When Kris Kristofferson refused the lead in Two Lane Blacktop, he did a smart thing: he stayed out of a bad movie. Of course that movie was popular and would have given Kristofferson exposure; then again it didn’t do much for James Taylor’s cinematic career, or Dennis Wilson’s, either. How come Kris knew better than to take part? “I didn’t know shit about cars,” he said.

He also had other options. One was a script called “The Dealer” - more familiar ground, he admitted. UCLA film student Bill Nolan, the writer, based the story on his own experience and those of a fellow student, a marijuana dealer. Columbia Pictures liked it, bought it, said Nolan could direct it, called it Cisco Pike, and according to Paul Hemphill in the New York Times, negotiated Kris Kristofferson’s contract at Janis Joplin’s wake.

When Pike was released in 1971, Kristofferson was 35 years old. His reputation was Nashville country picker, underground style. A protege of Johnny Cash, Kristofferson won the “Song of the Year” award for “Sunday Mornin’ Cornin’ Down” from the Country Music Association in 1970. He had been hanging around Nashville for five years, but “The Law Is For The Protection of the People” - a song about cops holding up a hippie to cut his hair - is the antithesis of “Okie from Muskogee,” and the CMA likes to give awards to people like Merle Haggard, not Kristofferson.

"nohin' to it": Kris grins gains and grins and grins.

Where was this guy coming from? All over, apparently. He’d begun sending his material to a service buddy’s aunt, songwriter-publisher Marijon Wilkin in Nashville, from Germany, where he was in the Air Force trying to be like his father, who was a lifer. He’d also done time at Oxford University in England on a Rhodes scholarship, and was just about to teach English at West Point when he went to Nashville. Most of his fans thought he was a country bumpkin; even his most recent interview, which appeared in Rolling Stone, sponsored that image. But in that interview a comment about Cisco Pike betrays the location of his real turf: “Cisco Pike, ” he said, “looked like it would be a day at the beach.” That beach was located somewhere around San Mateo, California, where Kristofferson spent most of his childhood. From there he attended Pomona College, wrote sports for the school paper, and was a football star.

Sound like a Renaissance man to you? Maybe. But Cisco Pike was a flop; it played on a double bill with Machine Gun McCain, Norton took a vacation, and Kristofferson wasn’t in another movie for two years. Pike garnished a following for itself though, probably because it was a whole lot better than Two Lane Blacktop, Sir Doug Sahm wrote some good songs for it, Gene Hackman and Karen Black co-starred, and it reflected honestly some of the ambiguous characters who hung around in the 60s. Kristofferson’s face was very reflective - in fact it was this movie where he first earned a reputation for not acting at all. A “sleepy, sardonic style,” one reviewer said.

In 1973 his next two movies were released almost simultaneously. The first was Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. This time Kristofferson wasn’t smart enough to stay out of a bad movie. He maintained his sleepy persona through that one, too - he was terrible but then so did the was of the cast.

It wasn’t until Blume in Love that people began waking up to the kind of guy he was. He played the character of Elmo, a musician on welfare (for 12 years) who moved his organ and himself into Karen Anspach’s recently flown (by George Segal) coop. “Paul Mazursky told me to just be natural.be myself, which I think is a good way of directing me,” he said. “As it turned out,

I had to do some acting. Rita and I had split, and I was supposed to be this cool dude who don’t give a damn.” And cool he was. Blume, a busy divorce lawyer, spent an entire day with him trading stories and getting stoned; and when Blume raped his wife in order to win her back, Elmo cried; then he got himself together and went away in his van, much to the amazement or Segal, who wondered how any man could be so free. “Nothin’ to it,” was the message Elmo sent on a postcard back to L.A.

Besides being cool, Kristofferson was also sexy, which may seem to go without saying except that his teddy bear, laid-back countenance does not lend to such an image. When you think about him, you realize that he puts all the other male sex objects into a box (no pun intended); Redford, Newman, McQueen, Burt Reynolds - they’re all too cold. Charles Bronson is their parody; don’t you wonder why he never even gets to kiss anyone? (And the Six Million Dollar Man is his parody, but that’s another story; we can’t call him a sex object yet, even though one five year old I know wants him to be her new daddy.) Kristofferson, far from cold, practically reeked of understanding in the Blume In Love trangle. He wasn’t just hip to Nina’s raised consciousness - he was buddies with her crazed husband, too.

In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, his sex appeal has less to do with his head. In fact, it has to do with his beard. Ellen Burstyn, after endless “let’s-get-

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ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE Directed by Martin Scorcese (Warner Bros.)

In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Scorcese explores a world as remote as the turf of his Mean Streets was familiar. Ellen Burstyn is Alice, a housewife in Socorro, New Mexico’s Tupperware Nightmare. Her truck driver husband has lost interest, her bratty wise ass eleven year old is addicted to Mott the Hoople, and she is so lacking in outlets for her simmering rage that all she can muster is a shout of “Socorro sucks!” while she bangs the walls. With the bravado of hopelessness, she tells her friend she can really live without a man. The phone rings, and her wish is granted: husband’s dead on the highway.

The movie becomes a road picture. Alice with Tommy sells the house and their belongings, yet they still don’t have enough money to get home to Monterey, Calif., where in the awesomely colored opening shot a foul mouthed eight-year-old Alice swore she could sing better than Alice Faye. Though singing was the only work Alice ever did, she’s got precious little talent to stand between her and Tommy and starvation. But Alice, at 35, is determined to make it, singing in sleazy piano bars in Phoenix, waitressing at Mel and Ruby’s Cafe in Tucson. Tommy’s (Alfred Lutter’s) resilience while relegated to a life of television and potato chips in cramped motel rooms in the Arizona summer is one of the movie’s recurrent joys, as is the snappy, eloquent patter between mother and son. More transient but no less uplifting is Harvey Keitel (star of Mean Streets) as Ben Eberhard, who fills casings with gunpowder at a Phoenix bullet factory. He’s dumb, a bit ugly, persistent and crude; Alice is older, prettier, smarter, lonely and horny. Their affair ends when Keitel proves that only Jack Nicholson can top him when it comes to projecting anger’s spontaneous combustion into irrational action. It’s on to the next town, and eventually, Kris Kristofferson.

Scorcese revels in profiling the odd characters from the American southwest - waitresses, rednecks, Jewish bar owner, laid-back rancher; it’s almost as if Scorcese, the New Yorker, is a foreign director making a movie about America, though he lacks the luxury of detachment. Scorcese’s eye still focuses on the urban underside: his sense of lighting and atmospheres in the piano bars, the empty downtown streets, the beauty of sunbathing contrasted with the tepidity of Mel and Ruby’s.

Yet the movie is not without affection and humor. Again it is Alfred Lutter, the somewhat girlish looking eleven year old boy, who shows the wit and ease of Tatum O’Neal without the pretension. But Scorcese and writer Robert Getchell aren’t prancing under a Paper Moon. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is concerned with loneliness and the search for identity, with Ellen Burstyn following her road in much the way Nicholson did in Five Easy Pieces. The relationship, I think, is more than coincidental. Alice’s husband, played by Billy Green Bush, was Nicholson’s oil drilling buddy in the former movie; Flo (piano lady), the other waitress in Mel and Ruby’s, is a characterization inspired by Karen Black. What we are finally left with is Alice’s confession (in an outhouse in back of Mel and Ruby’s, somewhat appropriately) that she was wrong: she can’t live without a man. The bittersweet realization is that for some, “to be with him in his world, than without him in mine” is the only option left alive.

Wayne Robins

THE RAPE SQUAD Directed by Robert Kelljchian (AIP)

“The problem with movies these days,” a Hollywood producer recently complained, “is that they’re all male love stories. Write me a picture with a strong female lead and I could sell it tomorrow.” Consider it sold.

