Harlan Ellison's Watching (19 page)

(The casual reader, knowing this reviewer writes sf, might think I am taking a stance based on special knowledge. Even were this the case, which it ain't because I assure you I am a scientific illiterate who could no more program the correct technical data than perform a prefrontal lobotomy, the position would not be invalid. On speaking to students from Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana—where the film premiered simultaneously with its Los Angeles opening—I was given precisely the same complaints. Many of them rejected the film outright because of these errors, which put the believability of the entire story in doubt.)

But, again, the film succeeds. It is affecting. It is one of those hybrid fish-&-fowl creations that should fall under its own weight. But it doesn't. It is compelling, inevitably gripping, touching and somehow very true and dead to the heart of the Human Condition.

I attribute much of this to the stunning performance of Bruce Dern. For with the exception of excellent cameo performances by Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin and Jesse Vint as the murdered shipmates (parts they honor with the thoroughness of their talents), and the amputees who rode inside the three drone robots, this is Dern's show all the way.

His Freeman Lowell is a full characterization, hot and cool and trembling. He emerges as the solitary focus of a drama that could so easily have become just another nuts-and-bolts space opera. When Lowell directs the drones to bury the man he has killed, and with his throat tightening with grief says a few words over the grave—via TV intercom—no one can be unmoved. When Lowell, out of the desperation of loneliness and guilt, anthropomorphizes the drones and plays poker with them, there is such a sureness, such a suspension of disbelief
on the part of Dern
, that it becomes a tragicomic scene filmgoers will always remember. In scenes where the dialogue written for Dern is as cumbersome as a hippo trying to insert a pessary, the actor lifts and flutes and dwells on note after note of the script with the precision of a master soloist. This is a case, one of the rare few, when the actor brings to an intrinsically awful script a genius that
must
be commended. With this film Bruce Dern steps softly but surely into the front ranks of American actors.

To comment further on the film would be to confuse myself and you, gentle readers, more than I have already. For it becomes clear that the more one picks at
Silent Running
, the more it falls apart. Taken in totality, it is a memorable and convincing film. I don't know why. Critical judgments evaporate. It is at once fable and warning and visual experience, and on those levels it was eminently worth doing. All concerned with the project—save those hack scriptwriters—can feel proud and pleased with what they've brought forth.

This is a step, however faltering, in the right direction for filmed sf; it deals with human problems in human terms, aided and abetted by the trappings of the superscience society. But more, it holds somewhere in its twisted skein, the magic elements that make a film unforgettable.

And if the review is illogical, chalk it up to future shock, or brain damage or the eyes of childhood that it seems to me are indispensable for looking at special dreams like
Silent Running
. And Bruce Dern can play on my team,
any
day.

The Staff
/March 31, 1972

Most blessed of all novelists is certainly Graham Greene. Unlike the shat-upon Faulkner, Hemingway, Cozzens, Roth and Updike who—with very rare exceptions—have had their novels turned to mulch by filmmakers, Greene's books have been widely and handsomely adapted.
This Gun for Hire, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, Orient Express
, Hitchcock's version of
The Confidential Agent, The Fallen Idol . . .
all were superlative films, though not necessarily big box-office. One is forced to the conclusion that the man's work is purely translatable, and even flubs like
The Comedians, The Quiet American
and
Our Man in Havana
have elements to recommend them that clearly emerge from the original material. As a writer who has seen how wrong his material can go in the hands of the inept and artistically corrupt in what is essentially a collaborative art-form, I envy the blessings that continue to be showered on Greene, not the least but at the moment the latest being MGM's transmogrification of
Travels with My Aunt
from the printed page to celluloid.

Working from a lean and utterly delicious screenplay by Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler, director George Cukor demonstrates that even at age seventy-four his talent is as firm and juicy as a pippin apple. Greene's "entertainment" about Henry, a mildewy English gentleman more concerned with his garden than with the joys of living, whose world is turned cockeyed by his swashbuckling Aunt Agatha, does not rush, neither does it stroll. In Cukor's hands it is permitted to slide, to slither, to slip like finest silk from opening sequence to O. Henry ending. It is a bravura performance by all concerned, not the least of whom are the exquisite Maggie Smith (whose makeup leaves something to be desired) and Alec McCowen as Aunt Agatha and Henry. It is a film of pure pleasure, a simple and uncomplicated joy shot with grace and wit and intelligence, and I do not think you will pillory me for urging you to see it at your earliest convenience.

On the other foot, however, we have
Man of La Mancha
from United Artists, a debacle in virtually every particular. More, it is a thoroughgoing disgrace. The days of substituting Mitzi Gaynors for Mary Martins in
South Pacifics
were gone, we thought, and bad cess to them. But with unerring stupidity and an eye for venality unparalleled since 20th remade
Stagecoach
and took the box-office drubbing it deserved, producer-director Arthur Hiller has cast Peter O'Toole as Quixote in the role made famous by Richard Kiley off-Broadway, and replaced Joan Diener with Sophia Loren as Aldonza.

It is embarrassing. O'Toole's musical capabilities, light and frivolous and utterly beguiling in
The Ruling Class
, are here strained far beyond the point of tolerance by those who know and admire Dale Wasserman's musical play. Neither is it to scenarist Wasserman's credit that the interior tension and enveloping humanity of the stage production have been leached out for the big screen. The less said about Ms. Loren, beyond her undeniable and frankly sexist-appealing beauty, the better. Her singing is the pathetic burbling of a titmouse drowning in a milk pitcher.

Virtually without moment, this is a film that does no one involved with it credit. And the lunacy of shooting scenes that look like backlot setups, in Spain, at enormous cost, is only matched in derangement by the cacophony of O'Toole's British accent, Loren's Italian accent and James Coco's Bronx accent all going down for the third time under the weight of the Impossible Dream. Better the windmill should have won.

