AFT director Edward Lewis in one press release, and originator Landau puts it even more explicitly and extensively in another: "The general consensus in the motion picture industry seems to be that you, the public, must be played down to...

...I do not believe this," Landau went on...

...show the films to a pre-sold audience whose members each had paid $30 for the eight-movie series...

...The joy of movies is that they are a mass art, with all the contradictory wonder that fact implies...

...Ely Landau, an independent moviemaker who had produced The Pawnbroker and Long Day's Journey into Night as well as television's justly praised "Play of the Week," had had a revelation...

...Landau and Company simply claim to represent all that is decent and noble—"entertainment on a high cultural level," trumpets one release, "the Coffee Table Movie," said The New York Times's Vincent Canby—and imply, therefore, that anyone who thinks the AFT films are less than divine just is not refined enough to appreciate this gift lavished on the American screen...

...What is upsetting about the American Film Theater, however, is the way it has chosen to sell itself...

...The inference is unmistakable...

...all too many films don't quite make it without having the extra burden of being part of a new theatrical concept...

...The Iceman Cometh, with fine actors in the supporting roles, was fatally wounded by the atrocious miscasting of Lee Marvin as Hickey, earth-bound and stolid when he should have been euphoric and messianic...

...The undoubted high point was Butley, a fascinating and hugely entertaining version of the Simon Gray play centering around a bisexual English college professor named Ben Butley who is given to quoting Beatrix Potter and verbally assaulting anyone in sight...

...We are dealing here with a classic public relations dodge, a successful grab for the white hats before anyone realizes what is happening...

...Unfortunately, Butley is about ten times better than anything else the AFT has done...

...If the groundlings of today are not interested, let them watch soap operas on TV...

...For, please note, American Film Theater productions are filmed plays, and far be it for a poor but honest movie to compete...

...Though sales in smaller towns admittedly fell well below the AFTs messianic hopes, Landau estimates that more than four million tickets were sold nationwide, and revenue will probably total $16 million to $18 million, about 10 per cent above the break-even point...