Mike Snell This Is Your Scene

DERBY; Directed and filmed by Robert Kaylor; Cinerama Releasing

If you were from Dayton, Ohio, had a wife and two kids plus an assortment of girl friends, worked in a tire factory, fancied yourself something of a swinger, and hankered after a little glory, what would you do?

Right on, you’d join the Roller Derby. Think of it: travel, excitement, fame, money, girls. Doesn’t sound too bad, huh?

Derby is a doqumentary about those possibilities. If you’re lucky like Charlie O’Connell of the Bay Bombers you can become a big winner. Charlie O. started out as a New York street kid. Now he’s a bourgeois baronet with an all-electric home in the hills behind Hayward. “I thank God I got into the Roller Derby, and for giving me a good life and keeping me off the streets." So says I Charlie O.

Derby is definitely a masochistically intriguing film. For a good many reasons. Not only is it a chilling glimpse into the life style of a whole class — working lower middle — it is also a measure of just how far you’ve gotten into a different way of life.

Actually the title is rather misleading. It might better be called Mike Snell, This Is Your Scene because it’s less about the Derby than Mike’s plan to join it. Mike is all of those things we began with apd more. He’s your basic American, w i f e - c h e a t i n g , c an’t-see-the-f orest, semi-literate, semi-punk with an unnamed but definite desire to ‘better himself’. He is also loveable — in the biblical sense. Mike’s idea is to quit his job and go to the Roller Derby training school in Oakland, Ca., He’s sure he can make it because he’s won some awards for speed skating.

Remember, Mike Snell is a real person. And Derby is a valuable document because he, his family, and friends have allowed the camera to probe intimately both sides of their lives. The cinema has more verite than Mike could realize.

More than Mike, the big star of Derby is little brother Butch Snell. Butch is a classic. Fat, indolent, dirty elbowed, open-mouthed dumb, he’s got a special purity. He has absolutely no drive or ambition, but when querried on why he doesn’t enlist he replies, “Un unh. No way. I’m a lover not a fighter.” Therein lies the moral.

And Derby offers at least one other revelation. That is, Playboy centerfolds seem to play a major religious role in the lives of Mike’s peers. They’re pasted everywhere. And they answer once and for all the question of what kind of a man reads Playboy.

Of course, lingering always in the background is the great golden rink itself. Derby is most effective in its all too few shots of forearm shivers, careening bodies, 'brawls and the orgiastic crowds which make up the Roller Derby spectacle. As one fan put it, the whole purpose is ACTION.

Roller Derby, more than any other sport, plays directly to the sadistic voyeuristic blood lust of the fans who come out by the thousands to froth at the sight of men and women inflicting pain on one another. It may sound scary but it’s also a multi-million dollar business. Therein lies moral the second.

Derby is definitely a flawed film. And it doesn’t tell you anything about Roller Derby you didn’t already know or suspect. But it is also accurate to a fault about one thing; that’s really how it is out there in the socio-economic heartland. Too bad it’s so accurate about the kind of life you’re trying to forget. I suppose the ideal place to show this film is outside of America — just so people there will know what we have to put up with.

P.S. It’s rated R presumably because there’s, alot of bodily function talk. So^ don’t take your mother unless you are 1) trying to open her eyes, or 2) trying to get even.

Jack Hafferkamp

Doinel, Paris TheTlmes and Truffaut

BED AND BOARD (DOMICILE CONJUGAL); Directed by Francois Truffaut; Columbia Pictures

Bed and Board is another chapter in the life and times of Antoine Doinel. You’ve come to love and grow with him through The 400 Blows, Love at Twenty, and Stolen Kisses. Like those films Bed and Board is a true delight. Truffaut again demonstrates his unique ability to create the nuance of life from mere film.

The story contained in Bed and Board in extremely simple. Also normal. Antoine (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is now married to Christine (Claude Jade), his girl from Kisses. He loses his job as a florist’s assistant and goes to work for an American ‘hydraulic’ firm as the operator of their remote control model boats. Christine has a baby. Antoine has an affair with a beautiful Japanese gif 1 (Madamoiselle Hiroko) whose bracelet c o n ve niently f a 11 s iirt o his demonstration pond. Christine throws him out. He is miserable. They get back together. No war, murder, rape, perversion, or insanity.

In the hands of someone less than Truffaut it could easily become a. Love Story minus cancer. Instead, it’s a deliciously warm .experience in the Company of a set of utterly charming characters. You see, Truffaut has the facility for breathing real life into his people. Not 'only his central figures, but everyone has a genuine personality of . his own; faultlessly expressed with a near perfect thrift. ■

For example, the TV repairman who — mind you, he’s on his way to the home of an elderly red-faced neighbor who hasn’t been outside in 25 years, and -, won’t go out until Petain is exonerated. So anyway, this TV repairman^ encounters Doinel who asks him if he’s married to a girl they both had known. No, he says, she quit work to marry an astronaut. “You know, big pay and always away.”

