University of Virginia Library

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.