Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 6

Yet these are merely surface similarities. The two films are as dissimilar as Lolita and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, though both possess dirndl youth and femininity.

The dissimilarities of 2001 and Silent Running are infinitely more striking than their lookalikes: 2001 had no human characters with whom one could identify; Silent Running pivots on the character of Freeman Lowell, the last ecologist Earth ever produced. 2001 was heavily mystical; Silent Running is a myth anch.o.r.ed in materialism and realism, despite its fantascience trappings. 2001 was optimistic in the final a.n.a.lysis; Silent Running is a cautionary tale with a downbeat ending. 2001 was scientifically accurate (with only very minor errors) down to the last grommet and spanner; Silent Running makes no attempt to disguise its mythic qualities and the flaws in its physical sciences are numerous, consequently. Silent Running is essentially a romance, 2001 was not. There are more.

But the most important difference between the two films, from the standpoint of criticism, is that 2001 so stunned with its metaphysical and cinematic overkill that virtually nothing but "Oh wow!" is available to its audience after they have seen it (a common denominator for Kubrick films, from Paths of Glory through Spartacus to Dr. Strangelove and up to A Clockwork Orange); Kubrick is clearly a genius, well ahead of the game; while the makers of Silent Running are merely extraordinarily talented men, and the film can be commented upon rationally because it isn't that rara avis, the fever-dream of a Polanski, a Fellini or a Kubrick. It is susceptible to comment and criticism, it is flawed, it is-at core-more human than 2001. And for that reason is more valuable to students of speculative fiction in films than 2001 because it bears the marks of human hands, it speaks to trends, it casts illumination on the directions sf can take in films: 2001 does not. It is a special vision and cannot be duplicated; it can tell us little beyond the rare qualities of a Kubrick.

So, at last, fighting off the lemming-urge to comparison, we come to Silent Running which, like the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead, is very very good when it's good, and when it's bad ought to go and sit on a cuc.u.mber.

Blatantly-and to its disadvantage-it is a message film. It says: Don't kill off the forests. It says: We have to be more ecologically humane. It says: If we keep going the way we're going, we'll fulfill Joni Mitch.e.l.l's warning, "They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot." And the film says these now-all-too-familiar-yet-nonetheless-inescapably-true cliches just that nakedly. Making for some very difficult, pretentious speeches by the protagonist, played by Bruce Dern. It is a mark of Dern's acting expertise, and the exquisitely special quality he displays in the role of Lowell, that the speeches just manage to slide by without rasping the nerve-ends. But it's bad scripting.

More on Dern, and more on the script, later.

Shunting aside for the moment the plot-holes in which one could lose a cab rig and trailer, the story is an uncomplicated one. The last botanical specimens from an Earth devoid of vegetation (and I won't even comment on that wonky concept at this point) have been enclosed in enormous domes, have been attached to s.p.a.ce freighters, and have been orbited out near Saturn. Lowell and his three shipmates have been on the Valley Forge-one freighter in a large flotilla-for eight years, tending the forests and desert areas in each of the five geodesic domes. One day they receive the long-awaited message from the flagship that tells them the final dispensation of the botanical specimens. Not the recall Lowell was hoping for, the recall to return the vegetation to Earth where it would flower anew, but a message that delights the three jaded and bored shipmates: uncouple the domes, blow them out into s.p.a.ce and vaporize them with atomic charges. Lowell's buddies love the message because it means they're going home. Lowell is appalled. He has come to love the forest, its denizens, its foods he grows with his own hands and eats (to the amus.e.m.e.nt of his shipmates living off dried and fortified synthetics from the robochef onboard).

The others blow three of the domes, but when one of them comes to Lowell's forest to plant the charge, Lowell-carried away in a violent fit of survival in the name of the land-kills him. Lowell then blows the fourth dome with the other two caretakers trapped inside. It explodes and Lowell has committed triple murder to preserve the forest.

He then plays a game of duplicity with the flagship, advising those in charge that malfunctions aboard the Valley Forge make it impossible to jettison the final dome, and he thinks his companions were in one of the blown domes. Then he pirates the freighter and, kidnapping the forest dome, he plunges into the rings of Saturn to escape.

