No Way to Treat a Lady

Eying the widow and the wine, the priest broguishly intones: "It's red like the blood he shed for you and me." Playfully he proceeds to tickle her ribs until she shrieks with laughter. Then, purpling like an eggplant, he chokes her to death and paints a lipstick kiss on her forehead.

The father image is only an illusion. The Roman collar is as big a put-on as his accent and his wig. Under them is an effete, seething schizoid (Rod Steiger) who can kill when he assumes an identity other than his own. But who is he? New York's police assign a green, gawky Jewish detective (George Segal) to find the answer. After eyeballing the first victim, Segal promptly advances a pop-psych theory to the press: the murderer, he argues, is a mother hater who takes Mom for a slay ride every time he garrotes a middle-aged lady.

The theory is not too far from the mark, but it elicits furious denials from Steiger, who keeps taunting his pursuer by phone, hanging up before the calls can be traced. Meanwhile, victim after victim is fingered by the Manhattan strangler, who blithely pops into new personae as easily as most men change ties. His disguises range from the Irish priest to a German plumber to a homosexual hairdresser. He even plays a prostitute in drag and throws in an imitation of W. C. Fields on the brink of madness. But the killer's ego is even more monumental than his talents. Eventually he overreaches by trying to do away with Segal's girl friend (Lee Remick), then gets trapped in a theater, where the chase comes to its inevitably bloody conclusion.

Although murder and mental illness are hardly laughing matters. Director Jack Smight squeezes legitimate comedy from the corrosive camaraderie of Steiger and Segal in their hare-and-hound relationship. Not that the film is totally successful. Eileen Heckart, as Segal's mom, aims at Kosher salami but comes out Irish ham. And the end, heavy with Christian expiation, is as self-conscious as a Sunday-school morality play.

But Segal gives his best performance since King Rat, and Steiger offers the audience a cornucopia of characters and caricatures. Some are overplayed while others are slighted, but consistency is beside the point: no other major American actor ^ould have brought off this kind of multifaccted tour de force, which once was the exclusive property of Alec Guinness.

"I'm only 42," he explains. "Brando is 43, Paul Newman is 43, but I look like everybody's father." True enough. Although Rod Steiger's weight rises and falls with tidal regularity--and the demands of the role--he normally carries about 220 lbs. of fat and gristle on his 5-ft. 10-in. frame. His hairline is almost a memory, and his jowls reflect years of studied attention to the pleasure of the table. Rod Steiger's worth has increased with his girth: his current fee is $500,000 a film, and most producers feel that the price is right for one of the most convincing character actors in Hollywood history.

Rodney Stephen Steiger is the kind of performer moviegoers seldom rec recognize on the street, and they tend to remember the role he created rather than the fact that he played it. Although a stratum of burly menace seems to underlie all his performances, there is uncommon variety in his characterizations. His recent range includes an evocation of Pope John XXIII in the semidocumentary And There Came a Man; Mr. Joyboy, the simpering mortician of The Loved One; the lascivious Komarovsky in Doctor Zhivago; and his favorite role, the guilt-racked Nazerman in The Pawnbroker.

Three times nominated for Academy Awards, Steiger is the current favorite to win this year's Oscar for best male actor on the strength of his performance as the mulish redneck sheriff of In the Heat of the Night. It was a job of acting marked by a craftsman's meticulous attention to detail: the assured swagger of the small-town cop who knows he is The Law, the wobbly waddle in the sun that evokes languidity induced by oppressive heat. To achieve the effect, Steiger relied on his standard technique: total immersion. "I've never seen a man become a role so much," recalls Director Norman Jewison. "Two weeks after we started the picture it was almost impossible to talk to Rod Steiger because he was in a Southern dialect night and day."

Lurching from line to line, Steiger frequently ad-libbed his way through entire scenes--including most of a boozy encounter with Sidney Poitier in the sheriff's house. When the occasion calls for it, Steiger can stick to a script. In The Mark he played a psychiatrist and did not change a line--but improvised in other ways. Drawing on his five years of treatment in New York, he remembered two characteristics of his own analyst: "He had too many patients, and he was always exhausted." Steiger made the psychiatrist a chainsmoking, unshaven, love-haunted man --none of which was reflected in the screenplay.

Steiger is an actor who seems able to make The Method work. Born in Westhampton, Long Island, he quit high school at 16 to join the Navy, When his hitch was up, he went to work for the Veterans Administration; a co-worker girl friend in Washington, D.C., got him interested in a local little theater group. In due course, Steiger headed for Manhattan and the Actors Studio. He made his first hit as the original Marty on television, then scored in films as Marlon Brando's brother in On the Waterfront, for which he received his first Oscar nomination. Kept continually busy in movies, Steiger rarely has time for stage work. His longest run on Broadway was in the 1959 hit Rashomon; after the play closed, he married his costar, Claire Bloom. Between assignments, the Steigers live in an ar--tique-littered Manhattan apartment, where he dabbles in Sunday painting and writes occasional verse, none published so far.

Currently, the Steigers are in Hollywood to give one of their rare tandem performances. "We are planning to provide America's answer to the Burtons," says Steiger. "We are fighting back." Their vehicle is The Illustrated Man, a sci-fi thriller, in which Steiger plays a tattooed carnival roustabout whose dermatological decorations provide the starting points for separate stories. To play the part, Steiger underwent a ten-hour makeup session getting himself covered from forehead to feet with multicolored intricate tattoos. Thinking ahead, Steiger is also reading up on Napoleon, whom he will portray later this year in Waterloo. He wants desperately to do the life of Dylan Thomas (but suspects that Richard Burton may have first crack at the role) and of Ernest Hemingway. In any other actor, such ambitions could be put down as hubris, but for Steiger it somehow seems natural. "There is no such thing as a straight part," he insists. "Every part you play is a character."

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