University of Virginia Library

CINEMA

'Kellerman': Sterile Guessing Game

By GEORGE TOLES, JR.

—Ed.)

"Who is Harry Kellerman, and
Why is He Saying Those Terrible
Things About Me?" is a graceless
little film which earnestly wheels
out the cob-webbed notion that
commercial success spells misery
and maladjustment for the creative
artist, and solemnly assures us that
if it's food for thought we're after,
this time-tested insight will give us a
hearty meal.

Over the last thirty years, there
have been countless films enamored
with the image of the dishevelled
genius in threadbare attire,
whistling the theme from
Liebestraum in his delightfully
cramped and unlivable garret as he
produces an impressive stack of
bulging manuscripts-whether it is
novels, operas or oils that represent
his particular aptitude, the volume
is suitably prodigious.

If the author/composer/painter
is unfortunate enough to have his
ability acknowledged beyond his
immediate circle of destitute
friends (honest souls all, who might
be a trifle obtuse, but would gladly
split their last potato with him in a
pinch), he will be forced to leave
his leaking-hovel of a room, where
Real Happiness lies camouflaged
somewhere among the horseflies
and flaking paint, for a
soul-shrivelling "room at the top."

Material comfort invariably
precipitates an across-the-board
warping of values. With ping-pong
predictability, we have the artist's
dull-witted former acquaintances,
as well as his discovery that the
colorless but sincere drudge he
married when times were hard is
something of a millstone. The first
wife tearfully resigns her position
to a predatory siren with razor-thin
eyebrows and an awesome cleavage.

Retribution is swift, however.
Those marvelous natural talents
play cribbage with dry rot, soft
living softens the brain, the last
four books are flops, wife number
two stalks off with a bullfighter,
false friends mysteriously
disappear, and there you have it.
Back to the garret and the
dormouse with the checked apron
("if she'll still have me"), and pray
God it's not too late for a fresh
start.

Herb Gardner, who has fashioned
a bright, metallic screenplay for
"Harry Kellerman", eschews many
of the details in the portmanteau
description I have provided, but the
response to life which he registers is
shelled from the same pod. Young
audiences can usually be counted
on for an enthusiastic reception of
a "materialism contaminates"
subject, particularly if it comes
equipped with symbolic underwear
and a slick pessimism about
depersonalized urban life.

Neon Dialogue

Those who admire Gardner's
zigzagging excursions into the lives
of off-beat New Yorkers (Murray,
the dapper nonconformist of "A
Thousand Clowns", springs
immediately to mind) claim that he
has an ear for idiom and the
insider's feel for the way New
Yorkers converse. But Gardner's
characters are never quietly
authenticated; they all have fidgety,
hard-sell, laugh-track voices that
barnstorm the viewer with dialogue
that could be bracketed in neon.

We feel a curious kind of
pressure building within each scene
that has little or nothing to do with
the choppy, thick-soled earnestness
of the conversations or the
calculated relationships emerging
between uniformly dreary
characters. It comes, I think, from
an overheated visual style, supplied
by a director determined to extract
a large, complex statement from an
almost weightless script.

Hoffman: Vibrating In A Fixed Key

"Harry Kellerman?" is a
situational movie, a film which
moves on a circular track around a
tapered emotional surface in which
everything vibrates in a fixed key.
Unlike the point-to-point linear
films which can be approached in
terms of their "story-lines," the
situational type depends for its
effects on the potency and
resilience of a core image.

Charlie moored to his insulating
piano in an after-hours bar in
Truffaut's "Shoot the Piano
Player" is a wonderful binding
image for a situation film with a
richly varied texture. The manic
seesawing between tormented
accusation and guilt-ridden apology
that gives Lumet's "Long Day's
Journey into Night" its
down-spiralling movement and hard
energy is also its image visually and
verbally echoed within a whole
series of scabrous confrontations.

"Harry Kellerman?" fails
because its situation is hollow and
the images which it tries to
crystallize have the comic strip
blandness of a Nancy and Sluggo
scooter race. From the film's
opening sequence, when the camera
records Dustin Hoffman's
fantasized suicide leap from the
roof of a skyscraper-his flight
becomes a four-minute aerial ballet
as the credits peep out on either
side of him-we begin to brace
ourselves for one of those
shipwrecked clever movies in which
everything that doesn't sink
immediately is going to become
part of a free-floating mess.

Director Ulu Grosbard and
photographer Victor Kemper do
not, unfortunately, have Mike
Nichols' knack for dressing up
glossy, undernourished material like
Feiffer's "Carnal Knowledge" and
giving its vacuities lyrical bite.
There are just enough laughs
skittering along the surface of the
Nichols' film to provide its
concluding glumness with an
authoritative edge. Everyone is so
miserable this must be realistic, just
like "La Dolce Vita."

Isn't "Carnal Knowledge," like so
many other pretentious,
well-heeled message movies, trying
to sell us a bill of goods? What it's
saying, in effect, is that if your
interests happen to be tits,
snatches, Playboy foldouts and
exploiting women as sex objects,
chances are you'll be a flabby,
impotent gasbag by the time you're
35.

"Harry Kellerman?" has the
look of a Mike Nichols' film, which
is to say that it's dimensionless,
antiseptically colored, and
infatuated with getting the camera
in tight on the actors' features.
Shots that aren't riveted to some
expressive facial landscape will be
sure to have a point (a
psychological or satiric value), and
we'll be given plenty of time to find
it before being shown anything else.

Overplanned

The space-world of "Harry
Kellerman?" is deliberately
constricted, as it is in "Carnal
Knowledge", but what there is
overplanned and unilluminating. We
never happen upon anything by
ourselves, or feel that the interiors
are worth looking over for
interesting details. Dustin
Hoffman's apartment is one of
those white glacial monstrosities
that the rich, alienated zombies in
an Antonioni film are always
turning up in; the walls are covered
with fluorescent lit poster-size
magazine covers representing the
Artist in various Narcissistic poses.
With sterility and "no exit" decor
gaping at us from every alcove, it
quickly becomes evident that
George Soloway (Hoffman) is being
groomed for some delicious form of
self-annihilation.

The major part of the film,
consequently, becomes an elaborate
guessing game between Herb
Gardner and the audience as to the
probable means and time George
will finally choose to put an end to
himself. Hoffman's performance
thankfully never descends to the
feeble jack-in-the-box improvising
that marred so much of his work in
"Little Big Man," but in this film
he seems to be recycling familiar
effects and cagily treading water.