Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 7

Perhaps that's as it should be. Perhaps Boyle is having it just the way he wants it. Lautrec once ventured, "One should never confuse the artist with the art." Perhaps Boyle understands that to remain a private person he must present the pleasant, public face and by the magician's misdirection of a talented actor force those who would go beyond the performances to the performer, to settle for the better part of Boyle: his on-screen portrayals. Perhaps interviewers ought to mind their own G.o.ddam business and leave audiences to simmer in their own morbid curiosity. Perhaps all there ever was and all there will be of Peter Boyle is what he offers us in darkened theaters.

But never again, a fake lunch under false pretenses.

The Staff/February 16, 1973 3rd INSTALLMENT Cinematically, the most stunning thing happening currently is the cycle of New Hungarian Cinema on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Circ.u.mstances conspired to prevent an earlier broadside for this exceptional series of films, thus killing your chances to see the first three programs, but tonight (Friday 23 February) and tomorrow you can catch the fourth, fifth and sixth bills; the seventh and eighth next weekend. If you never listen to me again, do yourself a favor and cancel whatever else you have going, and don't miss this rich and bewilderingly varied testament to the health and muscularity of the Hungarian film industry.

To whet your imagination let me tell you about the first two films in the cycle, one a fourteen-minute short of almost heartbreaking insight and Kafkaesque surrealism, the other a dream feature that reminds one of the first bold uses of color by Fellini and Ophuls.

Student Love is the short film. The story is deceptively simple . . . one of those ideas that seems so obvious upon viewing, one wonders why it has never been done before: a rural movie house, the audience spa.r.s.e, a film of saccharine, adolescent romance. Suddenly the film breaks. The lights go up. The audience waits patiently a few minutes, then begins clapping, jeering, demanding satisfaction. From the shadows emerge first a silent woman who stares back at them: the a.s.sistant manager. Then the manager. Nothing can be done. The film cannot be repaired. They will be given pa.s.ses to come back the next night. We want our money. We will give you pa.s.ses. But the film tomorrow night will be a different film . . . we want our money . . . or we want to see the end of the film!

A semi-obese woman of middle years suddenly appears and says, "I will tell you how the movie ends." The audience is intrigued. They put a chair up on the stage in front of the blind screen. And the old woman begins telling how the film ends. But it is not the idyllic love story the audience wanted. It slowly turns into a nightmare of loss and shame and degradation. The woman's face is a special wonder, gentle readers. It cannot be described here with even the remotest accuracy. Pressed to explain the face and the expressions that consume it as she tells her heartbreaking story, I would use metaphor, and make references to the patina of sorrow left in the character lines of the face of one who has lost youth, lost expectations, but not lost dreams. Could the story the woman is telling not be the unseen film but a paradigm for her own life? One is not told. The audience rejects the ending, tries to retell it for itself . . . the short ends enigmatically, the old woman still sitting on the stage, the audience unsettled, having undergone a disturbing experience.

And by extension we, the other audience, have undergone a doubly disturbing experience. In fourteen short minutes director Gyorgy Szomjas and the film's scenarist (whose name, sadly, sadly, is unknown to me) have compelled us to re-examine the act of moviegoing. We have not been permitted-as the audience in the film has not been permitted-to go merely for escapism. We have been drawn into the vortex of life and its pain, its unutterable anguish. Moviegoing is traditionally a fleeing from the real world into fantasy realms. Go to the movie and forget your cares for two hours. But not this time. In fourteen minutes the condition of sorrow and loss has been laid open and it is our own viscera we see.

If by the above you perceive that this short film made its mark on your reviewer, more than even the longer and more technically adroit feature with which it was shown . . . you perceive correctly.

I have no idea if this film will be released commercially in Los Angeles, but if it isn't, stalk it across the world. Find it. See it. You will not soon forget it.

By comparison, the full-length feature Sinbad that accompanied Student Love fares well-for it is a visual and sensual cinematic revel, a celebration of diffused colors-but only because it is such an evocative piece of film art.

A lesser effort would have been washed from the memory instantly before the potency of that little black-and-white, fourteen-minute wonder.

