Dustin Hoffman mimics a shy young Italian bank clerk in the Italian comedy Alfredo Alfredo while a fluent, mellifluous Italian voice speaks for him; in general, dubbing is an abomination, but the stranger’s voice does wonders for Hoffman — it brings him out. In American movies, he’s the perennial urban weakling-adolescent, doomed to swallow spit forever, but here, rid of the frightened, choked-up voice that constricts his characters, he gives a softer-edged, more relaxed performance. Maybe the director, Pietro Germi, put him at his ease; Alfredo, Hoffman’s bank clerk, is warm and friendly and likable. Hoffman’s face has never been very expressive (sometimes his rabbit stare makes me think that the great Maureen Stapleton has spawned an emotionally retarded son), but he has always been able to get our empathy. We feel exactly what he wants us to, and in Alfredo Alfredo his flickering anxieties are very ingratiating. Perhaps the idea of playing an Italian in an actual Italian movie was like a complete disguise to him, and so he lost that self-conscious worry — “Who am I and what am I meant to be thinking right this minute?” — that makes him so tense an actor. Hoffman’s acting along to the sound of someone else’s voice makes him seem like a silent comedian doing a routine. I remember thinking, some years back, that in a few scenes the dubbing of the witches added to the humor of the Francesco Rosi fairy-tale fantasy More Than a Miracle. (It starred Sophia Loren and Omar Sharif, and had some of the silly sweetness of The Thief of Bagdad.) Hoffman has scored a lot of points with his nasality, but the novelty of seeing him without that strangling trademark gives this rather conventional comedy an extra dimension. As it turns out, the picture, which begins promisingly high, sags under a load of uninspired, forced gaiety, and Hoffman himself doesn’t have enough comic eccentricity to sustain his stunt. (A Mastroianni might have dipped into himself and come up with more.) Still, the first half hour or so is probably the most pleasing and the least self-conscious screen acting Hoffman has yet done.
Pietro Germi’s method pits individuals — heaping collections of foibles — against the rigid Italian legal system, with its irrational laws governing marriage, divorce, and cohabitation. The comic tone is a bit used: almost everything Germi does here he has done before, and better. He overplays his hand this time. He knows how to make comedy move, and knows just the right length for individual scenes, but you get twice too much of everybody, as in the title (which is easy to remember but sounds like a new Italian restaurant). Stefania Sandrelli (the young second wife in Germi’s Divorce — Italian Style, the seduced young girl in his Seduced and Abandoned, and Trintignant’s wife in Bertolucci’s The Conformist) is that rare creature, a beautiful, sexy comedienne. She has one of the great walks in movies, a way of moving that doesn’t have to be photographed from the rear: this girl comes right at you, and her delicate forward lurch is pure provocation. Her Mariarosa is the beneficiary of the sly trick of nature that gives girls with exquisite features an illusion of mystery; she’s an imbecile sphinx, mysterious yet dumb as a cow. Mariarosa is an extravagantly romantic dictator — a maniacal caricature of the dizzy-dame princesses brought up in the fantasy that the man on whom they confer their bodies should live in thrall forever. The early scenes of her imperiousness and her enslavement of the deliriously impressed Alfredo are high slapstick; but perhaps Sandrelli the comedienne should be taken only in short stretches. Since her comedy style here is all based on one gag — that Mariarosa’s beauty is empty and her romantic and sexual demands are insatiable — Mariarosa becomes as wearying to us as to her exhausted Alfredo. Once we get the idea, Germi fails to move on to something new, and his attempt to provide a contrast in a modern, independent working woman, played by Carla Gravina (she was the victim with the pained, melancholy eyes in Without Apparent Motive), isn’t developed comically. He uses Gravina as a straight woman to the possessive, flighty Sandrelli, and so she has nothing to do but be efficient, and undemandingly pleasant to Hoffman, and Hoffman gets nothing to react to.
Sandrelli is the domestic tyrant of the bourgeois past, Gravina the career woman who liberates Hoffman. But the movie misses out by failing to show the dangers in the sexual freedom Gravina represents, and by failing to explore what the liberated Gravina sees in the shy, inexperienced bank clerk. In the conception of the timid, naïvely obliging Alfredo were the moviemakers perhaps saying something about the relation of the sexes? Hoffman is no more aggressive with one woman than with the other, but if Alfredo is the helpless prey of Gravina, as he was of Sandrelli, this isn’t something the movie wants to get into. It retreats to old, safe ground. Still, Germi has his moments, especially in the courtship of Alfredo and Mariarosa, and when, on the first night of their honeymoon trip by rail, he finally makes it in, and she pulls the danger cord and stops the train, the joke is worthy of Freud.
