Only So Funny...

Funny Girl. It's been a long, long time As I remember, the first half of this film a movie biography of vaudevillian Fanny Brice, shines and dazzles; very upbeat, very funny, the perfect showcase for the kitschy comic charms of its star, Barbara Streisand. But toward the middle the story starts to dim, at first imperceptibly, then markedly, until it has receded into a depressing and self-indulgent darkness. I am left with two images. One is of Barbara Streisand's overripe features mugging and straining as young Fanny auditions for her first show. Hilarious The other is of a successful and (with the help of posture lessons) statuesque Fanny, breaking down in tears during a concert because her marriage with her first husband (Omar Sharif) is kaput. Maudlin. The first image urges me to recommend it, the second signals me to say, avoid it like the plague. So go, invite a friend, and cuddle during the second half.

Alice's Restaurant. Arthur Penn does a nice job of turning Arlo Guthrie's half-hour-long ballad, about hanging out in western Massachusetts and ingeniously resisting the draft, into a loose, rambling, amiable film. The first half works particularly well. The second half drags on a bit too long and is broken by some incongruously depressing sequences, but the movie still remains one of the best film portraits of what life was like for the draft-board-baiting bohemian back-packers of the '60s.

At lunch the other day, sitting with an actor, I remembered the first time I saw Citizen Kane. He remembered too, and we compared gurgled memories of How It Was the First Time. This is a fairly routine thing to discuss, I realize; in New York, Oxnard, Peru, Indiana, and bless it, Kaplan, Louisiana, hums of conversation rising from cafeteria tables like locust clouds, and if you poll each little bug, here's what he'll say: "The first time I saw Fred Astaire dance I was trans-fixed...after the first time I saw the "Seventh Seal" I couldn't win a chess game for a month...the first time I saw Abbott and Costello I nearly busted a gut!"

Movies still are pretty much a national virus, and to people who really love them, "Citizen Kane" is the item to measure the others against. It's such a self-conscious work that every frame lectures the viewer on film and stagecraft both--and even though its technical precocity makes it something of an exhausting film to watch, you want to watch it over and over after it's finished. "Kane" is the object lesson in American movies--in itself, in legend, in its tradition. It's not the starting point, but the center around which everything else moves. It's a construct, not a natural--a device, not entertainment, and it's never been a great popular success. Too self-serious to project a world of beauty into which one would want to project oneself, "Kane" is too dark and heaving a work to have dignity; "Kane's" immaturity makes it condemnatory. It challenges the order of things, it's disruptive. Welles and the young people who made the movie weren't interested in romanticizing the old doffers and tyrants who ran things.

Padre, Padrone. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's entrancing film about the loam-to-letters life of a bestselling Sardinian author from humble peasant origins provides the most convincing evidence since Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris" of the resilient vitality in Italian cinema, the recent excesses of Fellini, Antonioni, et al. notwithstanding. The Taviani brothers' first film to receive international attention, it features a host of mind-gripping sequences destined to set apart "Padre, Padrone" as one of the most important films to cross the Atlantic in the late 1970s. To name only two: the unforgettable series of shots capturing the varied expressions of a village's collective lust, from a young boy sodomizing a mule to the rusty sex rites of an aged couple; or the scenes showing how far the "spare the rod" philosophy of rearing is literally taken by the father of the future writer Gavio Ledda (Saverio Marconi). Mario Masini's cinematography especially shines in filming the lush greens and radiant ambers of a sunlit Sardinian landscape. But most importantly, few movies have ever probed the bitter relationship of an intractable patriarch and his eldest son more sensitively and unflinchingly than the quasi-literary "Padre, Padrone."

Outrageous! Only Woody Allen at his best could outdo some of the one-liners in Richard Benner's brilliant comedy about a female impersonator's rise to stardom and the whacked-out woman behind his success. Craig Russell's unabashedly gay hairdresser has graced us with a character we will not soon forget, completely stealing the show in the movie's plot and the movie itself. His series of famed singers and actresses belting out "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" will bring down any house, so carefully honed are his Channings and Ellas. Co-star Hollis McLaren is inevitably overshadowed by Russell's stagewise presence, but the delicate treatment she gives to her Crazy Liza perfectly complements her outlandish buddy.

The Omen is a soulless, gutless endeavor, an ultra-gory, workmanlike tale about the arrival of the anti-Christ, one Damien. (Every movie about the devil must have its "Damien"). Every ten minutes someone gets impaled, chucked out a window, or decapitated, the latter by a plate-glass window in a scene lingered over by the cameraman as though he were some kind of vampire. One moment of imagination: the prowl of a vicious wolf-dog from hell whose breathing is synchronized with one of Jerry Goldsmith's Latin chants. Gregory Peck is well-meaning, but as animated as a potted plant, and the rest of the cast is colorless until their respective bloody deaths. Why is it that these movies strive to be so serious, devoid of lyricism or wit? There's nothing more terrifying than the unseen, but in "The Omen," we can even see the producers counting their money. A big hit in '76, with a sequel due this summer. To hell with it.

Lies My Father Told Me. My friends all cried during this Canadian "I remember Grandpa" tale by Jan Kadar, set in a Jewish ghetto. Gramps rode the streets in a horse-drawn wagon, selling and buying rags, clothes, and bottles, and teaching his grandson, the narrator, to be simple, pious, etc. I found it lumpy and mediocre, with one of the most puerile scores ever written, but the atmosphere is pleasant, and you might sniffle a little when they take away Grandpa's horse and it kills him. Nasty, bad people.

The Serpent's Egg. Ingmar Bergman hasn't set a film in a broad, sociological context in a long time. It shows. If this means his next film will be a masterpiece, then it's probably worth it. It doesn't take genius to figure out there's something very, very wrong with this movie, but so many critics have dwelled cruelly and accurately on its short-comings, that I'd like to confine this discussion to the film's good qualities.

Dersu Uzalu. A very fine film, but a regression, albeit in color, to Akira Kurosawa's early days of static, pictorial movie-making. I prefer the raging, audacious Kurosawa of "Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo," but this simple piece, a memoir about a little old hunter, has undeniable charm, pathos, and humor. The rich colors and meticulous compositions become frustrating after awhile--we want Kurosawa to shake off his awe of the wilderness and plunge into it with the old daring and fervor--but there's something heartwarming about a touch this sure, and the wisdom and taste to know when sentimentality is appropriate. Every once in awhile, this can be exhilerating: a jaunty succession of browned still photographs of Cersu and the company of Russian explorers, for example, would make George Roy Hill hide his head in shame. A "nice" film--if you see it, you'll like it. If you don't......Eh.