On Golden Caramel

ON GOLDEN POND rewinds me of Sugar Daddies. Actually, it makes me think of all sorts of gooey candy like taffy or Bubble Yum or Star Bursts. But most of all, it makes me thing of Sugar Daddies--those generous-sized oblong lollipops that bend into curious little cow licks after they've been in your mouth for a white. I remember a commercial for Sugar Daddies that used to be on TV. In showed a vat powering--and it seemed like it would poor eternally--the thick golden brown syrup that eventually hardened into the lollipops. On Golden Pond is a lot like that. You walk out feeling like someone has poured thick sugar syrup all over you. Of course, that need not be so had, I like an occasional Sugar Daddy. But the experience is still awfully fully sticks.

The movie's stickiness stems from its overwhelming sentimentality. It is a piece of high corn, shot through with the kind of cheesy sentimentality one ordinarily finds on TV shows like Family--the kind that are below even The Waltons The script, adapted by adapted Thompson from his 1978 Broadway play of the same name, is sappy. the characters are to varying degrees flat, and the emotional neatness of the whole is a bit stilling.

One must scrape the bottom of the barrel of credulity to believe that in one short summer or about two hours running time--a verit-able slew of the nasty little problems that life coughs up at us resolve themselves so quaintly. Among the difficulties that late (actually, kismet might be a better word for it dispenses with like some powerful spot remover are an old man's anxiety about aging and death, the long-time antipathy he and his daughter share, the uneasiness of the wife mother who is caught between them, and the generally screwed-up nature of the son of the daughter's boyfriend. It sadamn nice world that patches up all these problems so quickly and congenially, isn't it.'

Which is not to say that the bird doesn't fly in its own strange way Admittedly, the plot could give you case to nausea a lot like the kind you would get from consuming an entire box of rock candy. But On Golden Pond survives because of two actors who once again prove that they can develop acceptable. If not quite plausible characters ex nihilo. It is a shame that actors like Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda should get saddled with parts like these. That they carry it off and breathe a little life into what might other wise be an inert pile of celluloid only suggests that their lustrous reputations are well-deserved Perhaps I am the sucker the real sentimentalist for letting those two familiar septuagenarian faces get to me. But it seems, simply, that here are two people who can act and act well, even if the roles may not merit the effort.

As Norman Thayer a retired professor rounding 80, Fonda plays the curmudgeon to the hilt. Thompson's script is very much in the Neil Simon mold since it is one great aggregation of one-liners, and Fonda gets the lion's share of them. The jokes are a bit softer and more countrified than Simon's bitchy repartee. but Fonda succeeds in putting enough spin on them to give the dialogue bite. His deadpan is convincing. He puckers up his chin a little and blows the quips out like a man nonchalantly shooting marbles from his mouth into a brass spittoon across the room where they make a loud clang and roll around for a second.

Thayer's wile, Ethel--Norman and Ethel, now there's a pair of old folk's names--is utterly sunny. As Ethel. Hepburn, is a sort of superannuated dryad, prancing in the woods, picking berries, skinny-dipping and crooning paeans to nature. By no means an airhead. Ethel happily flips the birdie at a passing motor cruiser that ploughs by the Thayers' canoe. Moreover, she knows Norman is not the crotchety old coot he appears. Rather, he is a wonderfully warm fellow who happens to be obsessed with death. Norman and Ethel are, of course, very much in love. One can debate whether any woman can get away with calling her husband a "knight in studding armor" in a movie or on stage. I doubt whether anyone could. Katherine Hepburn, though, takes a stab at it and dogs as credible a job as one could imagines. It is just that sort of relationship.

UNFORTUNATELY, the Thayers' 42-year-old daughter, Chelsea--a good name for some from that younger, suspect generation--doesn't quite agree with her mother's estimation of Norman. She thinks he is a "son of a bitch." Norman made a lousy, insensitive father. On the threshold of middle age. Chelsea is still peeved at Norman. Norman, for his part, has not many friendly things to say to Chelsea, who has shows up at the Thayer's summer home for Norman's birthday. One can believe that Chelsea would turn up for such an event, but it's a bit of a strain to imagine her bringing along her demind-boyfriend to be skewered by Norman's verbal parries. The dentist (Debney Coleman), incidentally, is the real McCoy; he wears a light blue cotton Suit, a white and blue plaid short and a dark solid tie. Now that is a dentist. What requires a great leap of faith is understanding why Chelsea wants to unload the dentist's 13-year-old son on Ethel and the old bastard for a month while she and the dentist traipse around Europe. But skepticism never got anyone anywhere in the wonderful world of Sorman Rock well and Norman Vincent Peale (funny how that first name crops up, isn't it").

If there is an unpleasant stick of compressed paper in this jolly, it is the acting of Jane Fonda, who got the role of Chelsea in a cute but of incestuous casting. Jane tenses her mouth. furrows her brow, makes portentous cracks at her father, and screams to her mother with a forced, hollow rage about Norman's injustices. In all fairness. Jane has virtually no role to work with, since we know nothing about her except that her husband "didn't work out" and she cannot stand her father, though she wants to love him.

The younger Fonda, however, adds nothing to the part. She is plastic, flat, phony. Her performance has but one redeeming--well, partially redeeming--aspect. Demonstrating that the aging process need not commence until well past 45. Jane cavorts at various times across the screen in a two-piece bathing suit or a skimpy pair of short. I would not be surprised if that were a plug for her Latest venture into the literary world June Fonda's Workout Book. All those years of campaigning for Tom Hayden and making set-fi poem films for Roger Vadim have not taken their toll on Jane. It is a good plug.

So Chelsea and the dentist drop off Billy (Doug McKeon) A jaded kid from the city. Billy is a precocious adept at the fine art of "cruising chicks." At first he is insolent, recalcitrant obnoxious--a caricature of the stereotype of the urban brat Predictably. Ethel, Norman and nature work miracles on the lot in four lightening week's. The rest is connect-the-dots. By the end of On Golden Pondso many things have fixed themselves up that one has the feeling that Skylab has fallen out of the heavens and, after disintegrating, magically reassembled itself on earth Nice.

NOT ALL CORN has to be crap On Gold Pond is reminiscent of another film that is certainly not discardable--Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. Both movies have the same wild American optimism that everything can be overcome, that no problem is too much for well-meaning people. It's Wonderful Life was much more carefully crafted. Its direction was far better than Mark Rydell's in On Golden Pond; Capra's film avoids the dippy touches like shots of water lillies set to flute music and the cozy nature symbolism that pervade the Pond. Still, both films are escapes into a blithe cheerfulness--one which, despite its occasional silliness has its place. You do not have to subscribe to this optimism to enjoy it occasionally.

On Golden Pond does not achieve what It's a Wonderful Life does. It oozes a bit too much. But thanks to some fine acting by Fonda and Hepburn it is not a completely intolerable blast of air from the land of Make-Believe.