Film

...A noisy adventure-thriller starring Sean Connery, set in the not-too-distant future on a moon of Jupiter...

...These films tend to derive their material and style from popular pulp culture (Superman II, Zorro, The Gay Blade), or occasionally from adulterated classics (Clash of Titans...

...Surely in their many years of film viewing they have found something else to admire and emulate aside from the movies which appealed to them as schoolboys...

...a much prized Mercedes sinks beneath the ice of a wintry lake...

...For those who may tire of reading and absolutely insist on seeing a movie this summer, I can suggest two less highly publicized films which manage to treat essentially trashy material with some imagination and style, and which take the sort of risks big-money filmmakers are unwilling to contemplate: Alligator and Polyester...

...But I really think that the funniest film of the year by far is John Waters's malodorous Polyester, a subversive and inspired comic melodrama which chronicles the heartbreaking tribulation of suburban housewife Francine Fishpaw (played by Devine, a broadly talented 300-pound male transves-tite...

...It is also wickedly funny: When the identity of one of the gator's victims is reconstructed from a surviving big toe, the toe is accorded a solemn funeral...

...The film is accompanied by Odorama, "A ludicrous gimmick which allows the audience to share in ten of the more penetrating odors which plague poor Francine...

...Gaijin: A Brazilian Odyssey...

...The tale it recounts is that of Japanese labor-immigrants who came to Brazil in the early years of this century to work on the coffee plantations...

...The hormones have been injected into dogs (kidnapped off the streets by a shady pet-shop owner) whose dead bodies have been discarded in the sewers...

...Out of such intentions, bad movies are made...

...But Alda takes no such risks, and seems intent on creating a pervasive impression of amiability...

...is leavened with sophomoric gags: The noise of one husband humping his nubile second wife prevents the other two couples from sleeping...

...this does not mean that the films stink, but refers to receipts at the box office), and floods the country's screens with the sort of fare which the industry moguls imagine will appeal to unformed intellects...

...Some leavening...

...This vapid, relentlessly middle-brow social comedy traces the shared vacations of three middle-class couples in each of the four seasons...

...The extraordinary beauty of the countryside is set off against the self-satisfied piggishness of the bourgeois inhabitants...

...One summer offering that is sort of fun is Raiders of the Lost Ark, produced by big money makers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg...

...It is appropriately horrific and is filled with scenes of violence (so is Raiders), but the film's violent spectacle is by no means its sole rai-son d'etre...

...Directed by Switzerland's most renowned filmmaker, Alain Tanner...

...Stars a beautiful island off the coast of Scotland, supported by Donald Sutherland, in one of his more baroque performances, and Kate Nelligan...

...This programmer has quite as much action and thrills as Raiders of the Lost Ark, is more cleverly written, has superior characterization, and manages to entertain on a greater number of levels...

...Alligator is a low-budget monster-horror movie directed by Lewis Teague and scripted by John Sayles (The Return of the Secaucus Seven...

...The industry, accordingly, counts on the summer months.for what Variety terms "big B.O...

...This often moving saga works some of the most fascinating material to be dealt with in any recent film...

...Dialogue is in Portuguese, Japanese, English, Italian, and Spanish, with English subtitles...

...Hits and Misses Outland...

...but in any case are relentlessly escapist...

...Writing and direction eschew all subtlety, opting in the end for the cheap sensationalism of a schlock horror movie...

...Messidor...

...Waters is one of the most enterprising of the country's regional filmmakers—he works out of Baltimore—and his earlier works (Pink Flamingoes, Female Trouble, Desperate Living), have earned him a considerable cult following in underground movie houses and on the midnight circuit...

...Eye of the Needle...

...Within Alligator, for those alert enough to appreciate such things, there is a social sub-text warning of uncontrolled experimentation in biological engineering...

...These are, one discovers, extraordinarily boring people, apparently innocent of any ideas, who have no insights into themselves or anything else...

...Its premise is a story I first heard while growing up in New York in the 1950s, and later encountered in the fiction of Celine and Thomas Pynchon...

...As for the movies, the summer months bring little to stretch the minds or excite the finer sensibilities of adult .viewers...

...The film's inane dialogue (where are you, Preston Sturges, now that we need you...

...Despite its low budget ($2.5 million), the film is superbly shot (I especially like the eerie wavering reflections of water off the drain sewer walls—the actual sewer walls of Los Angeles), intelligently edited, and delights by its attention to detail...

