Dead End

It always takes the movies a little while to catch up. The so-called "black humorists" of the early 1960s--Joseph Heller, John Barth, Terry Southern among others--are only now beginning to have their books made into films. On the face of it, they make prime movie material. Crazy, anarchistic, sometimes scurrilous, they seem to offer endless visual possibilities for acerbic comedy. But the problems of adaptation are also uniquely difficult. Much of the wit of these books comes not from situation, but from tone and style, brittle qualities that tend to disintegrate before the camera's demanding eye.

Characters turn into cardboard, plots funny in the telling become imbecile in the illustration. The secret of such lunatic comedy, as Stanley Kubrick understood so well in Dr. Strangelove, is to hold things down, to enhance the weirdness by emphasizing the basic realism of the situation. Two new movie adaptations practically stumble over themselves rushing in the opposite direction, with results that almost humiliate their original sources.

Laurence Harvey appears onstage to deliver Hamlet's soliloquy, then divests himself of princely raiment to a thundering strip-joint beat. As the bell sounds for the opening round of the world heavyweight boxing championship, the two burly contenders tiptoe to mid-ring and embrace with consummate passion! A new luxury liner turns out to be propelled by a gang of seminude galley slavettes, who bend to the oar under a whip cracked by everyone's favorite sado-maso slave queen, Raquel Welch.

Such are the Candy-coated tidbits found in The Magic Christian, a thoroughly unpalatable adaptation of Terry Southern's 1960 novel. The book, an episodic account of a billionaire's lifelong devotion to "making it hot for people," made at least a reasonably funny prep-school primer. The film (whose script Southern helped write) purports to give upper-middle-class shibboleths a jolly beating. Instead, it is just another flagging satire, with ludicrous overtones of homosexual lubricity.

Peter Sellers continues his comic decline as that grand guy, Guy Grand, who amuses himself by bribing athletes and actors to perform outrageous acts of public--and usually pubic--harassment. Together with his adopted son (Ringo Starr), he perambulates the English countryside looking for preposterous spectacles to stage. Their prankish piece de resistance is the launching of an ultraexclusive liner, The Magic Christian, which they quickly transform into a ship of ghouls.

The only comic relief in the whole ghastly affair is created by Ringo--to no one's credit but his own. Director Joseph McGrath apparently intended to exploit the popular Beatle brand of ironic mischief. Instead, Ringo's smirking indifference to his superfluous role neatly mocks the film itself.

End of the Road's peculiar combination of chichi, opportunistic avant-gardism and calculating commercialism makes it far more offensive than the crassest products from either Hollywood studios or the underground. The screenplay is the work of Terry Southern (again), who also acted as a coproducer, Scenarist Dennis McGuire and Director Aram Avakian. The three have taken John Earth's trim, controlled novel about a nervous breakdown in the groves of academe and reduced it to a madman's drool.

Jacob Horner (Stacy Keach) is a young college student who flips out shortly after graduation and is whisked off for treatment to an improbable madhouse run by a Dr. D. (James Earl Jones). The doctor is a fanatic whose therapy depends largely on a barrage of audio-visual nightmares, which handily allow Director Avakian to produce an elaborate and almost endless mixed-media show that is about as mind-blowing as the Ice Capades. Horner, whose brain by this time has virtually been diced, goes off precariously to teach English at a small suburban college staffed by a faculty of pederasts and perverts that puts D.'s Bedlam to shame. In between classes, he rapidly becomes the somewhat baffled third party in the psychotic marriage of another faculty member (Harris Yulin) and his ethereal wife (Dorothy Tristan). Things end as badly as they began, with a wretchedly vivid abortion scene that mistakes nausea for honesty.

The rest of the film makes much the same mistake. Under the chaotic direction of Avakian, who has all the finesse of a Visigoth, the cast performs like a group of barking, hungry seals. Stacy Keach spends the entire film in an opaque trance that gives little evidence of either passion or talent. James Earl Jones trumpets his unbridled self-indulgence with missionary zeal. Harris Yulin's talent seems to consist mainly of eyeball rolling and teeth gnashing. Dorothy Tristan lends a glimmer of dignity and humanity to her portrait of the faithless faculty wife, but her efforts are in vain. Avakian, a former film editor, should have known how to cut this film: into little pieces.

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