SHORT TAKES

SHORT TAKES

McQ (Warner Bros.):: John Wayne is Seattle police detective McQ. McQ is rugged. Seattle is rugged. McQ’s old time policeman buddy is not rugged. He is soft. He is soft because he has just been ventilated by a few thousand machine gun slugs. McQ is annoyed. He wants to find the killer. He quits the conservative police force to track he, she or it down. He runs into Colleen Dewhurst. She is shot. He runs into dope dealers. They are shot. He runs into crooked cops, hired assasins and two-bit thugs. The crooked cops, hired assasins, two-bit thugs and two thirds of the population of Seattle are shot. If John Wayne is smart, he will concentrate on running into the writer, director and producer of this film. The only difference between McQ and any episode of “Ironsides” is that John Wayne’s legs move and he’s never played Perry Mason. naha

THE THREE MUSKETEERS (THE QUEEN’S DIAMONDS) (20th Century Fox):: Lavish, swashbuckling farce, in the tradition of The Crimson Pirate and The Thief of Bagdad, this could be the primo movie mounting thus far for Dumas’ durable blade brigade. Features your proverbial cast of thousands, sprinkled with the likes of Faye Dunaway, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York, Geraldine Chaplin, and Christopher Lee, with only Charlton Heston and Raquel Welch performing at less than peak pleasability. Sure, a lot of the gags fall flat, but the galloping pace set by Richard Lester (who guided those lovable moptops through A Hard Day’s Night and Help in addition to providing us with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To The Forum) makes most of this mish-mash work most of the time. Best of all, though, are the kinky baroque costumes, with hats shaped like doves, unicorns;, partridges, wild boar, and other assorted mammalia they had way back then. Sequel was filmed simultaneously, (Smart! Save money!) and from the clips flashed at the finale, The Four Musketeers looks to come up a winner too. And it always was an A-l candy bar.

Brian Zabawski

BLACK BELT JONES (Warner Bros.):: Like pornographic films which have only enough plot to segue one fuck scene into another, this American-made martial arts comedy has a story line so dumb it’s clearly only filler between the real action — a series of large-scale kung-fu confrontations. Unfortunately, after you’ve seen one kick-to-the-groin, you’ve seen ’em all and you’re left with all this throwaway nonsense inbetween. Happily, though, the nonsense in Black Belt Jones is so nutzy it’s hard to resist. Like the scene in which Mr. Jones (Jim Kelly, who looks nearly as unreal as Bruce Lee) tells co-star Gloria Hendry (Ms. Kung-fu to you, punk) to stay' in and “Do those dishes or something” while he charges off to danger and intrigue with his gun. Old Gloria pulls out a gun herself and shoots the dirty dishes one by one. “They’re done,” she says, “Now let’s go.” When they’re finished acting cute, they get to be as ugly as everyone else in the movie (more dumb niggers and wops than you can shake a stereotype at) and cart off the baddies in a garbage' truck (I love the symbolism here) after an endless fight in a bubble-spewing car wash. Who said there are no more happy endings?

Vince Aletti