With the aid of a pair of memorable drone robots-one other was lost during the wild ride through Saturn's rings-Lowell "runs silent" through uncharted s.p.a.ce beyond Saturn, tending the forest, programming the drones to repair his injured leg, teaching them to play poker, and finally coming to grips with his horror at the murders he's done in the name of goodness.

Finally, Lowell is confronted with the situation of the forest dying. For moments a moviegoer dwells on the fascinating allegorical possibility that the corpse of the man Lowell killed, buried in the forest, has somehow poisoned Paradise. But it is merely that the freighter has sailed too far from the Sun, and the plants are unable to sustain the photosynthetic process needed to keep them healthy. At that point a search party from the flotilla, having been sent around Saturn in search of the Valley Forge, locates Lowell and advises him they're coming alongside to dock. Lowell rigs high-intensity lamps in the forest, tells the remaining drone robot that the responsibility for caring for the forest is now his, blows the dome into deep s.p.a.ce where, ostensibly, it will continue on its trajectory to infinity, and alone save for a crippled drone that has become his friend, he a.s.suages his guilt over the death of his companions by atomizing the freighter, thereby committing a kind of n.o.ble suicide.

Patently, the base story is ludicrous. Its errors in logic and science are horrendous. (When I approached director Trumbull, after the first time of the three on which I've seen the film, and asked him why in the world the simplest rules of physical science, rules known to every junior high Physics 101 student, were not observed-like, for instance, when the domes are jettisoned and exploded we hear the sounds in s.p.a.ce, when everyone knows s.p.a.ce is a vacuum and sound cannot be transmitted through a vacuum-he responded that they were telling a kind of "fable" and though they had dubbed the film originally without the misconceived soundtrack explosions, they felt an audience would prefer to have the sounds, it would make the whole thing seem more identifiable. I conceive of this as a dodge on Mr. Trumbull's part, a weak response intended to fend off a criticism that cannot be overlooked. But further, it is a pandering to early-1950s horror film misconceptions of the ways in which sf should be treated. It may have worked to hear rockets blasting in deep s.p.a.ce, to hear the sound of wind as meteors whizz by out there in the dead place between the stars, back in the moron days when Zsa Zsa Gabor was always a member of the first crew to the Moon, but 2001; Marooned; Forbidden Planet; Planet of the Apes; THX-1138; Charly; A Clockwork Orange; Colossus: The Forbin Project and a host of others have clearly taken us past such redneck errors in filmed sf.) The script is rife with such errors and skip-logic in basic construction: If all plant life had vanished on Earth, as the film advises us, the ecological chain would have been broken before anything could be saved; Man would have vanished early on, the rains would have ceased to fall, the oceans would have died, and the story would never have taken place.

Why orbit the freighters out by Saturn? The cost of shipping even the most essential items into s.p.a.ce would make the shipping of whole forests unfeasible by their incredible cost; and even if they could do it, orbiting around the Moon is far more logical than sending a whole flotilla out to Saturn. To what end? Why not Mars or Venus, closer in?

Our best astronomical information tells us that the rings of Saturn are only perhaps a dozen miles thick, flattened in their rotation around the planet by the enormous gravitational fields; further, the rings seem to be made up of ice particles. A s.p.a.cegoing vessel like the Valley Forge would have had to be going at least four or five miles per second, and would have pa.s.sed through the rings in a blink of the eye, rather than the minutes-long rapids-run Silent Running offers, though I freely grant the filmic twisting of astronomical realities made for good visuals.

Or, even granting the ship its journey, and taking the acceleration rate at a very conservative two miles per second, if it hit even a tiny particle, the impact would have torn the ship to flinders.

And how did the astronauts manage to keep walking around on the decks when the freighter was not spinning to induce artificial gravity? Why didn't everything float in free fall?

And how can we accept a science of Man advanced enough to accomplish the unbelievable feat of sending whole forests into s.p.a.ce that would also build a drone robot that would catch its "foot" in a strut and get ripped off the gantrywork of the freighter?

The holes are many and gigantic.

Yet the film succeeds. Somehow, despite all the idiot errors that could have been so easily avoided had Trumbull and producer Michael Gruskoff merely sought out the technical a.s.sistance of, say, Dr. Robert S. Richardson of the Palomar and Griffith Observatories, the film makes it. (Jesus, they needn't have even sprung for an expensive authority like Richardson. Any moderately competent sf writer could have saved them this embarra.s.sment. Even a hip sf fan could have poked holes easily filled during the scripting. But the scenarists, Deric Washburn & Mike Cimino and Steve Bochco were clearly inept choices, and on their heads rests most of the denigration of this film.) (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 a.s.sure 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 s.p.a.ce 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 c.u.mbersome 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 HARLAN ELLISON: SCREENING ROOM [1973].

