Woodshed Sex

The U.S. Customs Bureau office barred it as obscene. Readers found it shocking and scandalous. But since 1964, the courts and the public have acknowledged that it was only Henry Miller letting go his barbaric yawp over the rooftops of Paris. Today The Tropic of Cancer is available without prescription in drugstores all over America. And now, for anyone over 17, it is presented in motion-picture form, dirty words and all. Director Joseph Strick's last adaptation was Ulysses, which suffered not from infidelity to the text but from an insufficiency of imagination. In Tropic of Cancer, he again provides a verbatim stream of self-consciousness on the sound track, illustrating it with a series of dislocated vignettes. The result is a woodshed sex lecture with lantern slides.

Miller's crapulous expatriates have a vitality that even Strick cannot quash. Their scatological, X-rated fury at a world that has the audacity to be imperfect is still molten. And their alternate curses at and apostrophes to the female pudenda retain a primal humor. But anyone who has read or watched the real Henry Miller knows that the author possesses a sly, ribald wit that is entirely absent from Rip Torn's somnambulistic impersonation. Leeching meals and wives from the bourgeois, Miller-Torn provides neither charm nor intelligence; it is impossible to believe that he would be invited out for a drink, much less in for the night. Moreover, though his dialogue is fixed in the '20s, his scenes are mired in the '60s. The female of the species have a few humorous lines, as when a naked contessa looks up at her slavering lover and whispers, " 'Ave I told you dat I 'ave de clap?" But the men all founder with such painful lyrics as "her organ was her treasure, even though she sold it each night for a few pieces of silver."

In 1934, when he published Tropic of Cancer, Miller could justly claim that he was 20 years ahead of his time. The film version, unhappily, is as many years behind--one more boozy, verbose old victim of the Lost Generation gap.

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