Quick Cuts

By J. C.

JEREMY captures young love--its humor and giddiness as well as its melancholy--with wistful affection. Too wistful, in fact. Jeremy (Robby Benson) is a precocious, upper-middle-class New York kid who aspires to be a cellist.

"Music expresses love and parting simultaneously," says Jeremy's shrewd, strict teacher (Leonardo Cimino). "It expresses life. Play it that way." Jeremy meets Susan (Glynnis O'Connor) at school one day, talks with her about the busy loneliness that seems to trouble them both, and falls in love with her.

Benson and O'Connor bring real warmth and urgency to the deepening relationship between the two teenagers.

The film grows bleary, however, over the tenderness and eventual sorrow of the relationship. Director-Writer Arthur Barron, though adept at catching the surfaces and undertones of mildly affluent New York life, indulges in a kind of high-calorie sentimentality that seems itself adolescent, without being able to convey the real turbulence and anguish of adolescence. He glazes Jeremy over with winsomeness, and seems to demand that it be liked for its own slightness and vulnerability.

THE STONE KILLER stars Charles Bronson, who will not go away. It was directed by the equally persistent Michael Winner, who spins out at least a couple of features a year, most recently a vehicle for Burt Lancaster (Scorpio) as well as another one for Bronson (The Mechanic). Here Winner attempts to counterbalance Branson's concrete immobility by immersing him in a plot full of flash and frenzy. It is a mostly futile effort. The script, about a rogue cop, is patterned closely enough on Dirty Harry to be called Grubby Lou. There is a series of slaughters, apparently having to do with mob warfare, that keeps Lou (Bronson) shuttling between New York and Los Angeles, getting blood on his own hands from time to time. The plot is infernally tangled and unrelieved by humor. There is a good, loud, nasty showdown in a subterranean garage, and an effectively brutal scene of a mass mob assassination. The Mafiosi, portrayed with almost parodistic seriousness by the likes of Martin Balsam and Alfred Ryder, hire Viet Nam veterans to do their dirty work, a bit of practicality that also passes for covert social comment. The Stone Killer concludes in sober fashion with a sermon on evil, which, we are told, is pervasive and unavoidable. Rather like Charles Branson-Michael Winner movies, apparently.

-- J.C.

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