O LUCKY MAN! Directed by Lindsay Anderson Warner Brothers

Malcolm McDowell will probably win an Academy Award nomination for his performance in O Lucky Man! He could probably give a damn. His luck, however, seems to point in that direction. The lyrics of the soundtrack wail �The next one will be the best one of the year.� The prison warden in the movie informs him �The world is your oyster... you have eyes like Steve McQueen.� Malcolm, as Mick Travis, responds to this vision like Joan of Arc. His large eyes look at life in a pure, naive, idealistic way, quite the reverse of Clockwork Orange's Alex. In fact, it�s partially the preconceived notion of Malcolm as an evil creature that creates suspense in O Lucky Man! Even the revolutionary schoolboy (also Mick Travis) who McDowell played in If. . is a far cry from this innocent pilgrim.

Lindsay Anderson directed If .. O Lucky Man! marks his reunion with Malcolm and screenwriter David Sherwin, along with a group of people from Anderson�s previous films. Like Peckinpah�s standard set of actors, Anderson works with the same group and most have more than one role in this movie. Don�t let that confuse you — they had a low budget. Besides doesn�t everybody remind you of somebody?

Structurally, O Lucky Man! is like a dream (or a nightmare). It mixes influences and images with some semblance of logic, hinging on fantasy and using a tremendous amount of recurring significant detail that is heavily Freudian. Like a dream, O Lucky Man! is a series of episodes masterfully linked into an epic revealing profundities cloaked in absurdity or irony.

O Lucky Man!'s dream is about an upwardly mobile Englishman, Mick Travis, and his travels from the ages of 19 to 29. He starts as a coffee salesman (Malcolm did work for Chase and San-., born). Then climbs the rungs of success via the sincerity of his smile and a li�l bit o� luck. Travis gets promoted from trainee to North Country rep when the former rep conviently vanishes.

On the road, Mick�s escapades begin with a dowdy landlady, Mary Ball, who greets him in bed after he�s sampled a Chocolate Sandwich (a burlesque act in which a black fellow tackles two white waifs in bed). This respectable entertainment was hosted by his first coffee customer, a hotel manager-town mayor. A neighborhood tailor presents Travis with a charming gold lame suit, before Mick makes a trip to convince an Atomic Research Establishment they need his coffee. But he�s arrested, electrified, signs a confession of his communist sympathies and narrowly escapes getting blown up with the building, thanks to an accomodating tea lady. Lucky stiff.

Next stop is a church where the Vicar�s wife (formerly Mary Ball) discovers the exhausted, starving Mick reaching for bread on the altar. �That�s for the Lord/� she reprimands but then takes pity and breastfeeds the boy. Refreshed, and hitching to London, he�s picked up by the Millar Medical Research Center, who offer him 150 pounds for experimental rights to his bod.'Mick is terrified of sterilization, though. On the way he encounters a revolting Millar victim whose half-pig body convulses, sweats and squeaks. This hastens Mick�s departure through a second story window and into the Alan Price Band�s van. (Alan composed and performs the tremendous score of O Lucky Man! He and his band have sort of a Greek chorus role. Price used to be in The Animals, later teamed up with Georgie Fame and had a hit with Randy Newman�s �Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear�.) Price�s back seat is for carnal behavior, of course, this time with a rich industrialist�s lovely daughter, 'Who is unimpressed with Mick�s naive dreams of material success. (Price�s band echos �Without a dream, you are nothin. Nothin. Nothin.�) But the Renoirs in her room excite Mick�s' ambitious drive and he lands a job with Sir James Burgess (any relation to Anthony?), the girl�s father (and formerly the Tailor). He strikes gold again when Sir James� personal assistant drops out a 23 story window.

Are you following me? This begins to remind me of a Beatles movie.

Feeling, no doubt, like Horatio Alger, Mick enjoys the limo, mansion and champagne only briefly. The scene that leads to his calamitous downfall (life isn�t a bowl of cherries) involves an African empire deal. Home movies of napalmed natives convince Sir Burgess to stamp out the Afro-rebels by investing in the vacation paradise. Mick ignorantly walks into a frame-up, faking the rap for the illegal proceedings, gets thrown in jail, comes out a rejuvenated, rehabilitated, individual giving generously to the Salvation Army, spouting Zen philosophy, trying to save a suicidal woman and attempting to feed a pack of derelicts who stone him and his filthy charity out of their gutter. . .

Mick, aimlessly stumbling down an arcade-lined, crowded street, spots a character in a gold lame suit (he also played pig-man) offering stardom on a sandwich board. At the audition, Mick�s selected by the director (Lindsay Anderson in a Hitchcock-like appearance) to smile for the camera. But with the trials he�s undergone for the last three hours (10' years film time), there isn�t much reason to grin. When Mick asks why he should smile, it�s like Dicken�s cheeky Oliver Twist saying �Please sir, I want some more!� Anderson clouts the bloke over the head with his script, thereby enlightening Travis with the understanding of acceptance. A slow smile emerges — not the compulsive, toothy one he* had at the onset of his adventures. Actually, it�s more of a smirk, clueing the audience in on the irony. We�ve now come full circle.

