Hallelujah the Hills

With evident pleasure the producer of Hallelujah the Hills (David C. Stone) writes that his film is a "zany romantic comedy" which conveys "a feeling of Americana, camaraderie, and youthful adventure." "It has been likened," he continues modestly, "to a combination of Huckleberry Finn, the Marx brothers, Douglas Fairbanks, and the works of D.W. Griffith." I wish I could say that the comparisons are valid, for such a combination, I feel sure, would be delightful indeed; but the fact is I found Hallelujah the Hills intensely boring.

Not too long ago a little-known French comedy called Zazie Dans le Metro played the art-cinema circuit. It was a great spoof of all sorts of movies, from the Last Year at Marienbad variety to the Disney cartoon, and it was brilliantly funny without being selfconsciously clever. Writer-director Adolfas Mekas has tried without success to pull off the same sort of joke in Hallelujah. All that comes through however, is an hour and a half of very self-conscious and very unfunny cleverness.

The only thing about the film to escape the deadening hand of Mr. Mekas is Meyer Kupferman's superb music, easily one of the best background scores ever composed. It is consistently witty (often reminiscent of Prokofiev's whimsical compositions), and able to conjure up a whole spectrum of moods. The music can stand so well by itself, in fact, that one feels the movie was written as a visual accompaniment to it. At least, what happens on the screen does not seem to have much other reason for being.

Ostensibly, Hallelujah has a plot, but I can't say I felt like puzzling it out. So let me refer to a printed synopsis: Vera is a lovely girl who has been courted by two men for seven years--Leo (Marty Greenbaum), who is quiet and awkward, and Jack (Peter H. Beard), who is handsome and unpredictable. Since each suitor sees the girl differently, Vera is played by two actresses (Sheila Finn and Peggy Steffans). This is clever. In the eighth year Vera marries Gideon, who never appears; and Jack and Leo go off on a camping trip in the Vermont Hills to forget her. They find themselves unable to forget, however, and spend their time (and the audience's) recalling the courtship in a series of tedious, confusing, and meaningless flashbacks.

By way of spoofing movie-making, Mr. Mekas lards the film with many little parodies of other movies, some of them recognizable (one of Ugetsu, for instance), most of them not. Good parody can be broad, but it musn't be rubbed in; why does Mr. Mekas choose to have Japanese characters appear on the screen in the Ugetsu scene and Cyrllic subtitles flash on during a sleigh ride when the music in both cases makes the jokes perfectly well? Mr. Mekas' other comedy technique is the avoidance of all logical transition between events in the film. I should say that a number of persons in the audience seemed to be laughing themselves silly at all the non-sequiturs. I'm afraid I found them tiresome.

The actors, particularly Mr. Beard, throw themselves into their "zany romantic comedy" with breathless enthusiasm, and I can only marvel that the tiny cast did not sustain several fatalities in its wild romps through Vermont. I also find it a great shame that this exuberant and refreshing amateur spirit--which could do much for the good of the American cinema--has been so subverted in Hallelujah the Hills by the arty pretensions of producer and director.