An ordinary jogger coming up behind you might give you a split second of fear if unseen people had been shooting at you and following you and you didn’t know why. When the jogger had gone past, however, your relief might make both him and your fear seem funny. James Caan lives in this precarious state of seriocomic anxiety in Slither, and we see the world as he does — as a nut-bin mixture of the sinister and the ordinary. It can’t be sorted out, because crooks and killers can be as square as anybody else — and this movie is in love with square crooks, especially roly-poly ones. Slither is a suspense comedy that keeps promising to be a knockout entertainment; it never delivers, and it finally fizzles out, because the story idea isn’t as good as the curlicues. But it has a pleasant slapstick temperament — a sort of fractured hipsterism. The director, Howard Zieff, the advertising ace who did the “You Don’t Have To Be Jewish” series for Levy’s bread and the Alka-Seltzer and Benson & Hedges commercials, has never made a feature film before; the original screenplay, by the talented twenty-six-year-old W. D. Richter, is his first to be produced. The offbeat rhythm of their sneaky gags keeps taking the audience by surprise. The best aren’t big gags — they’re a matter of a look, a turn of phrase, a character trait — and they don’t advance the plot, or even bear on it; they’re happily inconsequential. Caan, a high-school football hero turned car thief, who has just been released from two years in prison, is thick-witted and decent; he is thrown into situations that require him to act hip when he’s most befuddled, and his permanent expression is a double take. His brain seems to be clogged; he can’t quite get the import of the remarks strangers address to him. When he hitches a ride with an amphetamine freak (Sally Kellerman), the velocity of her compulsive talk leaves him openmouthed. The movie’s flea-hopping humor depends on the permutations in these encounters; Caan is never quite sure whether the strangers are innocent bystanders or enemies, crazy-square or crazy-hip.
The hero’s quest for a fortune promised him by an embezzler he met in prison (Richard B. Shull) takes him through a series of northern-California towns and then south to Pismo Beach. The quest itself is a tired gimmick; it’s too bad that the hero’s nomadic movement doesn’t center on something less mercenary — it wouldn’t matter if the goal were even more implausible, but this one just seems dutiful, perfunctory. And it has become a little insulting to the audience that we’re always expected to care about whether the hero — our surrogate — can grab some loot. However, Zieff knows the value of funny people, and he plants some of his former associates in those towns. The crazies are often as entertaining as when we first spotted them in commercials. Shull, who sings “Happy Days Are Here Again” in the train that is taking Caan and him away from prison, is eliminated during the pre-credits sequence, but he helps to make it the best come-on a movie has had in years. (If the end were as good as this dadaist shoot-’em-up beginning, the picture would be a sensation.) Allen Garfield, the slob of the porno spoofs, plays an investment counselor, and Peter Boyle and Louise Lasser are Caan’s companions in the rambling chase for the money. Their spooky married love is the closest thing to romance in the movie; Boyle’s obsessive concern to shield his wife from obscene language is like a reversal of the obsessions in the pornies. Sally Kellerman doesn’t have the innate funniness of these people, or of some of the bit players, like Virginia Sale as the bingo caller. The others underplay for humor; Kellerman, who has the laugh lines, gets her effects by overplaying. She’s becoming a little like Betty Hutton: her desperate energy is lively and appealing, but it also throws her scenes a little out of whack. Caan, who plays stooge to everybody, and the rest of the cast are goofy, friendly caricatures; we can grasp the contours of their personalities — and that’s part of what’s distinctive about the film. The people don’t act like anybody else.
I’d like to think that Zieff is a put-on artist and is parodying the TV commercials’ idea of realism, but there’s a strong possibility that this waggish style is his idea of realism. And it may turn out that he has only this one facility: the ability to bring people out, to let funny people do their funny things, as in his commercials, and to get the timing blissfully right. He’s not adept at handling a more complex sequence in a bingo hall, and he doesn’t quite succeed with the neat idea of the bright-red car with its camper trailer (which holds Caan and Boyle in front and Lasser in back) versus the sinister big-bug black van with invisible occupants that follows them — the black-knight-in-armor villain, a Basil Rathbone tank. Zieff doesn’t locate the action for us in the effortless, taken-for-granted way of a skilled director; despite the movement in Laszlo Kovacs’ warm outdoor cinematography, we don’t always have our bearings — where does the crowd in that bingo hall come from? But Zieff does know his people; he introduces some of them by their voices before we quite see them, and when we hear Louise Lasser, we laugh before she appears. Her performance is an extension of what made her funny in commercials, and it’s her best work on the big screen; her amiable, toothy carrot-top is an American authentic, a woman who treasures and protects her own quirks — and why not? Boyle, with his dreams of avarice, has a glint of the indefatigable greed of Casper Gutman of The Maltese Falcon, but he seems to be the happiest, luckiest husband since Nick Charles. The movie has a fatuous, prickly humor; it doesn’t get anywhere, but it stays prickly; it never goes straight.
