|
Jules et Jim in overalls is the gag cultivated over the course of forty years, "too much cowboyin' or too much courtin'?" Genial jackasses, one uptight (Anthony Perkins) and the other rambunctious (Beau Bridges) in bucolic Texas from 1925 to 1965. Between them is the belle with no use for convention, Blythe Danner glowing like a raggedy Margaret Sullavan. ("You'll soon be afraid to hold hands," she snaps at a blushing beau as she casually heads off to a skinny dip.) The noisy mule that interrupts a necking couple, the fancy saddle as beguiling as a bare blonde, the local dance that serves to start a scuffle with the girl's future husband. Perkins in youthful mode curiously reprises Friendly Persuasion gestures, his father (Edward Binns) ponders the prairie and dispenses wisdom: "A woman's love is like the morning dew... It's just as apt to settle on a horse turd as on a rose." McMurtry territory after Bogdanovich hit the jackpot, Mulligan would have been a proper substitute but instead Sidney Lumet takes the reins like a very uneasy city slicker. The young widow (Susan Sarandon) is "the kind I could get real excited about in a temporary way," the eternal feminine meanwhile has children who don't survive the war and declares "menfolk began rising with the moon." Danner in a brief John Singer Sargent close-up and an offhand nod to Duchamp's Étant donnés are lush patches amid the general aridity, still the film achieves poignancy despite nondescript landscapes and clumsy narration and dusty old-age makeup. Bridges carries the dénouement as the boy turned geezer, quipping about geriatric erections and mooching dessert off his friend's hospital tray. "What's your goddamn hurry?" Mazursky (Willie & Phil) and Penn (Four Friends) have their own Nouvelle Vague transmutations to chase. With Conard Fowkes, Claude Traverse, and John Henry Faulk.
--- Fernando F. Croce |