Was Bill Haley Your Dream Lover?

MOVIES

THAT'LL BE THE DAY Directed by Claude Whatham (Anglo-EMI)

The English, as we know, take their rock and roll very seriously. The Bill Haley/ Teddy Boy explosion in Great Britain had an effect that would probably have held enough residual power to keep the Isles rocking even without the tremendous impetus of the Beatles. A film examination of the late fifties in England should then ideally be both a valuable historical document and a raving, boisterous entertainment.; That’ll Be The Day is a little of both, but ultimately not enough of either.

It drags along so painfully for about the first half-hour, in fact, that one has grave doubts that it could manage to redeem itself in any fashion. The literate, but rather dry screenplay by journalist Ray Connolly deals with Jim, played by McCartney look-alike David Essex, his dropping out of school, the straight life, and his absorption of the world of rock and leather. His sporadically interesting travels are accompanied by chunks of blaring music that is, considering that the musical supervisors were Neil Aspinal and Keith Moon, ineptly chosen. With Their credentials, they should certainly be aware that “Sealed With A Kiss,” “Runaway” and “Runaround Sue” were not even gleams in their composers’ eyes in 1959. Such anachronistic lapses are distracting and unnecessary. To compound matters, Jim becomes quite excited when a friend brings him a Buddy Holly album from home, but when he places it on his portable record player, what do we hear but Richie Valens, crooning about Donna. And Jim isn’t even disappointed. So much for his credibility.

But just when you’re ready to write this movie off a^s a total dud, Ringo Starr makes his entrance, greased-up duck tail and all, and his personality lifts the film to another level entirely. As the lecherous bad company that transforms our runaway boy into a junior league Alfie, Ringo delivers a riotous performance that almost allows us to forget the sentimental chaos going on all around him. He and Jim, first as waiters at a summer club and later as workers on a fairgrounds, cook up an act of shilling customers, pulling birds (though Jim gets most of the action) and general looning about that has an energy lacking in the rest of the film, and leads to speculation on how good That'll Be The Day could have been with some minor adjustments (a director of Lester’s calibre, more characteristic musical selections, the real McCartney in the lead, for example). Anyhow, our favorite Beatle gets beaten up about halfway through, eliminating him from the action, and leaving the movie floundering around for most of its duration. Jim’s old schoolmate, now at the university and involved in the Ban the Bomb movement, tells Jim that rock was just a fad and that trad is in (which it was^ briefly in England — remember Kenny Ball, Mr. Acker Bilk, et al), to which Jim solemnly replies that rock ‘n’ roll will never die. Soon after this confrontation, Jim goes back home to Mum, marriage and a baby, then follows ip his Dad’s footsteps by abandoning home and hearth. The last scene shows him buying an electric guitar, off on the road to fame, intimating that we might be in for a sequel following Jim through the Beatle years. Now that’s a period Aspinal knows about.

To be fair, there are a number of good bits in That'll Be The Day. Director Claude Whatham has, in his first theatrical film, created an aura of physical accuracy, pinched partially, (at least in spirit) from The Last Picture Show, without slipping into a morass of nostalgic detail. The casting is nearly flawless, especially of the girls, who manage to represent the coy, grabby sex of the times in all its brassiere-twisting splendor. And besides Ringo, we get a splendid drumbashing bit from Moon, and maybe best of all, a cameo from Billy Fury doing a brilliant send-up of his own early sixties image, that pretty-boy lacquered look he and Cliff Richard perfected in those in-between years. For these segments, Ringo’s quarter of the film, and Essex’s singing along with ‘Dream Lover’ in the privacy of his room, going through all the dramatic motions as he performs for an imagined screaming crowd, see That’ll Be The Day when it comes to your local drivein this summer. But don’t mistake it for the real thing. The authentic time-travel rock movie has yet to be made, the one that’ll capture the essence, the whole ethos of the era. It remains to be seen whether Richard Nader’s Let The Good Times Roll or the long-awaited Ameripan Graffiti can do for our side of the Atlantic in the ‘50’s what Whatham and company have attempted to do for Merry Olde. Meanwhile, catch this one, but scan your T. V. Guide for early A. M. showings of High School Confidential or Rock Rock Rock. Why settle for “Born Too Late” when you could be boppin’ at the high school hop?

Mitchell S. Cohen

THE EFFECT OF GAMMA-RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS Directed by Paul Newman

The most difficult thing about movie acting is being natural with a camera up your face. The most difficult thing about movie directing is making natural speech and action into something so uncommon that everyone will sit glued to the credits until everyone else goes home.

“The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds,” is a play-mademo vie, originally written by Paul Zindel, produced on the screen and directed by Paul Newman, who is fortunate enough to be married to or father of most of the cast. It is a rare family in a transmogrifying film. Joanne Woodward plays angry Beatrice Hunsdorfer and Nell Potts (stage name), her daughter on-screen and off, plays Matilda. Eli Wallach’s daughter Roberta plays Beatrice’s oldest daughter Ruth. Nepotism be damned — they’re all great. Matilda loves Science. Ruth loves boys. Beatrice loves nothing at all, since her no good husband left her and died in the Holiday Inn.

