At Sea in Manhattan

By JAY COCKS

THE PRISONER OF SECOND AVENUE

Directed by MELVIN FRANK Screenplay by NEIL SIMON

On the inauspicious occasion of this movie's debut, condolences again to the great Anne Bancroft. There has been, recently, a spate of movies about women --Alice Doesn 't Live Here Anymore, The Stepford Wives, A Woman Under the Influence--which has led to the suggestion that at last the American cinema is losing its masculine bias, that now there are lots of good roles for women and lots of good actresses to play them. Well, the actresses may be there, but the parts are not. Why would Anne Bancroft be in this movie otherwise?

Bancroft is one of the very best actresses in America. She has power and passion that she never forces, a directness that is always startling and, at its best, pure. She also has a fugitive sensuality that she knows how to use (as in The Graduate) and, whenever necessary, to turn off. By exact measure, she gets to use one-half an erg of all this talent in The Prisoner of Second Avenue.

Apparently she was recruited to lend a little weight to a mean, shallow and indifferent enterprise. The Prisoner of Second Avenue is a listless nervous-breakdown farce, adapted by Neil Simon from his play about the traumas and indignities of living in Manhattan. Jack Lemmon, unwired and wrung out, appears as an lid executive who loses his job and proceeds to crack under all the usual New York tensions, from unruly cab drivers to walls that crack like eggshells, from vicious neighbors to violence in Central Park. Bancroft plays his wife, loving and impatient and reasonably brave, who sees him through the crisis and begins to pick up some of his anxieties.

The movie is blank, unimaginative --think of every joke you have heard about New York over the past decade and here it is--and Bancroft cannot make much of the bits and scraps she is given. She is misdirected by Melvin Frank (A Touch of Class) to underline cartoon New York mannerisms: a threatened rasp in the voice that can easily twitch into hysteria, a battery of body movements that look like preliminaries for infantry combat.

Still, there are moments when Bancroft breaks through. They are fleeting, almost incidental, but when they come upon us, they are a melancholy reminder of what we are all missing. Most memorably there is the instant when the wife first realizes that her husband is moving beyond ill temper into breakdown. "Oh God, Mel," she says, "I'm so sorry," comforting him in a rush of feeling that is the truest thing in the movie. sbJay Cocks

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