Three Orphans

By RICHARD CORLISS

PIXOTE Directed by Hector Babenco Screenplay by Hector Babenco and Jorge Duran OVER THE EDGE Directed by Jonathan Kaplan Screenplay by Charlie Haas and Tim Hunter THE DARK END OF THE STREET Directed and Written by Jan Egleson

Scan these faces--young, feral, frightening--and look for clues. They are faces to be found at a municipal swimming pool, or bobbing asleep in the back row of a classroom, or peering through a pawnshop window, or avoiding the camera's eye on the 10 o'clock news. They are faces too tough to be scared and too unsure to be anything else. They hold mocking, omniscient mouths and a tough-guy stare that could burn a hole in an adult's best intentions. They are the faces of the young urban underclass.

In the two decades spanning World War II and Viet Nam, when juvenile delinquency had acquired a status halfway between fear and fad, Hollywood looked to rationalize the action of teen offenders for an audience of their peers. They Live by Night (1949), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), even Bonnie and Clyde (1967) were updated romantic tragedies--Romeo and Juliet in comic-book form. Moral judgments abounded: parents were drips, teachers pedantic fools, the police oafish brutes. It was you and me against the whole stinking world.

Three recent films take a different approach. For the dead-end kids at the center of each film, morality is a gray area; only their lives are black and blue. Hector Babenco's Pixote (Portuguese slang for peewee) is an eleven-year-old Sao Paulo waif living his long days in a kind of Dotheboys Hall for juvenile offenders. In another school, pleasing the older boys might mean carrying the water bucket; here it involves stashing dope, spearheading escapes and, above all, keeping his big dark eyes open and his mouth shut. The film is canny enough to reveal the horrors of underage incarceration in Brazil before it turns Pixote and his comrades loose on a jag of snatching purses, rolling drunks, courting death. Thus it suggests that society is a prison of the spirit and freedom is the death throe of society: suicidal anarchy. Whenever the film focuses on Pixote's face--solemn, premoral, scuffed like a club fighter's--it seems a snapshot of an infant convict at the end of his last mile.

Over the Edge is set in the American West; The Dark End of the Street in a North Cambridge, Mass., housing project. The children in the first film are from the middle class; in the second, lower class. But they face the same shifting anxieties, the same ominous anomie. Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge follows the narrative line of earlier "teen gang" pictures--from idleness to violence, for no other reason than for something to do--but has a special kick. Here are boys and girls 12, 13, 14, precociously aping their elders. It makes the climax, in which they demolish the local high school, as chilling as any thing in The Exorcist.

The Dark End of the Street moves at a slower, more familiar--but just as chilling--pace. Two bantering friends, one white, one black, meet on an apartment roof. The black boy, stoned, staggers blithely off the roof and dies. With that one fatal step, the life of every teen-ager in the neighborhood becomes a juggling act of honesty and discretion. To tell or not to tell, when there is no clear right way and only pain can result--that is the question. Like Babenco and Kaplan, Jan Egleson knows too much to argue or to judge. Nor does he editorialize with flashy montages and camera angles. This is the art that does not conceal art so much as ignore it.

Like orphan siblings thrown into separate foster homes, these three worthy films have met different fates. Pixote is playing in art theaters across the U.S. and scooped up many of the critics' year-end prizes. Over the Edge, completed in 1979, spent two years in preventive detention after the failure of other urban-gang movies; now it has won a theatrical run in Manhattan after a preview at the Public Theater. As for The Dark End of the Street, it played a week at a New York independent firm festival last June, and has since been remanded to tract-house anonymity. Calling all cinematic social workers: Help free The Dark Endof the Street. -- By Richard Corliss

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