But Sinbad is a stream-of-consciousness journey through the last moments of a dying roue's memories . . . a gallery of a thousand brilliantly-pigmented paintings. The women he loved, the places he moved through, the meals he ate, the emotional crises he survived, the billions of false sentiments he used to put his victims on their backs. Each one lovingly examined with an incredible visual eye that glances quickly but misses no detail, each one turned in the imagination like a faceted jewel, seen from many angles, returned to in the mind's view again and again . . . without genuine understanding but rich in the detritus of memory. Like the marrow bone Sinbad eats in one exquisite series of scenes, the memories of this Don Juan's affairs never seem to be wholly emptied of their aftertaste. There is always a bit of succulence to be savored.

Director/writer Zoltan Husarik, forty-one years old and offering this as his first motion picture effort, reveals himself to be a man with the talent to expand the film form: his use of color is breathtaking, startling, variegated and unforgettable; his story seems jumbled, erratic, non-cohesive, but when the film ends one realizes there was coherency in totality. One leaves the theater having seen into the smoldering, remorseless core of a certain sort of human being.

And if one accepts Faulkner's statement " . . . the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat" as the truth, then the gift of Husarik is a precious and invaluable one.

Again, this reviewer has no idea whether after its museum tour this film (and the others) will be released commercially, but if the opportunity ever presents itself to see Sinbad, you miss it at your own risk of loss.

Michael Webb and Ronald Haver of the L.A. County Museum of Art's film program department are to be commended for their courage and foresight in bringing this outstanding cultural and entertainment cycle to our city. They've already been rewarded with three weeks of sellout audiences (making your efforts to gain admittance that much more difficult), but for the film buff seeking enrichment beyond escapism, there is no reward great enough.

Go, at once! Get tickets for the remaining programs. You will thank me for chivvying you.

Along with our sense of societal self-loathing, concomitant with our shame at racism, inhumanity, warmongering and profligacy, we the American people have recently been l.u.s.ting after films about amoral anti-heroes. As if we were seeking, in visual explications of the utterly amoral and despicable, some catharsis: a release from the awfulness of our own corrupt natures by examinations of fictional counterparts incredibly more debased than ourselves through the logistics of fantasy manipulation. Some of these films have become cla.s.sics: Hud, A Clockwork Orange, Little Mother, The G.o.dfather: because they were made with Art and Understanding. Others, as The Unholy Rollers, The Getaway and The King of Marvin Gardens, have failed-however interestingly-because they chose to deal with the superficial, sensational aspects of that exhibited amorality.

The latest in the genre of loathsome flicks-and I don't want to overlook McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Hammersmith Is Out, which former I hated and latter I adored-is a very interesting nightmare from Cinerama Releasing under the t.i.tle Payday.

Starring the too-seldom-seen Rip Torn as country & western semistar Maury Dann, the film was written by Don Carpenter, whose 1966 novel, Hard Rain Falling, should be familiar to you. It was directed with a firm hand by Daryl Duke and marks the producing debut of jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason. In arresting supporting roles Ahna Capri, Cliff Emmich, Jeff Morris and Frazier Moss-most of which are names you may not know but ought to remember-add tone and expertise as solid background to Torn's bravura performance.

When I call this a "loathsome" film, I want you to understand I'm not talking about the quality or entertainment levels of the production, which are high; I'm talking about the philosophy presented as the viewpoint of the central character. He is a swine. An utterly amoral, mean and despicable swine whose sycophantic fans long for nothing more than to be f.u.c.ked and/or f.u.c.ked-over by him. I mean, when you're watching a film about a segment of show biz, and the most likeable dude in sight is a road manager, for Christ's sake, you know you're observing a barnyard full of genuine slop-swillers!

The plot is a rambling one, moving through two days in the road tour life of Maury Dann and culminating with "payday." During those two days the filmgoer is treated to an intimate evisceration of the squamous lifestyle of a contemporary G.o.d, one of the uncrowned American n.o.bility-the musical idol. (And having traveled with The Rolling Stones and Three Dog Night, I can a.s.sure those naive few of you who've never been to a rock concert, that the brutal meat-into-meat couplings, the ravenous groupies, the sudden maniac-flashes of anger and violence, the constant stench of machismo exhibited in this nice nice script are far from exaggeration.) The power of utter adoration with which popular musicians are gifted by their vampiric followers forces even the most gentle and ethical into att.i.tudes of callousness and brutality. For those who are already twisted . . . it is a blank check to demean other human beings and develop a messianic view of the entire human race.

G.o.d knows it isn't a new story; we've seen it to telling effect in Citizen Kane, A Face in the Crowd, The Great Man and other fables, but it is a story that needs to be told again and again, a lesson that needs to be relearned (apparently) with every change in cultural mores.

