Seconds

By J.C.

Walking into a movie theater these days is often like walking into a flashback. Many of the new releases are actually sequels to successes of summers past. Among them:

SHAFT'S BIG SCORE brings back the black private eye who divides his time almost equally between brawls and bedrooms. Here, one of Shaft's fillies has a brother mixed up in the numbers racket. When the brother's storefront insurance office is bombed, the police find his body in the debris but no trace of the $250,000 that he and his partner had stashed in the company safe. Shaft starts to track the money down, a process that eventually involves him with some shady types from Downtown, some anxious cops and a bevy of slinky, mindlessly sexy playmates. Compared with last year's Shaft original, Shaft's Big Score is more elaborate, a lot glossier and finally duller. Shaft himself suggests that the black man's ultimate goal is to live high, smash faces and make terrible demands on his sexual prowess. As the hero, Richard Roundtree brings considerably more fervor to the clinches than to the dialogue.

COME BACK, CHARLESTON BLUE features two of Shaft's soul brothers, a pair of Harlem plainclothesmen named Grave Digger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge) and Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) who made their movie debut in the casual, sometimes chaotic comedy thriller Cotton Comes to Harlem (1969). In Charleston Blue, Director Mark Warren shows a boisterous if somewhat blatant sense of fun as well as a knack for dealing with mayhem. Charleston Blue is like slaphappy and violent vaudeville. Under the guise of cleaning up the ghetto, a flashy fashion photographer called Painter is rerouting all the Mafia's heroin traffic through his own hands. Johnson and the Digger are on to him pretty early in the game, but they cannot make a move because every citizen above 110th Street regards Painter as some kind of black Robin Hood. The movie comes unhinged occasionally, especially in sequences that borrow liberally from such diverse sources as Public Enemy and The French Connection; but Cambridge and St. Jacques, two resourceful performers, are always on hand to snap things back into perspective.

CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES is the fourth installment in an apparently endless series of simian science fiction (TIME, June 5). For a while, each chapter (Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes) looked cheaper and more cursory than its predecessor, but thanks to some razzle-dazzle direction by J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone), and most especially to the superb cinematography of Bruce Surtees, Conquest is the handsomest of the lot. It has the same storybook gusto and bizarre pageantry as the original. The setting is the America of 1991, when a mysterious virus has wiped out all household pets. Apes have taken the place of dogs and cats and have been trained to perform menial tasks (filing, sweeping up, waiting on tables). They are treated like slaves by a repressive government until one of them, named Caesar, leads an open revolt. Scenarist Paul Dehn sometimes lets his satire turn into sermonizing, but he also engineers a clever and jauntily cynical reversal of sympathies whereby audiences cheer the marauding apes in their campaign to overcome mankind.

BEN, when last seen, had just set his loyal horde of fellow rats upon Willard, his misanthropic master. Willard ended, appropriately enough, with Willard's grisly demise, but Ben is back as busy as ever in this sleazy slice of horror for the pre-high school set. The basic conceit of both the rat and the ape pictures is that animals at worst are misunderstood and at best are infinitely preferable to humans. Ben pals around with a sickly kid named Danny who suf fers from a weak heart and, to judge by his actions in the movie, a weak head. Danny sticks up for Ben when the nasty policemen want to kill him, even vis its him in his sewer home somewhere under Wilshire Boulevard to warn him that the cops are coming with fire hos es and flamethrowers. Such touching devotion leads to a dewy denouement that paves the way, alas, for still another sequel.

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