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Echo and Narcissus explicated, from the author of Midnight Cowboy by way of William Inge. Florida Keys off-season, the hotel reception desk like a ship's prowl (Huston's Moby Dick) and the squalid strip joint are preliminary spaces for the traveling youngster (Brandon De Wilde) looking for his older brother, "he oughta be in a zoo somewhere." He turns out be the sociopathic side of Warren Beatty's gigolo suavity, the brutish wastrel ever ready to jump into a millionairess' yacht or a lonely schoolteacher's wagon. Back home in Cleveland, he's enshrined at Christmastime by needy Mom (Angela Lansbury) while Dad (Karl Malden) seeks refuge in the basement with bourbon and jigsaw puzzles. John Frankenheimer keeps the interplay of soft-focus and Gothic hysteria whirling, "all part of your contempt for the family unit!" (Languid lap dissolves here give way to shock cuts in The Manchurian Candidate, though the Oedipal furies remain.) "Kicks" are the nihilist's simple goal, nothing matters but the purity of "the old maid from Toledo" (Eva Marie Saint) and then the overdue realization that the prodigal "rhinoceros" is really a beast. The artist as teenage eavesdropper and journal-keeper, with Wellesian embroidery for the interiors. (The Magnificent Ambersons is a model for the end of adolescence.) Backyard barbecues, strolls by the lake with swans, the palpable Inge Midwest terror—something has to shatter that fancy Nativity window display. "Just a little trouble with the distributor." A fulsome orchard after snow and rain, "no umbilical cords." Ritt wastes no time in putting together his own version (Hud), Beatty in Shampoo imagines the Lothario's happy therapy. With Constance Ford, Barbara Baxley, Evans Evans, and Madame Spivy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |