Put It Together, Ivan

GEORGE SEGAL, in my estimation, is born to win, but in this movie he's been given a crooked deal. The scriptwriters (David Scott Milton and director Ivan Passer) can't make up their minds between hilarity and a grim social realism. While real life often veers between the tragic and the ridiculous, a movie needs some sort of coherent outlook--either in the choosing of the scenes themselves (as with slices of life in which the slice is carefully cut) or in their treatment.

Born to Win is a movie where the parts make up two halves. Segal is one of America's best comic actors, and he has ample opportunity to display his talents as a small-time conman and junkie. Captured by a bunch of crooks he has doublecrossed, and locked into a lady's bedroom without his clothes, he dons a pink nightgown and exposes himself through the window to a watching neighbor below, hoping she'll call the police. As he jumps up and down in anguish, opening the nightgown and desperately trying to show enough of himself over the windowsill, the girl slowly starts to strip, too.

When he's high, JJ (Segal) can talk sweetly enough to charm an elephant into a birdcage; waiting for a fix, shriveled and twitchy, he is at the mercy of his habit, dependent on others.

Karen Black, as the ultimate in unliberated femininity (what was she before JJ came along?), takes him into her apartment (and her heart), calling out from the kitchen, "I can tell you're nice," as he carefully helps himself to loose objects decorating her living room. Mindless she may be, characterless she is not. I can't remember any of her lines, but in spite of a banal script she makes a delightful happy-go-lucky sucker to Segal's dangerous charm.

All this ties in poorly with the other parts of the film, which begins as a sort of underworld Taking Off. (Taking Off is another first American film by a Czech director, also concerned with drugs, but in a middle-class milieu.) Unlike Taking Off, Passer's film switches suddenly from slick comedy to terror and sordidness as JJ's companion mistakenly shoots himself up with rat poison intended for JJ and crumples to his death. JJ drags him to an elevator, then flees in fright. The body lies inert across the doorway, the arms flexing up over the chest and relaxing as the automatic door tries again and again to close.

And at the very end, when JJ walks off carrying a little packet of white powder, he wonders--and we wonder--is it rat poison again? You hope so--there's no other way out of JJ's desperate situation, caught between crooks and cops, developed so convincingly in the second half of the film. If he doesn't get it this time he will the next.

Passer--I haven't seen his other feature, a 1965 Czech comedy cum pathos called Intimate Lighting--seems able to get what he wants out of actors and settings, including a new side to George Segal--but he hasn't done enough yet to know what he should want. Where Milos (Taking Off) Forman maintains comedy almost consistently, and John Schlesinger in Midnight Cowboy--another New York film by a non-American--invests even his comedy with mournfulness. Passer switches erratically from the theatrical, wisecracking comedy when Segal performs so well to genuine gutwrenching--to say nothing of a few misguided "lyrical" beach scenes.

HE DIFFERENCE is between showing the funny side of a realistic scene and making such a scene funny by writing funny dialogue. John Schlesinger, in Sunday, Bloody Sunday (which is the better half of this double bill and makes it well worth seeing) is a master at this art of making you laugh and cry at the same time rather than in sequence. While the children tended by heroine Glenda Jackson are unbearably cute they are also unbearably noisy, precocious and at the same time deeply wounding in their perceptiveness.

"Has Bob left you?" inquires 12-year-old Lucy in her impeccable English. Jackson shakes her head as she takes a piece of fudge. Lucy continues calmly, "I expect that's why you're overeating."

Passer tries to range too widely between humor and horror without catching the link between them. Similarly, Schlesinger fuses the diverse cultures of London, as when his middle-class doctor hero encounters a pack of freaked-out roller-skaters careening past his car. Nowhere does Passer even suggest any side of New York other than the dank underworld and the faceless corridors roamed by George Segal--except perhaps at the very end when he walks away on a bright city street and disappears, followed by two brisk, unconcerned city slickers. He and his world have vanished without a trace.