This latest incarnation is a healthy one, and Rip Torn as Maury Dann will chill you to the spine. Ahna Capri as his toothsome little trollop-of-the-moment gives the best performance of her spotty career and is only less horrifying because she has less power in Dann's ego-world. There are special scenes that leap from the screen with telling impact: a moral blackmail encounter with a rural dj, a fight scene culminating in a kind of murder, and a scene following the slaughter in which Torn purifies himself by creating a country tune so sickly-sweet it could give you diabetes.

But it is the overriding miasma of loathsomeness that makes Payday a memorable film. It is a despicable film, in the most positive senses of the word. Positive, in that it holds up the mirror of life and wrenches us around by the hair, and demands, "Look at yourself!"

It is a vision only the most honest will admit has veracity. For the others . . . merely purgative.

Bud Yorkin has produced and directed a swell film going under the t.i.tle The Thief Who Came to Dinner. It is swell. It is dandy. It will make you smile. It will produce wonders before your very eyes such as Ryan O'Neal actually acting, Jacqueline Bisset actually becoming invisible, Warren Oates actually getting a chance to show his stuff and-oh oh what an and-the remarkable, sensational, bewildering, blindingly talented Austin Pendleton stealing an entire motion picture away from the heavymoney stars.

Walter Hill's screenplay of the Warner Bros. caperflick has O'Neal as a former Establishment computerschlepp who decides as long as everyone is stealing from everyone else under the mantle of Big Business, he will become an independent operator. And to the strains of Henry Mancini music that is ultimately interchangeable with the score he wrote for Charade, O'Neal becomes "the chess burglar," a second-storey cat who leaves a chess piece and a note describing his next gambit at the scene of his high society ripoffs.

Oates is his Inspector Javert, an insurance d.i.c.k with a stiff neck and an unbendable ethic. And for the first time in more films than I care to consider, someone has turned Oates loose. To telling effect. He is a pillar of strength throughout the film. But it is the character actors who enrich this pudding: Jill Clayburgh as O'Neal's former wife, so true and right in one touching scene that you can hear the ganglia of your familiarity mechanism tw.a.n.ging; pudgy Ned Beatty as the fence; Deams, locked in partnership with Gregory Sierra as his Chicano side-boy; Dynamite . . . each of them rising above the briefness of their parts to carve themselves forever in the cliff-face of your memory; and Austin Pendleton as the chess editor of the Dallas newspaper . . .

Oh my. Austin Pendleton ought to be on exhibit in the Smithsonian. He is a national treasure. People ought to come pouring out of the studios and bury him in money to make film after film, starring Pendleton as whatever he wants to be. He is so good, it's like the first time you saw Falk act, or the best evening you ever spent with George C. Scott, or the moment when you realized Lee Grant could act any other cinematic lady she chose under the table. Austin Pendleton is a winged wild wonder, and Bud Yorkin has had the good sense and good taste to let him gambol freely.

It is a h.e.l.luvan evening's entertainment, and if you don't find yourself applauding and cheering the ending, have yourself fitted for daisy-s.p.a.ce at Forest Lawn . . . you're neck-upward dead.

And I know you're going to think I've been bought off with nothing but rave reviews in this column, but what the h.e.l.l can I do? Last time two out of three were s.h.i.t, this time all four are sensational. It runs that way. So just shrug and accept the rolls of the dice as I launch into my final rave, in celebration of MGM, director Richard Sarafian, scenarists Rodney Carr-Smith & Sue Grafton, and a group of memorable players headed by Rod Steiger, Robert Ryan, Kiel Martin, Katherine Squire, Scott Wilson, Ed Lauter, Jeff Bridges and a sparrow named Season Hubley, all of whom have formed an unparalleled artistic gestalt to bring forth Lolly-Madonna x.x.x. (You can read that: Lolly-Madonna kiss kiss kiss.) I don't want to tip the plot too much, save to advise you it is a terrifying story of mounting violence between two present-day Tennessee hill families, a feud film, if you will, but one that far outstrips the usual Hatfield-McCoy nonsense cityfolk conceive of as representing rustic animosities.

Steiger and Ryan play the heads of inimical households, and Wilson, Timothy Scott, Lauter, Bridges, Martin, Gary Busey, and Paul Koslo play the various siblings. Randy Quaid also plays one of the sons, and Joan Goodfellow plays the lone daughter. Their performances require special note, of which more later.

