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Hippie-dippies and craggy squares, the Generation Gap in the Hollywood Hills, the diminished state of movie romance ("...crumbs and no cake at all"). The cultural chasm is sketched as an office window separating the polyester suits from the "low tide" of peace signs and rainbow beads, then bridged by the canoodling of a graying broker (William Holden) and a teen vagabond (Kay Lenz). The fogy has had it with no-strings sex in his hilltop castle, the pixie has come to terms with transience, weeps at the sight of a wounded pooch, is enraptured by her first glimpse of a Los Angeles beach. Their love scene is sculptured with silences and gentle half-light, though not before sub-Erich Segal sparring. (He: "All this love that you give away... Wouldn't you once like to have it returned?" She: "Does becoming old mean feeling foolish?") Something of the Lost Movie in Clint Eastwood's directorial oeuvre, its pastel-soft hope for the mismatched couple relates to the savage male-ego scrutiny of Play Misty for Me just as the ragtag community of The Outlaw Josey Wales relates to the sagebrush Armageddon of High Plains Drifter. Focus on outdated lingo and Michel Legrand-scored beach montages and risk missing the inexorable peeling of the values from bourgeoisie and counterculture alike, Eastwood's Sirkian attention to vivid reds in hollow interiors, the pointed way the protagonist is exposed in all his male dread by a Mephistophelian sauna comrade, and Holden's abrupt realization, while paying for his girlfriend's new duds, that he's now playing the Norma Desmond part. A bit of captivation, distinctly Californian yet oddly Gallic, a duet picked up in The Bridges of Madison County. With Roger C. Carmel, Marj Dusay, Joan Hotchkis, Jamie Smith-Jackson, Shelley Morrison, and Dennis Olivieri.
--- Fernando F. Croce |