American International Pictures, already known for its shrewd exploitation of American audiences’ predilection for horror, bikers and sex, has plunged into the new genre of female violence with an almost messianic fervor. Appropriately enough, this year’s entry is called The Rape Squad. It’s a ball-buster of a film. Not since Barbara Stanwyck’s black widow spider role in Double Indemnity has there been such' an apt demonstration of repressed female frenzy on the screen.

This time around we are treated to a quintet of aroused women, who after being viciously assaulted, form a rape squad to seek revenge on the most motley crew of male villains since the Born Losers crowd assembled. Much of the film’s thematic development is drawn directly from Dirty Harry and Death Wish, pioneer ventures in the new urban vigilante genre. All the girls have originally been raped by the same guy. He wears a hockey mask, and makes his victims sing “Jingle Bells” when he rapes them. Faced with an impotent police force and a demented rapist, the girls find that their only recourse is to take the law into their own hands. Like its predecessors, Rape Squad portrays a vicious, violent underworld where there are no nice guys and no middle ground. It is sewer cinema.

The squad is reminiscent of the old Dirty Dozen crowd. There is an impassioned leader, a minority member (in this case black too, although not a football player), an unstable neurotic (the old Telly Savalas role), an enemy convert (here a housewife who has renounced her husband), and of course a father figure, actually a maternal karate instructor who initiates the squad into the martial arts.

The one-dimensional male figures are predictable enough: the rapacious night club owner, the outraged pimp and a poor, overweight private eye who makes obscene phone calls. Fortunately their punishments are frequently played for laughs. The private dick scene is particularly funny as the girls humiliate him with their mock erotic advances, rip buttons off his bulging polka dot shirt, and joke about the size of his sex organ.

AIP director Robert Kelljchian exploits every possible fascination his audience might have with urban amazons. AIP knows who sees these pictures, so the film is specifically designed for male audiences. The Squad consists of independent, self-reliant women who rarely spout any Women’s Lib jargon; that would alienate their viewers. The picture also displays enough naked flesh to satisfy the crumpled newspaper crowd. Not only are the girls slowly and agonizingly raped, but as Squaders they map their strategy sans clothes in their neighborhood Jacuzzi. But the amateuristjc energy of the violated women makes the otherwise cliched karate violence pretty authentic. The rape squad has won the audience over.

Patrick Goldstein % I

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to-know-each-other” visits to his farm with her son, is standing alone with Kristofferson by the cows. “Can I touch your beard?” “It’s soft,” she says, fascinated into their first kiss. The romance that unfolds plays Burstyn as the hesitating partner and Kristofferson as the sure one. He’s alone now, and with one bad marriage behind him, has lots of time; she has designs for \)er life for the first time - and continuing responsibilities to her child - that force her to make a choice about David. When she does, his appeal, like his patience, is still there. He never assumes what will happen with them, but that guilelessness is just part of his attraction.

Once Kristofferson’s sex appeal was compared to Clark Gable’s: “an oldfashioned blend of sensuality and niceness.” But if that appeal has been defined by Kristofferson in these two films -and it has - one can only conclude that it shapes the character of the hero in two modern, not old-fashioned, love stories. Blume is about the disintegration of a suburban marriage and Elmo hangs out long enough to appreciate a change in the behavior of each of the partners, although he himself never changes. Alice is about the involuntary flight of a middle-aged mother towards self respect, and David is the right person at the right time.

How many more parts like these will come out of Hollywood? Mazursky and Martin Scorcese, who directed Alice, seem interested in finding them. And Kristofferson is natural for them. He may be just a songwriter-turned-actor ex ROTC batallion commander from San Mateo, California, but if he doesn’t fuck up in Barbra Streisand’s production of the A Star Is Born remake, he may just be Hollywood’s Next Big Thing, too.