There is so much to say about this film, it is sui generis, I hesitate to say much more than don't miss it. But thoroughness compels me to note that the sole jarring note in the film is Steiger, toward the end of the story, whose thespian mannerisms rankle and attack the carefully-woven skein of everyone else's non-Hollywood performances. Scott Wilson is by turns brutally effective and soul-wrenchingly pathetic; Ed Lauter is simply superlative as Hawk and he brings off a death scene that a lesser actor would have found beyond him; Ryan is understated, totally in control of his characterization, and continues to be one of the masters of his craft, as worthy a player as has ever been ignored by the vagaries of a fickle industry; Season Hubley, in her virgin outing feature-wise, functions with charm and individuality as the catalyst of the feud, the girl who is taken for the mythical Lolly-Madonna-and after the many skin-exposures of esthetically disastrous bodies such as that of Glenda Jackson's, it is a pleasure to gaze upon Ms. Hubley in the buff; but now we come to Joan Goodfellow (Robert Ryan's 16-year-old daughter) and Randy Quaid.

Ms. Goodfellow plays Sister K, a breast-heavy country girl of simple desires and thwarted dreams. She is the only character in the film whom we know for certain escapes the debacle of the Feather-Gutshall Families' charnel house. Her performance is skillful and highly promising of a long and honorable career. The rape scene in which Lauter and Wilson taunt and finally toss her is a directorial and acting masterpiece; Ms. Goodfellow manages to convey all the terror and bravery of a bird stalked by ruthless hunters. I commend her to your attention.

And Mr. Quaid, as the r.e.t.a.r.ded Finch, is so awfully good you will find yourself clenching your fists, rocking back and forth with empathy, marveling at how one so young could know so much about the torment of the human condition.

I will say no more about Mr. Quaid, save to add that if there were nothing else in this film to recommend it, his performance alone would be worth the price of admission.

Lolly-Madonna x.x.x is neither a happy film, nor an easy one to forget. It is one of the most obstinately compelling films I've ever seen, and a credit to all involved.

This is your week to go to the movies: the treasures are littered everywhere, from the mansions of Dallas to the hills of Tennessee. If you have a dull week, it's your own fault; I told you where to go.

The Staff/March 2, 1973 4th INSTALLMENT So this schlepp wakes up in a hospital bed and the doctor leans over him and grins and says, "Mr. Traupman, I have some bad news for you . . . and some good news for you."

And Traupman, wincing, says, "Give me the bad news first, Doc."

And the doctor says, "Well, we had to amputate both your feet . . . " and Traupman breaks down and starts to cry piteously.

And when he gets hold of himself, snuffling tragically, he says, "Wh-what's the good news?"

And the doctor says, "The gentleman in the next room wants to buy your slippers."

Ugh.

Which brings me to the film reviews. I have some bad news for you, and I have some good news for you.

The bad news is Lady Caroline Lamb. The good news is Slither and The Long Goodbye. And just plain news is I Love You Rosa, which is neither good nor bad, but just is.

(The really bad news, like an incurable case of the pox, is Clint Eastwood's new flick, High Plains Drifter, which I saw but ain't allowed to talk about till release date April 6th; but two weeks from now, when I emerge from the primordial slime once again, I'll devote an entire column to that little bundle of charm. Watch for it; I don't get killing angry very often, but when I do it makes for juicy nibbling.) Anyhow. Lady Caroline Lamb. Out of United Artists by way of The Edge of Night. Midwife at the Caesarean, Robert Bolt-he of A Man for All Seasons, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago-who wrote and directed. And a b.l.o.o.d.y birth it is, indeed indeed. Disastrous. Better a two-headed calf.

Where to begin, oh Lord, where to begin? Jon Finch-he of Polanski's wretched Macbeth-as William Lamb, M.P. (That's Member of Parliament, not Military Police: this is a costume drawmuh of Regency England.) No. Begin with (giggle snicker) Richard Chamberlain as Lord Byron (tee hee t.i.tter), his eyes dripping with kohl. No. Sarah Miles, her gnome's mouth wrenching and contorting more hideously than even Jennifer Jones's mouth at its most histrionic . . . Miles of mouth as Lady Caroline Bird, Chicken, Thing, whatever . . . ! No!

