Down to earth in little old New York

MUSICALS are seldom to be classed as realistic. But the hallucinatory dream quality of the other new movies makes Marlin Scorsese's giant musical, New York, New York ("A", Odeon, Leicester Square) seem positively down to earth.
It is an up-dated experimental variation on the once familiar backstage musical. The date is V. J. Night, the setting the Starlight Terrace of the Waldorf Astoria. Jimmy Doyle (Robert de Niro) is a brash persistent GI, a saxophonist in a fancy shirt determined to pick up a girl for the celebrations.
He lights on Francine (Liza Minnelli) a "vocalist". They spend the rest of the two-and-a quarter hour film on the switchback of success and failure, tormenting each other with professional rivalry and emotional jealousy.
When I saw "New York, New York", it did seem very long. Admittedly since then the distributors have cut out a quarter of an hour. Robert de Niro is more of an actor than a star, and makes Jimmy as odious (and sometimes tedious) as such a boor would he in real life.
Liza Minnelli the brilliant daughter of that great entertainer Judy Garland. recalls her mother and only just stops short of her mother's original genius. As Francine's agent, Lionel Stander also recalls mellower days.
The rest of the new movies made me wonder in whose dream I was taking part. Among the galaxy of authorities cited in the publicity for Exorcist II: the Heretic ("X" Warner 2, ABC Fulham Road), besides the controversial Teilhard de Chardin, the atheist Sir Julian Huxley, Russell Tars and Harold Puthoff, authors of a book called "Mind-Reach", are numerous psychiatrists, bio-feed experts, hypnotists and "Vatican experts".
The cast includes Linda Blair who played Regan, the victim of the original "The Exorcist"; Richard Burton (of all people) as her current priest, Fr Lamont; Max von Sydow as Fr Merrin, who exorcised her demon in the earlier film, and' several thousand British-bred locusts,
Louise Fletcher. the formidable nurse from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", here plays a smooth and serene psychiatrist therapist, presumably the heretic of the title, champion of materialist sciences against religion, with the film aspiring to bridge the gap.
This sequel to The Exorcist" appears more sophisticated and pretentious than the previous excursion into demonology. But Regan still has bad dreams from which the clinic hopes to cure her by the shock of an electronics headgear while the priests beat the air battling for her soul.
Dreams, like the cinema, know no natural barriers, so the action sweeps and switches dementedly from city and clinic to canyons and mountain-tops, Ethiopian cliffs and African jungle. Despite all the modern mumbo-jumbo, the surface of the film resembles any old hocuspocus of black magic and white science though with some more than usually exciting spectacular "special effects".
Most distinguished of the new visionary movies is Heart of Glass ("A", Paris-Pullman) by Werner Herzog, director of the marvellous "Aguirre, Wrath of God." His great authority and sense of style give the new film some fascination, though none of the illumination or clarity the title suggests.
The visions are the prediction of a legendary Bavarian prophet a herdsman called Hiss, who foresees the end of the world., fire at the local glass factory, the secret formula for ruby glass, epidemic madness in the village. Herzog's grandeur of style applied to these and innumerable other prophecies washed down in Bavarian beer makes matters too obscure for average minds to follow.
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at making man evolve into animal and vice versa, make very bad dreams. I don't remember the Charles Laughton version in detail, but it was surely more seriously nightmarish.
It is difficult to decide which are the more distressing, the animals turning human or men on all fours. Even Michael York as the inevitable juvenile castaway and Barbara Carrera as his equally inevitable beautiful fellow-fugitive cannot save much.
There is nothing obscure or subtle about the dreams manufactured for The Other Side of Midnight ("X", Empire). This tale of two girls, one French, one American, both betrayed by the same wartime American pilot (John Beck) is one of those preposterously idiotic films outraging all sense and taste, which get made every year or two.
I regret that it is too late to recommend the very brief Hitchcock season just over at the Camden Plaza. When I saw "The Lady Vanishes" again, this beautifully made compact comedythriller looked the best movie since I first saw it in 1939.
Freda Bruce Lockhart .
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