Out to Lunch

By Frank Rich

WHEN YOU COMIN' BACK, RED RYDER

Directed by Milton Katselas

Screenplay by Mark Medoff

When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder is an orgy for masochists. For two hours the audience is trapped with a collection of loathsome people who take turns showering one another with verbal and physical abuse. It would be nice to say that there is some brilliant point to the repulsive goings-on, but none ever presents itself.

The movie has been adapted by Mark Medoff from his own 1973 off-Broadway play. Like so many well-made American dramas, it is a long day's journey into night: the characters slowly reveal the sad truths of their misbegotten lives. The difference between Medoff s play and other recent exercises in theatrical soul baring (from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to That Championship Season) is the catalyst that provokes the truthtelling. It is not booze that loosens the characters' tongues but a gun.

The pistol belongs to Teddy (Marjoe Gortner), an aging, long-haired rebel who marches into a New Mexico diner one morning in 1968 and proceeds to hold both the hash-slinging employees and the dyspeptic customers hostage. Teddy's aim is really not to rob or murder his captives but to humiliate them. He forces a haughty middle-class tourist (Lee Grant) to bare her breasts; he makes cruel fun of the diner's crippled owner (Pat Hingle); he tells a fat young waitress (Stephanie Faracy) that she is doomed forever to spinsterhood. By the time that Teddy departs, his victims have been stripped of their selfdelusions. Meanwhile, the audience has been treated to a headache-inducing avalanche of shouting matches and two-bit catharses.

Milton Katselas' direction of Red Ryder does not serve Medoff well. As anyone who saw Katselas' Report to the Commissioner knows, he likes to let actors chew up the scenery. Gortner's portrayal of Teddy is as overblown as Michael Moriarty's star turn in Commissioner, he is such a bundle of stylized theatrical tics that Teddy's unpleasantness never becomes psychologically interesting. He is just a shrieking, obnoxious madman, an unintentional Mad magazine parody of Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon.

Some of the protagonist's prey fare better. Though at times hobbled by accent difficulties, British Actor Peter Firth (Equus) is surprisingly convincing as the title character, a sullen, ducktailed counterboy with vague cowboy dreams of glory. TV's Hal Linden, playing Grant's stuffy suburban husband, makes some thing fresh out of a stereotype, as does Faracy. Unfortunately, these performers must share the screen with Grant and Candy Clark, who turn already hysterical women into harridans. "Filth! Filth!" Grant screams at Gortner, in one of the movie's many unwatchable moments.

None of the actors is helped in the least by the film makers' attempts to open up the original play. Once we see that the characters can be explained away by their conventionally pathetic home lives, they become mere Freudian cliches. Yet, hard as it is to identify with Medoffs characters, it is even harder to decipher the script's themes. For all Teddy's references to drugs, frontier mythology and Viet Nam, the movie has little to say about the '60s, violence or American values. If there is any lesson to be learned from Red Ryder, it is only that one should think twice before entering roadside greasy spoons.

-- Frank Rich

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