Guilty

Harvey Middleman, Fireman. "Why shouldn't you feel guilty? Aren't you a normal American man?" asks Family Counselor Hermione Gingold. Thereby hangs the tale, and perhaps the whole significance, of Harvey Middleman--fireman, husband, father, and suburban schlemiel. His home, job, wife and children are all lovely in their way, but Harvey (Eugene Troobnick) detests taking out the garbage--for him the symbol of drab conformity. One day he carries a lissome blonde (Patricia Harty) from a burning brownstone. "I'm Harvey," he says hoarsely. "I'm Lois," she whispers, stirring in his arms. They kiss, and Harvey abandons himself to guilty passion until the night his ladylove asks him to carry down a brown paper bag on the way out.

Harvey's creator is 33-year-old Ernest Pintoff, a gifted animator who put outsize satirical bite into such prizewinning cartoon shorts as The Interview and The Critic. In his first full-length feature in color, Pintoff has harnessed live actors to a dead horse. Harvey Middleman exudes a bogus air of originality, but is seldom funny enough to make its simplicity seem unpretentious.

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