Cooling Out

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BUSTIN' LOOSE

Directed by Oz Scott

Screenplay by Roger L. Simon

He's a bad dude, cool and sassy, street smart and maybe even mean if somebody tries to hassle him. Anyway, he will have you know that there is plenty of righteous rage underneath his hipster's slickness--better not mess with him.

But his eyes betray him. Whenever his image is challenged, or even when he merely pauses to contemplate the possible consequences of his outrageous shuck, they grow round with alarm. Then there is the problem of body language. Just when he is smoothing along nice and easy, something will throw him off-stride, and he will be afflicted by these strange jerks and twitches. And that says nothing about the sudden babbles of overexplanation that seize him when someone in authority intrudes on one of his scenes.

Out of this discontinuity between the image he desperately wants to project and a reality that is considerably less grand, Richard Pryor has created, in such otherwise indifferent movies as Silver Streak and Stir Crazy, what may be the current screen's most appealing comic persona. His style may come from the ghetto, but his screen character is an everyman offering a sometimes poignant, but always funny, commentary on male fantasies of knowledgeability and bravado.

Considering his box office strength, one would think that Pryor could command the creation of vehicles to match his gift. Or perhaps he likes being the best thing about a picture, since he functioned as his own producer on Bustin' Loose, and it is, if anything, more inept --certainly more overtly sentimental --than his other films. In his new movie Pryor plays a sometime con, forced by his parole officer to drive a bus from Philadelphia to the State of Washington if he wishes to avoid a return to jail. The passengers are the lawman's fiancee (Cicely Tyson) and a group of variously troubled, and variously adorable, children, whose orphanage has been closed and who seek a home on a farm owned by Tyson's aunt and uncle. From the moment the antique vehicle sputters out onto the turnpike, one knows what is going to happen: by sharing a number of misadventures, the man and the woman will fall in love, and the youngsters will learn to abandon their wayward ways. The children's growing affection for their driver will, in turn, soften him so that he can be molded into respectability in time for a denouement that will not miss a single upbeat note.

That plot would be serviceable enough if the incidents that mark the cross-country passage were fully exploited for comedy or suspense, or if any of the characters were allowed to stray from their totally predictable path. And surely an actress as talented as Tyson should be given some material that would show her as something more amusing than Miss Priggy.

Still, there is Pryor. Whether he is trying to keep up his nerve while holding up a television store, getting the Ku Klux Klan to help push the bus out of the mud, or merely riding a horse for the first time, he has an indestructible charm. Another comedian might grow desperate in such unpromising circumstances. Not Pryor. The easy subtlety of his glances and gestures, never too big, always wonderfully readable, almost convinces one that something worthwhile is happening here--or is about to. One remains alert to his possibilities. And wishes that the people who make his pictures would try to attain a similar state.

--By Richard Schickel

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