SHORT TAKES

SHORT TAKES

ADMIT ONE

Bring me the head of Sam Peckinpah.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (UA):: Sam Peckinpah has turned out one horrendous film after another (with the exception of Junior Bonner) ever since The Wild Bunch. Alfredd Garcia, however, hits a new low. The Getaway, in comparison, is a tour de force. All the Peckinpah elements are here — the malevolent Mexican(s), the whore with the golden heart, and, of course, the man, always a man, out to prove and/or redeem himself— but they serve no purpose. Warren Oates runs the gambit of emotions from A to B (thanks Ms. Parker wherever you are), and Isela Vega makes Ali MacGraw look like an actress. When we get the head of Sam Peckinpah, we should ask that it not be on film.

Kit Rachlis

CALIFORNIA SPLIT (Columbia):: Make a picture interesting to a detached audience when mqst of the running time is devoted to watching people play games — poker, horses, the tables, and basketball — when a large percentage of that audience doesn’t even know how to play? And what’s worse, has no money riding on the bets? Sustain a consistent energy level throughout a structureless, plotless, and climaxless cinema set piece? When you’ve got only 3/4 of a good script? Okay, you can be Robert Altman, more adept at making this kind of film than anyone else around. You can take careful scrutiny of George Segal and Elliot Gould, a couple of affable All-American gaming addicts with Altman’s ever graceful and fluid camera. Most of the time Split will come on like gangbusters: yocks aplenty, gobs of finely drawn minor characterizations, and some oddly disturbing bits of violence, popping out as they do from nowhere. Some dead passages in the script, but intelligent and genuinely funny.

Brian Zabawski

Kids to the rescue!

TOGETHER BROTHERS (20th Century Fox):: A black cop affectionately known as Mr. Kool is shot down on a Galveston, Texas, ghetto street.. The only witness, a big black-eyed black chjld, goes speechless with shock after the assassin turns the now-empty revolver on him, then flees.Will the killer find and eliminate the child witness before a young ghetto gang turned very amateur detectives finds the killer? One guess. How this old-fashioned kids-tothe-rescue plot is twisted into one of the most bizarre films I’ve seen in some time — complete with a nasty, hard-asnails whore and two of the screen’s most unimaginable transvestites — is in itself worth the price of adhiission. Most of the young cast are non-actors and it’s ovbious, but they have their moments, which is more than I can say for most of the professionals involved here. The score, what little there is, is by Barry White. Right on?

Vince Aletti

Scott: Tight-lipped disgust.

BANK SHOT (United Artists):: The real question here is how the great George C. Scott got plays a lisping master criminal, sprung from an absurdly-escapable maximumsecurity prison to lead a bank heist, and he plays the part with such tight-lipped disgust that you can’t help thinking it’s directed at the picture itself as much as the incompetent “gang” that springs him. Director Gower Champion apparently figures that his audience’ll never get. the gags unless he digs ’em in the ribs a couple or four times, and since the comedy is mostly on a Hee-Haw level to begin with, by the time he’s done rubbing it in you want to go after him with the nearest blunt object. As a filmmaker, Champion is a great ballroom dancer. One hopes that, at least, Scott got paid a bundle.

Michael Goodwin

Joe Don: Painfully pointless.

GOLDEN NEEDLES (American-International):: Joe Don Baker in a Kung Fu movie would only seem to work by dint of the fact that his forte is being mean, but even though he hefts a Walking Tall big stick thru tbe head bad chink’s windshield at one point most of the violence in this witless dud consists of people falling through breaking glass in slow motion. So aside from one good massacre by blowtorch it’s pretty dull fare. Wretched scripting make Joe Don and Elizabeth Ashley the most painfully pointless couple since Don Sutherland and Jennifer O’Neill in Lady Ice (Elizabeth: “I never heard of anything worth having that wasn’t worth taking chances for.” Joe Don: “That’s not what my momma said. She always said, ‘Wear your galoshes when you go out. Don’t take chances.’ ”), and Joe Don’s black sidekick, played by some athlete or other in what amounts to a walkon, is thrown in strictly to pull the folks uptown. Burgess Meredith and Ann Southern also turn up in two goofy character squibs as a bowtied fiend and a Shelley Winters outtake respectively.

Lester Bangs