Quick Cuts

SIDDHARTHA is set in the India of 25 centuries ago, but it has the contemporary familiarity of a quickie weekend at Esalen. Hermann Hesse's novel has been adapted with stuporous devotion by Conrad Rooks, who in 1967 unleashed Chappaqua, a shambling phantasmagoria of the hallucinatory world of alcoholism and drug addiction. His skills have become no sharper in the intervening years. Siddhartha (Shashi Kapoor), as any campus sophomore would know, spends the better part of his lifetime beating the bushes in search of spiritual insight and fulfillment. It is a hard job achieving nirvana, and seems to require a great deal of sitting by babbling brooks and talking in hushed tones. For a while Siddhartha embraces worldly things, including fine raiment, sumptuous food and Malala (Simi Garewal), the woman who he decrees will be his "love teacher." Finally he grows discontent and makes his way back to the one wise person he has met, a man who poles a raft back and forth across a river. Siddhartha has learned, as it were, to flow with the current. Cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who has lent visual majesty to all of Ingmar Bergman's recent work, must have realized early the folly of taking all this didactic mysticism seriously. This, at least, would explain why every image is bathed in the dreamy light of a tour ad for Air India.

DILLINGER is the first feature directed by John Milius, a young screenwriter who is as well known for his self-publicizing as for his screenplays (Jeremiah Johnson, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean). Sounding in interviews like a combination feudal lord, Texas land baron and bawdyhouse piano player, Milius proclaims the glories of guns, the beauties of blood lust and the masculine honor of big money. Affectation like this makes good copy and, judging from Dillinger, bad movies. Instead of the brash and abrasive effort that might have been expected, Dillinger is slack and derivative. Its main inspiration is Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, both in its ideas (outlaws as folk heroes, mythic celebrity as the ultimate reward of the criminal life) and its images (bloody faces pressed against car wind shields, lovers in a field shaded by a cloud passing briefly across the sun). But Bonnie and Clyde's humor, excitement and sense of fatefulness are woefully absent. Milius, who also wrote the script, creates no real characters, only targets. He has two surpassing leading actors: Warren Gates as Dillinger and Ben Johnson as the G-man who finally does him in. His most singular accomplishment is that he manages to make them both look bad.

SHOWDOWN features Dean Martin, looking disgruntled, being pursued across New Mexico by Rock Hudson. Both men were fast friends until Rock up and married Susan Clark. Then Dean, figuring he would only be in the way, rode off into hard times. By the time the movie begins he is reduced to assisting at train robberies, an occupation that causes the citizens of the town of Cumbres considerable concern and gets Rock, the town's new sheriff, on his trail. Most of the tension here derives from watching Martin try to get through a scene. He is given a little action to keep him awake, and his dialogue has the reassuring familiarity of a Las Vegas lounge act. In one sequence, for example, Hudson gets shot in the posterior. "I'm sure glad it didn't hap pen to me," Martin drawls, " 'cause that's where my brains is." After a couple of those, one begins to wonder when the chorus girls are coming on.

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