Soft Core

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

". . . ALL THE MARBLES"

Directed by Robert Aldrich

Screenplay by Mel Frohman

This is not a movie that benefits from second thoughts. It has the structure of a conventional sports story: an agreeable underdog team known as the California Dolls and managed by a comically shrewd eccentric (Peter Falk) overcomes various tribulations to achieve a morally satisfying--and suspensefully staged--climactic confrontation with their longtime nemeses, the Toledo Tigers. Since the sport in question is something called female tag-team wrestling, there is a certain novelty of milieu and characters that has its entertainment value.

And the picture is well made in a broad-stroke sort of way. Director Aldrich (The Big Knife, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Hustle) has never been one to linger over subtleties, but he has a good sense of life on the scramble in the less exalted realms of Middle America, and he covers the action in the ring quite brilliantly. One starts to feel one's own tendons screeching as the ladies apply their holds to one another, and the shuddering impact of bodies flung to the canvas registers in the audience's bones. Writer Frohman has concocted a nice bickering relationship between Falk and his Dolls (Vicki Frederick and Laurene Landon), who are attractive, talented and without doubt the bravest young actresses in the business. As for Falk, his character has managed to identify himself, in his own mind anyway, with another traveling entertainer, Pagliacci. That, however, does not prevent him from wielding a baseball bat effectively when he has to defend himself and gruff words fail him.

Above all, he is, in his scheming way, the defender of a dream, an old-fashioned American dream of plucking and lucking to the top. That the movie implies this fantasy nowadays seems to survive only down here among the social mushrooms may even be a valid bit of cultural commentary.

All of this being the case, why does "... All the Marbles" leave one feeling lousy the morning after? Probably because its true subject is not the relationship between Falk and his women or the things they will do to rise to the tawdry top of their tacky world. That material, effective as it often is, can only be seen as an excuse for what is in fact an exercise in sadism. Basically what "... All the Marbles "does is invite its audience to witness pretty women in scanty costumes (and, by the end of the inevitable--and ill-motivated--mud-wrestling sequence, virtually no costumes at all) racking one another up. Their positions of combat are sexual; so are the carefully emphasized screams, moans and groans of pain, which are made to seem almost indistinguishable from those of pleasure. It is all very well calculated--at least one audience was cheering loudly as the Dolls approached their final victory. But the fact remains that the heart and soul of this movie are strictly soft core.

--By Richard Schickel

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