Mark Rydell’s films are nothing if not commercial, and Cinderella Liberty isn’t commercial. Rydell has one foot in forties movies and the other in a Gucci; neither is on the ground. In The Cowboys, he made a Western about John Wayne and a bunch of kids on a cattle drive — and people who go to Westerns don’t want to watch a bunch of runny-nosed kids learning how to become men. In Cinderella Liberty, which Darryl Ponicsan adapted from his own novel, Rydell has a Baptist sailor (James Caan) take up with a beat-out whore (Marsha Mason), and mixes their messy affair with a high-minded interracial big-brother story. (Caan can’t save Mason, but her little part-black son — Kirk Calloway — stirs his paternal impulses.) And where’s the audience for that? It’s too sordid for kids and too familiarly “touching” — and insultingly “universal” — for adults. Caan acts and looks like Gene Hackman here, but he does nobly, considering that his sailor is supposed to be simple and decent; he’s the sort of fellow who takes a kid fishing and plays basketball with him — just what nobody wants to watch. Rydell shows some taste in handling the performers, but his taste is unrewarding; they don’t overact (except for the freakily incorrigible Eli Wallach), but they have no excitement, either. And he doesn’t know how to play his emotional ace. He tries to milk too much poignancy from Marsha Mason’s big eyes and toothy grin, and our awareness of what we’re meant to feel keeps us from feeling anything. Rydell wants to jerk tears, and he follows all the tear-jerking models, and yet he can’t get the moisture going. He uses Vilmos Zsigmond as cinematographer and Leon Ericksen as production designer (the movie was shot in Seattle), but their work for him isn’t like their work for Robert Altman; it’s merely craftsmanship — it isn’t infused with a director’s spirit. Rydell has nothing new to offer, and in movies the old isn’t gone, it’s still around, and it has an innocence and a conviction that Rydell can’t simulate; it also has superior manipulative skills. If he’d brought Cinderella Liberty off, I still wouldn’t like it, but maybe I’d have had to fight a lump in the throat. When you aspire as low as Rydell does — all he wants is that universal lump — and fail, you’re nowhere. (It’s obvious that this movie was directed by a man. The slatternly, boozing whore, who can’t bother to feed her son or take him to the dentist, trots off to the hospital to have another baby, and breathes perfectly for a natural childbirth.)
No actor can triumph over a bad toupee. That’s as close to a general proposition as one is likely to arrive at from watching movies. Didn’t Walter Matthau learn anything from seeing himself decked out in those terrible wigs in Plaza Suite? There isn’t much acting honor to be had from The Laughing Policeman, but Matthau, playing a black-haired police detective, loses what little there is to Bruce Dern, who plays his partner. In his earlier days, Matthau would have played Dern’s role; now he looks like Al Capp and tries to be the young hero. His hair shrivels his stature, the way John Wayne’s embarrassing autumnal crop does; I had loved the way Wayne looked in True Grit (he was like Finlay Currie in Great Expectations), and he had seemed beyond foolish vanity. Matthau used to be a strategic scene-stealer: he used to putter around looking rumpled and sleepy while dropping zingers. This time, he’s as square as the squarest of actors; he does the ancient obvious, while Dern’s contentious but muffled manner — the way he puts cobwebs on his lines so there’s an instant’s delay before you quite get the joke — is the latest in fey, ruminative one-upmanship. Dern’s performance is the only virgin element in this standard imitation of Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and Bullitt, adapted from the popular Stockholm-set novel by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö and moved to San Francisco. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg, the choppy film makes practically no sense (once again the mad mass murderer is some implausible sort of fancy homosexual), but it has been set up to be a ghoul’s delight. Cadavers are examined, bloody wounds are inspected. It’s best not to take chances with Rosenberg. I wouldn’t invite him to a funeral.
Every now and then, a film turns up that I think is so excruciatingly awful I can’t believe anybody is going to open it. Invariably, it not only plays but gets some good reviews. The last of this ilk was The All-American Boy, featuring Jon Voight as an alienated boxer; the new one is called Bone, and its four principal characters jeer at and taunt each other with what are meant to be hideous truths. Yaphet Kotto is Bone, the symbolic black who cuts through the white man’s lies. The picture was written, produced, and directed by Larry Cohen, who has mated the lurid exploitation film with a high-pitched attack on hypocrisy and American values. We can tell from the noise that Cohen thinks he’s saying something important. He keeps changing his assaulting camera angles and throwing in big Off Off Broadway scenes, kidding himself that hysteria and hyperbole are Expressionism. He’s a fourth-rate Hans Richter, and Richter strains patience. The setting is L.A.; Yaphet Kotto threatens rich-bitch Joyce Van Patten with rape on a pool table, and weirdo Jeannie Berlin (Bone was made before The Heartbreak Kid) seduces Van Patten’s husband, Andrew Duggan, while she pretends they’re at the movies and feeds him popcorn and candy (Black Crows). There’s also a variation of the Stuart Rosenberg car masturbation scene from Cool Hand Luke, and the antenna rises for a chortle. According to one reviewer quoted in the ads, “Cohen manages to have much fun impaling the fraudulence of sour materialistic Wasps, but his signal achievement is in showing how the stereotypes we have of each other cripple our relationships.” Another critic says, “If you are tough enough to laugh at the kind of story that makes you wince Bone is your kind of movie. I’m that tough — I did laugh.” I didn’t laugh, but I winced, repeatedly, at the shrillness, at the overbright color, and at all that stale taunting. Who in the movie audience would still wince at a Wasp cleanly impaled? It’s when the arrows are wide of their mark that one winces. It is not enough to be against the status quo; you must have talent.
[January 21, 1974]