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September 25,1978 GAYSWEEK 14

a frathouse troubadour who has been sitting on a stair plaintively singing, "I gave my love a cherry, but it had no stone... And during the climactic parade a New Frontier float, complete with huge flower-constructed head of JFK and four pink-pillbox-hatted Jacquelines, gets creamed by the animals' Deathmobile. However, even during these sequences director John Landis avoids any real viciousness, pointing up the moments' buoyant animalistic esprit instead. Looking like a depraved but enterprising bum, "Saturday Night Live" regular John Belushi is the standout Delta. However, whether stuffing impossible amounts of food in his mouth or splatting to the ground on a ladder from which he has been peeping into sorority windows, Belushi's comedy is thoroughly craftsmanlike, the kind of deliberative, carefully worked out mayhem one associates with greats like Laurel and Hardy.

nteriors isn't a very interesting film. It's like a student's art film of the middle 60s, full of guilt, alienation and bland, characterless dialogue, and acted out in large, spare spaces revealed by gray, pearlescent light.

The story involves an upper-class family with obsessive, artistic natures. The mother (Geraldine Page), a perfectionist, is so insecure and the family so critical of themselves and her that she keeps trying to commit suicide. Meanwhile, her husband (E. G. Marshall) decides to free himself of this claustrophobic life by marrying Maureen Stapleton, a vulgar outsider. She is ignorant of the structure of selfhatred and mutual criticism of the family, and at the end, to the distress of Interiors's neurotics, Stapleton reigns and Page is dead.

Despite the obvious care Woody Allen put into creating his too-too ménage, the film is in a perverse way autobiographical. These Interiors Wasps, with their intense concerns with art, poetry and interior design, are so obsessed with good taste, with rearranging the slovenly disarray of human personality, so guilt-ridden about simply being human and alive, that despite their Establishmentarian disguise,

pire or just misunderstood. Witless, art Channel 13 Will Air 'Word Is Out'

pire or just misunderstood. Witless, artless and dumb, Romero's films are basically good for one thing-and that depends on whether you think some movies should be around simply to disgorge disgusting violence. This product, in Martin, is doled out with great stinginess, as the razorblade-and-hypo killer spends most of his time dewy-eyed and defused by questions of conscience.

Nea

Téa, by French-Argentinian feminist filmmaker Nelly Kaplan, is an energizing, visually luscious film about a willful and sexually liberated 16-year-old girl. Sybille (played by the Swedish Ann Zacharias) is still a kid, but a radically honest one. Looking like a troublemaking Veronica Lake, she is challenging, impatient and spiteful, altogether a witchlike apparition of freshness and change.

The privileged daughter of a rich Swiss family, Sybille uses her freedom scarily. She induces her matronly mother (Micheline Presle) to run away with her-the mother's-lesbian lover, challenges the basic honesty of both her father and her adult lover in such startling ways that they try to slam her around, and writes an erotic book called Néa that makes her a fortune.

Like its heroine, Néa is beautiful to look at, briskly captures what is pleasurableintriguing bookstores, Geneva lakesides, ghostly mansions, misty overlooks-then moves on to other interests. Ultimately, in its urgent heart and fairy-tale sparkle, Néa recalls a time of life when impatience seemed a human being's most honorable characteristic and gold was sure to be waiting at the end of the rainbow.

Wh

ho'll Stop the Rain, a drugsmuggling opus filled with eccentric and phlosophizing characters, is the sort of movie that only really comes to life when it shakes itself free of its literaryacademic influences. The first part of the film, which takes place in Vietnam and centers on Michael Moriarty's alienated war correspondent-amateur drug smuggler, is arbitrarily injected with all kinds

of hip moralizing and philosophizing.

Plainly, everyone's respect for the pres-

they remind us perpetually of an unfunny tigious Robert Stone novel Dog Soldiers,

Woody Allen, a man who is forever apologetic about his Jewishness, his sense. of being out of place.

At the end of the film Geraldine Page, seeming to succumb to some sort of terminal perfection, gives herself up to the good-taste gray sea. We couldn't care less. She, as well as Diane Keaton and Marybeth Hurt as her compulsively soulsearching daughters, all give strained, exemplary performances, but what has it been for? Though there are no jokes, the film itself is an absurdity, a bloodless Waspy shell, a horror fantasy of the ruling class, filled with monsters obsessed with the same fear of their own disproportionateness and abnormality that activates Allen's comedy. The movie exalts the silly horrors of narrow-mindedness.

It might be well to add something about the film's "art." Interiors looks spare and sounds empty, but it isn't an honestly ex-, perimental movie. Behind the scenes, Allen is constantly concerned not to tax his audience's patience too severely. This is an imitation Bergman film made with the audience awareness of a Catskills

comic.

Mshows at the Waverly) is the story of

artin (playing weekend midnight

a young, alienated Pittsburgh vampire as directed by pompous primitive George A. Romero. What with his The Crazies and now Martin, enough evidence has come in to show that Romero, director of the crude but effective Night of the Living Dead, only knows how to steer scenes of outright mutilation. His sledgehammer portrayal of all other human interactions is tiresome. The Grandma Moses of film, he whiles away his time out in Pennsylvania pounding out self-important, twodimensional tracts like Martin, where flat-voiced semiprofessionals argue perpetually about whether Martin is a vam-

on which the film is based, gives the entire Vietnam sequence an annoyingly diffuse, literary tone. Director Karel Reisz, known for his exercises in academic editing (The Gambler, Morgan!) compounds these difficulties by ignoring the need to clarify plot. He removes us further from immediate concerns with such hackneyed devices as the dreamlike repetition of one of Moriarty's traumatic battle experi-

ences.

