Paul Williams: One-Upping Barry Manilow

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE

Directed by Brian de Palma

{20th Century Fox)

Rock isn’t dead; it’s been stolen.

The master thief is Swan, head of Death Records, an entrepreneur so cynical he makes David Geffen look like Robin Hood. Swan discovered Elvis, plugged in Dylan, brought over the Beatles. His latest sensation, the ShaNa-Na-ish Juicy Fruits, are fading, and he needs to find the right act to open his ultimate rock palace, the Paradise.

Enter Winslow Leech (William Finley), who looks like he jams on the broom at your local A&P. But he has a magic touch: Beethoven rolled over, with Elton John melodies and the voice of a hummingbird, or at least Leon Russell. Swan swipes Leech’s rock-opera of Faust, frames Leech. Leech seeks revenge, gets mutilated in a record pressing machine, and becomes the phantom of the paradise.

The parody gets pretty predictable from here: a little Phantom of the Opera, Dorian Gray (not Dobie’s brother), Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback of Notre Dame, but the action is carried by De Palma’s swift script, split screens, eye-poppingly colorful set design, and outstanding performanqes.

Shaggy dog Paul Williams is a little too huggable to be embraced as Swan, but Jessica Harper as the soft rock sex symbol Phoenix, Finley, and George Mammoli as Philbin, Swan’s resident greaseball, are all fine. Our favorite son nomination for best supporting actor goes to former rock critic. Gerrit Graham, who steals the second half of the show with an abundance of wit and exuberance. He plays Beef, the primadonnaish heavy metal glitter superstar, chosen to sing Leech’s epic ballad.

The key to the movie’s intentions, however, is Paul Williams, who not only plays the promoter but wrote Phantom’s soundtrack. A quirk of fate— Williams’—turns the hard rock score into a vehicle for Jessica Harper, and it begins to sound alot like the Carpenters, Williams’s hitmakers. The demented rock audiences who seconds before were cheering Beef are now hailing PhoenixJessica-Karen Carpenter as their new queen, which makes this whole mqjvie seem suspiciously like an effort on me part of Williams to steal rock ‘n’ roll himself and replace it with “Close to You” when no one’s looking.

The rock you save may be your own.

LENNY

Directed by Bob Fosse

(UA)

Lenny Bruce’s name is everywhere these days — on numerous books, on records including a new Casablanca commemorative set of the “best” of the Johnny Carson show, on stage including reportedly an upcoming Broadway musical (“But what about all the shooting up? I asked my informant. “Oh, they left all that out,” she said.), and in this movie, which will probably walk away with several Academy Awards and bring Lenny’s name to the masses more forcefully than any of the outrageous stunts of his own lifetime.

It’s all more than ironic, and it’s not enough to just say that he was ahead of his time, or worse, that he was a “victim” of “the system.” Lenny Bruce was Honey Harlowe Bruce: Don't bring me down.

a guy who made a point of living on the edge, and that is far more important than Ralph J. Gleason pontificating about the tradition of Swift and Voltaire. His comedic routines were socially important, but they were most powerful and kinetic before persecution and the “Voltaire/Swift” line obliged him to start acting self-conscious about his status as a social commentator.

The fact is^that Lenny Bruce was a son of a, bitch, a nihilist basically, and his brilliance was inextricably meshed with his nihilism. The problem with Lenny, which is a very taut and powerful drama done in semi-documentary style and a perfectly satisfactory piece of entertainment until you begin to think about it, is that it makes him far too much qf a social pathfinder/victim and far too little of a son of a bitch. It cuts his balls off. Dustin Hoffman gives what is almost certainly his greatest performance yet, and when I first saw and heard him up there I got chills because he sounded and looked so much like Bruce, but he also misses the essence of the man he’s portraying. How he misses may be found in a Hoffman quote in a recent Rolling Stone article on the film: “It’s a key thing that Lenny didn’t take drugs to flake out, to get wasted. The drugs were usually uppers, amphetamines, from what I understand. They were used, if anything, to keep him goihg for four days. He’d do a tremendous amount of work, writing, taping. It kicked him into his work. The obsession with his work was the central thing.”

