FilmsLittle Murdersat the Cheri

UNTIL Little Murders, the great American sound comedies had always been nihilistic, disrespectful of traditional film genres, but severely handicapped by their own uneasiness in scoring thematic points. It is hard to take even films as distinguished as Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux or Huston's Beat the Devil as little more than devastating evidence of the director's hatred for the work he had been doing and the authorities he had obeyed. Chaplin could glorify his own superiority, Huston could include himself (through Bogart) in ironic rings of betrayal and failure; the result was the same. Righteous indignation was nullified by a confession of impotence.

Little Murders is the best American comedy since Dr. Strangelove. It is also different from any other American comedy. It delights in disparaging obvious social evils and dwelling on the eccentricities of every individual it scans. But it isn't booby-trapped: it neither removes us so far from the characters that all we see is their grotesquerie, nor thrusts us so close that we can not view them critically. In this age of "free-form" commonplaces and conventionalized alienation, Little Murders relies on a definite narrative structure and the wish of its characters "to belong" to move its audiences. Absurdist works make apparent the terror of normality, and delineate human limitations. Little Murders recognizes the tenacity of the human spirit, and how it attempts to make sense out of massive social and technological adversaries: street gangs, the electric company, the police force. The incidents portrayed are terrifying; but because the characters keep hold of their identities, the film builds to a climax which is terrifyingly human.

Although Little Murders at first seems to be about the perils of living in a violent city, one soon learns otherwise; the violence only highlights the isolation of each family from its neighbors and environs. The Carol Newquists are the urban John Does-even their ethnic background is eclectically modeled. Thus, each member must strive to serve a separate, useful social function, and is then thrown back into the family to secure personal happiness. The son who served his country in Korea and Vietnam is relieved of this struggle when he is killed at 95th and Amsterdam before the film begins. The younger son attends college while drooling like a moron on his home turf. The father attempts to live his life in units of activity which are meaningless except for signifying his continued existence. The mother runs errands and keeps house.

Most important is daughter Patsy, the one who attempts to lick the system by disregarding its failings, by finding four good things for every bad. She loves interior decorating, and is blithely unconscious that her metallic designs are inherited from her world. She loves skiing and swimming and horseback-riding, while ignoring the gas stations and telephone wires and Negro gardeners that surround her at the Concord.

Her great project is the wooing and revival of Alfred Chamberlain, a near-catatonic photographer with an outlook of complete acceptance and without any desire to dominate his environment. The couple's relationship structures the film. Through Alfred we understand the family's plight, and the director's attitude towards it.

ALFRED is the perfect observer: wholly rootless, he is the progeny of parents who used him only to test their Freud and Ferenczi. Patsy's task is enormous. Alfred's college sojourns into any form of activism were doomed when he realized that above every government functionary there was another, that society had become a machine which continues to blur personal motivations until it runs down. Patsy, for all her fatuous cheerleading and self-enclosed attitudes, wakens Alfred out of his emotional lethargy. But just when he acquiesces to her post-marriage plans, she falls victim to an assassin's bullet.

It is at this point that the film's assumptions are tested. Alfred's problem as a photographer was that he began to see objects very clearly, and people not at all. But the film is urging us to look very carefully at people, and understand how by wishing to keep well when irrational acts are killing them, they destroy themselves. If we are to take the film seriously, there must be no revulsion at Patsy's death, and no Kew Gardens harping on apathy. Luckily, the subsequent shot is humane but unsentimental: Alfred stumbles down a crowded subway, still splattered with Patsy's blood. Though the seated travelers do not rise to help him, and look away embarrassedly, they're not particularly hateful. They're probably very interesting people themselves, and their faces are amusing. There's just no way in the paranoid conditions they live under that they and Alfred can break through to each other. While they sit, another train rumbles unnoticed past the subway windows.

Similarly, during a Dziga-Vertovian picture-taking walk through Central Park, Alfred can only capture his subjects' surfaces, or fleeting glimpses of pastoral beauty. Alfred reaches the conclusion that in a compartmentalized city hit by random violence, a life-style and home must be staked out, and allegiance paid to them. He buys a rifle; the family, thus released, turns into a sniping party. It is happy once again.

There are flaws in the film: vignettes featuring Lou Jacobi as a past-throttled immigrant judge, Donald Sutherland as the pastor of the First Existentialist Church, and Alan Arkin as a neurotic police chief are all ill-timed. The first is prolonged to an ineffectively surreal note, the second (by far the funniest) turns into roundhouse farce, the last starts and ends hysterically.

For the most part, however, Alan Arkin's first job of direction is marked by the conscientiousness and compassion that he has shown throughout his acting career. Arkin has stated that the films which he most admires are Renoir's Grande Illusion and Regle de Jeu; the latter film has obviously instructed him more than any American comedy could in the use of setting to explain character, and the need to root a danse macabre in thematic and dramatic progressions. Like the early Renoir, he is very much an actor's director, using his characters' figures and reactions to make comic points, deftly tracking and cutting to capture them. Arkin succeeds in bringing visual depth and storytelling acumen to Jules Feiffer's screenplay. If only Arkin had directed Catch 22!

The essential roles of Patsy and Alfred are splendidly enacted by Marcia Rodd and Elliott Gould. Where Patsy could easily be strident. Miss Rodd is vital., And where "apathist" Alfred could easily fade into the background. Gould invests him with an intelligent, observant presence. There is a moment when, while listening to Patsy, he actually does fade away, and then starts back; the resulting laugh comes as a salute to Gould.

But perhaps most striking of the collaborators is photographer Gordon Willis. His lighting captures the muffled diffusion of city sun, the dank swank of a resort ballroom, the verdant warmth of a mid-afternoon in the park. Last year his talent was used only to dress up the dross of End of the Road -a film which burst apart by emphasizing the presence of violence, and not its causes; here he contributes to the success of a minor masterpiece which takes a very cool, bitterly funny look at some very harsh truths.