1st INSTALLMENT 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, Hitchc.o.c.k'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 c.o.c.keyed 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 subst.i.tuting 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 embarra.s.sing. O'Toole's musical capabilities, light and frivolous and utterly beguiling in The Ruling Cla.s.s, are here strained far beyond the point of tolerance by those who know and admire Dale Wa.s.serman's musical play. Neither is it to scenarist Wa.s.serman'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 s.e.xist-appealing beauty, the better. Her singing is the pathetic burbling of a t.i.tmouse 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-cla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 l.u.s.t 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 G.o.ddamed 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 laoc.o.o.nian in his direction, Quincy Jones's music is ba.n.a.l, Al Lettieri overacts, Sally Struthers underacts, and Ali MacGraw can't act worth s.h.i.t. 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 c.r.a.p 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 s.h.i.t as has been released this year, and the horror and wonder of it, is that it came from such ma.s.sive 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 cliches of black films (after the first seventeen minutes, which are embarra.s.sing 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 bulls.h.i.t-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. .h.i.t 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.

Those who know my work and my nature will attest to the fact that I am hardly a flag-waving VFW style Amurrrican. But I confess to misty eyes and a swelling of the chest as I emerged from 1776, the Columbia Pictures version of Sherman Edwards's Broadway musical, as scripted by Peter Stone and directed by Peter Hunt. In this stylized and too-frequently cartoony interpretation of how the fathers of our country got around to signing the Declaration, there is a kernel of grandeur that not even Hollywood flashslam can wither. Friends who've seen the film look at me as though I fell off the Moon when I tell them I adored it. They cite to me the staginess, the fustian, the pomposity, the flaws without number. I don't care. In fact, if the truth be known, I don't give a d.a.m.n, Scarlett. It is a family picture with several moments-the young Union soldier's lament for the dead, John Cullum's slavery song-that stop the breath. It is the kind of film even revolutionary cynics like myself need to be drug to every once in a while, to remind us that as f.u.c.ked-up as we are today, once we were the first true democratic republic. It's something we need to be told from time to time, and this elegant film does it nicely, thank you. And no, dammit, I don't need a Kleenex, so get the h.e.l.l away from me.

Jeremiah Johnson is too long, Pete 'n' Tillie is absolutely great, I missed Hit Man and John Wayne's new one for Warners, The Train Robbers, is like listening to a long, bad joke for a mildly amusing punchline. It creaks with all of that 1942 "you're a man now, son, and you'll know it by not getting on your hoss like a sensible lad and hightailing it out of here when those twenty kill-crazed badmen come ridin' over the dune to blow your brains out" garbage. Ann-Margret is exquisite and does the best she can being really miscast; Rod Taylor is wasted; Ben Johnson is starting to get on my nerves with his grittiness; and Duke Wayne is . . . Duke Wayne. If you dig that sort of bulls.h.i.t, go see it; as for me, with the exception of True Grit, Wayne's last nine hundred films have gone through me like beets through a baby's backside.

Which brings me to the National General/First Artists flick, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, starring Tab Hunter, Stacy Keach, Anthony Zerbe, Tony Perkins, Ava Gardner, a buncha others, and them sensational bulue eyes of Paul Newman, what get upstaged by a bear in the most hilarious face off ever recorded for posterity. Bean is one of those flagellant flicks where they sit you down and keep beating you and you keeping saying don't stop. It goes on and on, and you wouldn't cut a minute of it. One of the d.a.m.nedest films you'll ever see. Keach, as Bad Bob, is the very last word to be said on mean gunfighters; Hunter is brief and brilliant as a hangee with a reluctance to be hanged; but that bear! He is a star; a furry, crotchety, lumbering, b.l.o.o.d.y star. I cannot urge you strongly enough to go delight yourself with Newman as Judge Roy Bean. It whips past at hurricane speed, spurred by John Milius's script and John Huston's superlative direction and, though one cannot detect the pa.s.sage of a thought in its semimindless madness, it is for all that a treat. A two-popcorn-box treat. It opens with a shootout, it ends with a shootout, and everything in between is pure fool's gold. What I mean, a treasure for the childlike in heart.