However, once Nick Nolte, Moriarty's merchant seaman buddy; and Moriarty's wife, Tuesday Weld, hook up in California and are pursued across the Southwest by a government agent and his two goons, Who'll Stop the Rain moves from being a film full of idle verbalizing and technique to one in which character takes over. In fact, it eventually becomes as obsessed with investigating the mysteries of character as the characters are by the drug that is the center of their lives.

Blond, massive, gimlet-eyed Nick Nolte emerges from this boiling mélange of dope seekers and the alienated with actual integrity, while Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty, as the strung-out instigators of the action, fall into the naive-wise roles of observers. In their blond, washed-out innocence, they get tortured (Moriarty) and drugged (Weld) back to morbid childhood passivity and from some little point of consciousness watch themselves get brutalized. But Nolte pays the dues.

Even the pair of hired goons pursuing Nolte and Weld have the tang and immediacy of real people, and one observes them with almost as much curiosity as one does their quarry. If you care about these people, it isn't because the movie makes you identify with them but because they all seem real-are pumped full of the richness of human personality--and the death of any of them, even the worst, seems like a terrible waste.

NEW YORK, September 11-WNET, Channel 13, will telecast the documentary film Word Is Out on Tuesday, October 10, at 9 pm.

Subtitled "Stories of Some of Our Lives," it is a series of interviews exploring a variety of histories and lifestyles within America's gay communities. The idea for the film was conceived by Peter Adair, who spent two years prior to the production raising money for the project. The interviews were conducted by members of the Mariposa Film Group, a San Francisco-based filmmakers' collective. The men and women interviewed range in age from 20 to 79 and represent a broad spectrum of cultures and lifestyles-from a New York executive

and a San Francisco drag queen to a former high school cheerleader and a middle-aged ex-WAC.

According to the Public Broadcasting System, "The people in the film tell their stories with an honesty that speaks not only to the gay experience but all human experience."

Word Is Out was reviewed by John Alfred Avant in the April 3, 1978 edition of GAYSWEEK.

The May 15, 1978 edition of GAYSWEEK carries an interview with three of the six members of the Mariposa Film Group. The group includes Nancy Adair, Peter Adair, Andrew Brown, Robert Epstein, Lucy Massie Phenix and Veronica Sel-

ver. ■

The Mariposa Film Group (left to right): Veronica Selver, Lucy Massie Phenix, Nancy Adair, Andrew Brown, Robert Epstein, Peter Adair.

"Marietta': a Fresh Look

BRUCE MICHAEL GELBERT

Naughty Marietta

OPERA

later American music theater, harks back to European opera and operetta. Elizabeth Hynes has a heavier voice-practically a spinto-than does Gianna Rolandi and, though a wobble is now increasingly evident, her vocal placement is forward and her soprano bright and flexible. Howard Hensel fortunately avoided the high interpolations that gave Jacque Trussel

by Victor Herbert: New York City Opera, such difficulty but, once beyond the September 8

I

returned to the New York City Opera's -production of Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta on September 8 to hear the four soloists, Elizabeth Hynes, Howard Hensel, Susanne Marsee and Charles Roe, who replaced Gianna Rolandi, Jacque Trussel, Joanna Simon and Alan Titus of the opening cast in the roles of Marietta d'Altena, Captain Dick Warrington, Adah Leclercq and Etienne Grandet (BrasPique) and found that, on the whole, I preferred the second cast to the first one. The new book Frederick S. Roffman created for the work remains annoying, but it is, ultimately, on the score's most inspired melodies that Marietta's acceptance by contemporary audiences must rest. The second cast leads, performers ostensibly less charismatic than those of the first cast, proved better equipped to serve the music and its composer. The finale of Act One of this production, an ensemble parodying the stereotypical Italian operatic concerted finale, made, with this quartet, a point far preferable to the ironic one made when flawed opera singers attempt such parody. With a good alto and a good baritone, the introduction of "This Brave New Land," from Herbert's The Prince Ananais, into the second scene of Marietta seemed an inspired decision.

Evaluated by a theatrical critic, this cast's performances might have been found exaggerated. They were not attempting to perform as other than opera singers and as such were entirely appropriate for an opera company's approach to a work that, in addition to anticipating

lower-lying passages that he executed with polished lyricism, he, too, found the tessitura taxing. Transposition downward of "I'm Falling in Love with Someone" would have benefited both tenors. Susanne Marsee managed Adah's big musical moments easily and persuasively. Charles Roe impressed particularly with floated high piano tones in "This Brave New Land."

James Billings as Acting Governor Grandet and Russ Thacker as Silas Slick were retained from the opening cast and Thacker's scene with Hynes, "If I Were Anybody Else But Me"; his song "It's Pretty Soft for Silas"; Billings's solo "The Sweet By and By"; and his subsequent dance with Thacker remained the brightest highlights of the evening. (Roffman, who pointed up the romantic doings of no fewer than four female-male couples in his rewrite of Herbert's The Red Mill, given by the Bel Canto Opera in May, saw fit to excise Silas's comic love interest Lisette from his Marietta. There is historic precedent for the leading soprano to listen to the confidences of and sing a duet with the youthful comic baritone-cf. Pamina and Papageno-but the French sentiments in this duet sound odd when expressed by the Italian Marietta and the character of Lisette is missed here.)

After more than a week of performance, increased clarity marked the diction, not commented on in my first appraisal of Marietta, of the choral ensemble and of the choristers cast in small solo parts. The company's chorus master, Lloyd Walser, conducted the performance with conviction. ☐