Eerie Ennui

By JAY COCKS

CHILD'S PLAY

Directed by SIDNEY LUMET

Screenplay by LEON PROCHNIK

Winter term at a Catholic boarding school for boys, and the students are restless. But this is no case of ordinary snowbound ennui, as eager young Gym Teacher Paul Reis (Beau Bridges) soon discovers. There have been "six student-caused accidents" in the winter term alone. Fingers have been mashed, brows bloodied, eyes gouged, as if the boys were all under the rule of some demoniac impulse.

Extracted with misplaced fidelity from Robert Marasco's unfortunate 1970 Broadway success, this lame tale about the corruption of innocence is little more than a trot for Lord of the Flies. An unpopular Latin teacher nicknamed "Old Lash" (James Mason) is certain that all the trouble is caused by his colleague Dobbs (Robert Preston), whom he describes as a "malevolence" and an "obscenity." Dobbs, however, is beloved of all the boys and Lash heartily despised as an overbearing, paranoid pedant. The bitter rivalry between the two teachers leads eventually to madness, suicide and the equivocal triumph of evil, at least as far as the Code and Rating Administration will allow.

Beau Bridges is appropriately agitated throughout. Preston seems miscast, adept at being folksy and jolly but confounded when he is called upon to be sinister. Memories of The Music Man constantly intrude, and we keep expecting him to break into a chorus of Seventy-Six Trombones. James Mason is superb as a kind of misanthropic Mr. Chips. As written, the part is little more than a cartoon. Mason turns it into a full portrait of a frightened man in the process of being destroyed.

It is a performance of such stature that the rest of the movie looks scrawny beside it. In Fail Safe and The Deadly Affair, Lumet showed a strong and substantial flair for melodrama, but nearly everything seems to go wrong for him in Child's Play, from Michael Small's sonorous and silly score to the untidy accumulation of anticlimaxes left about by the scenarist.

Jay Cocks

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