THE BLINDMAN ABKCO FILMS

The Blindman is the new Ringo Starr movie, but that doesn’t have very much to do with what the movie is about. There’s not a lick of rock and roll on the soundtrack, and Ringo’s mournful Liverpudlian wit — when it comes across at all — is seen unintentionally.

What Ringo reminded me most of, in fact, was Rick Nelson in Rio Bravo. He has the same enormous blue eyes and the same doomed gunslinger approach, but the differences are what make this such an exotic movie.

It’s trashy as hell. Ringo is little more than a bit player; he’s not The Blindman, because Tony Anthony (who is shaping up as the new Clint Eastwood) is. The plot is riduculously complex, with so many twists and turns that we learn quickly that it is not really to the point. It’s all played for the laughs, the gore and the excitement. There’s plenty of each, all of it inconsequential and it’s just this that made me like it so much.

Ringo’s last couple of movies were little more than a drag — he just isn’t cut out, I don’t think, for anything that might matter in the way that Candy and The Magic Christian (particularly the latter) might have mattered if they had been successful. They weren’t but it wasn’t Ringo’s fault. He was, at the very least, charming and funny in each of them. That’s probably all the man is cut out to be, but then Charlie Chaplin wasn’t cut out to be much more.

Maybe The Blindman is supposed to Ringo’s first “straight dramatic” role. I don’t know. If it is, that’s someone’s mistake. Ringo conveys his pain in a manner that belongs to the very funniest people on the screen. He’s been compared to Chaplin often enough to make the comparison trite but it still sticks in your mind. And he mugs well enough to make you think of, say, Buster Keaton. Like those two, he’s best when he keeps his mouth shut.

But Tony Anthony carries the movie.

The Blindman might have some allegorical significance — in fact, I’m almost sure (after El Topo) that he’s supposed to — but it’s lost in the improbabilities of the script. He’s supposed to be tracking down 50 women who were stolen from him as he was shepherding them to Texas where they were to marry some ranchers or cowboys or something.

They’re an unlikely crew of wives. They all look like they just escaped from a Playboy picture spread — perhaps a short discourse on a classy “X” flick, bosoms bursting, heads held high. Their ambience is a lot more raw-meaton-the-hoof, a lot more coquettish than is usual in wifely roles. (I can’t imagine anyone getting upset by the sexism; the movie is so trashy and inconsequential that it’s a throwback in the first place, and as everyone knows sexism wasn’t invented until 1968.)

Ringo’s brother has stolen the women and the rest of the movie is sort of about The Blindman’s struggle to get them back, the Ringo gang’s struggle to keep them and a Mexican general’s struggle to keep his head after his entire army has been wiped out by the Starr brothers’ gang in a scene lifted right out of The Wild Bunch.

There is also a love interest, involving a girl Ringo moons desperately over for the entire movie, a girl who has nothing to do with The Blindman except that he has helped her and her father escape from Ringo’s evil clutches ... it would take far too long to explain the whys and the wherefores of it all.

Lots of blood, lots of wit (after The Blindman’s balls are almost blown off, he dusts himself off and says, “Being blind is bad enough...” or again, “Being blind makes you half a man. Being blind and broke .. . well that’s a bitch.”) but none of it really comes to anything.

Maybe that’s what I love best about it. Certainly, if you can still look at the world through a Beatle-prism, that’s what makes Ringo everybody’s favorite Beatle at the moment. There’s nothing in The Blindman that matters; Ringo knows it, and so do we. He isn’t defensive about its irrelevancy (like Paul) and he doesn’t insist on social (John) or moral (George) overtones. It’s just there.

I keep thinking that maybe “Backoff Boogaloo” could be the best song yet about the British in Ireland; maybe it’s the music the troops can march out . of the country to. Or a proposal that they do just that.

But I made that up: And the best thing about The Blindman is that in drawing so heavily from other trash flicks (Beyond the Valley of The Dolls, El Topo — sort of cosmic trash — and The Wild Bunch, which is trash by association) it gains integrity through lack of pretense. It certainly does those films as much justice as Bangla Desh does its counterparts: Woodstock, Gimme Shelter and your choice of Battle of Algiers or Fantasia.

It ain’t A Hard Day’s Night, but it’ll do.

Dave Marsh

FRITZ THE CAT

Way back when, before you or I probably even started smoking pot, a young cartoonist was scrawling all kinds of things on the reverse sides of the pages of some wallpaper sample books he’d found in the trash one day while cruising one of Cleveland’s seamier sections. Most of the scrawl was justscrawl, but some patterns started to emerge. One of them was an actual cartoon character, a kind of free-wheeling cat, and the cartoonist, whose name was Robert Crumb, named him Fritz. Shortly thereafter, Crumb got a break of sorts from Harvey Kurtzman, who had just dumped MAD, a magazine he’d helped found. Kurtzman printed some of Crumb’s stuff in HELP, his new humor magazine. Some more of it wound up in Cavalier. Eventually, Ballantine Books collected three of the Fritz strips and put them out as a book. Then some wiseguy came along and decided to make it into a full-length animated cartoon.

