Growing Up Absurd

You're a Big Boy Now comes on with an arsenal of grown-up ideas about a Little Boy Blue who is as green as they come, especially in bed. The boy, Bernard (Peter Kastner), traverses the stacks of the New York Public Library riding roller skates and dumbwaiters, shuttling between a fast-working actress (Elizabeth Hartman) and a sloe-eyed librarian (Karen Black), wonder- ing which chick to turn. Off duty, he gets knocked about by a Wylie Mom and a wily Dad (Geraldine Page and Rip Torn). In the last reel the boy grows up, puts down his parents and stomps off to his librarian love.

Admittedly, a custard-pie plot. What keeps Big Boy grown up is some of the wackiest free-association camerawork since Richard Lester made the Beatles work A Hard Day's Night. When Bernard, wandering around town, sees the initials W.C. above a public toilet, his mind expands them into Warring Countries--whereupon the screen flashcuts to newsreels of battle; when the words change to Welcome Communists, Russians pass in review. A scrawl in the subway, "Niggers Go Home," reminds him of My Heart's in the Highlands; bigotry is changed to beauty as the Scottish hills abruptly fill with Negroes frugging to the skirl of bagpipes.

When the film focuses on Bernard, all is fair and funny; but there are too many absurd inside bits that become outsize bites, eating away at the film's essential innocence. Michael Dunn as a dwarf actor, Michael O'Sullivan as a one-legged albino hypnotherapist, and Julie Harris as a spinster with a girl-hating rooster stagger through scenes that suffer from fallen archness; and the names of almost everyone--I. H. Chanticleer, Miss Thing, Barbara Darling, a dog named Dog--only force the farce.

Both the faults and freshness of Big Boy stem from the same source: the vast, undisciplined energy of its writer, producer and director--all of whom happen to be Francis Ford Coppola, 27. In his first big-league effort, Coppola flashes more than enough talent to suggest that he will make a major movie once he learns not to trip over the line separating daftness from deftness.

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