Village Idiot

Two for the Seesaw. Gittel Moscowitz is a slob. Also a kook. Number one, she lives in the Village and looks it. She is 29 but she still wears ballet flats, black tights and bulky knits, and her hair is like something she maybe found under a bed. Add to which she is having her second ulcer and living on cottage cheese, as everybody can plainly see from the mess on the front of her bulky knit. But Gittel has a career. She is known as Gittel Mosca on the stage--of the 92nd Street Y.M.H.A. Gittel has push. For years she picked up her unemployment check every week and rode the subway uptown to study interpretive dancing with Jose Limon. And Gittel has principles. No matter how terribly she is tempted, she never sleeps with a man on the first date. Unfortunately, Gittel also has a heart as big as Hadassah. She supports half the dead-beatniks who shack up with her, and sometimes she even pays their train fare to see other girls.

Gittel (Shirley MacLaine) is the happy-go-unlucky heroine of this earthy, funny, warm and surprisingly wise little comedy adapted by Isobel Lennart from the Broadway success (1958-59) by Playwright William Gibson. Like the play, the film tells the story of Gittel's affair with a visiting fireman who has run out of steam, a lawyer (Robert Mitchum) from Omaha whose problems gee with Gittel's. She has been a doormat for men, he has been a lap dog for his wife. He needs self-reliance, she needs self-respect.

In the course of their brief affair the lawyer and the slob laugh, cry, work, play, fight, love, live. And at the end of the affair, they are wiser and stronger than they were before. For the first time in his life, the lawyer loves as a grown man loves, taking what he wants and leaving what he doesn't; and what he doesn't want, he decides, is to spend his life with Gittel. The shock is painful, but for the first time in her life she refuses to give herself to a man who doesn't want her self. She sends him home, and home he goes to make a new and hopeful start.

Seesaw has its ups and downs, among them MacLaine and Mitchum. On Broadway, Anne Bancroft opened her veins and transfused the audience with hot red gouts of life and laughter; in the film, MacLaine turns on her talent like a spigot, and out comes a cooler flow of charm and humor. On Broadway, Henry Fonda was a mirror skillfully held to reflect the heroine; in the film, Mitchum is just another blank wall in her cold-water flat. Still and all, in the passage from Broadway to Hollywood, not too much of the Gibson has been spilled.

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