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By F.R.

FINGERS

Directed and Written by James Toback

James Toback is the man who wrote The Gambler, a particularly pretentious 1974 James Caan vehicle about a dedicated schoolteacher with a fatal weakness for making dangerous bets. Toback's new film is about a dedicated concert pianist (Harvey Keitel) who runs dangerous missions for his Mafia father. Both movies are cut from the same synthetic Dostoyevskian cloth, but Fingers actually manages to be more obnoxious than its predecessor. Perhaps the reason is that Toback wouldn't stop at writing the new film; he had to go on and direct it as well.

Fingers is not an auspicious directorial debut. At the narrative level hardly an incident in the movie is credible. Dip beneath the plot and you arrive at a psychological sewer. Among several gratuitous shock tactics, Toback treats the audience to an on-screen prostate examination and the spectacle of two women's heads being smashed together. The film's most persistent Freudian motif is a phallus fixation that borders on the pathological. Though Toback tries hard to emulate the expressionistic style of Director Martin Scorsese, Fingers never amounts to more than a flamboyantly neurotic drive-in movie.

The only real evidence of professionalism comes from Cinematographer Mike Chapman (Taxi Driver), who has shot New York's mean streets in his usual lucid way. The cast varies from bad to worse. Heroine Tisa Farrow speaks as if she were a spaced-out extra on furlough from Blow-Up. Jim Brown, the subject of a 1971 Toback book, is on hand only to act out the script's juvenile racial-sexual fantasies. As the hero, a schizo prone to gesturing with his mouth while banging at the keyboard, Keitel gives the first terrible performance of his career. He is such a bundle of grating mannerisms that one can hardly blame his angry father (Michael V. Gazzo) for telling him "I should've strangled you in your crib."

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