Based on a Premise

The Troublemaker is an avant-gardish comedy geared to the perceptions of bearded anarchists. But for half of its 80-minute length, practically anyone can enjoy it. Anyone, at least, who is reasonably irresponsible, mad about old movies, and perhaps a wee bit crazy in the first place. Written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker, onetime entrepreneur of a Greenwich Village coffee-and-show house known as The Premise, the movie tells of young Jack Armstrong (Tom Aldredge) who arrives in An Unidentified City--the one substantial clue to its whereabouts is a Statue of Liberty in the harbor--and tries to open a coffeehouse. He finds a promising firetrap on Bleecker Street, signs a lease that looks like a Dead Sea Scroll, and begins to clear out the debris, among which he uncovers Citizen Kane's sled, in scribed "Rosebud."

Ostensibly inspired by his own experiences with municipal corruption, Flicker soon wraps his hero in red tape and delivers him to a greedy pack of policemen, firemen, city inspectors and hotshot racketeers, all seeking payoffs. The cop is a half-witted movie monster, obviously put together by graft. The fireman is a Negro with an Irish brogue. Behind them all looms the Syndicate's Mr. Big, who may or may not be the local crime commissioner.

But such frequently sophomoric social satire is what's wrong with Flicker's cinematic prank. What's right with it is its irrepressible urge to let the plot go hang and take up more amusing matters, some of them crude, some of them nude, a few of them downright sidesplitting.

Jack Armstrong's cohorts are an improper Bohemian (Joan Darling) and "an aggressive, successful young lawyer" (Buck Henry), an astringent facsimile of Jack Lemmon with everything pared away but the raging, libidinous core. Together these three spray buckshot at everything from psychological testing to Hollywood sex and suspense to Harold Lloyd cliffhangers and the sacrifice of 5th century Chinese maidens. Occasionally they take time out to paint one another white, or to elude a Sanitation Department truck propelled by murderous impulses. With all its freewheeling eclecticism and formless exuberance, The Troublemaker is finally just funny enough to leave an audience feeling it ought to have been a whole lot better.

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