Not to begin at all. To ignore. To pretend that Bolt was denied access to his wife's bed-Ms. Miles is wife to Mr. Bolt, you see-until he cobbled up this historically wayward and artistically hebephrenic lacrimulae amphora. To forget that even the most talented, most heroic among us occasionally go bananas with a Fulton's Folly. To warn the unwary that this is what used to be called-in pre-lib days-a "woman's movie." To catalogue words like tearjerker, childish, simplistic, dishonest, tedious, portentous, laughable, ludicrous, silly spectacular and bathetic, with hopes that no one will be unwise enough to defy the endless b.u.m reviews this overblown satin-bag of trash has garnered for itself. To end with a weary shake of the head. To move on to the good news. At a dead run.

Or, more appropriately, to move on with a SLITHER.

Which has got to be the world's longest, funniest Polack joke.

The characters are named Kopetzky, Fenaka, Kanipsia . . . and what they are engaged in here is a kind of orchestrated berserkoid behavior that must have caused the bank that put up the money for its filming many a sleepless night. MGM didn't release this film, as the saying goes, it escaped. Directed by Howard Zieff, written by W.D. Richter, photographed by the brilliant Laszlo Kovacs (another Polanie), Slither is what Cornell Woolrich would have written had he been reborn as Donald Westlake. It's one of those "no one ever found the embezzled money" yarns, but beyond that point of departure the landscape ceases to be terra familiaris and instantly becomes Cloud-Coo-coo-Land.

d.i.c.k Kanipsia-James Caan-gets out of the slammer after doing a stretch for car boosting, takes pause for a beer at the home of a con sprung along with him, and seven minutes into the film his ex-cellmate gets machine-gunned to death before Caan's eyes. Then Caan hides in the cellar of the house as his riddled buddy tells him there's this boodle of loot and "no one ever found the embezzled money," so he should go to such and such a town and look up Barry Fenaka and tell him "the name is Vincent Palmer." Down cellar slithers Caan, and his buddy pulls a bouquet of TNT out of an old trunk and blows the house to flinders. Next day Caan comes up out of the root cellar and starts thumbing his way to Barry Fenaka. Except he's being followed by this huge motorvan all flat-black and ominous (whose appearance onscreen is invariably accompanied by the kind of Sat.u.r.day morning serial music you knew meant the bad guys were coming). And Caan gets picked up by this dingdong post-Flower Power freakette played by Sally Kellerman in her most manic phase, a freakette who, when they stop for lunch, for no particular reason, decides to armed rob the lunch counter. And then . . .

Oh, h.e.l.l, why spoil it for you. There's the incomparable Peter Boyle as Barry Fenaka, resplendent as a Polish emcee with cornucopial lore about rec-V's, and his entire terrific collection of Big Band sides transferred to tape. There's Allen Garfield as Vincent J. Palmer, adding another chunky characterization to the store of memorables that are rapidly causing him to be recognized as a character player in the grand tradition. There's crazy Sally Kellerman in cutoffs, batty as a hundred battlefields, stealing every scene Caan doesn't use a big stick to beat her away from.

There's wildness and weirdness and some of the funniest sight gags since Chaplin's Modern Times; there's dialogue that you'll miss because you'll be convulsed with laughter from the one that just whizzed past; there's a lunatic celebration of systematized madness; and the emblematic line is delivered by Caan when he tells Sally Kellerman she'll like living in these here parts because, "Everybody's crazy."

Slither is not to be missed. It's not often you get to see what certifiable nuts can do when they're turned loose with cameras.

And if Slither sounds too wild for you to tackle cold turkey, you can go at it slantwise by catching Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in Leigh Brackett's sensational adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel, The Long Goodbye; call it a feeder dose of insanity that'll sustain you into the big time.

There's so much to be said about The Long Goodbye that aficionados of both cinema and the Raymond Chandler mystique will be kicking this around for years.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Chandler or his private eye hero Philip Marlowe, be advised this is the sixth of the seven extant Chandler novels to be filmed. Farewell, My Lovely was made in 1944 with d.i.c.k Powell as Marlowe; in 1946 Bogart a.s.sayed the Marlowe role in The Big Sleep; 1947 saw The High Window filmed as The Brasher Doubloon; 1948's The Lady in the Lake with Robert Montgomery as the private eye was the most stylistically interesting of the Chandler translations onto film (till The Long Goodbye, that is) using the camera as point of view, the audience seeing Marlowe/Montgomery only when he looked in a mirror; in 1969 The Little Sister was made, badly, and t.i.tled Marlowe, with James Garner looking ill at ease in the characterization. (There was also a short-lived Philip Marlowe TV series in 1959 with Granny Goose Phil Carey in the t.i.tle role, but it was abortive at best.) Still unfilmed: a sad little thing t.i.tled Playback that Chandler published in 1958, just one year before his death.

