The 11th New York Film Festival was one of the shortest (18 films, most of them shown twice) in the Festival's history and one of its least spectacular, yet it sold out immediately, mostly through advance mail orders from people on the Festival's own mailing list. What was good in this year's program was very good, but it had more j than its share of dreck and pretentious dreck at that, even the most deadly of which was screened to a capacity audience. Are people so starved for classy films they'll go see anything the Festival offers up? Yes, even if it means paying for the privilege of booing in comfortable seats. There are so few elite " activities left these days. But the Festival does provide a service even for those who can't get in by introducing new directors (although too often they're the same new ones all the time) and spurring interest in old ones. If distributors seem to have lost interest in the careers of Satyajit Ray, Joseph Losey or Ermanno Olmi, the Festival can usually be depended upon to keep us up to date and give the distributors a nudge at the same time.

As with programs in the past, a good number of the films screened this year will not be given a general release — some we are being spared, but others we are being greatly deprived of. Jean Eustache's extraordinary The Mother and The Whore, for example, is terrifically demanding, not only because of its length (3 Vi hours) but its relentless talk, and for that reason is unlikely to be shown in this country. Yet it was one of the Festival's best films and probably one of the best films to come out of France in the past year. Oh well.

The films are reviewed in the order of their showing at the Festival. Three are left out; Straub's History Lessons because I figured I had enough boredom in my everyday life; a French documentary entitled Israel Why that I just didn't want to know the answer to; and, sadly, the Russian Andrei Rubley because it was either have lunch or go to a 2fi hour movie and I had. lunch (Rublev is scheduled for ^release this year and is reportedly magnificent.) A note of interest: there was an awful lot of rock & roll or just plain music aside from film scores in the program this year. Mean Streets opened up with "Be My Baby" and jumped from The Stones to The Marvelettes to popular Italian songs throughout. Badlands went from Satie to "Love is Strange" to James Taylor; Petra von Kant played Giuseppe Verdi, - The Platter! and the Walker Brothers and all action stopped in The Mother and The Whore when the record .player went on.

Day For Night (La Nuit Americaine) — Francois Truffaut: Dedicated to Dorothy and Lillian Gish, this movie about movie-making is Truffaut at his most irresistible. Truffaut himself plays the harried director of an apparently soapoperatic melodrama called Meet Pamela which is being filmed in the south of France on a series of elaborate studio sets. But if the film-within-the film seems bland, the action behind the scenes is fascinating: rain-making, hosing "snow" onto an outdoor set, orchestrating the precise movements, of a crowd scene, even getting a kitten to lap up a saucer of milk oh cue. And further backstage, the actors and crew, all of them richly detailed, going through their own crises: Jean-Pierre Leaud playing his usual romantic fool, first with a sassy script-girl, then with leading lady Jacqueline Bisset; Valentina Cortese as a quickly fading star who does more drinking than rehearsing; Jean-Pierre Aumont as the classic French romantic lead, distracted by the imminent arrival of his young lover; Truffaut having dreams about the Cinema in neon letters. Roles within roles, and all so brilliantly realized it's a disappointment when the film ends.

Illumination — . Krzysztof Zanussi: Another pointless end. Alienation and "disintegration in Poland, interspersed with scientific lecture demonstrations. A young student ponders What is the meaning of life? or something like that. Feh.

Kid Blue — James Frawley: For the first time, the Festival included a film released but unappreciated in the United States during the past year, Why they broke precedent for Kid Blue, I don't quite understand — there were certainly

a lot of other box office flops deserving special attention — but the choice wasn't as bad as I was led to expect. Dennis Hopper sure ain't no kid and the Wild West sociology does get in the way, but the movie's bright and funny and the rest of the cast — including Janice Rule, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson and Peter Boyle — is just fine. Plus the Festival's one concession to B-movie entertainment: a slapstick happy ending.

Fejeanne Padovani — Denys Arcand: A. French-Canadian film about Corruption in High Places. The lowest TV crime series, the shoddiest black film begins with more sophisticated assumptions about money arid corporate power than this film serves up after 90 tedious minutes. Grade Z acting, witless filmmaking — the worst this year.