The Staff/January 19, 1973 2nd INSTALLMENT In 1970 I read Wally Ferris's novel, Across 110th. It was a tough and uncompromising naturalistic novel of underworld life in Harlem, not as good as Chester Himes's Coffin Ed Johnson-Grave Digger Jones books, but a direct lineal descendant of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson in terms of honesty and dealing with the pragmatic realities of omnipresent violence. It was an upfront piece of street fiction, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Consequently, I waited with some breath bating for the film version, having heard Anthony Quinn would be cast in the role of Detective Frank Sullivan (Mattelli in the film version), a role that promised to be his meatiest since Barabbas, Zorba and Conchis in The Magus in 1968. Trepidation a.s.sailed me when I learned Barry Shear was to be the film's director-I once worked on a film with Barry and I've followed his credits pretty closely since that time with, I must confess, a steadily increasing dismay with his film technique-and that Luther Davis would script from the novel. Mr. Davis's last film before this a.s.signment was the seriously flawed Lady in a Cage, ten years earlier; and nothing between except television, a vineyard guaranteed to dull the originality and vigor of even the most splendiferous of toilers. But I waited. Somehow, the prerelease screenings were denied me, G.o.d and the Motion Picture Producers a.s.sociation only know why. Then I read with joy Judith Crist's review in the 18 December issue of New York magazine wherein she lauded the film as a "ruthless, hard film that presents just the facts, ma'am-and does so with a slamming realism that makes this film something more than a Sat.u.r.day night entertainment special." Heartened, I sojourned to my Van Nuys nabe last night to catch Across 110th Street, top half of a bill that included one of my personal favorites, the undersold and much-denigrated The Wrath of G.o.d.

Thank goodness The Wrath of G.o.d was on that bill, because Across 110th Street was a total washout. A deceitful, dishonest, utterly unpaced and inept piece of violence for violence's sake, flensed of all logic and purpose, deaf to its own idiom, caked with cliche and devoid of any of the values to be found in the Ferris novel; a film that once again panders to the basest needs of the black audience, at the same time offering m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic release for our white liberal guilt.

The film tells the story of three down-at-the-heels Harlem blacks who rip off a co-op Mafia/Black policy bank and are thereafter stalked to death by their brothers, the Family and the fuzz. The accent, however, is placed upon the machinations of the mafiosi as they ham-handedly exploit the black underworld in ferreting out the heistmen; and while the two films bear little resemblance I could not help comparing Across 110th Street to Fritz Lang's M (recently seen again, for the nth time). Both films concern, in part, the efforts of an underworld apparat to locate criminals who are endangering their own security. In the case of M, a child killer, located by the safecrackers, robbers and beggars in Berlin's Threepenny Opera underground of the early Thirties. In 110th, the black Mafia hired hands of the policy/pills/prost.i.tution trinity. But where M paints an arresting portrait of the life and times of the era, however sordid and ominous, 110th skims across not only the streets but the sense of life in the Manhattan ghetto. The devilish pull of intensity and individuality in Harlem is subjugated to the fripperies of Technicolor bloodletting even Peckinpah has eschewed lately out of sheer familiarity, boredom and, yes, overkill. Black films like Sounder, Trick Baby and Top of the Heap have shown us ways in which the special world of the black experience can be viewed through anycolor eyes with the impartment of veracity and empathy. 110th takes the cop-out route into insensate cliche and the vile charnel houses that lie at the core of all our souls. It is the route of anti-art and anti-truth.

I don't know how much of this ugliness is attributable to Davis's script, but I do know that Shear has tried to steal the film by upstaging plot, characterization, good taste and artistic reserve with a camera the like of whose c.o.c.keyed vision has not been seen since the earliest moments of Richard Lester-Sidney Furie keyhole-peeping.

