Summer Coolers

By * LC.

Summer Coolers Shaft is a window-rattling thriller about a black private investigator named John Shaft (Richard Roundtree), who says "Right on" a lot and runs around in an endless variety of leather costumes making things hot for the bad guys. The film develops a good, affectionately edgy relationship between Shaft and a white cop, played by Charles

Cioffi, who was equally impressive as the villain in Klute. There is also some robust acting by Moses Gunn as an orotund Harlem mobster. Despite a few too many racial jokes, Shaft is a fast-moving pleasure. Director Gordon Parks keeps things going at such a headlong pace that the movie hardly pauses for breath.

The Last Run, on the other hand, is just full of hot air. George C. Scott, looking dour and uncomfortable, appears as an aging, paunchy driver for the Mob who takes a job after nine years to see if he can still cut it. He gets tangled up in the ill fortunes of his passenger, a hit man with a cheap line of chatter (Tony Musante) and his girl (Trish Van Devere), who is supposed to be a moll but looks a good deal more like a Peck & Peck model. The suspense is so listless that the characters seem considerably less likely to perish from gunshot than from atrophy.

Unman, Wittering and Zigo has to do with unpleasant goings on in an English boarding school, where the boys of lower 5-B casually inform their new master (David Hemmings) that they have murdered his predecessor. It is a basically unbelievable premise that nevertheless makes for some nice, subdued thrills. That is exactly the sort of thing that Willard sorely lacks. It is a movie with a good idea--a young man who uses rats to avenge the oppressions of his elders--but it would have needed a combination of Bunuel and Hitchcock to carry it off. Instead it has Daniel Mann (I'll Cry Tomorrow), who manages, despite a good performance by Bruce Davison, to make the movie look like something disinterred from the cellar of TV's Twilight Zone.

Peter O'Toole has a nice time in Murphy's War, carrying on at full cry against a German submarine patrolling a South American river in the waning days of World War II. Sian Phillips (Mrs. O'Toole) is on hand to play a pacifist nurse, and the repartee between husband and wife is snappy, affectionate and diverting. That is rather more than can be said for the rest of the movie. William Holden turns in an excellent performance in Wild Rovers as an agile but aging cowboy who robs a bank with his young buddy (Ryan O'Neal). It is a role that owes much to the character he created in The Wild Bunch, and the film itself owes similar debts to such illustrious predecessors as Red River and The Searchers. Writer-Director Blake Edwards (The Pink Panther, Darling Lili) is more at home with gilded entertainments than campfire yarns. There is the distinct feeling about Wild Rovers that Edwards could not wait to get off the prairie and back to the penthouse.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller is basically a frontier comedy about hookers, gamblers and entrepreneurs that also functions nicely as a raucous send-up of capitalism. The film develops a striking ambience, thanks mostly to the talents of Production Designer Leon Ericksen, who constructed a Western town that is simultaneously grungy and beautiful. But Director Robert Altman often seems to be trying to make his movie worse than it actually is. Working on impulses that seem more self-destructive than artistic, Altman insists on slicking up this straightforward saga with a barrage of stylistic fillips (ragged editing, overuse of the zoom lens) that badly undercut the action. Julie Christie is resilient enough as the upwardly mobile madam, but Warren Beatty seems in danger once again of changing into a lump. A fine and facile character actor named Rene Auberjonois plays as if possessed by Donald Pleasence, while the rest of the supporting cast do a pretty good job of concealing their embarrassment. Some scenes--like a well-engineered shootout on a bridge--do, however, supply ample evidence that Altman is a man of some talent, and capable of better things.

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