A Doll's House — Joseph Losey: All through this adaptation of Ibsen's play, I kept thinking, the original dialogue can't be this dumb. So I reread the play and was dismayed to find out it is. "I am a human being like you or I must become one," Jane Fonda as Nora tells her husband at the end. Well right on, Jane, but who besides a character in a play talks like that? The problems with this.screen version are all of this sort: a stiffness and artificiality in the dialogue, the condensation of the main action in two or three days, and Losey's rather awkward attempts to break out of these stage conventions and provide some background for the action as well as some breathing space outside Nora's "doll's house." If these tensions between film and play prevent the movie being completely satisfying, the action is a fine compensation. Fonda is particularly good in a part that requires both silliness and intelligence. Delphine Seyrig as her friend Kristine is a little over-precise but so good you begin to wonder what she might have done as Nora. Reportedly, A Doll's House has been sold to TV where, given the conventions of a whole new medium, it just might turn out to be much more impressive than it is on a movie screen. Or much more boring.

Return (Ritomo) — Gianni Amico: A young man and his wife drive from Rome to their birthplace in the north, expecting to find his, father dying. But the telegram that brought them proves to be a hoax and instead of death, they become invoked ini rediscovering their pasts, or the shreds of it that remain. Occasionally moving, the film gets bogged down in scenic excess and finally trails off to a pointless end that almost makes you resent whatever involvement you had before.

Mean Streets — Martin Scorses: This knock-out film about, young petty gangsters in New York's Little Italy is so gutsy and real it makes The Godfather and its filmic relatives seem like Hollywood fantasties. It's a tough, violent movie but the violence is so casual it seems as much a part of the characters as talking. The acting throughout is fantastic with Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro outstanding. May be the best American film this year.

La Rupture (The Break Up) — Claude Chabrol: High melodrama about a woman (Stephane Audran) fighting for Custody of her child that Chabrol deftly turns intp a surprisingly involving semithriller. Jean-Pierre Cassel as the thoroughly unscrupulous creep hired to dig up some dirt on poor Stephane is as fascinating as a snake about tq strike, but Chabrol's sex kitten and LSD trip scenes are really silly. Sugar-coated nastiness.

The Mother and the Whore — Jean Eustache: Whew, three and a half hours of talk in and out of Paris cafes with, basically, only three people: the everpresent Jean-Pierre Leaud, Bernadette Lafont as the girl he lives with and Francoise Lebrun as the girl he picks up. In black & white. It feels like 3H hours, but the characters, no matter how irritating their constant talk ("This is ridiculous — what novel do you think you're in?" one girl ■ says to Leaud), gradually draw you in and hold you. Utterly direct yet utterly eccentric filmmaking, it becomes more incredible when you know all the ■ dialogue was written in advance — even the extraordinary monologue about sex Lebrun tears out near the end.

Land of Silence and Darkness — Werner Herzog: A documentary about a remarkable strong German woman who is deaf and blind is not exactly drive-in movie entertainment, but Herzog's film is both sensitive and tough, touching and purposely upsetting, even offensive at times. There is no preaching and very little sentimentality — not an easy movie to take, but a necessary one.

Just Before Nightfall — Claude Chabrol: A man kills his mistress, his best friend's wife, ih the opening scene and is gradually driven to distraction by guilt and the terrible sympathetic understanding he receives instead of punishment. Slow as hell and in spite of Chabrol's wonderful precision, twice as boring. Stephane Audran again, but even Chabrol's finelycontrolled stand-by can't save this one.

Distant Thunder — Satyajit Ray: A World War II-caused famine in Bengal and its effects on a young husband and wife provides Ray with the subject of one of his best films. Typically understated, lushly beautiful; the characters (and viewers) become aware of the gravity of their situation only very slowly until its consequences are all around, and filially on top of, them. Subtle but strong.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant — R.W. Fassbinder: God knows what the Festival committee was thinking of when they selected this film. The only thing that saves this one from being this year's worst are its moments of inadvertent humor, Set in a bed-sitting room, with a cast of six women, this is the sort of Lesbian movie that oozes with tormented passions, drunken scenes and the most hideous dialogue. Stylized to death, with really unbelievable costumes — after a while you think, "This has got to be an elaborate joke," only, after

more than 2 hours, there's no punchline. Better Sappho's Sweethearts than this mush.

Doktor Mabuse — Fritz Lang: The Experience of the Festival: nearly four hours of silent film with live piano accompaniment and someone to read out the inter-titles which were missing, this 1922 German film was somehow completely engrossing. Lang's plot is drawn out endlessly but holds you more surely than most of today's gimmicky caper-thrillers. Mabuse is a fabulous madman, a psychoanalyst — criminal master of disguises who hypnotizes people into his power. As Cara Carozza, one of his pawns, cries, "He's damnation, he's ecstacy and he loved me!" The plots and counter-plots are elaborate, the settings darkly decadent German expressionist. A brilliant, exciting movie and one of the rarer pieces of film history around.

