Wednesday's Child

By J.C.

MAN FRIDAY

Directed by JACK GOLD

Screenplay by ADRIAN MITCHELL

This bit of crepuscular enlightenment is Robinson Crusoe glazed with contemporary revisions. Here a hapless Crusoe (Peter O'Toole) is portrayed as an overbearing racist. He may be clever enough at fending for himself alone on the island, but human companionship brings out the worst in him. When Friday (Richard Roundtree) and some cannibal friends wash ashore on "his" island, Crusoe dispatches them one by one. Soon only Friday is left, and Crusoe is about to slay him when the black man instinctively adopts the one pose that will save him from the white man's wrath: he becomes abject. He pretends to have been the prisoner of his traveling companions. Crusoe, mollified, saves Friday for servitude.

The protagonist of Man Friday is still Crusoe, but he is no longer the hero. It is the intention of the film makers to ridicule Crusoe's 18th century notions of the civilizing ideals which, Scenarist Mitchell implies, persist into and continually plague the 20th. Accordingly, this Friday comes from a very hip tribe. He laughs openly at Crusoe's attempts to instill the principles of wage-earning and sporting competition and figures Christianity to be foolish but harmless. Crusoe is soon turned into a pratfall personification of Western man. When an opportunity to escape the island arrives, he begs to join Friday's tribe. They will not have him, and he must return again to his lonely habitation.

The movie, which does have an energetic performance by O'Toole, represents a particularly cretinous kind of intellectual masochism. We are meant to believe that Friday's tribe of cannibals represents some grander order of cultural purity free, one supposes, from the debauching influences of conscience and thought. These cannibals, however, would be at home in a minstrel show: they chuckle over the white man's antics, flash long rows of gleaming teeth and pass a great deal of time either sitting around the campfire or singing about the funny ways of the palm tree. For the mentality behind Man Friday, this may indeed represent a higher form of culture.

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