(An example, the better to ill.u.s.trate to those of you who wonder how film critics make their a.s.sessments of good or evil: in one scene the policy hoods have located the wife of the man whose car was used in the heist. They have her in an office in Harlem, sitting in a chair, and Tony Franciosa [brutal son-in-law of a Capo Mafioso] enters to question her. He walks to the desk, sits on it and leans far across in an unnatural posture, one hand on the telephone-which he never uses-forming a triangular hole through which the camera moves down and in to shoot through, framing the woman. It was clearly a staged motion, out of sync with the action in the room, ordered by the director to enable him to get an artsy-craftsy shot. Bad, because it was an unnecessary move by the actor, misleading because it directed the audience's attention to the phone which was never used, intrusive because it detracted from the tension intended to be built in the scene. It was Shear, saying, "Looka meeee!") As for the actors, no one was permitted freedom and consequently all seemed hamstrung. Quinn could have phoned in his part, so mannered and flaccid was he in his portrayal of the aging racist cop. Yaphet Kotto as his black opposite number on the force was wasted. And as for Anthony Franciosa, the best that can be said for his grimacing, strictured antics is that his brief marital liaison with Sh.e.l.ley Winters failed to rub off on him any of her talent . . . but all of her hysterical mannerisms.

United Artists' Across 110th Street is a deceitful, shallow, crazed production that will look, in retrospect, like precisely what it is: a venal attempt to rip off the cinematic needs of both blacks and whites in a transition period of film where honesty is desperately needed, but in which we are being fed unpalatable helpings of gore and other vittles that can by no stretch of the appet.i.te be considered soul food.

Steelyard Blues is an outrageously adroit high-wire act performed without a net over a terrain of orchestrated lunacy. Forget the direction by Alan Myerson, which is slovenly, fractious and framed with all the elan and artistry of a Super Bowl half-time ch.o.r.eographer. Ignore the screenplay by David S. Ward-and as a scenarist who contends the auteur theory and Bogdanovich suck just rewards from the screenplay, you will not often catch me saying ignore the screenplay-but ignore it this time: unless you're one of those freaks who enjoys unraveling the "world's most challenging crossword" from the Sunday Times of London. Ignore, in fact, everything but the performances of the princ.i.p.al cavorters in this buxom brouhaha. It is an actors' film, pure frolic from opening sequence of Trick Baby's Mel Stewart in a jail cell, spitting on Donald Sutherland . . . to final moments as Peter Boyle in gunslinger gear, sided by Jane Fonda, Sutherland, Garry Goodrow and John Savage, ride thataway over the horizon to the pocketa-pocketa sound of a chopper warming up for The Great Escape.

What plot there is consists of tracking Sutherland-as the slammer-p.r.o.ne, destruction-derby-loving brother of a politically upward-mobile district attorney-across an urban landscape of junkyards, rooftops, hooker-festooned doorways, lion s.h.i.tladen zoo cages and highways from which Goodrow tries to taxi a rattletrap PBY amphibian. Sutherland, as Jesse Veldini, is superlative; he mugs and dimples and beams with all the ingenuousness of Puck from the Comic Weekly, caught in the act of going down on Tinker Bell. His Veldini as societal outlaw plays vividly against the manic counterpoint of Howard Hesseman, absolutely perfect as the toothy D.A. brother, Frank . . . and it is a moth's wing contrast that writes the very last word on ugly sibling rivalries . . . or didn't you catch the name-play of "Frank" and "Jesse"?

Ms. Fonda melds the tastiest elements of her roles in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Klute to bring forth the character of Iris, happy hooker and ex-paramour of the erratic Veldini with a subtlety as strong as the best jazz ba.s.s line, and a graciousness that says watch Boyle and Sutherland, I'll be here when you get back.

One marvelous exchange between Sutherland and Fonda goes like this: Fonda: "When are you going to stop thinking being a criminal is glamorous, Veldini?"

Sutherland: "I'm not a criminal, I'm an outlaw."

Fonda: "What's the difference?"

Sutherland (realistically): "I dunno."

But it's Peter Boyle (see accompanying interview) who pulls off the caper. His creation of Eagle, escapee from a lunatic asylum, ex-human fly, man of many schizoid incarnations, is a breathtaker. If he gets overlooked for an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting, may G.o.d strike the Academy members with bolts of lightning in their hardening arteries. He has to be watched every moment, like an IRT dip, as he becomes the hooded human fly, a carpenter, a mad dog, the 1950s pinball greaser, the platinum-wigged airline captain, and even (with one lightning line) a Bogart surrogate. He is simply remarkable. Joe was memorable, The Candidate was masterful, but as Eagle he emerges as one of the best all-around actors this country has produced since Robert Blake. In all the subcutaneous ways that keep a movie fresh in the mind years after it's faded from the screen . . . it is his film.