Badlands — Terrence Malick: This first film may be derivative (it's hard not to see some Bonnie & Clyde here), but it's so good I want to see it again. Inspired by the story of Charles Starkweather — the guy who went off on a 1958 car trip with his 14-year-old girlfriend and was captured in Texas 10 victims later — Badlands follows Kit (Martin Sheen), 25 and proud of his resemblance to James Dean, and Holly (Sissy , Spacek), ten years younger, from South Dakota to their eventual capture in Montana. The murders — beginning with Holly's father in a scene that owes a lot to Pretty Poison — seem almost incidental and are treated that way by the pair. Holly narrates throughout in a flat voice and her love comic approach to life sets the perfect tone for the film. The photography is like that on picture postcards — clear and sharp with brilliant blue skies — and several scenes are especially memorable, like Kit and Holly alone in the desert, dancing in the yellow glare of the headlights while Nat King Cole sings "A Blossom Fell" on the car radio. With Mean Streets, another excellent American films.

It won't curdle your eyeballs, but still...

CHARLEY VARRICK (Universal)

Real fine entertainment, most solidly recommended of the season. More Last American Individualists ripping off the Mob for mucho moolah, but while it won't gross your eyeballs curdled like Across HOth St., it's a hell of a lot more fun to watch than just about any other current couple hours. Thank great script, taut plot, seasoning of American folktype wit, and committed acting by all concerned, especially Walter Matthau, who plays this cropduster turned bankrobber with grace, subtlety and a fine understated middleaged brand of macho. It also maybe helps if you know it's by Don Siegel, who's given us two decades of nerve-gripping / schlockoroonies from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Dirty Harry. Speaking of the latter which, if you gurgled with delight at that fiend who played the Zodiac-type killer there, you'll be gratified to know he's back in this one, and the veins bulge out his temples good as ever. Joe Don Baker's mighty fine, too, as the Vegas Mafia's honky hitman — this movie finally confirms for once and all Joe Don's stature as a true American folk hero: he's such a total pig o" your dreams he makes Burt Reynolds look like David Niven. Best scene's where, in the midst of going around mashing on people and taking all deliberate steps toward snuffing a few, he hasta be boarded one night in one of the mob's cathouses, which operates out of a trailer. The madame leads him to his cubicle, followed by a surf goddess type obviously fascinated by the big plugugly, who practically spits on her: "Ah don't sleep with hoors/" The ending's no wimpout, either.

Lester Bangs

EXECUTIVE ACTION (National General Pictures)

Now that Watergate has made high crimes within the government all the rage, what better time for a movie based on the true-to-life B-espionage thriller Mark Lane and, associates tell us was really the way JFK was done in? Burt Lancaster, Robt. Ryan and Will Geer play some military-industrial higher-ups afraid that Jack and the Kennedy boys have enough in-family talent to fill the White House with their owrP'til 1984, implementing their policies supporting Black liberation, and opposing the Nam conflict and outrageous military power plays. So instead of letting Jack put them out of their jobs, they decide, for the good of the country, to remove him from his. All theintergovernmental machinery and money is channeled into the complex plot, they finger a patsy named Oswald, and even have his lookalike running around Dallas. The double goes into a gun shop and asks the clerk to put a telescopic .sight on his rifle real fast, as he has this very important job to do in a few days. "And your name sire?", asks the clerk. "Oswald!," the imposter proclaims with proper extrachromosome pride, "Lee Harvey Oswald!" Three CIA sharpshooters Actually do the job while the real Oswald innocently sips Coke in the School Book Depository Commissary. Oswald makes a great sympathetic character (now that we know who the real t d guys are), and all your favorites like Jack Ruby, the Carousel Ballroom, Abe Zapruder, John Connally et al, that you remember from what turned out to be the longest (and biggest) TV special of the decade, are brilliantly brought back to, life. All director David Miller has neglected to provide is the emotion, and while "Executive Action" beats any 10 recent liberal-politico molars like "State of Siege," it's really too bad it doesn't make yop feel more, because I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who wouldn't be convinced of any conspiracy even if they found producer Edward Lewis and Mark Lane in a mangled heap at the bottom of Laurel Canyon after another mysterious case of "brake failure."

Brian Zabawski