Time to Bail Out

By J. C.

ALEX AND THE GYPSY

Directed by JOHN KORTY

Screenplay by LAWRENCE B. MARCUS

Alexander Main is not only well into middle age, he is working his way past it. Like most middle-agers--at least the ones who appear in movies and are usually portrayed, as here, by Jack Lemmon --Alex is disgruntled, angst-ridden, desperate and about dead-ended. His life is a crumbling edifice that needs some heavy restoration work. What it gets, instead, is a demolition job in the person of one Maritza (Genevieve Bujold), an aggressively nubile gypsy. You know the type: wild, tough, unconventional, sexy, mystical, earth-spirited--all those things. She also reads palms, tea leaves and the bottoms of feet.

Alex and Maritza meet as she is running out, literally, on her third prospective bridegroom. She jumps into Alexander's car, weeping and yelling, pursued by her dear old dad and other hot-blooded types. "Three times my father sell me," she tells Main. "For good money, you know." Despite these aborted forays into wedlock, Maritza has managed to preserve her integrity as well as her virginity. "I never alone before," she confides in her smoke-cured gypsy accents as she and Alex pull into the Main digs. "Gypsy's family, they stick together. I got no place to go now." Main is enchanted. But then, he is apparently not hard to please.

There is something almost disarming about the banality of Alex and the Gypsy. It looks like detritus from the last decade, all full of soured good vibes and oafish notions about freedom of the spirit. Maritza is supposed to represent the wildness that Main longs for, the last chance of his life. From everything Director John Korty (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) and Writer Lawrence Marcus (Petulia) show us, she is as liberating as Lucrezia Borgia. Maritza gobbles fruit and chats about Django Reinhardt while Alex makes love to her; she also has a hard time staying out of jail for assaulting another bedmate. No prize himself, Alex is ever aware of his paramour's wanderlust; during bouts of passion, he keeps her handcuffed to the bedstead.

Hard Dollar. It is not simply that Alex is a fool for punishment. He makes his living from it. He pulls down a hard dollar as a bail bondsman and indulges in much gruff whimsy during working hours. "What's the good word?" a gangster client asks him innocently. Alex pounces: "Sunset is a good word. Pretzel is a good word." At last, the gypsy stirring in her soul, Maritza jumps the bail that Alex has posted for her assault rap and heads for Mazatlan in a private plane, accompanied by a rich gent with a lickerish eye. Alex, who has spent most of the movie trying to keep Maritza under both bond and bondage, decides that like other wild creatures -- Jonathan Livingston Seagull, for instance -- she must roam free. He encourages, even effects her escape. As she flies off into the sun, Alex stands at the side of the runway, barechested, waving his orange gypsy shirt like a wind-up Zorba, vowing to follow her. They deserve each other.

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