Clearly, the actors had a romp. They whirl and spin and do a dervish number that those weary of Burton/Brando deep breathing and boundaryless blood-baths will applaud. In short, in Steelyard Blues Warner Bros. has a rare joy, sui generis, and is one of the happiest ways to spend an evening in many months.

It was a lean two weeks for screenings, otherwise I wouldn't inflict this one on you; however, a word to the wise might save you a couple of wasted hours of TV watching on 21 February when ABC-TV's Wednesday Movie of the Week presents Lee Remick starring in And No One Could Save Her.

What hag-demon possesses networks like ABC, or production companies like England's Robert Stigwood Organization, compelling them to proffer such pallid floral bouquets as this, their first cooperative venture into filmed-for-TV movies?

Surely no one connected with this dreary little "thriller" could have held any illusions about the freshness of the plot as concocted by Anthony Skene (a gentleman who ought to have his wits, as well as his pencils, sharpened): Fern, heiress, has been married six months to Sam, a devilishly handsome broth of an Irish lad, who works for the Boston branch of the London Bank. One day he receives a cable, your father is dying. He splits for Ireland. Fern, who has a history of emotional breakdowns, starts to get twitchy when he doesn't call. Finally she flies to Eire (for no logical reason save the show would have ended after five minutes had she not) to track him down. No records of Sam. He isn't who he said he was. Plot complications ensue-devoid of logic or inevitability but simply programmed out of coincidence at the whim of the plot-manipulators-and finally we discover Sam is some species of Blarney-enriched gigolo, thrown out of prep school for "getting a girl in trouble," womanizing through young manhood, making ends meet by making ends meet with wealthy ladies on tour boats, married already.

That's right, you've got it: marrying Fern, the cable, running off . . . it was all a plot so Sam could get Fern's money when she killed herself out of hysteria and grief at his loss. But when she doesn't (as chancy a piece of plotting as one could wince at witnessing in an adult drama), he decides to do her in himself. Fern is saved. Sam falls to his death. Fadeout.

The definitive statement of this arthritic plot was Gaslight, and that was 1944. A hundred thousand potboiler "gothics" and "women's novels" have celebrated it ad nauseum. Every hack writer and hack producer who didn't want to spend the location budget for a hack western or hack war epic has redone this story till only the most culturally deprived and cinematically naive viewer fails to spot it within moments of the opening credits. It is a fool's game, and one even ABC should be above playing . . . at least publicly.

Lee Remick, as Fern, is her usual somnambulistic self, wandering through yet another eminently forgettable nonperformance; Milo O'Shea plays a Dublin attorney named (of course) Dooley with such overblown affectation it becomes more parody than portrayal-a hysterical mismatching of unequal parts Brendan Behan and drunken leprechaun; Jennie Linden, she of Women in Love, flashes onscreen too briefly, and has been dealt too mundane a role, to remain long in the memory; everyone else serves as shadows.

There is the stench of corrupted Abbey Players technique throughout, and only the camera lingering lovingly on sites and vistas of Dublin prevents this reviewer from suggesting the lynch rope for all concerned. Yet even the pleasures of watching a travelogue behind Ms. Remick's ghostlike peregrinations is not enough to succor us against the idiot script. It is a waste of time, an utter waste of time.

And to return to the original question, why does ABC cast all the way to England for a production company whose inept.i.tude and ba.n.a.lity of product can easily be matched by our own, home-grown schlock outfits?

Leave it to the traditionally last-running network to avoid all the talented filmmakers overseas and grasp with both hands the overseas equivalents of the Quinn Martin/Aaron Spelling dreck-makers. ABC takes the lead at last . . . in the importation of offscourings.

The Staff/February 16, 1973 A SORT OF AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER BOYLE.

What comes to mind first is: Why should anyone grant an interview?

The answer is a simple one, most of the time: To promote a property. If it's an author, the current book on the stalls. If it's a public figure, it's the career, the image, the upcoming trial, the political position. If it's an actor, the soon-to-be-released film he or she is contractually obligated to hype. If it's a fanatic, clearly it's the need to be seen, to be heard, to be noticed.

But in the case of any of the above who can be termed "together," what is the impetus?