(There are also a.s.sorted short stories that have been collected in volumes variously t.i.tled Killer in the Rain, Trouble Is My Business, Pick-Up on Noon Street, though most of them were originally published in the marvelous volume called The Simple Art of Murder, containing Chandler's brilliant essay on mystery writing under the latter t.i.tle.) Of the three giants of the detective story genre-Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich and Chandler-Marlowe's creator has always seemed to me to be the best. (Though since the Fifties, Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald have inherited the crowns, not merely by default and the death of the three masters from whom they learned their trade, but also on the basis of their impressive writings.) Chandler was smooth, dealt with the undercurrents of venality and weakness that riptide through society's seamier depths, and in Marlowe eschewed the larger-than-life image of the detective as cultural hero, choosing rather to make Marlowe an average man with an above-average fascination for low-life. Because of the clarity of delineation of Marlowe, even the worst of the films made from Chandler's novels has had a je ne sais quoi, a vitality, a verve that detective films made from lesser sources could never touch.

And when Marlowe films have been right-as in The Big Sleep and The Lady in the Lake-they have become small masterpieces of Americana, for they've captured within the idiom of suspense a cross-section of the tone of life in our country at that time. And The Long Goodbye abides by the tradition. It is right. Very right indeed. And the responsible parties are director Robert Altman, actors Gould, Rydell, Van Pallandt, Hayden and Arkin, but most of all scenarist Leigh Brackett . . . about whom a few words and an open love letter.

Leigh Brackett once wrote a story with Ray Bradbury t.i.tled "Lorelei of the Red Mist." She also wrote science fiction adventure stories through the Forties and Fifties with smashing t.i.tles like "The Beast-Jewel of Mars," "The Citadel of Lost Ages," "The Dragon-Queen of Jupiter," and "Lord of the Earthquake" to name only the tamest. She also wrote a clutch of hardboiled detective novels such as An Eye for an Eye, The Tiger Among Us, and, most recently, Silent Partner. She is also married to sf writer Edmond Hamilton with whom she lives in a tiny Ohio town, far from the Hollywood charnel house, which has not stopped her from writing the screenplays for such films as 13 West Street, Rio Bravo and-surprise!-The Big Sleep.

I have known Leigh and Ed since I was seventeen years old, and I must tell you that being able to praise unrestrainedly her latest screenplay is a singular pleasure. For a while there-back in the Sixties when Leigh and I were on the Paramount lot together, she writing b.u.mmers for Howard Hawks, me writing b.u.mmers for Joseph E. Levine-it seemed the enormously talented Ms. Brackett might have fallen under the thrall of schlock filmmakers. But The Long Goodbye is tough, tight, tense and structured so intricately I still haven't unraveled some of the puzzle twists. The dialogue is as sharp and au courant as anything Leigh's ever written, the small script touches that light up the background are all there, and wondrously, there is none of that self-conscious hipness so many of our younger scenarists seem h.e.l.lbent on cramming into current scripts.

And as all but a.s.sholes like Bogdanovich will admit, without a strong script from which to build, any given film's chances of succeeding artistically are reduced geometrically in relation to the arrogance and inept.i.tude of the director. But Robert Altman had the crafty and cunning Brackett script from which to begin, and on its solid base he has created a film in the mode of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which he also directed, but which was far less successful than The Long Goodbye. In the former film, Altman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond employed the "flashing" method of film processing to achieve a Brueghel-like muted pastel look, smokey and fuzzy, and very unnerving to this reviewer. In that film there was also unrestrained use of mumbled dialogue that kept one straining and uncomfortable throughout. Altman and Zsigmond repeat the technique here, but somehow the mood and pace of a contemporary suspense thriller allow the fuzzy look and semi-audible jabber to play like a baby doll.

