Inspector Clouseau and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Ever since his first appearances with Chicago's improvisational Second City troupe, Alan Arkin has been doing a series of disappearing acts. The authentic Arkin vanishes into a part, never to be seen again. Like Peter Sellers, he has ample physical credentials for a cab driver but rather odd ones for a star. His blunt, anonymous face was born to grouse behind a steering wheel. His voice -- often hidden behind a Puerto Rican or Mittel-European accent -- is a grainy urban product, like soot. His hair is rapidly disappearing; his walk is a series of slumps.

Nevertheless, at 34, Arkin has established himself as a major theatrical talent. In his Broadway debut in Enter Laughing, he played an acting student, crippled with a plethora of fright sweat and a dearth of talent. The performance earned him a Tony Award. As the suicidal intellectual in Luv, Arkin was so explosively funny that his director, Mike Nichols, called him "the best actor in America." He won an Oscar nomination for his first full-length film role: the resignedly subversive Soviet officer in The Russians Are Coming. His first straight picture, Wait Until Dark, was a Guinness-like tour de force in which Arkin offered portraits of a father, his son and a psychopathic killer.

But there are disadvantages to being Alan Arkin, the submersible actor. Without a dominant personality that remains a constant in each performance, he is the victim as well as the beneficiary of his material. In his two most recent films, his vast comic abilities tick away in a bomb that never goes off, and his gift for pathos and poignancy soars so far above the surrounding melodrama that the film becomes virtually a one-man show.

In A Shot in the Dark and The Pink Panther, Gallic gumshoe Jacques Clouseau was played by Peter Sellers with his overfamiliar banana-peel approach to comedy. In Inspector Clouseau, Arkin follows meticulously in his predecessor's flatfootsteps, but the result is only a parody of a parody.

There is the elaborate sight gag: Clouseau exits from the wrong door of a plane and gets carried out with the luggage. The Malapropism: "You are pushing my leg." The convoluted scheme: a gang of thieves disguise themselves in Clouseau masks to enter Swiss banks. The third time round, however, the mixture is flat and tasteless. Bud Yorkin's slovenly direction makes the film look as if every expense had been spared, trapping Arkin in a farce of habit that will probably retire Clouseau to oblivion --one picture too late.

Fractured French. From Inspector Clouseau to Carson McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a journey from comedy to tragedy, from fractured French to utter silence. As John Singer, a deaf-mute silverware engraver living in a small Dixie town, Arkin moves through a gallery of Southern gothic tragedy. A fellow mute (Chuck McCann) does violence to a store window, and is committed to a mental institution, where he dies. A Negro doctor who befriends Singer is racked with cancer, and has a hostile, hate-drugged daughter (Cicely Tyson).

For a time, Singer tries to make a lasting impression on his fellow sufferers, but one by one they rebuff him. When McCann dies, Singer, by now robbed not only of his senses but his sensibilities, takes his own life. Only when he is gone do his erstwhile friends realize the extent of his empathy.

As a novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter was half poetry, and like most poetry, it suffers in translation. Yet, though much of the sentiment drips into sentimentality, Arkin is triumphant as an Everyman isolated from the humanity he can reach but not touch. With galvanic, Chaplinesque gestures, he makes his inarticulate mouth seem to shout his agonies; when he "talks" to himself, he speaks sign language with a weary, resigned accent that makes his fingers seem to sigh.

The surrounding emotional landscape is alternately barren or soggy, but Arkin's performance gives Heart the systolic beat of life. He is helped by lanky Sondra Locke as a typical McCullers adolescent whose burgeoning body and psyche can neither retreat to childhood nor advance to maturity, and by Tyson, an absolute embodiment of the slogan "Black is beautiful."

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