Sounding Brass

By Christopher Porterfield

NASTY HABITS

Directed by MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG

Screenplay by ROBERT ENDERS

Last year. All the President's Men; this year, all the abbess's nuns. Nasty Habits, adapted from Muriel Spark's 1974 novella The Abbess of Crewe, uses the goings-on at a Roman Catholic abbey outside Philadelphia to burlesque the Watergate affair.

Glenda Jackson, who is running for abbess, consolidates her strength with the help of two Haldeman-Ehrlichman types (Geraldine Page, Anne Jackson) and enough bugs and hidden cameras to outfit Moscow's embassy row. Her young rival (Susan Penhaligon), who is having a tumble under the poplars with a neighborhood priest, campaigns on a promise to make the abbey into a love nest. Just before Jackson sweeps to victory, her forces send a pair of Jesuit novices to burglarize her rival's sewing basket in search of love letters.

The novices bungle the job, the press takes up the story, and--but why go on? Anybody who did not spend the years 1972-74 in a bathysphere can imagine the rest, and that is the trouble. Once the correspondences begin to fall into place,.watching the movie complete the pattern has all the excitement of watching somebody fill in the outlines on a piece of needlework. The Watergate references are the sole point of most of the shenanigans; yet the movie has nothing particular to say about Watergate--unless the trivialization itself is the message.

Glenda Jackson holds her sometimes blatant screen presence in check and plays her devious role just right --that is, absolutely straight. Her haughty deadpan shades imperceptibly into sanctity or into sanctimony as her plotting requires. Sandy Dennis has some moments of dimwit charm as a John Dean-like scapegoat who has none of Dean's shrewdness, or anybody else's either. But a running gag in which a globetrotting diplomatic nun (Melina Mercouri) periodically uses her briefcase radio-phone to coach Jackson in Kissingeresque Realpolitik falls rather flat. And the Gerald Ford figure is a football-playing nun (Anne Meara) who is always--guess what?--falling and bumping into things. That joke has long since been exhausted in TV sketches.

What enabled Novelist Spark to get away with her spoof for 116 pages--if indeed she did get quite away with it --was her severe, ironic prose. Echoing with the nuns' devotions and bits of English poetry, it contrasted with, and almost rebuked, the broadness of the subject. With Nasty Habits, on the other hand, the title is a fair barometer of the film makers' sensibilities. Spark's silvery resonance has, in the words of St. Paul, become as sounding brass. Christopher Porterfield

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