Baby Makes Three

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

LOVIN' MOLLY

Directed by SIDNEY LUMET Screenplay by STEPHEN FRIEDMAN

Molly Taylor is a free spirit somehow blooming in a wasteland Western landscape. In the beginning--way back in 1925--a reasonable, ambitious rancher named Gid Frey loves her, but he is not "silly" enough for her taste. His buddy, Cowboy Johnny McCloud, also loves her, but he is too silly--or shiftless--for her. So she marries a real no-count whose fate (he dies a couple of years later) is no matter because before, during and after her marriage, Molly gives separate but equal bedroom time to her two true loves. In the process she bears a son to each of them.

The triangle has pyramid-like endurance, persisting for some 40 years. In the best of circumstances, it would strain credulity; with Molly played by dull, spunkless Blythe Danner, its strength is incomprehensible. Although she is a sweet enough young thing, even in the early going she suggests no mysterious depths of feeling, intelligence or sexuality that would require more than 40 minutes to plumb. As she ages--and life plays its usual mean tricks on the three of them--she seems a pleasant, easy kind of woman but not the focal point around which three lives are built.

Anthony Perkins and Beau Bridges agreeably aw-shucks their way along through life with her, but Producer Stephen Friedman's adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel Leaving Cheyenne does not give the actors any emotionally revealing scenes to play. The script's dominant and ultimately boring mode is half-expressed rue leavened by quaint down-home turns of phrase. In attempting to cover four decades in an hour and a half, the story uses an enormous amount of voice-over narration. The device does not exactly enhance our involvement with the film. Director Lumet, venturing for the first time into Western territory, betrays the dude's classic enchantment with large vistas.

Time and again he reduces his charac ters to elements in static landscapes, fur ther distancing us from Molly and friends. friends.

Richard Schickel

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