Quick Cuts

By J.C.

CESAR AND ROSALIE. For some reason Gallic romances seem to require an inordinate amount of automobile travel, and the principals in this soggy little love story are forever wheeling off in passionate pursuit of one another. Cesar (Yves Montand) is a buoyant businessman, a self-made success, enamored of Rosalie (Romy Schneider), who loves him and yields to him but always, somehow, eludes him. David (Sami Frey), who looks like Warren Beatty after two weeks on a health farm, is a cartoonist also in love with Rosalie. At first dazzled by her two determined suitors, Rosalie scurries between them, settling, finally, for neither. Meantime, Cesar and David become fast friends, their common pain and loss binding them together. As enacted by Miss Schneider and photographed by Jean Boffety, Rosalie has a certain smoky beauty, as if she were being observed through several layers of gauzy bandage. But her charms are, alas, merely photographable. Rosalie's mysterious appeal remains elusive, so it is difficult to see what exactly drives Cesar and David into such genteel frenzies. They would probably be happier with each other anyway.

JEREMIAH JOHNSON. "The real Jeremiah Johnson," Screenwriter Edward Anhlat has explained, "killed 247 Crow Indians and then ate their livers, and that's not nice." The film that was extracted, with considerable timidity and falsification, from the Johnson saga is exactly that--nice. Its niceness is both part of its charm and its undoing.

Johnson was a mountain man, one of a rare, rough breed that wandered the unexplored West of the early 19th century, living off the land, doting on danger and craving solitude. Mountain men like Johnson became the greater part beast after a while. Their survival depended almost solely on their read iness to adopt such skills and senses as are usually called animalistic.

Robert Redford, who plays John son, is severely miscast. Fresh-faced and eager, he is certainly not about to eat any Crow livers, so Redford's Johnson becomes a kind of chivalrous Indian fighter, compelled to slaughter Crows because they killed his family. Thus compromised, the movie still has some virtues. It was photographed in Utah, and the landscapes of fall and winter are regally beautiful. In fact no one seems to fill the screen as well as the mountains, save for Stefan Gierasch, whose performance as a rapscallion mountain man named Del Grue is joyous and exceptionally inventive.

PETE 'N' TILLIE are Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett, two lonely San Franciscans gingerly approaching middle age. After a whimsical and rather winning courtship (the movie is at its best here, sweet and shrewd and funny), they settle down into suburbia. They have a boy named Robbie, bright and happy, who contracts a mysterious disease and dies before reaching adolescence. The marriage founders, breaks and is mended again. Based on the Peter DeVries novella Witch's Milk, Pete 'n' Tillie is a mixture of puns, wisecracks and tragedy. All this might have worked but in stead is disconcerting because the movie takes only certain very tentative risks.

For example, Burnett, handily managing her first major film role, gets the sort of scene that actresses kill for: while Pete is upstairs playing with the dying Robbie, Tillie walks into the backyard and curses God ("You bastard, you bloody butcher") in a burst of fury and grief. But no sooner has she finished than her voice is heard again in narration on the sound track saying "Later, I could hardly believe that was me." It is as if studio executives, nervous about blasphemy by the country's TV sweet heart, wanted to smooth things over al most before they got started.

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