Stealing the Skin Show

I, A Man looks like just another of Pop Artist Andy Warhol's home movies. Still, Andy's home is unlike anybody else's, and so are his films. This one follows a cat named Tom (Tom Baker) as he prowls bedrooms and hallways in search of birds. There are six in all, including Ingrid Superstar--real name: Ingrid von Schoffen--as a chubby blonde who refers to her overexposed mammaries as "fried eggs," and a brassy type in a pea jacket who turns Tom down because she herself prefers to make it with chicks. Some of the improvised dialogue is four-lettered, most of it unlettered.

The title of the movie is a takeoff on I, A Woman, a sleazy bit of Swedish pornography about nymphomania that unaccountably was a hit on the U.S. art-house circuit last spring. Though both films are ostensibly about the heterosexual search for love, Man is really something else. There is more display of bosoms than in a South Seas documentary, but Torn steals the skin show every time, as the camera affectionately concentrates on him while it caricatures the girls.

Man is likely to blur Warhol's image as the Zanuck of the nonmovie. The sound track, regrettably, is as clear as a hi-fi record, and the film is as much in focus as the average overground flick. After wobbling his camera in 60 or so pictures, demonstrating that film making is all in a flick of the wrist, could it be that, in his cinematic technique, Andy is finally going straight?

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