Portnoy Half Fulfilled

PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT Directed by Ernest Lehman Warner Bros.

The film version of Portnoy's Complaint is neither as offensive as Myra Breckenridge nor as monumental as The Godfather. It is an archetypal example of the best seller turned into a �big� movie: half-fulfilled yet still vaguely pleasing because it retains something of the original, far superior, material. Ernest Lehman wrote, directed, and produced the film. He can also take most of the blame for what went wrong with it.

Lehman is a pro, a polished screenwriter (Sweet Smell of Success, North by Northwest) whose successful work has allowed him to become producer of such recent blockbusters as Virginia Woolf and Hello Dolly. Yet, as the adaptor of Roth�s novel, he makes several crucial errors. The first, and most injurious to the author�s conception, is the decision to play down Portnoy�s family life. Alex appears only as a teenager, never a child, and the scenes of domestic strife occupy less than a third of the film. This unbalances the film, and changes it from the kind of Lenny Bruce-meets-Freud angst-epic that Roth created into the elongated story of a love affair (between Portnoy and the Monkey), padded out with some family background. It�s still amusing (Lehman has been intelligent enough to preserve much of Roth�s dialogue) but it�s off target.

Lehman�s other error as a screenwriter stands as a classic example of Beverly Hills good taste. In an effort to �lick� the book, and possibly to insure an �R� rating instead of the dreaded �X�, Lehman has taken a strange stance towards the book�s sexual passages: they are talked about, but never shown. The film needs something more, something visually equivalent to the outrageous, pomo-comic talk that gave the book much of its impact. But every time someone hops into bed,the camera gets gun-shy and starts focusing on liquor

bottles or shoulder blades. We hear everything (Alex�s obscene monologues, his passionate dialogues with the Monkey), but we don�t get to see anything. I�m not saying that Lehman should have turned the whole thing into a stag flick, just that a little visual spice might have helped to make it seem as ribald and unbuttoned as the book was. Alas, in this movie, what you hear is what you don�t see.

Lehman�s greatest failure, however, is as a director: he has failed to give the film a coherent visual style. There are zoom shots, medium shots, and a tremendous amount of reaction shots, but they never blend into a perceptible style. Roth�s novel was a manic cry of urban Jewish despair, as carefully shaped and paced as a nightclub monologue. The film needs a style which conveys this — perhaps the crazy-cat editing of Richard Lester, perhaps the cool, clinical quality of Mike Nichols� Carnal Knowledge — but Lehman never finds it.

All of this may lead you to believe that Portnoy's Complaint is a disaster.

It�s not. (Although the ending, with the shrink remaining silent, Benjamin leaving the office in tears and then, a la ships that pass in the night, walking by Karen Black on Fifth Avenue, all to the accompaniment of Michfel Legrand�s syrupy inappropriate music, is disastrous, as well as being a complete distortion of the book�s final point of view.) But no, it�s not bad, just vaguely competent and uninspired, entertaining at times, but never anything more than that. Certainly the acting can�t be faulted. Richard Benjamin, with a babyfaced smirk that keeps on threatening to crack and release a yowl of psychic pain, is Portnoy just as you may have imagined him. Karen Black is, by turns, funny, fleshy, touching, and a pain in the ass as the Monkey. And Lee Grant, though she pushes a bit too hard in her early scenes, has just enough good moments — like a first shot in which, propped up in bed, she welcomes Alex with her arms extended like the petals of a Venus fly-trap- to make you wish that they gave her more.

Anatole Broyard, in reviewing Roth�s novel, called it �the Moby Dick of masturbation.� It would be nice to say the same for the movie, but, for all its good intentions and tine performances, it�s rather limp.

John Kane

STAMPING GROUND Directed by Jason Pohland A Fine Films Release

A stamping ground, kids, was what they used to call the place where wagon trains parked and the pioneers got out to boogie. And since, brothers and sisters, we�re pioneers too, space cowboys, in fact, what better name could there be for this, the latest obsessive-compulsive rock festival movie?

Don�t you wish you were at the Holland Festival of Music, where this was filmed? Think of it. Girls with no bras, some even with no blouses. Kids with painted faces, blowing bubbles and smoking ^dope. Beads. Headbands. Grooving. No cops, no narks, no hassles, no bad vibes did these lenses catch at all.

Bob Hite: �I feel less uptight here than I�ve ever been. Beautiful country you�ve got here.�

Dig the windmills. Tulips. Canals. Dig A1 Wilson, bluesy, funky, stiff, glazed, not many weeks from dead. Never mind. Canned Heat smokin� joints on stage, boogieing. Far out!

Dutch kids smoking dope through chillums. Swimming naked. Why do Dutch kids look like Long Island nembutol addicts?

It�s raining. It�s A Beautiful Day (naturally) keeps their amps cranking while the kids chant or hide under plastic, just like they did at Bunker Hill, or Swan Song, or Crosby�s Farm or wherever.

That�s neat. A European fag selling plastic forks. He looked like a paid actor. A girl wakes up and puts on eye-shadow and makeup. A Dutch sorority sister? �She�s probably from Colorado,� said Sam Maddox, Boulder�s Teenbeat Mojo Man.

Bill Thompson, Airplane manager: �I really enjoy the music.�

Grace Slick: �I don�t object to killing as long as both parties are interested in it.� Paul Kantner is smoking a . . . a .. . uh, a joint! Wow!

Pink Floyd banged a gong. T Rex got it on. Santana was as usual excessive, though the photographer had a crush on their drummer. The Byrds were �Ole Blue.� Country Joe sang �Freedom� and then talked like a wired young Ed Muskie.

Two bands were worth the look. Family was incredible, with the scraggly Roger Chapman shaking the dt�s, a com-

bination of David Peel burnt synapses and Ma Barker subtlety, truly possessed, seriously bizarre, a breath of rare eccentricity in the midst of all these straight dopers.

Then there is Dr. John. Hopefully, there will always be Dr. John. He lo�oks like the Bayou Pope, with Shirley Goodman and Joni Jonz, the soul peacocks of New Orleans, shaking tambourines and bubble machines, last of the true psychedelics. And that�s no jive.

Photography? There were ten cameramen, thirteen assistant cameramen. None of them knew what they were doing. Pacing? Stamping Ground makes Medicine Ball Caravan look like Bullitt.

Actually, the movie is a search for a new level of sublime boredom. It is so boring that one is literally at the edge of one�s seat in anticipation of what kind of boredom is going to replace the last boredom.

This is a culture? Listen boys, tell yer gal if she wants to see Stamping Ground, you�ll only go dutch. And girls, tell your main man what he can shove in the dike if he even suggests it.

Wayne Robins

FRENZY Directed by Alfred Hitchcock Universal — International

What can I tell you about Frenzy? That it�s Alfred Hitchcock�s 52nd film. That it�s about a series of London necktie stranglings and how the wrong man is accused of them. That I really didn�t care about it that much.

�What is this shit, anyway,� you�re saying. �Hitchcock is a genius.� Well, maybe. He certainly is a supremely talented man who has made more than his share of arguably great films. But Frenzy, though an improvement over his recent efforts, is not one of them. It�s a bit of dry-as-dust academics, pleasingly reminiscent of many of his British films of the thirities, replete with suspenseful set-pieces and several dollops of hearty, macabre humor.

But it doesn�t make you care. And in any art form, that�s the whole ball game. The set-pieces — a long tracking shot from a helicopter down the Thames river, a backwards tracking shot away from the scene of a murderous rendezvous, a splendidly edited scene during which the killer tries to extract his tie-clasp from the clenched fist of a dead woman — click by flawlessly. Each one is a gem, and it�s possible to write a rave review for Frenzy by cutting it up into several small pieces and drooling over them one by one.

But we don�t see movies in pieces; we see them as a single entity and we respond to them on that level. We must care about the films we are seeing and the people in them. When the killer hold the knife at Jane Fonda�s throat in Klute, your palms better start sweating; when Popeye chases the subway in a bashed-up car in French Connection, your heart better beat a little faster. And while it�s possible, and even proper, to explain our reactions to these things in terms of the editing and the camerawork, there�s one other thing you must consider: the attitudes you�ve built up towards the people involved. Those attitudes aren�t something we pick up by chance, they have to do with the total quality of the film: the amount of momentum it builds up, the way it flows, the emotional empathy we feel with the characters, or, as often as not, the stars. Frenzy, because of its episodic story line, clinical attitude, and stereotyped characters, never makes us care

about it. That is its ultimate undoing.

And all the auterist-academic shit that�s going to hit the fan when the film opens (the carefully worked contrasts between the murderer and his wronglysuspected friend, the playful links Hitchcock works out between eating and death and the way they relate to, oh say, the �you eat like a bird� Line from Psycho, or the meat carving bit in Sabatoge), none of that can redeem the film. Frenzy is a technically perfect, emotionally empty film, crafted within an inch of its life by an' extremely knowing artist.

One last note: Hitchcock has said that actors are cattle so frequently that he may have begun to believe himself. The actors in Frenzy are a hardworking, highly proficient group of people; but they sorely lack personality, much less the kind of glittering star quality dispensed with such champange smoothness by past Hitchcock performers such as Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, or Grace Kelly. They are boring little people^ and Hitchcock hasn�t bothered to make sure that we become involved with them. And they are ugly! That may sound like a pretty cheap remark, but, after seeing a couple of

dowdy British women with faces like push-in crumpets being strangled by a lumpy looking male star, see if you too don�t find yourself awash in a sexist reverie of visions of Janet Leigh twisting and turning that incredible body and face away from Mrs. Bates� butcher knife. Leigh is the kind of movie star who�s often put down as plastic, but in the traditional Hollywood terms of mythic iconography, she is ten times more honest (simply because she�s such a fantasy) than any of the drab, �real� people who populate Frenzy.

John Kane