Or the old mailman glancing after Christine and mumbling, “I’d lay her badly, but I’d lay her gladly.”

Or the cafe owner passing a pint-sized kindergartner. With tongue suitable inserted he says, “You on your way to jsehopl? Aren’t you on strike?”

Now this doesn’t sound expecially knee-slapper. But it is. Precisely because here and in countless instances Truffaut never makes the mistake of hitting us Over the head with obviousness, His clues' and jokes, even, are presented very casually. If you get it, great. If not, well,, there is always Airport.

Not that there aren’t some problems with Bed and Board. Like, it bites off more time than can be comfortably chewed. It triestt> condense here and there,the result being that time is Somewhat confusing. It passes fast here and slow there. The film is also toq long. Especially if you get stuck behind a bushy head and have to crane your neck to read the sub-titles. AH the gripes,, though, are minor.

Oh, in case you aren’t acquainted with Doinel, don’t think you’ll be lost if you haven’t seen the other films. Bed and Board stands on its own. (If yod haveseen them, keep your eyes open for some nice reminders.) It’s an A-number-one motion portrait: of Doinel, of Parish of the tithes and, mostly , of Truffaut’s wit.

Its been said here and there that with Bed and Board the Doinel pycle has been completed, and that Truffaut has no further plans for his semi-autobiographical non-hero. Let’s all hope not. We need all. the old friends we can hang oh to. And I, for one, am anxious to keep Doinel as my French correspondent.

Jack Hafferkamp

On Drowning Film Freeks

El Topo, directed by and starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, is a nihilistic, apochryphal fantasy; a surreal desert landscape in which death is the only redemption, and blood the baptismal fluid. I found it loathsome in the extreme: a potpourri of sdcond rate Bunuel rip-offs set in Serge Leone country, unredeemed by the grace, visual style or sensibility apparent in the films of the two above directors.

But El Topo, which can’t find a national distributor who’ll buy it and book it into theatres, is playing at the Elgin Theatre in New York every night at midnight. It attracts an audience of hard core freaks who respond to it every fra me of the way. EyCn ignoring Jodorowsky’s shoddy technique, I was turned off by the hopeless, dimwit view of the world it presents. If things are as bad as “El Topo” depicts you can forget trying to alter the universe, or even going to the movies; suicide seems the only alternative.

But Barry Kramer saw it when lie came to New York, and he’s been pestering me for a review of it ever since. This is as much as he’s getting. The rest of this column is going to be devoted to Dyan Cannon. Which may not make much sense in the pages of Creem, but hang around anyway.

I’m a movie lover and a trash lover. Self confessed and self satisfied. One of thef few people in America who would gladly sit through Magnificent Obsession (a lachrymose absurdity by Douglas,Sirk in which Rock Hudson first causes Jane Wyman’s blindness, and then, out of love for her, becomes a surgeon and restores her sight) or Macao (Joseph Von Sternberg’s low point in which Robert M it chum and Jane Russell simulate exoticism on the RKO Studio backlot by riding around in a rickshaw and leering at each other) for that umpteenth viewing. Yep, a film freak.

Lately we film freaks are being drowned — on the left by nihilistic, political, hari kari movies such as El Topo and Godard’s latest films, and on the right by cumbersome reworkings of old formulas such as Airport and Love Story: And the “new” cinema which sits uneasily between these two, commited to both social and artistic standards and entertainment, turns up at least two Getting Straights for every one Five Easy Pieces. What ever happened to the foolish, escapist romantic movies of yesterday? Casablanca and North by Northwest and The Manchurian Candidate — all of which are very great movies — or Leave Her To Heaven and Imitation of Life and Walk on the Wild Side — all of which are hugely enjoyable bad, or good-bad movies? Television, the recession, and the conglomerates which have taken over the studios are a major part of the answer. But the audience’s taste for old fashioned hokum seems to have dried up at the same time.

All of which brings me to Dyan Cannon — an old fashioned movie star who appears in old fashioned movies. She’s a big sexy lady who comes equipped with the huskiest pair of shoulders since Joan Crawford and a pair of large, lewd red lips that were made for open mouthed kissing. She’s in* the tradition of Mae West and Marilyn Monroe — a healthy, extroverted woman who clearly enjoys sex for its bawdiness as well as its innocence — and in Doctor’s Wives she even manages to redeem lines such as “An orgasm a day keeps the shrink away.” She plays a lip-smacking nymphomaniac in the film, but, sadly, ten minutes into it her jealous husband goes berserk and shoots her. There are other trashily enjoyable elements in this pulpy mixture of eroticism and anesthesia — a frigid wife who gets her gonads going by shooting up on morphine, a scene in which a guilt ridden wife haltingly confesses a lesbian indiscretion to her husband who, instead of consoling her, beats her with a rolled up newspaper as if she were an errant terrier — but the loss of Dyan Cannon is deeply felt. Her sweaty, glittering, erotic presence defines the appeal of Doctor’s Wives better than anything in Daniel Taradash’s script does, and when she dies the picture goes with her.

