DEATH WISH Directed by Michael Winner (Paramount)

I saw Death Wish in a movie house on Broadway and not in a chic studio screening room even though last Christmas a radio film critic laden with shopping bags filled with gifts left the Twentieth Century Fox screening room on Manhattan’s very west side and was set upon by a gang of mugger-junkierapist-street-lice toughs and hearly crippled and blinded. The gentleman spent his Christmas holiday as well as his New Year’s and his January in a hospital (average rate in New York City $105 a day).

To get to Broadway, I took my local subway three short stops from my apartment. The subway ride was its usual odiferous, hot, muggy, sleazy self. It was too early in the evening for the passengers to be crowded into the first five cars — that was the policy once used to cut down on the murders that made July, 1974 in New York City “Death in the Subway” Month. (It was also “Death on Your Bicycle” Month after two people were pulled from their bikes in Central Park and hacked to death because they dared attempt something pleasant in Fun City and they had Pugeots and poor people have nothing.)

Broadway, itself, with it's junkies, hookers, male whores, pimps, winos, crack pots, degenerates, losts, and lonelies, gave off its usual Knife-in-the-Back vibrations.

The audience that packed the Death Wish screening, however, was brighteyed and eager. They knew they were about to see a film whose content would actualize one of their most ecstatic fantasies. And Death Wish is Walt Disney for urban middle-class adults.

Atchitect Charles Bronson is married to chubby but earnest Hope Lange. They return from a holiday in Hawaii. Three teen mugger-junkie-rapist-streetlife toughs invade Charles’ apartment. They rape his daughter (who subsequently goes mad); they murder his wife (who dqesn’t).

Bronson, a conscientious objector during the Korean War, — his father was killed in a hunting accident when he was mistaken for a deer — picks up a gun after another mugger attacks him on his way home down his Death Row Manhattan block and becomes Public Vigilante Number One. He sets out as a decoy and roams the city, flashing a wad of bills.

“Hey, mother fucker, give me your money!” announce knife-wielding, black, white, gay, hippy, and Latino muggers. They all get plugged.

The police, led by brilliantly dyspeptic Vincent Gardenia, do not know what to do. Street crime statistics have fallen drastically. Do they arrest Bronson and make him a martyr? Do they allow him to continue and perhaps encourage a horde of vigilante-imitators who will murder anyone who “looks greasy?’”

Instead, they run him out of town. Fade out as Bronson arrives in Chicago, gun in pocket, eager to do in all of the Windy City’s mugger-junkie-rapiststreet-life toughs in residence.

Death Wish is the most inevitable movie in years. When would Hollywood be sly enough to conjure up a middleclass man who was macho? The middleclass, after all, have to have some balls. In addition, violence in the movies is fun and watching muggers getting murdered is totally delightful (even more fun than my childhood favorite: feeding Christians to the lions).

The movie is also irresponsible, fascist, insensitive, and exploitive, as well as carelessly made and sloppily motivated. It is a rousing entertainment.

I EAT YOUR GORE Directed by Jean-Paul Barkowitz (American Intentional)

It is truly unfortunate that with the current spate of “Horror” films the true gem of the genre can be lost in the shuffle. This is the case with I Eat Your Gore, currently rounding a triple bill at local drive-ins. The real irony (and outrage) is that this masterpiece, and I apply the term without reserve, is playing “filler” to a vastly inferior double bill consisting of Eat The Scabs of Dracula and I Dismember Mama.

The director of Gore, Jean-Paul Barkowitz, is the definite example (and proof to the Philistines) of the much misunderstood auteur theory. Though Gore is his first feature film, his unique personality permeates the two army training films he made in Vancouver BC in 71. Who can forget the _chilling Frostbite or the whimsically titled VD & U? Both of these films embody Barkowitz’ main theme, that of man interfering with nature (or vice versa). One can go even further and discuss the master’s leitmotiv in a single word: tamper.

In Frostbite, the anonymous narrator (God? The Subconscious? Durward Kirby?) intones fhat “One must not tamper with the frostbitten finger until a reasonable amount of time has passed.”

In VD & U the word tamper crops up cleverly disguised in the touching (and telling) scene where the prostitute, brilliantly played by Monique Friedman, gazes out the window at the Vancouver winter and says, in a beautifully incongruous Southern drawl, “I wonder what the TAMPERature is?” Both theme and leitmotiv reach maturity when the (mad? slightly irritated?) scientist (Forrest J. Ackerman) is warned by his mentor (John Carradine) “There are things that mere mortals were not meant to tamper with!” Such is Art!

“Well I’ll be dogged!”, barked Barkowitz at his Tampa, Florida home when I first pointed out that Claude Hardly had discovered his theme & leitmotiv in his article “Cinema Shminima,” Sight & Smell Vol. 1, No. 3. Another famous Barkowiticism is “Plot be damned! A few good titty scenes can mean the difference between 200 and 500 thou clear on the smooch circuit!” Like Hitchcock, Barkowitz toys with his audience, and Gore lives up to this tenet. Also, he is not afraid to shoot in black & white considered an anachronism by the misinformed. Nor is he afraid to use the hand-held camera. In fact, the wonderfully ambiguous denouement, wherein the Gore-Eater simultaneously unmasks and drops trou, is made even more ambiguous by the fact that Barkowitz got his fingerprints all over the lens — surely a master’s touch!

I have said enough. I need only add that if you wish to see a master of mise-en-scene, an audacious auteur at work, you must see I Eat Your Gore.

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating of said pudding.

R. Calvin Walls

THE LONGEST YARD (Paramount Pictures)

The Longest Yard is a big, gauche prole movie, loaded with brutality, comic sadism, and leering wit, and set in a hermetically sealed world of prison cells, southern swamps, and, for elegance, fake wood paneling and shag rugs. The dramatic highlight of the film occurs when an unsuspecting victim pauses to comb his hair before being turned into a human torch; the comic one when a gorilla-sized inmate gets his broken nose shoved back into place. The plot? Mix two parts Cool Hand Luke (virile idealist vs. the prison establishment) with one part MASH (comic football). Dilute quality and serve at drive-ins.

If anyone could redeem this mess of Archie Bunkerisms and NFL Monday Night Football you’d think it would be director Robert Aldrich, the heavyweight honcho whose forte is vulgarity and whose credits include Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and The Dirty Dozen. But even the normally proficient Aldrich, who has always shown a kind of ham-handed strength in fusing theme and action, is defeated by the script’s basic incredulity (a football game in prison?) and its uneasy mixture of farce and violence. Some of the director’s best films, The Dirty Dozen, Attack, The Flight of the Phoenix, have portrayed a band of outsiders struggling in an alien environment, but in The Longest Yard the convicts we’re supposed to sympathize with are such a bunch of dim-witted yahoos that heckling is the only possible response.

And then there’s Burt Reynolds. If you believe the publicity Releases and the Cosmopolitan girls, he’s a star. But if you watch his acting — arrogance for the comic moments, wooden for the big dramatic ones — it’s another story. Reynolds has everything going for him except genuine talent. And his bantam rooster strutting, which accounts for his present popularity, precludes the kind of raw emotional power that has made superstars out of such unlikely types as Jack Nicholson. Dustin Hoffman, and Barbra Streisand. A few more performances like the one he gives in The Longest Yard and Reynolds is going to wind up the male Raquel Welch.

John Kane