Letting an interview, if it's done properly, can only serve to unveil the inner soul of the celebrity. (Done at the usual level of interviews it remains little more than movie fanmagazine frippery, gossip, press release PR puff bulls.h.i.t.) And who, among all thinking, feeling celebrities, wishes the soul unveiled? Masochism notwithstanding, it becomes an exercise in futility for interviewer and interviewee.

To do an interview properly, the writer must hang out with the subject for a period of time, to get the feel of lifestyle, to see the subject when he or she exists in unguarded moments, to find a thematic hook on which to hang a piece that will burn with veracity and insight. At least that is the method I've found workable; the only method.

For in each interview I've done (and because of the time and outlays of personal energy involved I've purposely done only a few in my seventeen years as a professional) there has come a moment, an instant in time, in which I've been able to see directly to the core of the subject. At least, in my arrogance and pride in craft, I believe I've seen that burning core. It came in the high desert beyond Thousand Palms, in 120 heat with Steve McQueen; it came in a noisy nightclub in Texas watching Jackie Wilson perform as I got the key to my piece on Three Dog Night; it was in the death cell at San Quentin when I perceived the parameters of the insane equation called Ronald Fouquet.

But short of such commitments, it seems to me virtually impossible to come back from a subject's world and ambience with anything but superficialities. All one gets is an encounter with the subject's public face. One asks questions one hopes are no more ba.n.a.l and familiar than those asked by a thousand other interviewers on the publicity circuit; one tries to establish a reality with the subject in hopes he or she will identify and reveal something fresh and meaningful; one prays for the moment of unconscious revelation.

In a one-hour luncheon conversation, with a studio publicity man in attendance, nothing can be gained. There is enrichment neither for celebrity nor for interviewer, and hence, no enrichment for readers of the interview.

So the second question is: Why did you go to interview Peter Boyle?

The answer is twofold. First, and quite honestly foremost, I wanted to meet and possibly make friends with Boyle. There are a few people whom one sees from afar, who seem to have a reality, a substance to them that demands acquaintanceship. It's a presumption, of course, on a moral par with calling a studio casting director to introduce you to a beautiful girl you've seen in a film. It's intrusion. But acceptable, within limits, because the studio and the celebrity are seeking promotion. There is a semisquamous give-and-take, a bargaining, an exchange of services.

I, the undersigned, wanted to meet Peter Boyle, for my own selfish needs of friendship.

But the second reason is how I justified it. Boyle-as my review of Steelyard Blues accompanying this article reveals-is, in my estimation, one of the finest actors this country has produced in the last twenty years. And so, give-and-take again, I would trade my need to meet Boyle for a (I hoped) informative and revealing piece on a talent worthy of attention.

That is why I went to meet Boyle and Warner Bros. press representative Vernon White for lunch at the Aware Inn, in the Valley.

What came out of that hour is very little.

I hasten to confess the fault was mine, neither Boyle's nor White's. Knowing what I've said above to be true about quick interviews, I should have either advised them I was not going to write a piece on Boyle, or committed the time to following along behind the actor for a day or so, circ.u.mstances permitting. But I did neither, and so herewith offer what few perceptions I did come up with, hence terming them a "sort of" an interview.

(And being painfully conscious of how me-oriented such half-a.s.sed non writing can be, I'm reminded of the terrible and dishonest piece Rex Reed once wrote for Esquire-a terrible and dishonest magazine-on Warren Beatty. Reed could not get his interview, was put off, was shunted from PR man to PR man and finally did a hatchet-job on Beatty to the tune of how put-upon he, Reed, had been in H*O*L*L*Y*W*O*O*D. I swear to you I will try to avoid such calumny in this article, but be compa.s.sionate.) The studio limousine was parked at the curb on Ventura Boulevard, the chauffeur pacing up and down, all the signs that this was but one more quick-stop on the flurrying radio and TV interview circuit, to be dispensed with as quickly as possible so the star could be whisked off to his next nameless stop. I was already late for the lunch and I felt no more secure on arrival than a sinner at the Big Gate.

Boyle and White were seated at a table near the window and the introductions were about par: White effusive out of some familiarity with my work and the needs of his job, Boyle pleasant but reserved, waiting to see what this encounter held.

We began circling each other.

