The New Pictures

The Bachelor Party (Hecht-Hill-Lancaster; United Artists). Paddy Chayefsky is the Proust of The Bronx. He remembers everything--even sometimes how things really are in working-class life in the big city. He remembers concretely, with photographic eye and phonographic ear. Yet his memories seem to move him --and his audiences--in inverse proportion to their importance. He is a minusculist, with a passion for the little ideas and the Little People--apparently not so much because they are people as because they are little. But for all that, Author Chayefsky has a metropolitan instinct as keen as a pigeon's, and an old cab driver's mystical sense of the city's meaning.

All the things that Paddy is are hard at work in this film, but often they are working at cross-purposes with something he is not but would apparently like to be: the father of his country. In other plays he has sometimes shown a tiresome tendency to prate, but in this one he spends rather more than an hour in mounting the pulpit and clearing his throat. When at last he thunders forth his text, the congregation is ready to hear the wisdom of the ages. Instead, the message runs something like this: "Don't cheat on your wife. Because if you do, you'll never finish night school. And if you don't finish night school, brother, you'll spend the rest of your life as a crumby little bookkeeper at 72 per."

The bookkeeper (Don Murray) is the protagonist in this Philistine's Progress. He lives with his pretty little working wife (Patricia Smith) in a small flat in a big Manhattan housing development. As the picture begins, the wife has just told him that she is going to have a baby. He is stunned. How will he ever be able to finish night school? And if he doesn't finish night school ... "I think you oughta go to this bachelor party tonight," says his wife after one look at the poor punk's face. "You oughta have a little fun for yourself. You work all day and go to school all night."

Charlie wants to go, but he's afraid to -- afraid he'll take one too many and do something he'll be sorry for next day. So of course he goes. He goes to the dinner at the big second-rate steak house, where everybody gets a snootful and tells dirty stories. And from there to a night on the town.

For a moment, at a Greenwich Village brawl. Chayefsky almost dares to face the moment of truth. Hero Charlie is all set to chuck his scruples and climb in the sack with a ludicrously pathetic little bohemienne. But then he realizes what a dope he is to be prowling the streets after something that doesn't seem to exist, when all the time a cozy little wife is waiting for him back home. Suddenly he knows that he "loves" his wife. The conclusion is apparently supposed to be a daring one. At the risk of offending the entire prostitute population, Playwright Chayefsky has come out firmly on the side of marital fidelity. But a reasonably attentive moviegoer will realize that Chayefsky offers genuine insights as well as phony issues. And in The Bachelor Party these insights have been skillfully translated to the screen by Director Delbert Mann, who made Marty. The scenes in the subway and the office are first-rate epigrams of locale. The reluctant groom C Philip Abbott) is a hilarious but touching study of altar nerves ("She's going to expect a lot. She's a widow"). The hardened bachelor (Jack Warden), young but not so young as he used to be, is also pathetic. "Home?" he laughs. "What do I wanna go home fuh? I awready read alia papuhs." But nobody is fooled. And this is what Paddy Chayefsky truly understands and poignantly expresses: that loneliness is really a kind of childishness, and that life is really not worth living without love.

On the Bowery (Lionel Rogosin). Alcohol is a religion, and one of its best-known shrines is a street and a district in Lower East Side Manhattan known as the Bowery.* There, in the long shadow of the skyscraping spires of success, the faithful make perpetual libation to failure. Day and night the staggering crowds of petes and winos, toads and loners mill about in a hundred sticks and arms and muskie stands (as the bars on Skid Row are variously described), and keep the dismal watches of the dark night of the soul. A trite and cheaply sensational subject for a movie? This film--without the pity that secretly insults, without the disgust that indirectly compliments --studies its subjects with honest human interest, tries to see what they see in their lives, tries to find what they find in the bottom of the bottle.

The technique is documentary. Producer Lionel Rogosin, a 33-year-old textile magnate who quit as president of Beaunit Mills to make this movie, shot every foot of it on the scummy sidewalks and in the smelly bars of the Bowery itself. The main character is a 42-year-old, self-admitted Bowery bum named Ray Salyer (who recently refused a $40,000 contract offered by a Hollywood producer with the comment: "I just want to be left alone . . . There's nothing else in life but the booze"). Since the picture was completed, two of the principal supporting players have died from cirrhosis of the liver.

The job took Rogosin 18 months and cost $60,000, including drinks for the cast. By the end of 1955 he had 100,000 feet of film, trenchantly photographed by Richard Bagley (The Quiet One). All this has been sensitively cut by Carl Lerner into a 65-minute movie that promises the safe delights of slumming but carries the, spectator into scenes that will sear his eyeballs like a splash of rotgut.

The picture's plot is as simple as a skid. A lush (Salyer) lands on The Street from nowhere in particular, blows his last buck on the booze, sells his second pair of pants to buy some more, passes out on the sidewalk, wakes up to find his suitcase stolen, takes a day's work as a crate hustler, tries to straighten himself out at the Bowery Mission but just can't stand the quiet and runs out for a quick one. That night he gets sapped and rolled in a back street, and the next morning decides "to get off this Bowery--I'm goin' to Chicago. Gonna make my last stand out there. If I don't make it this time, I'll give up."

Actor Salyer is exactly right in his role --the Virgil of this sad little hell. Though a ruin, he is a noble ruin, and by sheer force of presence he can command the onlooker to follow into the depths, and to look at things that may teach him a little-known truth about the brotherhood of man. It is not an ideal; it is a brutal fact.

* A British corruption of the 17th century Dutch word for farm (bouwerij), as the citizens of New Amsterdam called the estate of their director-general, Petrus Stuyvesant.

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