I'm probably the only critic in the country who'll say this, but I
enjoyed
National General's Barbra Streisand starrer,
Up the Sandbox
. The third release I've seen from the company of stars who call themselves "First Artists" (about the other two,
The Getaway
and
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
, more later), it is a mixed bag of fantasy and reality with Ms. Streisand as an upper-class Manhattan housewife trying to raise her consciousness with considerable difficulty. While I am not the world's foremost Streisand fanatic, I would be less than truthful if I didn't admit I
kvelled
at Ms. Streisand's performance. (If
kvell
is beyond you, ask your nearest Jew, of which some of your best friends are.) Irvin Kershner has directed Paul Zindel's script with a madcap berserkness that produces an ambience of fluidity and startlement. The film jumps back and forth between Streisand's dream-visions of what her life
might
be like and the no-less-intriguing realities of what it
is
like. Perhaps there are films that appeal to my less intellectual predilections, but
Up the Sandbox
jibed with the basic tenets of the Ellison Moviegoing Philosophy: it kept me rapt and happy all the while it danced before me. What the hell more can one ask from a mere shadow-play?

First Artists, however, will have to answer for
The Getaway
, as nasty a piece of business as I've encountered lately—with the exception of American-International's
The Unholy Rollers
, a film of pure depravity whose only saving grace is an incredible-looking female named Claudia Jennings who has every reason in the world to be proud of what she looks like with her clothes off. But not even the unnatural lust I feel for Ms. Jennings can keep me from returning to
The Getaway
with pickaxe in hand.

Understand: I am a
big
admirer of Sam Peckinpah's films;
no
one can express a greater admiration for Steve McQueen; the novel from which the screenplay was taken was written by Jim Thompson, one of the best goddamed hardboiled writers this country ever produced, in some ways better even than James M. Cain, and a man whose work I
tremendously
admire; but
all
of them, perhaps at the hands of scenarist Walter Hill or the dictates of producers Foster & Brower, have been served hideously here.

It isn't the violence that bothers me; in point of fact the violence is rather tame and predictable, hardly as innovative and eye-catching as that exposed in Peckinpah's brilliant
Straw Dogs
or
The Wild Bunch
; it is everything
around
the violence that sucks. McQueen is sloppy in his acting, Peckinpah is
laocoönian
in his direction, Quincy Jones's music is banal, Al Lettieri overacts, Sally Struthers underacts, and Ali MacGraw can't act worth shit. Perhaps that's where the major flaw lies. With Ms. MacGraw. And I would be a cad to pick up on the obvious straight line about lying with Ms. MacGraw. There's been enough of that crap in the movie magazines; but even so, McQueen will have to take the rap for carrying his girlfriend in this film. It was a sad artistic judgment to put a no-talent lightweight like Ali MacGraw in a role that demanded a young Claire Trevor. Because,
Love Story
considered, Ms. MacGraw is the sort of actress of whom it can be said, when she comes onscreen it is as though she just went offscreen.

The Getaway
is an utter bore. A failure as drama, as film, as entertainment. It is morally corrupt, artistically arid, conceptually outdated and in sum as thoroughly unredeemable a piece of shit as has been released this year, and the horror and wonder of it, is that it came from such massive talents.

Universal has added another black film to the current torrential downpour with
Trick Baby
(from the novel by Iceberg Slim), and it is to their credit that the film is some kinda nother
thang!
It is a
mean
film. Tracing the fading moments in the lives and capers of two Philadelphia con artists,
Trick Baby
manages to escape the already-concretized clichés of black films (after the first seventeen minutes, which are embarrassing and badly acted) to pound its story home like a good club fighter working a Friday night prelim. Mel Stewart, who plays Blue Howard, the senior partner of the flummoxing partnership, is for my money the hottest black actor in the country. I remember seeing him work in "The Connection" at the old Living Theater in New York, and being impressed with his ease and individuality on a stage. That was almost fifteen years ago. Now he has stepped forward, his time is
now
, to steal the film from director Larry Yust, from all his fellow actors, from the sensational Philly locations used to limn that special enclave of the black underworld, and he
is
Blue! The most engaging, outrageous, multifarious grifter who ever worked the pigeon drop! And when he tells a poker opponent trying to bluff him, "Don't con me, man, I'm bullshit-proof," the theater goes up for grabs. It is Stewart, and the growing beat of desperation in his rotting lifestyle that carries this film over and across the backs of the lesser black exploitation films currently glutting the market with a wash of honky blood and brains blown out to verify black
machismo
.

Trick Baby
isn't
Sounder
or
Black Girl
or even
Lady Sings the Blues
, but it is just mean and tough enough to rip at the real world for 89 minutes and send you away knowing your time was well-spent.

Sleuth
is also fine. It isn't knockedout terrific the way
The Life and Times
of
Judge Roy Bean
is knockedout terrific, but it is so solidly put together one equates it with the English country manor house in which the action of the film takes place: sunk to its knees in the earth. Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier take turns outacting one another, with the former the Italo-English hairdresser having the affair with the wife and the latter the mystery novelist married to the wife, who has lured the former to his house to kill him. And if that sounds convoluted, it is only indicative of the Anthony Shaffer script, based on his hit stage play, which has more wrinkles than a Jack La Lanne reject. Set up in the form of the traditional Agatha Christie conundrum thriller, I would be a swine were I to unveil any of the plot. But director Joseph Mankiewicz has laid in one little goodie that
must
be brought to your attention. The name of the actress who plays the part of Marguerite is "Margo Channing." Toy with that in your skull for a while, and then you'll understand why you never heard of the actor who portrays Inspector Doppler. Beyond those clues, deponent sayeth not.