This is a movie about looking at Things. Beatrice acid-mouths her way through lower-class life, pipe-dreaming about a place called The Man in the Moon Tea Shop, where she will become famous for her cheesecake, like she used to be. Matilda grows marigolds that have been exposed to gamma rays for a science project, a quiet, cosmic child, totally unlike her mother. Ruth chases boys and has epileptic fits, living down shameful stories about her mother through the grapevine, nonetheless becoming just like her mother used to be. And there is Nanny, the Hunsdorfer’s ancient, nearcomotose boarder who stands like a crippled oracle for what everything used to be. Beatrice grows crazy, Ruth grows bitter, Nanny grows old, while Matilda grows marigolds.

It is a brilliant script of great depth and refinement, acted perfectly and directed faithfully. There is none of the pretension that marred many a Newman performance as ah actor. As a director, he is totally controlled. He serves the story: the places, the faces, the lines, the times, using just the right amount of power for each. It is an incredibly mature product, and it is pure drama. It is not timely, no comment on Today, no cute fetishes that we can identify with and chuckle over, no clitorises in the throat, no theme by Andy Williams, no wholesome family fun, no murders, no monsters, no mobs. Just a story about real people doing real things that somehow becomes so timed, tuned, and twisted they lay you out flat in the end.

The people in the film industry who are no longer flabbergasted by the mediocrity of the Academy Awards were not flabbergasted when Joanne Woodward was not nominated. She is masterful in a long, windy role. Her daughter is perfectly cast as the blue-eyed and blessed Matilda, and Roberta Wallach is better than her age as Ruth. But the real power of the story is the story itself, the lines, the arrangement of words and thoughts that string you along the course of this dishevelled case of womanhood and somehow lead you in the end to a conclusion that you usually reach only in church.

This film is about the world. To Matilda it is atoms, to Ruth it is boys, to Nanny it is over, to Beatrice it is an ugly lesson to teach her daughters. Ruth will learn. Matilda will not; and she will be right.

Howie Buten

PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID Directed by Sam Peckinpah (MGM)

Even if you think, as I do, that Sam Peckinpah is the greatest contemporary American director, and that his Westerns are virtually unmatched in the history of movies, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid’s principal motif is still a chicken shoot.

The direction seems clumsy, the script confused, the acting amateurish and the edit (done by six separate persons, apparently) extremely sloppy. This may not be entirely Peckinpah’s fault — being saddled with four rock stars may be enough to defeat the very best — but it is Peckinpah who is going to have to live with the failure, not Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Rita Coolidge or Donnie Fritts.

What redeems Pat Garrett, in the rare moments when it is redeemed, is Peckinpah’s mastery of Western scenery and the film’s veteran cast. Peckinpah shoots the most awesome location shots he’s done since Ride the High County, a dozen years ago, and I don’t think anyone has ever shot the prairies, deserts and mountains of the West with such true love as Peckinpah did in that movie.

The list of veterans in the cast is itself awesome: besides James Coburn, who plays Garrett, Slim Pickens, Chill Wills, Katy Jurado, Emilio Fernandez, Jorge Russek, Jason Robards Jr., L. Q. Jones, Luke Askew and Harry Dean Stanton provide Peckinpah with the most experienced cast he’s had since The Wild Bunch, the film which began this Western anti-hero business.

Perhaps because the cast is forced to cope with amateurish performances by the rock crowd, however, they only manage to pull off one effective scene. That scene, however, is one of the most moving death sequences in American cinema.

Slim Pickens, as a reluctant sheriff helping Garrett track down a gang of outlaws with information on the Kid’s whereabouts, is shot and as he staggers to the river, Katy Jurado, playing his wife, begins to follow him. As Pickens sits on a rock, holding his chest and bleeding profusely, he and Jurado look at each other with a bond of truly honest affection, and a choir rises in the background. It is a stunning moment, just what you go to the movies to see: beauty and honesty, though that sounds corny. The point is, this scene treads the line between the corny and the real perfectly. Even the music, for once, makes it. If you see this-scene and aren’t moved, you might as well quit going to American movies.

About the music: Dylan has written two songs. The first, which plays over the credits, is a ballad in the style of Another Side with the usual cretinmythic lyrics. Then there is the choir which rises behind the Pickens death scene (the film’s death theme, in fact, popping up again whenever someone’s about to get it). This is better, since the words are unobtrusive. There are a couple other song fragments, too, but nothing you’d remember. How Columbia plans to get a soundtrack LP out of this is beyond me; I’d suggest they shoot for a 45, and be happy if they get it.

I have one other cherished memory from a pair of viewings of this movie. As Garrett finishes his stalk, knowing that he is finally in the same town with The Kid, he sidles over to a small shop, where a short, crusty, bearded fellow, with dazzling blue eyes, is sanding a coffin. It is Peckinpah, of course, as sassy as ever. He provides the epitaph for his own movie, too. “Well, why don’t you go on in and get it over with.”

Dave Marsh