Zoo Story

By JAY COCKS

RHINOCEROS

Directed by TOM O'HORGAN Screenplay by JULIAN BARRY

Imagine Ionesco's Rhinoceros cut, cramped, revved up and staged on a go-go dancer's platform in a roadhouse discotheque. That gives a hint of the kind of upbeat, frantic vulgarization done here by Julian Barry and Tom O'Horgan in another of eight filmed plays mounted by the American Film Theater. O'Horgan and Barry collaborated on Lenny, the Broadway biography of Lenny Bruce, and this film contains the same sort of trendy stunts, the same kind of empty, aggressive energy.

Ionesco is a logician of the absurd. His ironies are cool and geometric, his surrealism couched in subtle refractions of the ordinary. His work benefits from a naturalistic approach that reinforces the absurdity by contrasting it. Instead, O'Horgan clobbers the play with a bladder of tacky tricks, like shaking the camera to represent a rhino's point of view, staging a coy, clumsy dream sequence, and including a score by Gait MacDermot (Hair) suitable for rebroadcast in office elevators.

Rhinoceros, intact, is a scathing fairy tale, a parable about how everyone in a large town turns into a rampaging herd of large, loud, one-horned beasts. The lone holdout is a slightly sodden dreamer called Stanley (Gene Wilder), who regrets his inability to metamorphose, but who finally comes to realize the tenuous value of individuality. Stanley is a reluctant combatant and the winner of a dubious victory. His final assertion ("I'm the last man left, and I'm staying that way until the end") is as much an assertion of uncertainty as defiance, a bolster for his quaking confidence.

In all this, of course, there are distinct political analogies, particularly to Ionesco's experience just before he left Rumania in 1938, when many of his friends were throwing in with the Fascists. O'Horgan and Barry have removed not only the politics but the resonance as well. What remains is a squeaky sermon on the virtues of nonconformity.

sbJay Cocks

Zero Mostel re-creates his Broadway role of John, Stanley's friend and upstairs neighbor. Writing about the 1961 production, Critic Robert Brustein observed that "Mostel has a great dancer's control of movement, a great actor's control of voice, a great mime's control of facial expression." The film preserves Mostel's virtuoso performance, including a long, bumpy transformation from man into rhino. But the control that Brustein admired is not so apparent under O'Horgan's direction. Mostel, unchecked and unchallenged, easily skids into self-parody. Still, his billowing, bellowing metamorphosis into another member of the herd does provide the movie's only moments of real laughter, fleeting as they are, and as desperately uncomfortable as Mostel seems to be.

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