Boyle doesn't look like a bird-he's round and balding and somatotypically Everyman-ish-but his movements are birdlike: bright-eyed, beaky, sharp and quick. That was my first impression: that he was avian, hanging miles above the world, tracking the pa.s.sage of his dinner far below. Subsequent conversation proved it to be a not inaccurate observation on my part; the part of Eagle in Steelyard Blues could not have gone to a more perfect player.

Boyle is much more Eagle than ever he was Joe.

I handed each of them a copy of the review of the film. They read it quickly. "You're wrong about the script," Boyle said. "Ninety percent of what you saw on the screen was in that script." That stopped me. I'd gone out on a limb in the review, for the first time suggesting the actors had had more to do with a film's success than the usually unsung writer.

"Even the changes of costume, the human fly business, that Marlon Brando takeoff? That was in the script?" I couldn't be that wrong.

"All in the script."

At moments like that I regretted I wasn't a drinker.

"Even the scene where I was dressed as a carpenter, that was in the script." He needn't have rubbed it in. "The walking through the window, even the gla.s.s-chewing, that was all written." The man had no mercy. "I did the mugging behind the window and the barking like a dog, but just about everything else you saw the writer gave us." I had visions of rewriting the review to avoid looking like a schmuck, at least to myself. Then I looked up from my note pad at Boyle. He was smiling.

Under that scruffy mustache was a gentle smile; and only for a moment did I see where the altered angle of that smile might become the expression of a psychotic racist named Joe or a n.o.ble lunatic named Eagle. Boyle meant nothing by the smile, probably didn't even know he was wearing it. He was merely pa.s.sing time, talking a little small talk, fulfilling his obligation to the company store.

We rambled on together, pa.s.sing each other in conversation, touching briefly at points where informational-load was transshipped: though the cameras didn't linger on them, the posters in Eagle's room in the nuthouse were Boyle's idea, tokens of the human fly's att.i.tude toward life . . . Meher Baba, a smiling Don't Worry face, the Amazing Spider-Man; the order in which he'd made films since Joe . . . T. R. Baskin, The Candidate, Steelyard Blues, and the unreleased Slither, Dime Box and The Friends of Eddie Coyle; one of his heroes, someone he wanted to meet . . . Myron Nelson of Boise, Idaho, a man who rescues wounded birds and befriends them, everything from blind eagles to clawless hawks. I listened hard; time was running away from our hour, and I had the feeling we might never pa.s.s this way again.

I asked him about acting. About being Joe and what had followed. He sketched at stories of encounters, of casual horrors with those who had seen him as Joe and admired him, of those who had seen him as Joe and despised him. Of the few who had realized he was simply an actor playing a role. Of the night he had appeared on the Johnny Carson show and come to the realization that he wasn't there to be interviewed as Peter Boyle, the actor, but to perform as Joe, as some kind of primitive entertainment. "It was a shock. For a long time after Joe I couldn't play any violent roles. I was offered scripts, some of them excellent, but I couldn't do it. That was a bad time for me. Joe was the pure pre-Fascist man, straight out of Reich's The Ma.s.s Psychology of Fascism. Did you ever read it?"

I looked back at him, pen poised over note pad. "Is that Wilhelm or Theodor?" He made a little birdlike move with his head and looked at me differently. I think he knew.

"No, I never read it," I said.

For an instant we were playing with each other, the way two men who secretly fancy themselves intellectuals play with each other. One, two, riposte and retreat. Then I had his public face again.

Thoughts on acting: "I act the way Mies van der Rohe talked about 'less is more.' An actor has to let himself be watched. I sit here and let the walls watch me, the chair watch me, the table watch me." I stared at him like a bird. I have never understood what actors were talking about when they got into all that "s.p.a.ce" and "less is more" talk. It seems to make them feel good, though. I just report it.

There wasn't much more. We parted, and he took a couple of my books with him. I hope they don't wind up with the Gideon Bible in a dresser drawer in some Midwestern city on his next PR stop for the film. I didn't get my hook or my burning insight. At one point I thought I did, but when I got back to the typewriter I couldn't make it hang together. It had something to do with public faces, with masks, and about how much tougher it must be for Boyle to project those masks. They keep casting him as loonies of one sort or another, but he's apparently a simple and direct man, a good actor, and neither a Joe nor an Eagle at heart. But then again, all I had lunch with was a polite public face, a gentle and intelligent mask, so I have no way of knowing.

And lacking that knowledge, I can form no opinions.