FRANKENSTEIN

Directed by Paul Morrissey (A Bryanston Pictures Release)

Paul Morrissey's aesthetic journey from Flesh to Frankenstein is one from inventiveness to pretense and vacuousness. Other directors who have started with as little as Morrissey have made the transition from independent to consolidated director without selling their souls in the process. John Cassavettes is one example. Husbands and Minnie and Moscowitz are the same continuation of his uncompromised studies of people that he made (Shadows bnd Faces) when all he had were friends for actors and weekends to shoot film.

But the vety aiisterity, the spareness, what Marsha Kinder and Beverley Houston call “the new American naturalism” of Trash and Heat and their deglamorized subjects have simply been bloated in to shallow posing, pretentious parody and hollow camp in Frankenstein.

As it is, the 3D process of the film, a novelty which will probably carry the film farther than it deserves, is not the pranksterish media-manipulation we’ve come to expect from Warhol. It’s a showman’s stunt, like Cinerama. Both 3D and Cinerama are processes which are bigger than anything they could possibly contain. Frankenstein, neither a flaunting of the porno 3D of The Stewardessess, the beloved camp of Women In Revolt, or a take-off of the Rank/Hammer Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing gore and blood productions of Frankenstein and Dracula of the 60’s. This movie is not scary, it is not funny — it is merely the grossest dimension of all these things. It even lacks the i simple compassion and terror of The Exorcist.

The fact that all the blood and entrails are flung into the eyes by the film gimmick makes Frankenstein even more annoying than it would have been otherwise. As it is (and there were people leaving by the droves during the bloodiest bits of drollery), the events of the film become infuriating in their smugness. And how serious they seem to be taking themselves, as if Morrissey intended for his critical essayists, in years to come, to speak of Frankenstein as his “death” film. To carry it even further, these critics could suggest a strong sub-theme of the association between sex and death. Except that to attribute such sophisticated and academic portent to such a mishmash of undisciplined phlegm would be foolish and irresponsible, t

In one sequence the Baron von Frankenstein copulates with the female zombie on an operating table while he squeezes and gropes her liver and entrails through an incision along her rib cage. After he has had his athletic orgasm and drenched his white lab clothes in blood, he stoically turns to his assistant Otto and says, “In order to face death; Otto, you have to fuck life.” Get the allusion to the Brando fingers-up-the-ass scene in Last TangoT I think most of the audience was too grossed out and sickened by the preceding pelvic-thrusting to appreciate it, or even to care.

There are certain problems with the acting. Monique Van Vooren, Udo Kier,

and Srjadan Velenkovic can barely speak English let alone improvise and be witty in it as Sylvia Miles, Holly Woodlawn, Andera Feldman or Pat Ast were in Morrissey’s former, more improvisational films. Only Joe D’Allessandro retains even a glimmering of that old deadpan camp glee.

Frankenstein doesn’t even have the sense of fun and Roy Lichtenstein cartoon caricature that Roger Ebert gave 'the script of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and the new up-and-coming RusS Meyer soft-core Up the Valley of the Beyond. After Frankenstein, it’s safe to say that no one will be waiting with baited breath for Blood for Dracula, the next Warhol production and spastic extravaganza. With the opening of Frankenstein the underground has finally become officially absorbed by the amoebic entertainment establishment, which heralds the end of a curious era.

A POEM IS A NAKED PERSON (Flower Films)

Up to now, the films of Les Blank have never really been about music — they’ve been about the interface between music and life, the function of music. His short documentaries on Lightnin’ Hopkins (The Blues Accordin ’ to... ), Mance Lipscomb (A Life Well Spent) and Clifton Chenier {Hot Pepper) offered glorious music, but always in cultural context — and laced with the kind of wisdom that made you realize the real strength of blues, of zydeco, of American folk music in general, lies in their usefulness to people.

The folk musicians that interest

Blank are warm, wise human beings — and their wisdom serves as a running theme to give his films value far beyond merely musifcal documentaries. “If you old and ugly, be old and ugly,” “When you work, you gotta smile,” and “Look and listen, and you will find out,” — that last a perfect summation of Blank’s own ideology.

Now Les Blank has made a featurelength film about Leon Russell, A Poem is a Naked Person, and there are problems. Russell is, unfortunately, neither warm nor wise, his social context is not particularly interesting (who cares about rich rock stars?), and his music is of little use to anyone — aside from the rock merchants who sell it. Worst of all, Russell is shallow. Instead 'of talking about work, or music, or food, or pain, or love, Russell talks about . .. well, here’s a quote: “There’s the balance between paranoia and trust that gets the illusion going.” Sure, man, pass the joint.

