Conjugation of Courage

Director John Frankenheimer has exercised his film-making talents on such diverse subjects as The Manchurian Candidate, The Fixer and The Train. However the stories vary, Frankenheimer remains obsessed by the qualities of valor. Even his little-seen comedy, The Extraordinary Seaman, has a ghostly hero condemned to walk the decks of a rotting gunboat until he is able to execute a single act of military courage.

The Gypsy Moths is Frankenheimer's latest and most clinical conjugation of courage, a brooding tale of three stunt parachutists bound by the brotherhood of danger. Rettig (Burt Lancaster) is a moody enigma who gets his kicks by pulling his rip cord at the last possible moment. Browdy (Gene Hackman) looks like something out of Sinclair Lewis, a perspiring, frenetic showman who goes to confession before every jump. Malcolm (Scott Wilson) is a kid trying to challenge the deadening effects of a loveless, lonely childhood.

Barnstorming through the Midwest, this unlikely trio stops for a couple of days in Bridgeville, Kans., at the home of Malcolm's aunt (Deborah Kerr). Rettig beds the aunt, then commits suicide during a particularly difficult stunt. As a memorial to Rettig, Malcolm attempts the same reckless leap. What he discovers about courage and his own manhood should have been the core of the story; unhappily, the film is too oblique for its own good.

William Hanley's screenplay is full of ominous undertones and pauses that are often more leaden than loaded. Although Frankenheimer's direction is always precise and often--as in the skydiving sequences--masterly, much of the dialogue lacks the painful intensity that was obviously intended. The interrelationships of the characters make sense but have little emotional resonance, a handicap that only Gene Hackman manages to surmount. His brassy characterization of a free-living sky diver adds a poignant dimension of reality to a film that, like sky diving itself, is an exciting but slightly dubious exercise.

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