Now in spite of the fact that I have the highest respect for Lenny Bruce’s work, I also know that the central thing that emerges from his life, as from the lives of most of the cultural heroes of the Sixties is the pursuit of infantilism on almqst every level. It’s a fact that Lenny did take drugs to flake out (Ladies and Gentlemen... Lenny Bruce by Albert Goldman provides as many lurid details as I cared to take in), being a junkie for most of his adult life, and he did take speed to get wasted so as to blitz any victim proximate with his compulsive raps. That they often happend to be flights of free-associative genius is secondary to the fact that Lenny Bruce’s characteristic vocal tic was a kind of giggling snarl, a sharklike razor-edged angry slash, and it is that edge that Hoffman, good as he is, misses totally. He just doesn’t catch the nastiness that was finally > what endeared Lenny Bruce to those of us who may have chosen our heroes for the wrong reasons but at least liked them for what

they really were.

Director Bob Fosse and scriptwriter Julian Barry, who adapted the screenplay from his 1971 play of the same name, make the same mistake as their star. They leave out how Lenny set up his friends for dope busts, for instance, and so many similar details that anybody unfamiliar with his life may wonder why everybody kept picking on the poor Jewish boy with the potty-mouth. It’s a set up, and it’s exactly the kind of set-up that would make the real Lenny Bruce sick. So to speak.

Just imagine that speed-jiving hustler, whose totally profligate lifestyle was probably as much his legacy as his records are, who used to get sucked off by strippers while waiting to hit the stage, now having to sit in an audience full of people sobbing into their popcorn at the beautifully dramatized sight

of yet another sweet kid scuttled by establishment bluenoses. He would probably get up and piss on the screen.

Lester Bangs

FLESH GORDON Directed by Howard Ziehm and Michael Beneviste (Mammoth)

Flesh Gordon is probably the finest movie film-parody to come out of our U.S. since Woody Allen’s Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. By far Allen’s best film, it worked where others sprawled because he chose to work with short, contained episodes. Each concentrated' on a specific, timehonored movie genre for its target, and the result was bullseye after bullseye instead of the usual few yocks in between the ennui.,

The success of Sex can somewhat explain the plethora of grotesque progeny spawned since its inception. In Brook’s Blazing Saddles, and Morrissey’s Frankenstein the primary modus operandi had been the broader,the funnier/ the more, the better. Unfortunately, this fails, creating the effect of some blind, deaf and dumb comic archer trying to hit the broadside of a barn door... on another planet. .

This is simply to say that at long last a film has come along that simultaneously satirizes porn films, old Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon serials, and Ray Harryhausen Super-Dynamation spectaculars — in one marvelous package. And the humor has the same quality as the very best of the National Lampoon comicbook takeoffs.

Co-directed by two unknowns, Howard Ziehm and Michael Beneuiste, it was produced by Bill Osco who brought you the sound-synch porn pioneer Mona, the Virgin Nymph. In spite of whatever seamy porn enterprise might have concocted the production of.. Flesh Gordon, the money (and in view of the elaborate technical effects and sets, the budget had to be big) has been well spent.

Although this, unlike the original Flash, is in color, the same cheesy, makeshift look of the original serial has been -faithfully manufactured. The plot’s familiar: the planet Porno (its emperor: Whang) is attempting to control the earth by the use of a fierce sex ray. In the middle of airborne fellatio, Flesh leaps from his plummeting sexray-crazed prop plane, the heroine (also crazed) clinging to his pants and para’ chute. Haplessly they land in the proximity of the scientist, who is ready with a homemade rocket, appropriately (because of the nature of the mission) shaped like a golden phallus. It spews that tacky, but familiar, smoke exhaust as it carries them off to the home planet of the enemy.

The focus of Flesh on parody and sex, mind you, is always kept in the background. The film drifts effortlessly from encounters with such typical characters as a Robin Hood-type named Prince Precious (and his Merry Men) and a renegade band of pirate lesbians who dwell, literally, in the bowels of the planet, to scenes employing animated mythical beasts worthy of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad or Jason and the Argonauts. In one such scene the hero (Jason Williams) and his crew are beset by a whole cavern of spiny, writhing, uncircumcised Penisauruses, an allpincher castration beast, and finally, the by-now familiar Satyr/Cyclop standby in such films who abducts the heroine, whisks her away to a tower — only here he mutters blasphemies hitherto unemitted by such monsters, and complains, at one point, about his hemmorrhoids.

Some critics, no doubt in a delirium of nostalgia, have cleverly accused Flesh Gordon of puerility, forgetting the general ludicrousness of the original. Flesh Gordon lets the punishment fit the crime with derring do alacrity and a deserved vengeance.

Grigoris Daskalogrigorakis