It sucks.

That hurts to say, too, because I very badly wanted to like Fritz The Cat. The animation is superlative, the color is astounding, the camerawork is wonderful, and it is easy to see that the state of the art of animation has progressed by leagues since I stopped going to kiddie matinees ten years ago. Everything would be fine, except. . .

Except that with Crumb, any interpreter is faced with an almost insurmountable problem, and that is the fact that the original material is so complete, so subtle, and so perfectly balanced in all its facets, that if you’re gonna fuck around with it, you better be good. And these folks ain’t good. Where Crumb can take situations that are incredibly racist or sexist on the face of them and transform them into something quite else to the extent that the reader can find himself profoundly moved, these people have waded in and reduced the situations to mere shadow-plays of the ones Crumb delineated. Thus, Fritz’s adventures among the (black) crows in Harlem become incredibly racist in tone, with none of the original cynical distance from all the characters included. In other words, instead of laughing to yourself and saying “wow, that’s so true — so many folks really do look at it this way” you’re subjected to that same scene — only seen through the eyes of somebody who apparently really does look at it that way.

There are some nice sequences — a long, abstract sequence where a crow does the handjive to “Bo Diddley” while Harlem fades into focus, the bathtub sex orgy, and a speedfreak/biker/ revolutionary whose personality comes through wonderfully in spite of the fact that he’s only a minor character. But they’re outweighed by the terrible ones — Fritz’ crow buddy Duke’s death is treated with almost no sympathy since he’s expendable and if as much care had been taken with the fuck scenes as were taken with the scene where the revolutionaries beat up the biker’s girlfriend maybe the movie would deserve its X.

But the worst thing is the exploitation of Crumb. All throughout the movie, there are bits and pieces from just about all his work, lovingly rendered so as to make the unwary viewer think he had something to do with it. He didn’t. As of this writing he’s suing the filmmakers to have his name removed from all the advertising and credits — as well he might. This Fritz — like the people who made him — is an exploiter, not a confused soul stumbling around the “real world” and surviving on pluck and luck. One gets the feeling that this Fritz hasn’t a drop of compassion in his body, and representing him thus is a serious affront to a man who has lots, and is one of the very few geniuses we have left.

Ed Ward

FILLMORE

Conceived and directed by Richard T. Heffron

Twentieth Century Fox

Fillmore is the rock-documentary as before: cinema verite, rock groups, and split-screen and multiple image techniques for the numbers. The groups include The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Hot Tuna, and Santana, among others; and the ostensible purpose of the whole venture is to chronicle the closing of the Fillmore West, and parenthetically, the closing of an era. As a rock flick, it ranks somewhere above Celebration at Big Sur and somewhere below The Concert for Bangla Desk.

What’s missing is a structure, some kind of an over-all scheme to pull the various vignettes and acts together so that they loom larger than ordinary life, as the Fillmores once did. There’s a feeble attempt to wring some tension out of a series of scenes in which Bill Graham hassles with Santana in order to get them to appear on the closing bill, but the larger possibilites inherent in the event are left pretty much untouched. The closing of the Fillmores reverberates with all sorts of mythic potential; a kind of counter-culture Last Picture Show could have been fashioned from it. Instead, the people who made Fillmore have given us another passable music film.

Of course, there is Bill Graham. He lays down some fairly trite raps in a couple of interviews, but, in action, he gives the film a sense of life and immediacy which it desparately needs. Howling into a phone, cursing at a secretary, stabbing his fingers into mid-air as if he could puncture it, he emerges as a man of total conviction and self-dedication — sort of the Patton of rock. Fillmore functions best not when it turns a lead singer into a trio via the split screen or when it cautiously attempts to trace the rise and fall of youth culture through old newsreels, but when it concentrates the fiercely fought, minute-to-minute battles which comprise Bill Graham’s working day. In doing this, the film, purposely or not, becomes a well-deserved valentine to Graham.

That’s nice but it’s not enough. In their heyday, there was something very special about the Fillmores. Stumbling into the dark grotto, past the refreshment stand which sold yogurt and jelly doughnuts, past the rest rooms and the sickly-sweet odor that emanated from them, up the stairs that were always too steep and into the seats that were always too narrow, you felt as if you were finally there. After all those years of reading J.D. Salinger’s stories, listening to transistor radios, and watching the tube — after all those years of living vicariously — the Fillmores, as much as any institution or event which arose during the late sixties, seemed to be offering firsthand experiences. For once, it no longer seemed necessary to read about them; for as long as it lasted at the Fillmores, we became them, Swept up in that heady, self-centered sense of rapture that turns life into a series of sensuous, immediate encounters. Something not to be contemplated or planned, but merely to be experienced. Call that feeling what you will — I’d call it magic — but it’s what Fillmore lacks.

John Kane