SHORT TAKES
THE NINE LIVES OF FRITZ THE CAT Directed by Robert Taylor (American International) My friend Marya has a cat named Irwin who spends most of his spare time masturbating in the hallway. Fritz and his offspring do much of the same thing, except they do it on the movie screen.
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SHORT TAKES
S*P*Y*S:: There's not too much that's funny about the CIA, which may be why S*P*Y*S is not the funniest movie of the year. However, the further adventures of Earnest & Seymour might just make another excellent time slot for some lucky television network. The timely team of Elliot Gould & Donald Sutherland encounters yet another phase of warped reality as it finds itself poised somewhere between the CIA, which is out to get them, and the wacky world of three French anarchists. Although a bit predictable, Sutherland and Gould carry off an otherwise weak script with their usual aplomb.
Susan Ives Cook
THE TERMINAL MAN (Warners):: Homicidal psychopath Harry Benson (George Segal) is in his hospital room, awaiting the operation that will cure his brain dysfunction. Two attendants peek in through the spy-hole. "They're really gonna put wires in his brain, huh?" says one of them. "No shit," affirms the second, and the spyhole closes. Well, that's the way it goes, folks. Needless to say, the electronics screw up. "The operation doesn't work," notes one of the scientists sadly. I was kinda surprised he didn't add a shrug, and an "Oh well, back to the drawing board." If you ever wondered what a big-budget Kuchar Brothers feature would look like, this is your chance to find out. Only the Kuchar Brothers do it on purpose. Special Black Shadow Paranoia Award.
Michael Goodwin
UPTOWN SATURDAY NIGHT (Warner Bros.):: Sidney Poitier spent 20 years playing one Dignified Negro after another and insisting that he did it all because until his people had heroes his conscience wouldn't let him play the bad guy. Here he makes up for two whole decades with a shameless, unrelenting display of Dumb Nigger mugging and eyepopping fit to put Stepin Fetchit in, so to speak, the shade. Other than that this glossy crime farce is trivial and silly and utterly lacking in the vicarious impact customarily associated with the black motion picture experience.
Lester Bangs
HARRY AND TONTO (20th Century):: Harry, a 70-year-old widower, and his cat and confidant, Tonto, set out across the country from NYC to LA looking for America. A sort pf Easy Rider for the Medicare Set. Like Odysseus returning home after a life's series of archetypal adventures, Harry discovers that happiness is in the heart and not the culture. At the end of his voyage across our wunnerful' wasteland, he discovers happiness with an old-age home resident Yiddish pigeon feeder from Santa Cruz. Wherever you may wander, whatever be your goal, look upon the doughnut & not upon the hole. Is da meaning, I suppose. Poor little Tonto dies in the end, run over by some muthatucka car and even this ole heart o" stone is turned to tears. The flick is sincerely warm & bittersweet & the finest vehicle for the talent of Art Carney to date. Home is in the heart. Ah ...
Bruce Malamut
ZANDY'S BRIDE (Warner Brothers):: Gene Hackman's squattin" by the Pacific round 1870 when he receives a mail order bride in the person of Liv Ullman, whom he commences to rape and verbally abuse until she confounds him by standing up fpr her rights as a woman or human being or whatever. That's pretty much the plot, and I've made it sound more interesting than it really is. There might be the kindling for a women's liberation movie in here somewhere, but Zandy's Bride (from Jan Troell, who previously directed The Emigrants and The New Land) is so short on both action and character development that you simply cannot believe that you have sat through this film and still nothing has happened. Some movies are too realistic for anyone's good,, and this is the worst example in recent memory.
Lester Bangs
QUACKSER FORTUNE HAS A COUSIN IN THE BRONX:: The latest in a long string of liberal movies glorifying the innate nobility of the working class hero has Gene Wilder earning his disestablishmentarian bread by shbveling literal horsehit up from the very streets. Until, that is, the horse-drawn milkcarts of Dublin are replaced by trucks, and he falls in love with a coquettish American college girl, who probably regards him in much the same patronizing terms as this flick's audience. Which you should see, since you won't need to go to feature lengths to find the moral: they're all homely, sober, not against a good proletarian make-out, and the girl who tore my ticket had a "Support Farm Workers" button. (P.S. The movie is four years old, rereleased to capitalize on Wilder's, uh, stardom.)
Lester Bangs