What’s 1 so memorable about Dyan Cannon, what distinguishes her from such other competent people as Janice Rule and Diana Sands who also appear in Ddctor’s Wives, is that inescapable indefinable thing called star quality. Dyan Cannon seems larger than life, and so do the emotions she simulates. We share those emotions with her are drawn into the mystic, whorey, glamorous cbmmunion between actor and audience, finding ourselves reflected, our wishes fulfilled in the image she projects. Star quality. It’s not acting (Miss Cannon does that very well too), and it’s certainly not art, but it is one of the things that draws us to movies — at least it did so in the past.

Clint Eastwood also has star quality, though of an assuredly different kind. Like John Wayne, who he’ll probably replace as the cowboy king of the box office, he’s strong, assertive, aloof. A loner who accepts his destiny and does his job. Also like Wayne, he’s not so much an actor as he is a walking myth who gives credence and resonance to almost anything he appears in. %

Right now he’s appearing in The Beguiled, a Civil War gothic romance cum horror flick that distills the guadiest elements of Sweet Bird of Youth and Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. Roger Greenspun has written a thoughtful consideration of the film’s relationship to director Don Seigel’s auteur status (in Rolling Stone), but The Beguiled, for all its spiraling camerawork, hazy blue lighting, and moments of personal intensity, isn’t worthy of serious attention. The theme of a loner testing himself by pairing seven women off against each other is intruiging, but it gets lost in a series of contradictory flashbacks and sexual reveries (the most notable, an erotic pieta with Eastwood, Geraldine Page, and Elizabeth Hartman) which are dazzling to behold but numbing to contemplate. It’s a trash masterpiece, technically and emotionally more complex than Doctor’s Wives, but condemned to the same bargain, basement dramaturgy as the medico movie, rummaging through volumes of second hand Freud and coming up with seamy insights to explain away its characters lurid actions.

Don’t get me wrong. I dug Doctor’s Wives and The Beguiled. And Red Sky At Morning. Can’t forget that one. A young boy . . . growing up . . . Facing Life . . . moves to a new town . . . alcoholic mother . . . absent father . . . racial hatred . .\ first love ... first sex . .. Maturity .. . and off to war. There’s even a kitchen sink in one scene. And the kids in the movie are too much: a return to that pxe-Catcher in the Rye stereotype in which all kids indicated growing pains by acting like adults in bluejeans. They talk about sex (Hollywood cute) and they talk about death (Hollywood serious), and' at the end of the film there’s a staggering scene in which the young hero, his girl, and his best friend climb up to the top of a mountain. As the camera pulls in for individual wind-swept close-ups, each one recites his or her little speech about The Meaning Of Growing Up. The boy and the girl are portrayed by Richard Thomas and Catherine Burns,' both of whom appeared in Last Summer. But if you close your eyes and listen to the soundtrack you’ll find yourself conjuring up visions of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in a 1940’s Andy Hardy movie. Which is exactly what Red Sky A t Morning is. Which is exactly why I didn’t mind it.

I’m not arguing for trash and star worship over art and fine acting If anyone asks me what’s a good movie to see I’m going to tell them Claire’s Knee or The Conformist, not Doctor’s, Wives or The Beguiled. But I am saying that entertainment is important even necessary, and that it must not be ignored. Good, mindless entertaining movies like The Thomas Crown Affair Bullitand Darling Lili — or trashy entertaining ones like The Legend of Lylah Clare, Wild in the Streets, or Bloody Mama for that mattei — are part of what made films a mass entertainment medium, just as Dickens helped to shape the novel into a medium that all could enjoy. We know what’s happened to literature." People forgot that fine authors such as .Mark Twain and Hemingway were also great storytellers, and the fragmented, avant garde abstractions, of William S. Burroughs have taken over much of modern literature. What Burroughs writes is marvelous, but it appeals to a limited audience, and the storytelling end of the game has fallen into disrepute because it’s been left in the hands of hacks like Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. If the movie industry lets the cinematic Robbinses: and Susanns (the people who make Airport and Love Story) take over the entertaining, while the avant garde continues to devote itself exclusively to esoteric projects, it’s the end of movies as we’ve known them for the past half century. And that would be disastrous. El Topo sells out for its midnight showings but who’s going to fill the theatre for the rest of the day?.

John Kane