Uneasy Rider

Commuter--one who spends his life In riding to and from his wife; A man who shaves and takes a train And then rides back to shave again.

So ran E.B. White's light verse in 1925. Later such novelists as Peter De Vries and John Cheever revealed the darker poetry of the strange islands visited by the 8:02 and the 6:55. Now, about 15 years behind schedule, Loving creaks into the local station. Though it copies many of Cheever's mannerisms, it offers none of his insight or humanity. Yet, from its pretentious title to its artificial fadeout, Loving* poses as a train of revelations.

Freelance Artist Brooks Wilson (George Segal) lives your average 9 to 5 life: wife (Eva Marie Saint) in Connecticut; mistress (Janis Young) in Manhattan. Wilson has trouble peddling his ad illustrations--possibly because they look as if they were traced from a 1945 copy of the Saturday Evening Post. His wife has a combination of eros and vulnerability rarely seen outside Scandinavian movies, but Wilson prefers his hostile inamorata--possibly because she has almost no dialogue. To combat the strains of shuttling, the uneasy rider takes on huge loads of alcohol and begins alienating wife, children, colleagues and himself.

Any devotee of cheap Sodom-in-the-suburbs fiction can predict the finale. Walpurgisnacht occurs at a monumental bash thrown by your typical Fairfield County vulgarian. Crocked, randy, and desperate to get "the Lepridon account," Wilson beds down with the wife (Nancie Phillips) of a fellow commuter in the outside playhouse. Sure enough, a TV monitor, installed to oversee children at play, records the grope for the amusement of the guests and the despair of Mrs., mistress and Mr.

Segal, whose comic gifts are evident even in melodrama, is allowed a few light moments in the murky pseudo-sensitivity. But whenever the risibility reaches visibility, it is quashed by Director Irvin Kershner's instinct for vulgarity. Most of the time Segal lurches self-sorrowfully around town as if he had just received six bullets in the stomach. The rest of the cast, including such proven caricaturists as Keenan Wynn and Sterling Hayden, similarly behave as if they were dispensing painful truths instead of numbing fictions.

Depicting the commuter as a harassed, crab-grassed hypocrite is the equivalent of the 19th century view of moral wastrels disporting in the wicked city. There is indeed a crack in the picture window, but Loving demonstrates that if it obscures the vision of those looking out, it is far more distorting to smug voyeurs peering in.

* Not to be confused with the brilliant 1945 novel of the same name by Henry Green.

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