After living in the Midwest for six years on chili and bad newspapers, I finally took my one diversion, movies, seriously, and began seeing two a week. The land of the B film, the Midwest on any given week can provide more diverse viewing fare than can be had in a film capital like New York, the ultra-ultra world of $4 first run presentations, foreign film flops and Museum of Modern Art premieres of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Where else but Detroit (or St. Louis, or Cleveland, or Champaign, Illinois) could I have seen Black Gestapo, Cornbread, Earl and Me, Mandingo and The Eiger Sanction all in one week? The tally follows. I usually listened for good music, watched for new talent, andsnuck into a Robert Redford matinee when the B's gave me theZ's. Half-bad movies were the compromise I learned to enjoy. The Staples soundtrack on Let's Do It Again was pretty good, but the movie wasn't, proving you don't have to be white to make a comedy as bad as The Fortune. Aloha, Bobby and Rose was a fine eulogy to Elton John, except that he's not dead yet, and PaulLe Mat proved he could not be James Dean when he had to. This mustn't have been a good year; I wound up seeing my favorite movies several times, but here I am, at year's end, a satisfied addict.

ALICE DOESNT LIVE HERE ANYMORE (Martin Scorcese):: As Kate Millett would say, a poineering work. Middle aged working class woman faces independent pursuit of self after death of husband. Lands first job ("Why don't you come back tomorrow?" "No. If I come back tomorrow you'll say no."); quits job; travels with son ("Why did you marry Dad?" "Because he was a great kisser."); survives crises with friend ("What do you want?" "If I knew that, I wouldn't be sitting here crying in the toilet. "); settles down. First of two commercial releases this year (A Woman Under the Influence) genuinely interested in the question, "What is a woman?" to be answered by same. Fine performances by Ellen Burstyn, Lila Kedrova, Diane Ladd.

SHAMPOO (Warren Beatty):: Warren Beatty made two movies about the 60s. Parallax View was about politics, but they killed the love interest (Paula Prentiss), three minutes into the picture, and it stank. Shampoo, however, is about sex, and the rich lovercampaign fundraiser limits his political observations to a few numb sentences while Nixon buzzes on a left-on TV in the background. Paul Simon's babyfaced soundtrack is a brilliant mimic of the work he did for Mrs. Robinson;

Julie Christie gets her man, or at least a free trip to Acapulco, Lee Remick gets divorced, and Goldie Hawn gets free. Meanwhile the lives of the rich youth of Los Angeles look as shallow as a mineral bath. A very tough film, it probably won't date like The Graduate did.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON (Sidney Lumet):: A1 Pacino and Chris Sarandon in a real love story which made headlines in Brooklyn, New York, 1972. Gone is the self-righteous superstar Pacino forced out of Serpico and the possessed child king he fashioned in the Godfather movies. His most un-

forgettable one man show is this one, where he plays a frantic, fucked-up bank robber with a big heart and an eye for a.spot on the eleven o'clock news. BREAKOUT (Tom Gries):: Charles Bronson must now have a good reputation as well as a fat bank account because the casts of his movies have been getting better. Breakout has the best: Robert Duvall, Sheree North, Alan Vint (that square from Panic in Needle Park), RandyQuaid, anda fading Jill Ireland. This makes his pictures more interesting but puts him out of the running in the acting competition . Actually his best performance this year was in Hard Times, but that's because he hardly spoke, and we're reviewing talkies.

COOLEY HIGH (Michael Schultz) :: Chicago's south' side and a mid60s Motown soundtrack make for good storytelling. A sympathetic high school poet (played by Glynne Turman) helps a lot.

REPORT TO THE COMMISSIONER (Milton Katselas):: For . those of you who liked Charley Varrick, Report was 1975's common-man cops and robbers sleeper. Plus it showcased Michael Moriarity and Susan Blakely, my candidates for the superstar spots now held by Robert Redford

and Faye Dunaway. They can't be 40 going on 25 forever.

LOVE AND DEATH (Woody Allen):: What can I say about a funny ' looking m/an from New York who dressed up as a 17th century Russian Jew f or this picture? That it surprised me? Remember, last time he played Everyman as a 21st century robot butler. That Woody Allen could have made me laugh anyway just wearing Levis? Why he went to all this trouble — Love and Death was filmed in Yugoslavia, the cast was enormous, the color photography lush — well, he always goes to this trouble* That's why

his movies make top ten every year. And because he keeps hiring Diane ,

Keaton.

JAWS (Stephen Spielberg):: The old salt played by Robert Shaw is too stereotyped, Roy Scheider will never live down Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York, and the town wife is a casting ripoff from Eva Maria Saint's character in The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming; otherwise this film deserves all the hype it got.

