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The central image is buoyantly sketched, Mr. Wise Guy with baggy coat and suitcase and artiste's cap, out of the Brooklyn nest and into the Bohemian wonderland. Gangling and moonstruck like an Archie Comics beanpole, the aspiring actor (Lenny Baker) hurtles through the neighborhood, devouring life with a jester's grin. Elated after a midnight lay, he segues from manic Hamlet soliloquy to slurpy Brando monologue and concludes with an Oscar acceptance speech on a deserted subway platform, a surly flatfoot advises him to change vocations. (Everyone's a performer, everyone's a critic.) The girlfriend fiercely wielding the word "diaphragm" (Ellen Greene), the elegant wannabe writer (Christopher Walken), the queeny hepcat (Antonio Fargas) and the desperate neurotic (Lois Smith), the vitelloni around him. Frequently in the footlights of his psyche is the Jewish mother (Shelley Winters) with one lachrymose aria after another, "she invented the Oedipus complex!" Corman's The Little Shop of Horrors lays much of the groundwork for Paul Mazursky's funky recollection of the Fifties as a foretaste of the counterculture, a string of romantic flares and tragicomic breakups and revelations faced with a light, sunny heart. "Joking is the American actor's disease," admonishes the Method instructor, though the trouper's education unfolds not on the stage but in saloons and bedrooms where Dostoevsky's suicides are zingers until the real thing turns up. The kinship is to Reiner's Enter Laughing, The Blackboard Jungle is indicated in a screen test that gives a rich glimpse of Jeff Goldblum as a needling audition-room habitué. "I am an actor, generally living on air..." (Nabokov) Off to Hollywood at the close, with filmmaker and alter-ego gazing back at rowdy streets lost to time. With Dori Brenner, Mike Kellin, Lou Jacobi, Michael Egan, and Joe Spinell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |