Frantic Fling

By JAY COCKS, * Jay Cocks

THE LAST OF THE RED HOT LOVERS

Directed by GENE SAKS

Screenplay by NEIL SIMON

Driving to work one winter morning in his 45th year, Barney Cashman, as securely strapped into his black four-door sedan as into his whole middle-class existence, pulls up at a toll booth He looks yearningly across at a ravishing beauty in the car next to him. "So many pretty girls," he soliloquizes. "When I was a kid, there were maybe six or seven pretty girls. Today they're all pretty."

Barney's libido is tied up in as many knots as a second-grader's shoelace. When three pretty girls in succession offer him amatory opportunities, he is pathetically and sometimes hilariously unable to follow through. The first, Elaine Navazio, frequents the Manhattan sea food restaurant that Barney manages and practically sends him semaphore signals over the shrimp cocktail. He invites her to a rendezvous --at his mother's apartment, which is empty during the day while his mother works. Barney supplies his own bottle of J & B and buys his own glasses in Bloomingdale's so Mom won't discover any traces. "Are you married?" he asks, trying to make chitchat. "Mr. Navazio assumes I am married," replies the businesslike Elaine. "I assume what I want." Unfortunately for purposes of the tryst, the only thing Barney can assume is a defensive, feckless air.

The second girl is Bobbi Michele, a paranoid pothead whom Barney picks up while munching peanuts on a bench in Central Park. He lends her the cash to hire an accompanist for an audition on Broadway. When she shows up at Mom's apartment the next day to repay the money, all of Barney's fantasies of extramarital fulfillment vanish in a haze of marijuana smoke.

Barney makes a last frantic stab at infidelity with the melancholic wife of one of his neighbors in suburban Great Neck. Now the positions are reversed. Barney, after his combat training, has become the manic aggressor; Jeanette Fisher is the coward, full of fear and un certainty. Barney finally bundles Jea nette into a cab, then goes to a phone booth to call his wife Thelma and in vite her down to Mom's for a romantic afternoon.

Neil Simon writes funny commercial Broadway plays that, as movies, remain stubbornly stagebound. Most of Lovers takes place inside the same apartment set, instilling a sense of in creasing confinement that stifles screen comedy. There are some good fleeting gags, but here too there is a sense of constriction. Simon writes jokes and sur faces, not characters, so the actors really have nowhere to go in developing their roles.

Alan Arkin's Barney is a composite of small, shrewd gestures and intuitions, as in a marvelous sequence where he watches Bobbi sing What the World Needs Now Is Love with a mounting mixture of apprehension, thwarted lust and concern that the little old lady next door will hear. Arkin is a vast improvement over James Coco's preening, keening act in the Broadway Lovers, and he has Barney's look meticulously right, down to the monogrammed pocket handkerchief he wears in the pocket of his blue business suit.

Paula Prentiss as Bobbi does her familiar kook turn. Renee Taylor plays Jeanette with the same unsparing vulgarity she used for a similar character in Made for Each Other. Sally Kellerman comes off best of the women, partly because she is the first one we meet. Her Elaine is throaty, sexy, challenging and intimidating. By the time the other two put in their appearances, the whole thing has become for audiences what it is for Barney: an endurance contest.

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