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 bloody 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 titter), 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 bum 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.

Dick 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 Saturday 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, hell, 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 Dick Powell as Marlowe; in 1946 Bogart assayed 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 titled 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 title role, but it was abortive at best.) Still unfilmed: a sad little thing titled Playback that Chandler published in 1958, just one year before his death.

(There are also assorted short stories that have been collected in volumes variously titled 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 title.)

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 titled "Lorelei of the Red Mist." She also wrote science fiction adventure stories through the Forties and Fifties with smashing titles 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 bummers for Howard Hawks, me writing bummers 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 hellbent on cramming into current scripts.

And as all but assholes 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 ineptitude 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-assured, dangerous . . . or the Montgomery Marlowe, urbane, witty, charming . . . or the Garner Marlowe, ill-cast and embarrassing . . . 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 retard 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 Coke 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 assume 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 penis."

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