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. Circumstances 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 sparse, 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 assistant manager. Then the manager. Nothing can be done. The film cannot be repaired. They will be given passes to come back the next night. We want our money. We will give you passes. 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 roué'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 lusting 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 classics: Hud, A Clockwork Orange, Little Mother, The Godfather: 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 title 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 fucked and/or fucked-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 god, one of the uncrowned American nobility—the musical idol. (And having traveled with The Rolling Stones and Three Dog Night, I can assure those naïve 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 attitudes 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.

God 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 title 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 dick 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 twanging; 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 helluvan evening's entertainment, and if you don't find yourself applauding and cheering the ending, have yourself fitted for daisy-space 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 hell can I do? Last time two out of three were shit, 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 XXX. (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 retarded 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 XXX 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