And in casting Elliott Gould as Marlowe (a choice I would have thought lunacy before the fact) Altman has struck a bold masterstroke. Gould is perfect. It is hardly the Bogart Marlowe, clipped, self-a.s.sured, dangerous . . . or the Montgomery Marlowe, urbane, witty, charming . . . or the Garner Marlowe, ill-cast and embarra.s.sing . . . but it is a contemporaneous Marlowe that strikes the perfect balance between cynical optimism and tarnished knight errant. A little comical, a little self-deriding, a little out-of-touch and off-the-wall . . . but so splendid in totality that one can only hope Altman and Gould do it again, next time with a remake of The High Window.

Supporting Gould-and it's his show all the way, make no mistake-Sterling Hayden is bold and more than welcome back on the big screen, Nina Van Pallandt makes a promising and well-realized debut performance, David Arkin is properly pixilated as a r.e.t.a.r.d pistolero and Mark Rydell (himself a director of some talent) is outstanding as the utterly Reform Jewish thug, Marty Augustine. So impressive is Rydell that in one of the three scenes of violence in the film, a scene of sudden movement and madness, Rydell sets it up so well, plays it so consummately, that one feels one's heart go lub-dub as the c.o.ke bottle smashes.

I have heard filmgoers who've seen this movie put it down as incomprehensible, oddball, and simply bad. They are wrong. The Long Goodbye is a brilliant film, cast and written and directed with brio and courage. I venture to guess that in years to come it will a.s.sume the proportions of a cult film, and twenty years from now people will be quoting from it the way they quote from Casablanca. This is a must-see film.

And finally, I Love You Rosa, this year's Israeli entry for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award, a motion picture I understand was "acclaimed at the Cannes Film Festival," whatever that means.

Written and directed by Moshe Mizrahi, the film tells of a time in Israel when the Hebraic laws decreed that a widow had to marry her dead husband's brother, if he was unwed, in order that his family line would not die out. In the case of I Love You Rosa the brother is eleven years old and the widow is a strongly individualistic woman who wants to choose her own husband.

Similar to Lady Caroline Lamb only in both films' examination of the minutiae of cultural mores, this character drama succeeds where the other fell flat on its aristocracy. Ably acted by Ms. Michal Bat-Adam as Rosa and fourteen-year-old Gabi Otterman as the young Nissim, I Love You Rosa is a frequently painful, occasionally tendentious, ultimately arresting study of emerging character in a time and a place most of us will find fresh and different.

It is a good film, but it is not one I can get terribly excited about. Perhaps it's because I'm Jewish and many of the supporting characters remind me of my relatives, memories of whom are better left buried.

Call this a reserved review.

Or call me Ishmael.

Either way, I have some good news for you . . . and some bad news for you, Traupman.

So Traupman says, "Okay, Doc, give me the bad news first!" And the doctor says, "Well, while I was operating, I sneezed and cut off your p.e.n.i.s."

So Traupman breaks down, and when they revive him he says, "What's the good news?"

And the doctor says, "I ran a biopsy on it, and it isn't malignant."

See you in two weeks.

The Staff/March 23, 1973 HARLAN ELLISON'S WATCHING [FIRST SERIES, 1977'78]

1st INSTALLMENT They have asked for a regular column dealing with fantasy and science fiction in the visual media: theatrical features, television movies, continuing TV series, stage productions, live performances other than plays and/or musicals. In short, everything but recordings and comic books. Okay, I can do that.

What I cannot do is another hype column such as the nonsense-festooned handouts one encounters in fan magazines, which are nothing better than culls from the trade papers of the motion picture industry, Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. These are Rona Barrett-style ephemera that promulgate the wish-fulfillment stories planted by dynamiting publicists and every half-a.s.sed turkey who has taken an eighteen-month, two-grand option on a Zelazny or d.i.c.k novel, in hopes he or she can blue-sky a development deal with a network or studio.

