|
Eliot's "raid on the inarticulate," the entrance into adulthood as the exchange of one kind of chaos for another. The central image is a sleepy 12-year-old runaway by the side of a busy highway at night, a tiny figure leaning against a drum and surrounded by horns and traffic lights like nothing so much as Kipling's Junior Cheyne on the high seas. Catatonic at the mental institute, the "defective boy" (Bruce Ritchey) is deemed "one of our most notable figures" by the tough-love director (Burt Lancaster) but doted over by the new worker (Judy Garland), a failed pianist "just drifting." Out of the leathery womb of a sedan's backseat and into the makeshift community of a Thanksgiving play, a case study flinched at the brittle mother (Gena Rowlands) and recognized at last by the angry father (Steven Hill). "You know, sometimes I think we should be treating the parents instead of the kids." Stanley Kramer possibly wanted a director like Robert Mulligan and instead got John Cassavetes, one's patronizing plea for containing haywire emotion bumps against the other's risky exploration of it. (The clash of old system and New Wave is evident in Garland's entrance, real-life patients swarming around a nervous former MGM soubrette.) Communication is everybody's hurdle, the camera—craning down to a peewee football game in the bushes, tracking overhead for a police-station reunion—is an unsteady mediator, music alleviates the pervasive dysfunction. "The Marivaux of an accessory slackness" (Rivette) and his surprising kinship with McCarey (The Bells of St. Mary's), Cassavetes' farewell to the mainstream, "the whole of the human being" and nothing less. Rossellini in Europa '51 has the dilemma, Titicut Follies evinces an echo or two. With Paul Stewart, Gloria McGehee, Lawrence Tierney, Elizabeth Wilson, John Marley, and Juanita Moore. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |