Overworked Organ

"The rebels are in the suburbs!"

The line is worthy of Groucho, but then so is almost all of the dialogue in The Adventurers. Harold Robbins' peeping tome of love and revolution in a banana republic allowed for no such adornments as taste or logic, and neither does the film, at least not in its original 3-hr., 11-min. version. As a boy, Dax Xenos (Loris Loddi) sees his mother raped by the Fascisti. He swears revenge and years later the adult Dax (Bekim Fehmiu) helps a Castro-style Latin American leader named Rojo (Alan Badel) to survive a bloody uprising. On the way to the palacio, Dax becomes an insatiable voluptuary. According to Robbins' five-peseta psychology, the poor nino is cursed with the inability to feel--with his heart. With everything else, yes. But with that overworked organ, no.

Joseph E. Levine (The Graduate) purchased The Adventurers for a million dollars before a single word was written. Creative roulette was also played by the author. Once, during the assemblage of the novel, Robbins' publisher got a sneak preview of an unfinished page. "What happens next?" he asked. "I don't know," came the reply. "The damned typewriter broke."

Firecrackers Banging. The same improvisational quality pervades the movie; breast-twisting rapes occur whenever the plot flags; sloe-eyed, heavy-breathing women chuff across the screen like freight trains; Dax goes through his life phases (from peasant to gigolo to millionaire) with a single expression --that of a man with a pebble in his shoe. Masochists, lovers of camp and chroniclers of the collapse of Hollywood will sift for years The Adventurers' riches of embarrassment. There is the waste of Charles Aznavour as a kinky sadist and Anna Moffo doing her mini-Maria Callas. There is Ernest Borgnine, trapped in a Spanish accent several sizes too large. There is Candice Bergen, grimacing as she loses her virginity to the offscreen sound of firecrackers banging. There is windy dialogue ("Yesterday never happens again"). There is the rhythmic up-and-down movement of a camera lens during yet another harsh, graphic seduction scene.

Finally, this movie of unsexy sex and unleavened violence reveals its most absurd quality: an R rating. The rating system merely operates its hypocritical faculties when it X's such legitimate movies as Medium Cool, then blesses The Adventurers with a finger wag. Gazing at that lone letter, the viewer is left with the same question that occurs as he watches this beer picture on a champagne budget of $10 million: ?Por que?

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