Honesty Is Occasionally a Virtue

No one could capture Catcher in the Rye on film, though one supposes that Frances Coppola or a Michael Cimino could spend a couple dozen million trying. Of course either would give us lot of grass--acres and acres of golden grass--with a Wagnerian soundtrack, but it would still feel so ... phony.

"Phony," that most perfect word of Holden Caufield's vocabulary. That most concise sense of Salinger's classic work. And yet phoniness, like its sibling rival, sincerity, does not find expression in some sterile post-production studio.

To convey Holden's view one would have to shoot the entire film with some special distorted lens or some especially brilliant acting that would expose the phoniness that Salinger's narrative so painfully conveys--say, making headmasters look more literally like dachshunds.

Sincerity, that most elusive of virtues, is the one thing that only an individual can truly know, and simultaneously the one virtue that cannot be expressed simply, unlike so many cardboard cinema emotions. What really could be more phony than Richard Nixon's claim, straining for the sincerity he would never achieve, that "I am not a crook"? He who doth protest ... dispenses with any chance of conveying more than the ersatz.

Kindly Mother Dewitt, buttering her second English muffin one morning long ago, explained dining etiquette thusly: if you like the food at someone's house, eat only as much as you want, for your smile will drive away any doubts of displeasure. If you dislike the food, eat it all and ask for seconds--even if you do the psychedelic yawn afterwards (mother prefers a different metaphor).

One wonders, then, whether in some other life, in some other house by the sea, mom gave Marlon Brando the same advice. Little else could explain his guileful performance in LAST TANGO IN PARIS (Sack Charles), though mother would never use her muffin butter quite the way Brando does here.

Filmmaker D.W. Griffith once remarked that the medium succeeds like no other in "photographing thought"--letting the voyeurs among us run free in what we imagine we see, via some closeup, in a character's eyes.

Griffith, again, was wrong, as wrong as he was about the Klan's role in his beloved South. Tango intrigues us best by photographing not thought but thoughts. No one comes to understand the strange American widower that Brando plays--why he won't reveal his name, why he shouts to his dead wife, visits her lover--but rather one understands that one simply cannot understand the conflicting thoughts at which Brando hints.

Though Tango ultimately resolves its most superficial drama--who gets an apartment in Paris--the essence of Brando's character, his thoughts, remain as elusive as the credits roll as when he first mumbles, "Je suis Americain."

That same collage of photographic thought works with better humor for Jack Nicholson in PRIZZI'S HONOR (Sack Copley Place). At first glance he plays the amiable Mafia hit man as simply as he slips into his Brooklyn accent, but his animated face and agile acting reveal a character far more likeable and intriguing than some cotton-mouthed thug.

With her mystery and raw sexiness only marginally more concealed than in Body Heat, Kathleen Turner makes the perfect compliment to the more exaggerated Nicholson as his lover cum partner in murder. Easily one of Director John Huston's most brilliant films, it is also easily one of the year's best, and blackest, comedies.

For all its exaggerated GQ-Cosmo style closeups, ST. ELMO'S FIRE (Sack Charles) overexposes itself as the vampire of the summer's lingering movie releases in two ways. For the obvious, whatever thoughts may lie within the well-posed actors' heads photograph as lamely as Dracula's own mug shot. Simply put, "Assume the Missionary Position," invites something other psychological speculation.

And yet if St. Elmo's Fire is as unphotogenic as our big-toothed friend from Central Europe, it is also as charmingly seductive. The ever messed-up rich kid, the starry-eyed boys with love fixation, the political idealist turned proto-Yuppie: they are not Jungian archetypes or timeless characters of world literature, but they are, for some of us, too painfully familiar.

Yet again like the vampire, though, it sucks our blood as we enjoy it. If this pretty boy and pretty girl bunch seem unprincipled and carefree, they are also pathetically familiar, a reflection of souls we hope--but do not know--are not our own.

FRIGHT NIGHT (Sack 57) and YEAR OF THE DRAGON (Sack 57) are despite their opposite positions on the budget spectrum, equally affective failures. "You have to believe for that to work," the vampire-on-the-block says of the Cross held out before him. Double ditto, as Dewitt's kid brother says, for powerful horror and drama: you gotta believe.

But the putative heroes of these two bloodbaths--the kid who cried vampire too much and the I-eat-steal-wontons tough cop in Dragon look and feel so ... phony. More to amateurish acting in Fright Night and more to Mickey Rouke's pretentious acting in Dragon, both movies convey that condescending sense of cinematic closed-captioning for the slow of wit.

It's not enough for Rourke to sound like a Rambo who forgot to put the airpump to his navel; he has to dress up in his Vietnam fatigues, too. Our token Italian don in Dragon doesn't just get announced as the Italian, he has to put a voice box to his punctured throat to rasp out his tough words. What's this supposed to mean? Marlon Brando, eat your heart out?

The most surprising hit of the summer remains, thankfully, COCOON (Sack Copley Place). In a year where the average aged screen star probably wouldn't get served at the Metro, this touching movie shows, for a change, that not all that is heart-warming must fit on a toy shelf for Christmas shoppers. Even Dewitt gets his grandparents the old-fashioned way: he gets born with them. No plot line, no acting critique for this one, just see it yourself.

And, yes, Ron Howard directs well.

News flash: In case you're still wondering, Dewitt hears that Judith Crist and Michael Fox's mother really like TEEN WOLF (Beacon Hill).