Stocking Stuffers

THERE'S A GIRL IN MY SOUP--but it might as well be a crouton. In other words, the film, adapted by British Author Terence Frisby, is about as dreary as his play of the same name. Peter Sellers is cast as the galloping gourmet of British television and the Errol Flynn (albeit a spindly one) of the British boudoir. Prinking Lotharios always meet their match, of course, and Sellers' downfall comes at the hand of a goofy colonial bird (Goldie Hawn). Sellers is fitfully amusing when not indulging an inexplicable penchant for removing his clothes. But not even his comic talents can keep this writer's Frisby aloft.

I LOVE MY WIFE is just about what you'd expect from the author of Getting Straight and the director of If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium: a limp, adolescent, pseudo-hip study of the comic agonies of an unhappily married contemporary man. Elliott Gould, of course, is the star, and he shuffles through the cretinous proceedings with the guilty look of someone who has been through it all so many times before that he should know better. I Love My Wife is the kind of assembly-line candy bar movie that induces in an audience rage, stupor or pimples.

HOMER is a well-intentioned film about a young man's growing intolerance for his parents, his home town and his life in Middle America. Too often the script is predictable, the situations pure pasteboard. But Director John Trent has a subtle feeling for the nuances of small-town life, and scenes such as a going-away party for a Viet Nam-bound soldier are filled with a sense of quiet poetry that might have pleased Sherwood Anderson. In the cast are Tisa Farrow, Mia's preternaturally sensual younger sister, and (as Homer) a robust young actor named Don Scardino, who is the most genial and talented young leading man to appear since Beau Bridges.

ADAM AT 6 A.M. also concerns itself with youth and Middle America. The son of upper-middle-class parents, Adam flees his plush Los Angeles home for a summer in the heartland. He winds up in Missouri, where he gets a job with a road gang and meets one of those teenage girls (Lee Purcell) who favor pink and pigtails, and announce with pride: "I was valedictorian of my high school class." He falls in love with both the girl and the country, but neither romance can sustain the burden of examination and analysis to which Adam constantly subjects them. The film is too slick by half, and often uses caricatures instead of characters. But it at least refuses to give simplistic answers to complex questions.

FOOLS are two leftovers from A Thousand Clowns. The girl has changed from Barbara Harris to Katharine Ross, but the man remains Jason Robards. Once again he plays the crumpled buffoon, out of step with society, delivering loud, whimsical broadsides against such well-riddled targets as the Establishment, traffic and the FBI. His paramour is 25 years his junior, and her attachment for such a droning bore may be ascribed to callowness or to a classic Electra complex. But she is still the dream-child of The Graduate and the only visible excuse for an overblown farce that collapses into bloody and unmotivated tragedy.

FLAP serves notice that the plight of the American Indian has reached the exploitation stage. As Flapping Eagle, a proud ex-Army sergeant on an Arizona reservation, Anthony Quinn boldly plays Zorba the drunk redskin. Abetted by a wispy intellectual with the decidedly un-militant name of Eleven Snowflake (Tony Bill) and a bleary stereotype called Lobo (Claude Akins), Flapping Eagle decides to foment a three-brave revolution against white civilization. Guess who dies (but whose spirit lives on)?

HORNETS' NEST is a weird little war movie full of bizarre energy and merciless violence, a kind of Dirty Dozen Reach Puberty. The plot has to do with a group of Italian war orphans who capture a downed American paratrooper (Rock Hudson) and enlist his aid in wreaking bloody revenge on the Nazi occupation forces. There is one sardonic sequence where he teaches the kids to shoot machine guns and another, quite brutal, where they all joyously massacre a town full of Nazis. Director Phil Karlson's fadeout is hopelessly sentimental, and there is a subplot about a woman doctor that sabotages a goodly portion of the film, but Hornets' Nest survives all this as a morbid if minor curiosity.

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