Nor can I pretend to be a righteous, card-carrying cineaste proffering reams of erudite and punctilious copy espousing the auteur theory a la Bogdanovich. I am unalterably opposed to the theory that the director is the "author" of the film, perhaps because I'm a writer and I know, from firsthand experience, that most directors cannot direct their way to the toilet on the set. But I'll talk about that another time. Right now I merely wish to set down a few ground-rules about what this column won't be. (True Cahiers du Cinema mavens would be on to me in a hot second, even if I pretended to be a deeply serious student of film, when I copped to having fallen asleep repeatedly in L'Avventura, while having seen the 1939 Korda version of The Thief of Bagdad more than fifty times, clearly making it my favorite movie of all time, beating out Vanishing Point by only six viewings.) With rare exceptions, I will not review specific films or series. There are too many self-styled authorities overrunning the scene already. (You must understand: any schmuck who goes to a movie and whose ego gets in the way of good sense, who runs one of those "cinematic insight" raps-as shown in example in Woody Allen's new one, Annie Hall-and then has the good fortune to con some editor into accepting such drivel, can be a film critic or reviewer. They do it not out of any deep and abiding love for motion pictures, nor even because of an understanding of what it takes to create a film . . . they do it because they can get free screening pa.s.ses to the studio press showings. They are scavengers. Cinematic illiterates who pontificate without a scintilla of talent for moviemaking of their own. I put them in the same social phylum with kiddie-p.o.r.n producers, horse-dopers and a.s.sholes who use the phrase "sci-fi."

(Scaphism would be too light a fate for them.) What this column will attempt to do, and I'll make a small start at it in just a bit-patience is a virtue-is explain the way the film and television industries work. To describe what it is like to work in the media, the psychological att.i.tudes that prevail, the trends and endless imitative ripoffs therefrom, and-not to put too fine a point on it-service your seemingly-endless morbid curiosity about how The Industry functions, how films are made, why such c.r.a.p gets on the tube, who make the decisions, and in general inform instead of insult your intelligence.

In answer to the initial questions . . .

Q: If you despise television so much, Ellison, why do you continue to work in the form?

Q: How do you write a script for movies or television?

Q: What's it like working in H*O*L*L*Y*W*O*O*D?

Q: What is Robert Blake really like?

. . . I refer you (not out of venality or a desire to make even a farthing off you) to a 20,000 word essay t.i.tled "With the Eyes of Demon: Seeing the Fantastic as a Video Image" in The Craft of Science Fiction (edited by Reginald Bretnor; Harper & Row; 1976). Questions answered in that exhaustive essay will not be answered in this column.

Now. Having labored through all the preliminary bushwah one feels required to lay down, here is a sample of the service aspects of this column.

One of the most rigidly remembered templates for a series format in the minuscule minds of television network programmers and production company executives is The Fugitive. Devised by Roy Huggins in 1963, it reduced to the lowest possible common denominator all the elements that stunned TV watchers have come to demand from continuing series: a strong, harried protagonist with a "mission" (find the one-armed man who killed your wife, Dr. Richard Kimble), a "deadline" or "running clock" that puts urgency into the situation (clear your name of the murder before you are recaptured and get sent to the electric chair), a not-too-closely-examined reason to get from story to story each segment (you are running from the police), and something behind him that "pushes him forward" while the "mission" exerts its pull (Lt. Gerard is obsessively on your trail).

In its limited horizon thinking, each network has attempted to repeat the success of The Fugitive with dozens of cliche imitations of this format. Run for Your Life, The Invaders, The Immortal, Quest, Then Came Bronson, Route 66, The Guns of Will Bonnett, I'm sure you can think of fifty others on your own. With the tunnelvision that lies at the core of what is wrong with television programming, the networks and packagers who sell their wares to the networks are clearly much less interested in serving the commonweal, of uplifting the taste of viewers, and of being responsible to the people (who own the airwaves) than they are to getting David Janssen or an identifiable somatotype of Janssen back on the road.

The most recent manifestation of this obsession, and one that concerns sf readers, relates to the success (or apparent success in the myth-misted minds of network honchos) of the film The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Within ninety days of the opening of the theatrical feature, and its seeming popularity among that demographically-desirable audience of youngfolk perceived by the networks and the advertising agencies as being best-adjusted to the Consumer Society, I received three phone calls: two from production companies, one from a major network. All three said, in either these exact words or in close approximations thereof, "We want to do something just like The Man Who Fell to Earth."

"So go buy the TV rights to the book or the film and do it," I responded.

"Well, uh, er, we can't exactly buy the rights, they're tied up," they said. "But we want you to think up an idea like that."

"In other words," I said innocently, "you want me to rip off the original concept of the book and/or the movie, and change it just enough so you won't get sued."

Much huffing and puffing. Much pfumph'ing and clearing of throats. Much backing and filling. "Not ezzackly," they said, wishing they had called someone a lot less troublesome. "We want to do an alien that falls to Earth, but not the movie."

"But the movie is about an alien who falls to Earth," I said. I was having a terrific little time for myself, listening to them squirm.