The Happy Peasant

With his wayward orange mane and glazed fish-green eyes. Gene Wilder conveys a beguiling look of incipient madness. In his films to date he has seemed always on the verge of lurching into some marvelously insane enterprise. For a time he worried about becoming typecast as Hollywood's favorite neurasthenic comedian. "There was always a reservoir of hysteria in me that I could call upon as an actor," says Wilder. "As I grew out of it, I became more and more dissatisfied with the parts I was playing. But Hollywood, of course, couldn't keep up with my psychological advancement. So I played hysterical accountants [The Producers], nervous undertakers [Bonnie and Clyde], and mad aristocrats [Start the Revolution Without Me]."

Hollywood has caught up at last. Wilder, 35, has lately been besieged with scripts and has sifted through them with his own brand of mad logic. What sort of actor would turn down a tempting offer from Mike Nichols to play in Catch-22, but accept the lead role as a Dublin manure spreader in a film improbably titled Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in The Bronx? To everyone's good fortune (especially his own), Wilder did just that. Says he: "Quackser was the idealization of everything I've wanted to do as an actor. He typifies where I'm at now--humorous, sexual, innocent and striving for simplicity." Wilder's delicate blend of humor and pathos makes the viewer think he is seeing young Charlie Chaplin with reddish hair and an Irish brogue. It also makes Quackser Fortune one of the most delightful comic dramas in recent years.

Quackser is an urban savage who prefers shoveling horse manure from the streets of Dublin and spreading it on ladies' flowers to working in the foundry with his father. Without Wilder's protean talents, the film could have been absurd: an upper-middle-class American girl studying at Trinity College (Margot Kidder) nearly runs Quackser over in an MG but winds up taking him to her farewell dance and ultimately to bed. Wilder makes the affair believable by investing his role with an appealing integrity as well as sexual overtones; he himself added two scenes early in the film in which Quackser stays his daily rounds long enough to dally with a lusty Gaelic wench. The romance is only part of the film; the rest concerns Quackser's slow, painful acceptance of the inexorability of civilization. He is forced to a showdown with himself when the last milkwagon horses are cleared from the streets, and his eventual compromise is both whimsical and affecting.

Wilder's growth as a man and an actor has had its own special agonies. He was born Jerry Silberman in Milwaukee, the only son of a prosperous manufacturer of miniature beer and whiskey bottles. When his parents sent him to Black Fox Academy in Hollywood, he recalls, "I was the only Jew in the school, and I got either beat up or insulted every day." He was soon back in Milwaukee taking drama lessons after school and playing summer stock in the East. Wilder studied slavishly--at the University of Iowa, at the Old Vic in London, with Lee Strasburg in New York. A stint as a draftee medic in the neuropsychiatric ward at Valley Forge Army Hospital taught him almost as much as all the lessons. "I chose the job because it seemed most applicable to acting," he told TIME Writer Mark Goodman last week. "I've always been drawn to roles of emotional cripples."

Frenetic Ineptitude. In 1961 Wilder landed an off-Broadway role as a North Country farm boy in Arnold Wesker's Roots. His big movie break came in The Producers; though the 1968 film was a disaster, Wilder's frenetic ineptitude won him an Oscar nomination. As the frightened undertaker snatched for a joyride in Bonnie and Clyde, Wilder stirred almost as much comment as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.

For all his screen intensity, Wilder offscreen is relaxed and polite almost to the point of diffidence. "My quiet exterior used to be a mask for hysteria," he says. "After seven years of analysis, it just became a habit." In search of tranquillity, he, his wife and her daughter by a previous marriage are spending the summer at Long Island's Westhampton Beach. Otherwise they live in a modest two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Wilder wants simplicity, but not complete conventionality. "Quackser was only half a step off the ground from what is considered normal. That's me. My sister told me: 'Quackser has given you the chance to be what you've always wanted. A happy peasant.' She was right. That's what I've always wanted to be, a happy peasant."

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