Granny Knot

By Mark Goodman

You don't have to be a fan clubber to love Elliott Gould, but it helps when, as in Move, his talent is swaddled in mediocrity. Laboring under Stuart Rosenberg's incomprehensible direction, Gould strives to leaven a sodden lump of a movie. His role is that contemporary stereotype, the creative Manhattanite who thinks himself into a granny knot. However fascinating Gould's mumblings and stumblings may be, they are scarcely enough to sustain 90 minutes of pointless celluloid.

Hiram Jaffe (Gould) walks dogs in Central Park by day and writes skin books by night. All the while, his wife Dolly (Paula Prentiss) pelts him with Freudianisms that she has picked up as a psychiatrist's secretary.

They are moving two blocks down Central Park West, but Jaffe proves incapable of coping with that humdrum task. In a running routine that is a very low mutation of Kafka, Jaffe is consistently unable to persuade the anonymous moving man to move his furnishings. This is supposed to be a metaphor for Jaffe's general ineffectuality; it comes across as merely improbable.

Jaffe soothes his emotional wounds by retreating into fantasies, notably a romp in the hay with Genevieve Waite. But the viewer wonders: are these only fantasies? And does anybody care?

The one who really should care is Gould. His recent string of movies (MASH, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Getting Straight) are all doing booming business, but M-A-S-H is still his only first-rate film. He would do well to study the sagging box-office strength of Marlon Brando and Peter Sellers after too many years of carrying bad movies on good shoulders.

qedMark Goodman

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