All Fall Down

By R.S.

THE DOMINO PRINCIPLE

Directed by STANLEY KRAMER

Screenplay by ADAM KENNEDY

As a novel, Adam Kennedy's The Domino Principle was a thriller of more than usual style, distinguished by a fairly serious attempt to penetrate the mind of the sort of loser who, if properly manipulated, can be turned into a political assassin. Now the book has fallen into the heavy hands of Director Stanley Kramer, and, despite Kennedy's presence at the screenwriter's keyboard, everything that made the book good, popular fiction has somehow been lost.

The main lines of the plot have been retained, but they constitute what has become a standard trip down paranoia lane. Who are all these vaguely menacing character actors? What are their motives for knocking off a man we must assume is either a President or a presidential candidate?

Much screen time is devoted to demonstrating that the conspiracy against this distant political figure is widespread and heavily financed. People are forever getting into and out of a variety of vehicles, but all these goings-on make for neither arresting imagery nor suspense. And they have no function whatever in explicating the psychology of the murderer, a small-time punk whom the unnamed organization has gone to enormous trouble to spring from jail.

Gene Hackman plays him, and, because Hackman is a star, the killer has been given many redeeming sweetnesses that were not present in the book's portrayal of a hard, turned-in man who had, it seemed, come out to only one person, a low-caste wife. Candice Bergen is strangely cast as the wife in the film, playing the role with her hair colored a deglamorizing brown. But her scenes with Hackman have neither flair nor fire, and their love seems merely fabricated to satisfy a movie convention.

But why go on? The picture is a boring botch in every way, unconsciously exemplifying the film's title. When the first domino in a row is somebody like Stanley Kramer, you can count on him to fall down clumsily and knock down all the rest. R.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.