Gotta Dance

By R.S.

THE TURNING POINT

Directed by Herbert Ross

Screenplay by Arthur Laurents

You yield to The Turning Point relucantly, knowing well that it is conning you--with sentiment, with flamboyance, with sheer slickness. The story is an odd combination of "Old Acquaintances" and one of those 1930s musicals in which the kid from the chorus becomes a star overnight. The old acquaintances in this case are actually old rivals--ballet dancers who chose different roads many years back and must now deal with the consequences. The ambitious one (Anne Bancroft) has become a great star, is now fading, and fighting it. Her friend (Shirley MacLaine) may have been as talented, but she married, had children, is running a ballet school in Oklahoma. Shirley has always wondered whether she too might have been famous if she had stayed on with the Company--collectively portrayed by the American Ballet Theater. Meantime, her daughter (Leslie Browne) has grown into a talented dancer, and when the Company comes to town she is offered a place with it. Mother and daughter head for Manhattan, where the girl's rise is meteoric even by movie standards of 40 years ago: she shortly has the starring role in a new ballet.

That is simply ludicrous. More believably--indeed, touchingly--the two older women are granted, through the girl, the opportunity to come to terms with some unresolved issues. Bancroft, a would-be mentor, must fight through her resentment of youth and that freshness of talent for which no amount of hard-won skill can totally compensate. As for MacLaine, she comes to see that she cannot live through her daughter the life she did not choose. Both get a chance to work out their previously unspoken grudges, on the night of the girl's premiere, in a knockdown fight on the theater steps.

This provides Bancroft with a suitable I climax for a brave, bravura performance. Lined in the face, skinny to the point of emaciation, febrile in manner, she tiers the definitive portrayal of an aging star. MacLaine matches her in their big scene, but is perhaps too conscious of her nice-girl screen image in the rest of the picture. She is entitled to more desperation than she is willing to show;

Good as Bancroft is, it is not her performance alone that makes the picture work. Director Ross, a sometime choreographer, conveys the sweat "and hard work of dance, the sheer pain of the effort to appear effortless. Writer Laurents has a similar capacity for catching the pretenses and bitchiness of life in a dance company. These touches lie at the heart of the picture's appeal, grounding it in a reality that offsets its gee-whizness

Finally, there is the dancing. Ross has very effectively staged it for the camera coming closer to the spirit of live performance than any other film director ever has. He is, of course, lucky to have Mikhail Baryshnikov's spectacular leaps and ardent partnering to shoot. In fairness it should be said that Baryshnikov is also lucky, far more so in his movie debut than poor Rudolf Nureyev was in Valentino. Aside from dancing, he is required only to be sexy--in other words, himself--as he conducts an initiatory affair with Leslie Browne, and that he manages with aplomb. In short, he is likable, triumphing over his deficiencies of language, just as the movie triumphs over its shaky premise. It is hard to imagine anyone, with the possible exception of preadolescent males, who will not, in the end turn on to Turning Point.

--R.S.

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