Film
Devil Without a Cause
Hold on to your stomachs-- super-realism has hit the movies! Relax-- there are also more traditional thrills and yawns.
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I recommend this movie to students taking a study break during dead week. Because it's not the sort of movie to haunt or distract you after it's over, or even while it's going on.
EVERYONE BUT SHUT-INS MUST KNOW by now that Serpico is the real-life tale of an honest New York cop who won't take bribes and can't look away when his buddies do. My petty side bristles at the tattle-tale self-righteousness of such a crusader, but it's difficult not to admire his integrity. So what if his monomania occasionally borders on megalomania? Without a healthy blend of ego and integrity the world might never produce its tiny handful of Naders and Ervins and Siricas.
Sidney Lumet, the director of Serpico, also directed Lovin' Molly (Hollywood's shredded version of McMurtry's Leaving Cheyenne) savaged elsewhere in this issue. Trade gossip has it that Lumet's slapdash job was due to his eagerness to get on to Serpico. I'm afraid haste made waste on both counts. Not that Serpico is a bad movie, it's just that it could have been so much better. Here is a man who practices not only passive personal honesty, but active, quixotic honesty. Serpico, or Paco as he's called (played by Al Pacino), is full of dramatic contradictions: He plays opera music when not playing cops and robbers; grows plants as well as a mustachioed beard. He's a free spirit when it comes to marriage (never!) but a Middle-American 24-hour on-the-job drudge. All this made me want to know why Paco does the things he does. Lumet was content to show us his deeds alone.
This is regrettable, because there is nothing else of interest in Serpico to take up the slack. There is no suspense, no intrigue, no wild French Connection chase scenes. Even the cop-and-robber scenes are done with little more imagination than a made-for-TV movie. A little pretty or adventurous photography the caliber of that in The Sting or Don't Look Now might even have rescued much of it, but it was as automatically programmed as a traffic cop's signals. Also, we're inside that ugly, metallic precinct station so long and so often I felt I was being held for questioning.
The plot is a little too faithful to the structure of Peter Maas's book, which reads like a Sunday Supplement story. Paco's bizarre odyssey is told with all the wild abandon of a paint-by-numbers set, step by step and point by point. Except for occasional side-bar scenes depicting Serpico the off-duty madcap, or Serpico the sincere but non-commital lover, we simply follow along as Serpico graduates from cop school, loses his innocence, confronts his peers and starts his tedious climb up the bureaucratic ladder. There is also about forty minutes more movie than the story requires.
None of this is Al Pacino's fault, who brings as much warmth to the character as the script allows. But he's at his best when he occasionally expresses doubts about himself ("I feel like a criminal 'cause I don't take the money!" he confesses to his girl) and this doesn't happen too often. As it is, Serpico has more in common with Superman than Hamlet: more heroic than human, and more admirable than appealing.
THE MOST SHOCKING THING ABOUT Executive Action is not its greedy exploitation of rampant Camelot nostalgia; it's that director David Miller and scenarist Dalton Trumbo could fashion such a crashing bore of a movie out of the most dramatic single event of the Sixties.
Burt Lancaster, Will Geer and the late Robert Ryan play right-wing H. L. Hunt types who pay a team of expert marksmen to shoot Kennedy and make their world safe for plutocracy. In this hypothetical version, they cleverly set up Oswald as their entirely innocent patsy. But mostly they just carry on endless conversations in their plush suburban living rooms, and snarl at Kennedy's image on TV the way their ideological counterparts do now at Nixon.
Director David Miller begins the movie by making it perfectly clear that this is only a hypothetical version. And that's the last thing he makes clear, as he switches arbitarily from fact to fantasy and from newsclips to simulated action. No one, not even self-proclaimed assassination experts, could pretend to distinguish fact from fiction in Executive Action.
With our added dose of regional guilt, Texans will probably flock to this film as a form of mental flagellation. But boredom, not guilt, will be the whip.
MIKE NICHOLS, THE DIRECTOR WHO brought us The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge and Catch-22, has made a film about a talking dolphin. And in doing so, he has done more to revolutionize the animal-movie genre than anyone since Walt Disney invented Mickey Mouse.
No more of the sugary Hayley Mills-Fred McMurray types usually populating these movies. Surly George C. Scott plays the lead role, and like the other characters in Day of the Dolphin, shouts and curses and self-indulges on occasion. This may be a film where children learn more about the world of grown-ups than grown-ups learn about the world of dolphins.
Screenwriter Buck Henry (who also wrote Catch-22) has included enough espionage, murder, wire-tapping double-crossers and paper-shredding bad guys to give us jaded grown-ups something to relate to. The result is a film as funny, sophisticated and contemporary as a movie starring a talking fish can get.
The plot may require a willing suspension of disbelief, but if governors can spot flying saucers and tapes can erase themselves, why shouldn't dolphins pronounce two-syllable words and be trained to blow up the President's yacht?
I hate to claim that Nichols has done what decades of Disney-type films have never quite accomplished, but he has: he's made a film the whole family can enjoy. I saw the picture twice, and both times the adult audience behaved like kids at a Saturday matinee. They laughed aloud and clapped at the funny lines, booed the villains, and let out a simultaneous whoop of delight when the bad guys got theirs.
It would be nice to give Nichols the credit for this mass-mesmerization, but most of it really belongs to the dolphins. Swimming and courting and leaping through the air, Alpha and his mate Beta are the most winsome creatures to hit the screen since the lion cubs in Born Free. Had there been a dolphin peddler in the theater lobby, I'd probably be sharing my bathtub with one.
WELL, CAN YOU CON AN old con or can't you? Robert Redford and Paul Newman have teamed up to answer this niggling question. Johnny Hooker (Redford) is a green but ambitious small-time crook wanting to join organized crime; Henry Gondorff (Newman), is a slightly more savvy but down-and-out conman in Chicago who sometimes sleeps on the floor because he passes out there.
They join forces to "get" Lonnegan (Robert Shaw at his most sinister) a bigtime Chicago gambler and syndicate man responsible for killing Hooker's best friend and mentor, Luther. Their commendable sense of poetic justice is accompanied by an equally commendable itch to break into the Bigcon by (appropriately) outconning the biggest con of all. "I don't know enough about killing to kill him," admits Hooker with winsome innocence, so they plan instead to "sting" him, Thirties racketeer lingo for swindling in a big and humiliating way.
Director George Roy Hill crowds a lot of double-dealing, slick-tricking, bullet-dodging, lingo-laden action into The Sting. Some of it is funny and all of it is ingeniously done, but paced a little too fast and lasting a little too long for us sedentary Seventies softies. There's scarcely a pause that refreshes, or leisure to lay back and enjoy the photography of Robert Surtees (who captures the frenzied flamboyance of the Thirties as neatly as he did the West Texas Fifties in The Last Picture Show)...or great background piano rags by Scott Joplin...or an occasional touching scene, like a lonesome Hooker trying to make it through the night with anything soft and warm.
I guess it's okay to develop a plot instead of characters, but the few glimpses we get inside Hooker and Gondorff (and Lonnegan and Billie) cry out for longer looks.
Especially since the plot of The Sting is like a beginning knitter's sweater: tightly woven but full of holes. Also, a movie that insists on pivoting around a single gimmick (like The List of Adrian Messenger) needs to make it perfectly clear at the end just what the catch was; instead, we're delivered an ending more sensational than satisfying. Deprived of such instant enlightenment, I felt nothing so much as left out. I suspect the cast had more fun making the movie than audiences will have watching it.
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