There’s still a possibility here for an interesting film — even if it’s only a comment on the inbred life of the rock star. One can hardly expect the roadies, rock musicians and various sycophants who surround Russell to call him, but one can expect Blank to take a position — and he never does. Russell is presented uncritically, withput distance — pretty much at his own evaluation. No doubt this has something to do with the fact that Russell — as backer, producer and distributor — was calling the shots, but it’s still disappointing.

Leon Russell fans will have little, to complain of. There’s lots of music — concerts, recording studio stuff, private jams — all captured beautifully. As a rock movie, in fact, Naked Person is a superior product — gracefully shot and edited, and free from the multipleimage, neo-psychedelic bulllshit that has become de rigeur for such films.

And there are, here and there, flashes of the Blank brilliances: the visual for Russell’s version of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is a long, beautiful telephoto shot of the moon reflected in rippling clouds, cut to another long shot of the moon reflected in rippling water — Blank specialties. There’s Willie Nelson singing a bit of “Good Hearted Woman,” George Jones singing a bit of “Take Me,” and Johnny Gimble fiddling on “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms.” There’s the goddamnest sequence of Jim Franklin feeding a live chick (i.e., a baby chicken) to a snake, noting, “You’re in good hands with Allsnake Insurance.” Plus collapsing buildings, glass eating, parachute jumping, catfish catching and similar madness — all edited with the usual Blank deadpan humor.

But finally there’s a hole at the center of the film where Russell ought to be. I went, I looked, I listened — and I didn’t find out anything. Or at least no more than I already knew from reading Rolling Stone. Maybe there isn’t any more, but if not, why make a movie?

Michael Goodwin

DAISY MILLER (Paramount)

With Daisy Miller Peter Bogdonavich moves both backwards and forwards. Devoid of almost any references to old movies, his fifth film, lovingly shaped around the woman he adores, seems his most personal. At the same time, it is

also his least compelling work to date.

The awful truth is that Daisy Miller is a bore, something I never expected to say about a Bogdonavich film. If you got suckered into Modern American Lit in college you probably had to read the Henry James novella it’s based on. Daisy Miller, a young American of the fate nineteenth century embarks on a grand tour of Europe, properly chaperoned by her mother and brother. While in Rome she does as Americans do, but as the expatriate American colony will not, and flirts with a number of suitors. One of them, a solemn young man named Winterbourne, could save Daisy from the wrath of the local jet set but doesn’t. DaiSy suffers symbolic punishment when she dies of Roman fever. That’s all there is to the story, despite those hotcha-come-and-get-it ads that tell you “she did as she pleased.” (May the fates deal kindly with those horny enough to ignore the G rating and go anyway; Peter doesn’t even flash them Cybill’s alabaster thigh.)

Bogdonavich’s well-established visual and narrative abilities are of little use when applied to a story as thin as Daisy Miller. He has faithfully rendered the tone of James’ story, but to what avail? You can’t fault what he’s done with the movie, but you certainly wonder why he bothered to make it in the first place.

None of this would have mattered quite as much if Bogdonavich’s Daisy had been the ambiguous, innocent tease that James created. Cybill Sheppard is not. With her flat voice and her fasterthan-a-speeding-bullet delivery, she’s an annoyingly empty, uncaptivating heroine. Cybill looked like a star in her first two movies, but here it becomes painfully evident that she has neither the range nor the personality needed to carry off a major role. She should stick with the contemporary bluejeaned bitchery that brought her fame; probably she’d be most at home playing the kind of supporting sluts and beautiful alcoholics that Dorothy Malone and Gloria Grahame used to pick up Oscars for in the fifties.

Barry Brown is equally awful as the young man captivated by Daisy, but his casting is of more than peripheral interest. He looks like Bogdonavich. And in more than one scene he seems to have been directed to play in the aloof, disdainful manner that Peter cultivates on his talk show appearances. Is he really meant to be Bogdonavich? Is that why Cybill has the lead? Is Daisy Miller nothing more than Bogdonavich’s worst projection of his liason with America’s favorite Southern fired schiksa? If so, then this really is his most personal movie. These Rona Barrett mind games are just about the only interesting thing about the whole deadly movie.

John Kane