Reality on the Rocks

La Guerre Est Finie. At the Spanish border a car is checked by the guards, then sent on its way. Unknown to the police, it carries a pair of Red agents bent on toppling the Franco regime. Still another peek into the spyglass?

So it seems, until Director Alain Resnais warms to his real work: examining the mind and mores of a Spanish Communist refugee who lives in France but plots to undermine Spain's government. Diego, the refugee (Yves Mon-tand), refuses to concede that the Civil War ended in 1939, that for all but a dwindling detachment of long-mem-oried men La Guerre Est Finie -- the war is over.

Diego travels a dreadmill between the two countries in constant fear of arrest. He knows that for him there can be no victory, only an avoidance of defeat. Still, out of a habit that seems a stranger within his skin, he continues the gritty business of contacting comrades, smuggling propaganda into convoluted Spanish cities where, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, the streets follow like a tedious argument.

Living far from home and close to the bone, the aging agent has a few elemental joys: cigarettes, a glass of wine, and women -- his mistress (Ingrid Thulin) and a girl (Genevieve Bujold) who believes that a man so far left must be Mr. Right. A dry, desperate soul, Diego nonetheless has a fugitive imagination as agile as an alley cat and a sixth sense of survival in a treacherous by-world of Byzantine complexity.

La Guerre has no real beginning or end. At the film's conclusion, Diego is off to Spain to instigate a hopeless general strike in Madrid, unaware that the policia are closing in. His mistress boards a plane to bring him back to the safe harbor of France, fearful that she may be too late, that this time he has finally bought a one-way ticket home.

The official French entry at last May's Cannes Festival, La Guerre was withdrawn from competition under pressure from Spain. It is easy to see why: the villain of the piece is all too clearly the Franco government. Yet as Jorge Semprun's script makes clear, the revolutionists are not precisely heroes either. In the film's most insightful scene, Diego confronts a group of young incendiaries hell-bent on burning Spain to the ground. Both sides are presented as helpless amputees of history; the old rebel has a past but no future, the terrorists a future but no past. Communication is impossible; experience and extremism meet and pull apart without once having touched.

As in Hiroshima Mon Amour and Muriel, Director Resnais is obsessed with the mixture of memory and desire, and his overly literary Guerre at times seems both pat and prolonged. Viewers, however, are not likely to be bored with the performance of actor-singer Yves Montand. With a sour, craggy face fatefully evocative of Bogart and Camus, he exhales an air of melancholy strength that makes Diego seem as abused and battered as an old zinc bar -- and just as uncorrodible.

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), wondering 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

To Be a Crook is the tragicomic tale of four film-flammed factory workers who quit their pedestrian jobs to go on a crime-filled joyride through the streets of Paris. A quartet of cut-rate Belmon-dos, they see themselves essentially as Robin Hoods, but swiftly become a pack of robbing hoods; their crimes escalate from glomming some gum to heisting a locomotive to kidnaping an actress.

Reality intrudes into their make-believe celluloid world when they seek to exchange their hostage for a bag full of francs. A policeman tries to arrest them for double parking and with one flic, the flick, for them, is over. The boys lose their cool, shoot the cop, and spray the surrounding crowd with a submachine gun; three innocent bystanders die. The thieves flee, and like kids miming a game of cops and robbers they shoot it out on the rocks in an abandoned quarry. But playtime is over; the bullets are for real.

The story of criminals who meet a Bad End after the Big Caper is nothing new. What keeps Crook going straight are the poignant performances of the four French unknowns who play the hoods, and the sensitive direction of Claude Lelouche (A Man and A Woman). At 30, Lelouche understands only too well the movie-maimed members of his own generation who have turned their backs on life to make themselves over in the images of a reel world.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.