We don’t ask for lasting value from an escapist fantasy about a nonchalant gentleman-jewel-thief, but it should give us the giddy sensation of daydreams fulfilled, and the irresponsible fun of an hour and a half with witty, glamorous people who live by make-believe rules. It should give us the transient pleasures, which are often all we want of movies. That’s not a lot to ask, but it’s far above what Bud Yorkin, the producer and director of The Thief Who Came to Dinner, and Walter Hill, who wrote the screenplay (from a novel by Terrence Lore Smith), provide. This is a new factory version of old factory movies — to our dwindling delight. It has the same formula as The Getaway, which Hill also wrote: everybody in it is crooked, and we’re supposed to root for the young attractive pair who outsmart them all — in The Getaway, Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw (the McCoys), and in this one, Ryan O’Neal (McGee) and Jacqueline Bisset (his sexy socialite friend). Hill worked as assistant director on The Thomas Crown Affair, and there are strong reminiscences. And the insurance investigator (Warren Oates) who is doggedly tracking O’Neal carries more than a hint of the Edward G. Robinson role in Double Indemnity. But in this synthesis no one bothered to devise characters for the actors to play, so the actions (the setting is the posh parts of Houston) don’t grow out of anything — they’re just mechanical, with a pulse supplied by Henry Mancini. It isn’t merely that the picture has no style but that it has no soul; it’s a romance without romance. The audience becomes inordinately grateful for the bits of humor supplied by Jill Clayburgh (who resembles Jennifer Jones), as O’Neal’s ex-wife, and the tormented sissy of Austin Pendleton, as a chess columnist. Ryan O’Neal, playing a debonair, swinging Steve McQueen, is meant to be totally sympathetic. We’re supposed to be charmed by his cute corruption (though O’Neal can convey weakness without too much effort, and that might have given the character some depth). Jacqueline Bisset is so velvety a projection of masculine fantasies that she doesn’t have enough rough edges to be alive. She isn’t just richly made up; she’s anointed. She’s a walking ad for soft, sleek curves and luscious passivity. As for Warren Oates, he has so little character to play that his personality seems to scurry away from the camera. We don’t know what his foxy-eyed tenacity is based on. In Double Indemnity, Robinson had principles, and that’s what separated him from the crooks; here Oates simply seems nebulously backward. And it’s dismaying when a sausage movie like this one, which should be tied up, is open-ended. The picture isn’t terrible; it’s faintly diverting while you’re watching, largely because of O’Neal’s processed charm, but the vacuity and even that charm become oppressive.
Ryan O’Neal has such an easy presence that he can get by with almost no material, supplying personality and pace out of himself; he’s a relaxed smoothie — a confident winner, like Dean Martin — and it’s unbecoming in one so young. No other star has ever been so professional a likable all-American personality at the start of his career. O’Neal is so assured — so exploitative of his own cuteness — that our responses curdle. When he does the old bare-chested-romantic-male-star stuff here, it doesn’t work, because there’s no shyness in this man — just flesh and muscle. It all adds up to something callous and spoiled in his attitude toward acting. However, there’s one hopeful sign in his performance: he shows an instinctive physical rejection of the fraudulent serious lines. He may be a corrupt actor, but he’s not a hypocrite.
What O’Neal balks at is the defensive moralizing that Yorkin and Hill pour over themselves and the movie. The hero, a computer engineer, turns thief at the beginning of the picture and tells his co-workers why. It’s because people cheat on their income taxes and pad their expense accounts — because “everybody steals from everybody and we program the whole mess.” O’Neal says, “In a world of thieves, I wanted to be an honest thief.” This is the usual modern movie-colony cynicism; when moviemakers say “Everybody cheats,” it means merely “People like us cheat,” since, of course, most working people can’t cheat on their income taxes and don’t have expense accounts. The dishonesty of Yorkin and Hill is that they must posture about a world of thieves to justify doing what they were going to do anyway — try to make a movie about a modern Raffles, because romantic action movies are the easiest to finance and the easiest to market. Yorkin, the co-producer of All in the Family, Sanford and Son, and Maude, has become a leading exponent of self-righteous entertainment. An escapist fantasy doesn’t need justification, but it needs quality. O’Neal’s cute, bare-chested thief and Bisset’s gorgeous curvy number are inadequate as fantasy figures. There’s nothing in this movie to kindle an audience’s spirit. It’s a cold-hearted movie. People may buy tickets, but they’ll come out sour and hungry. O’Neal gives the honest insurance investigator a copy of Don Quixote, explaining that it’s about a man who refuses to accept reality. Yorkin and Hill could use a few dreams.
[March 10, 1973]