Quick Cuts

By J.C.

SAVE THE TIGER. Jack Lemmon wakes in the morning screaming--and he is worse off than he knows. Before the day is out he will have to see about having his clothing factory in Long Beach burned for the insurance money; introduce the new fall line of Capri Casuals; endure a brief nervous breakdown; inhale a joint or two of cannabis; sleep with an aging love child off the Sunset Strip; dream of a pop apocalypse populated by everyone from Bobby Kennedy to James Earl Ray; and recite lines like "I wanna walk in the kind of rain that never washes perfume away." Under the circumstances, that gully of sweat staining the back of his pajamas is certainly understandable.

Lemmon, rather less febrile here than usual, portrays Harry Stoner, a middle-aged businessman of average rapacity who has fallen victim to anomie and his accountant. Down at Capri Casuals, money is as scarce as affection at Harry's house. His only child, a daughter, is away at boarding school in Switzerland, and he and his wife have not exercised their connubial rights in some time. Harry can't stand it. But it is also difficult to stand Harry. His soulless soliloquies and fearless superficiality thoroughly sour the movie.

Director John Avildsen, who made Joe, continues to prove himself a master of the visual cliche, the low-slung symbol and the stereophonic anticlimax. He is abetted by Scenarist Steve Shagan, a sort of drip-dry Clifford Odets, who puts klieg lights around every metaphor. According to the credits, Shagan also functioned as the producer. Considering the results, that is a little like running off your unpublishable novel on your own vanity press.

UNDER MILK WOOD. Dylan Thomas wrote this verse play, as he put it, "for voices." The images that Director Andrew Sinclair has added to his film adaptation do not complement Thomas' language; they detract from it. The language that comes cascading off the sound track is bottled into florid captions for an illustrated travel guide to Wales. Whenever Sinclair is not being resolutely literal-minded, he diverts himself by being fantastical. It will not do for Richard Burton merely to read the first voice. He must appear, all rumpled and dour and selfabsorbed, like some wandering Welshman cursed to travel the countryside until he discovers his spiritual roots. Besides Burton, the cast boasts Elizabeth Taylor, playing Polly Garter as she might have looked if she worked Miami Beach at $100 a trick; Peter O'Toole, who appears to have dashed right over from the set of Man of La Mancha, still wearing his same makeup; and various excellent character actors like Vivien Merchant, Glynis Johns and Victor Spinetti. The film is actually brief, but it seems ruthlessly long, like being trapped in an endless high school assembly.

THE TRAIN ROBBERS. John Wayne can be a superb film actor, as in any film made by John Ford (like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon) or Howard Hawks (like Rio Bravo). In this doltish western, he gives the kind of performance--sloppy, indifferent, contemptuous--for which he is usually and too casually berated. Wayne seems to know he is doing a bit of hackwork. He lumbers through his scenes, not bothering to give his dialogue even the slightest inflection, looking at times as if he might nod off in the middle of a line. Writer-Director Burt Kennedy's script is an inane saga of a group of trailhands hired by a widow (Ann-Margret) to recover a stash of gold. Wayne and his cronies (Ben Johnson--who is reliably genuine--Rod Taylor, Christopher George, Bobby Vinton) ride around like a group of Kiwanians looking for a picnic ground and making cracks about the widow's bust-line--which, indeed, is about the only thing Ann-Margret has to contribute to the proceedings. -J.C.

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