Five out of six paying customers interviewed reported they were scared; two compared notes that they jumped out of their seats when Richard Dreyfus;? found the carcass in the rowboat. I, consider this proof of Jaan Uhelszki's theory that man is the only animal that willfully scares himself. Or proof that every land lemming is scared of the deep blue sea.

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (SydneyPollack):: Faye Dunaway makes the most of a small role as spyfucker; Robert Redford does his duty as cad but pulls off the roll of victim all right too. The only reason this spy vs. spy vs. spy thriller made my top ten is that I could follow the plot from beginning to end.

NASHVILLE (Robert Altman):: I was expecting to knock this off with OneFlew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but I couldri't. Altman's American history films are, first and foremost, an improvement over the film strip, especially for those of us who didn't grow up with Videopak cameras in our lockers. McCabe and Mrs. Miller was the tightest: a pioneer town in the 19th century Northwest, with the town madam, leading lady Julie Christie, wandering plausibly to the back of the set and the soft-shoe Chinese slum opium den, her hangout. The cult director turned out a crowd for Nashville which, unlike McCabe, has loose ends everywhere, and a cast of 24 to match. Barbara Harris, Geraldine Chaplin, Keith Carradine, Henry Gibson, Lily Tomlin all have minutes of genius recorded on this film that few directors will ever recapture. Altman's slight hand and reserved director pose allows these minutes to happen, but when they don't, sqme visions lumbe,r in ugly and unclaimed. When amateur singer Gwen Welles takes what she thinks is her big break and winds up doing a strip instead of her act, one wonders if America is raping this girl, or Altman. It should matter..

Drive In Saturday Lard Ass Arrives

Lard Ass Movies. That's what director Mike Findlay calls low budget women's prison movies that have been. turning up in Times Square lately. Shot by a unit that seems to bd on permanent bivouac in the Philippines, they have included Women in Cages, Big Doll House and the latest entry, Jonathan Demme's Caged Heat, the first of these films which has really crossed over,to attain cult status. Which raises the question: just how Lard Ass can you get?

The term originated during a screening of Big Doll House. Just prior to blowing up the warden with a, hand grenade, one of the inmates shouted, "So long, Lard Ass!" A year later, in Caged Heat, an attractive escapee guns down a sadistic » beer-swilling prison guard, who had just bitten off the top of a 12-ouncer. With a gleeful smile, -she announces, "No more brew for you, Lard Ass!" It turns out to be the hkjh point of the film.

Shower scenes seem to be a staple of the genre. Every third scene in Caged Heat takes place in the communal shower — Roberta Collins takes advantage of the bathing break to steal food from the kitchen for her friend who's in solitary. A toothless matron reads Viva while on duty. A demented prison doctor conducts psycho-surgical experiments on jailbirds while a benevolent Richard Nixon looks down in approval from a framed portrait on the wall.

The only reason anyone should , wa^te their time seeing Caged Heat is Barbara Steele. The actress who

enhanced Roger Gorman's The Pit And The Pendulum and who reached the apex of her career while hanging upside down by her feet in The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock does a real turnaround, playing a severe, cruel, wheelchair-bound prison official. The kind you love to hate, right? So how come I loved her?

Forget Caged Heat and break into

a woman's prison instead.

"A woman down the Jersey shore ran out into the lobby and threw up on the refreshment counter. That's when we suspected we might have a hit picture. " Or so says the distributor of Ilsa,She Wolf of the S.S., a movie that is currently packing them in like an open wound draws maggots. And if that simile disgusts you, better do an El Paso on lisa, because that's one of the visual treats this movie serves up right when you least expect it.

lisa is the kind of film that could set sadism back a good tetf years. Which might not be a bad idea since sadistic movies were better then. The ad copy goes: "The Most Dreaded Nazi Of Them All. She committed crimes so terrible even the S.S. feared her." Maybe so, but nobody in the S.S. had to watch this movie.

The crimes include a predictable assortment of prison camp tortures — floggings, castrations, electric shock treatments, infections with syphillis, sexual humiliations, etc. All the things / you didn't see theKrauts doing in The Sound Of Music. To be fair, though, there are three atrocities that are presented graphically enough to be singled out for your attention: the above mentioned maggot scene, a little stunt involving the systematic mashing of a girl's toes (she had big ones anyway) and the hanging of an inmate who is standing on a block of ice. See, when the ice melts...

Good as they are, none of these is sufficient to send anyone sprinting for the lobby to vomit all ov.er the 85 cent Milk Duds. Thought they had stronger stomachs on the Jersey shore. Isn't that where Bruce Springsteen is from?

EdQuard Dauphin