Color by the Number

By S.K.

There are some men whose tragedy arises not from what they suffer but what they fail to feel. Little Fauss and Big Halsy are such men--and so are those who made the movie.

Fauss (Michael Pollard), a goofy mechanical genius, is the otherwise backward son of a suffocatin' maw and a sufferin' paw. Halsy (Robert Redford) is a full-time motorcycle rider, ego-tripper and ladysmith. But the steatopygous girls who follow him are, as he admits, "gland cases" and "hurting whores." Between race-track rack-ups and sexual hang-ups, the film is crowded with subject--but barren of object. It is impossible to hide what never existed; nonetheless Director Sidney Furie seems to be attempting an existential comedy. Local color is dabbed in by the numbers. Maw (Lucille Benson) is comic-strip Steinbeck; Paw (Noah Beery Jr.) sells portable potties which he describes as p.p.s. Fauss is constantly taking ludicrous spills on his bike. Halsy is forever scratching himself, belching, boozing, caroming off lesbians--all the while covering past and future with a threadbare carpet of lies. Sometimes he talks like a daylight cowboy, sometimes like an Okie Voltaire ("Once, it's cool . . . twice, it's queer").

None of Halsy's pretensions is quite as labored as the 97-minute one that Furie has concocted. Pollard, an amalgam of chagrin and Silly Putty, is C.W. Mossier than ever. Redford is one of the few actors who can look gaudy wearing nothing but blue jeans. But both characters have infantile psyches; they seem as incapable of sorrow as of happiness. The aimless script is even more anesthetized. Its lame jokes are articulated by stunted heroes and vapid chicks: the halt leading the bland. Though its budget appears generous, the film's editing is cut-rate; scenes end in mid-sentence and time is perpetually out of joint.

The film owes its very existence to the recently successful two-man picaresques: Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy and especially Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But like a child aping an elder, it mimics the gestures and misses the point. The viewer can sense behind the film the search for a proven prescription. But such scrambles are self-deceptive. The movie business is too old to live on formulas; Little Fauss and Big Halsy evokes the repellent image of an adult pulling on a pacifier.

S.K.

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