...Drama of dissociation and alienation in the oppressively well-ordered society of contemporary Switzerland...

...Good books abound, and vacationers with sufficient leisure might even wish to tackle Terence Kilmartin's new translation of Proust...

...The time and place of each episode is established by a montage of picture-postcard views, as the sound track, predictably, provides accompaniment from Vivaldi's "Four Seasons...

...Polyester, shot in thirty-five-millimeter, is his first attempt to reach a broad audience and break into the commercial big time...

...Entertaining but quite unmemorable...

...In all fairness it should be noted that Lucas and Spielberg did not set out to make a Potemkin or a Citizen Kane (although the final shot of Raiders pays playful homage to the Orson Welles film...

...Basic plot is derived from Westerns—a High Noon in outer space...

...And in the summer, as during the Christmas season, the young are on vacation and are more likely to seek entertainment at the movies than when otherwise occupied...

...It has lots of cliff-hanging, buried treasure, loathsome tarantulas and snakes, some neat old sea planes, a monkey who appears to be a Nazi spy, an amiable hero in a Fred C. Dobbs hat, an attractive heroine who parades around the final sequences in a fetching satin nightgown—and the Wrath of God...

...When the novelty wears off, the animals are flushed down the toilet...

...At least parts of it are sort of fun...

...they are conspicuously short on thematic depth, wit, and well-written dialogue...

...Today's average movie goer, the film industry knows, is barely pubescent (to figure precise demographics, count the bubble gum blobs stuck to movie-house floors...

...I've got no objection to kiddie flicks, and Raiders of the Lost Ark is admittedly an appealing one, but I find it distressing that so much money, energy, and talent is lavished so exclusively on such shallow, mindless "entertainment...

...They sit around and talk—mostly about their mutual relationships, which the film never bothers to develop...

...Its real villain is not the monster-alligator, but the rapacious, unscrupulous head of a pharmaceutical firm which has been performing illicit experiments with growth hormones...

...Also recommended: Alain Tanner's Messidor and Tizuka Yamasaki's Gaijin: A Brazilian Odyssey (see "Hits and Misses"), two foreign films which begin making their way around the country by the end of the summer...

...The characters in The Four Seasons might have been treated, more appropriately, with mordant satire—revealing and mocking their vacuity...

...The three couples try to have fun, but they are such incompetent, joyless klutzes that they can never quite manage to do so...

...And so, for a mere $20 million, they have managed to bring to the screen the sort of movie which third-rate directors used to churn out for less than a hundredth of the cost...

...Directed and co-written by Tizuka Yama-saki, who is herself a descendant of the Japanese immigrants'portrayed in the film...

...It is a work of outrageous, pointed social comedy, and there's nothing else quite like it (the most obvious characteristic of most other current movies is that they are remarkably like other movies...

...The alligator apparently became corrupted by this tainted carrion, and grew to carnivorous monstrosity...

...Those which survive are nourished by refuse in the city's sewer system and grow to enormous size...

...They are long on action, special effects, and what passes for humor among the young...

...Tourists, so it goes, buy baby alligators in Florida, where they are sold as fish-tank pets, and bring them home...

...Trouble is, the few films in release this summer which pretend to some maturity tend to be quite as shallow and as witless as those designed for the youth market...

...Parts of it are also sort of silly...

...The Four Seasons, written and directed by Alan Alda, is a case in point...

...The film has been endowed with a cast of accomplished middle-aged actors (Alda, Carol Burnett, Len Cariou, Sandy Dennis, Jack Weston, Rita Moreno), but they are never given anything interesting to do...

...Brilliantly photographed...

...They sought, rather, to rework the material of the old matinee serial (Lucas defines this as "a movie about adventurers set in exotic locales with a cliff-hanger every second")— and to realize for today's young audience something like the movies which had most excited them in their childhood...

...Those two "geniuses," Lucas and Spielberg, have yet to make a single truly adult motion picture, representing real people who live in the real world...

...The film, as most Americans attuned to the media already know, involves a search for the Ark of the Covenant, containing the original tablets of the Ten Commandments brought down by Moses from Mount Sinai...

...Sayles transposes the story to a city in Missouri where, after twelve years down the drain, a giant gator (his body larger than a Cadillac Eldorado) emerges to terrify the inhabitants...

...World War II suspense spy programmer, based on Ken Follett's best-selling novel...