O Lucky Man! is based on Malcolm�s experiences but deals with issues which are more social/ political/ humanistic. (Candide and Kafka�s Amerika are suggested supplementary reading). Anderson hopes it�s a balance of both stimulation and entertainment. It is. The inclusion of comic and tragic elements is necessary for a successful movie but that�s assuming everyone understands the satire.

McDowell thinks O Lucky Man! is realistic, Travis is on a quest, trying to direct and control his life in the heroic fashion, attempting to mold his destiny by changing his fate. As Malcolm says �to seize your opportunities� and take your chances. He�s clearly managed well.

Robbie Cruger

SUPERFLY T.N.T. Directed by Ron O'Neal (Paramount) SHAFT IN AFRICA Directed by John Guillermin (MGM)

Since the black movie bonanza started, its two superheros have manfully avoided each other, respectfully allowing one another to prowl unmolested on their own turf. The truce finally seems broken, for in one week, on the same Broadway block, two sequels met soul to soul: Superfly T.N.T. and Shaft in Africa, pitted against each other for box office receipts and the title of baddest Megabrother in the Big City.

The first Superfly was a taut, fast moving adventure movie with a consistent visual style (thanks to the professionalism of Gordon Parks Jr.) Curtis Mayfield�s soundtrack to Superfly raised the movie above and beyond the level of mere blackploitation into a vehicle for his most important work as a serious compo'ser, and gave the movie a context with the non-cinema world that made watching Superfly a rare total experience.

To get into the theatre, we had to cross a picket line, �Superfly Ain�t Fly,� �Drug Movies Must Go� and �Clip Superfly�s Wings,� were some of the signs held by the fifty or so demonstrators from CORE. They also chanted:

�Who�s on dope?�

�Superfly!�

�Who�s not high?�

�Superfly!�

�Who�s a junkie?�

Inside, we see Priest, having escaped with his cool million from The Last Coke Deal, is in Rome. He plays highstakes poker with respectable international millionaires and crooks, drives a Lamborghini, and asks questions like �Where Am I?� He says things to his girl friend, who was so erotic in the first Superfly like �I love you. You�re the most important thing in my life. I need you, and don�t you ever leave me.� Then the Valentino swoon kiss. So much for eroticism and snappy dialogue.

I could go on. Did you know, for example, that there are �Negro intellectuals being paid to say how untogether niggers are?� One of those intellectual types is Roscoe Lee Browne, who is pretty great as the Umbian who recruits Priest to go to Africa... something about freeing Umbia from �the yoke of colonialism.�

Whatever happened got lost in O�Neal�s inexperienced direction, a pathetically self-righteous script, and intramural editing battles between O�Neal and producer/moneyman, a white cat named Sig Shore, all of which make Super fly T.N.T. the black Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Shaft in Africa fares much better. In fact, it�s an often exciting, often funny adventure picture that stands on its. own, even as the third entry in the series that began with Shaft and Shaft�s Big Score.

In the new flick, Richard Roundtree again plays the superstud Harlem private eye. This time John Shaft is whisked off to Africa to break up a modern slave trading ring that delivers flesh cheap to a rich, impotent Paris gangster named Amafi (Frank Finlay).

Shaft also socks it to intellectuals, but with a little finesse: �I was 21 before I learned that isn�t is another way of saying ain�t. � He talks the lovely Aleme (Vonetta McGee) out of signing up for a tribal clittoradectomy by asking �how you gonna know what you�re missing unless you give it a little wear and tear?�

Like James Bond, who Shaft is modeled most precisely after (he�s even given an African fighting stick with hidden gadgets), his drug is scotch, not coke. And like Bond, he has a weakness for enemy women — in this case, Amafi�s nymphomaniac girlfriend, (Neda Arneric) who is sent to seduce him.

Ah, Shaft. The three MGM secretaries sitting in back of me (all white, straight looking, lower middle class gum chewers) nearly wet their pants for a piece of his action. He�s beautiful to watch, Roundtree, a flawless body and nimble mind, both of which are well put to use in Shaft in Africa, which is a definite go see.

Where do they go from here? From what I hear, Shaft is going to be a TV series starring Roundtree, probably next fall. It oughta be a mutha. The absolutely lost ending of Superfly T.N.T. indicates there�ll probably be another sequel, and probably just as ghastly.

Nope, I-think to really keep people cornin�, there�s gonna have to be some new blood — sortie super sessions, in fact. Shaft and Superfly could team up, and fight Bruce Lee in �Kung Fu Comes to Harlem,� �Across Tsien-Dao Street,� or even �Superfly Meets Godzilla.�

Sean Connery, or even Clint Eastwood, could fight the winner.

Wayne Robins