Shedding Darkness On the Youth Culture

By J.C.

In its efforts to lure young people to the box office, Hollywood continues to cannibalize youth culture. A few well-picked, mostly tasteless bones:

Melody is about a lonely eleven-year-old boy (Mark Lester) and a misunderstood schoolmate (Tracy Hyde) who fall in love and are ridiculed by their parents, teachers and peers, but who eventually wed in a ceremony conducted by the boy's best friend (Jack Wild). The denouement finds all the school kids backing the prepubescent romance and holding their teachers off while the happy couple pump away into the sunset on a railroad handcar. There are some good secondary scenes of teasing and classroom high jinks, and excellent photography by Peter Suschitzky, who tries to give spice to an otherwise far too sugary project.

The lonely and misunderstood lovers in Friends go the kids in Melody a couple of steps better. They are older (14 and 15), but only a little wiser. They run off to a picturesque cottage in the south of France, where they set up housekeeping and discover s-x. They eventually have a baby, but since they fear discovery, they deliver the child themselves. They also play at marriage, standing in a corner of the church during a real wedding ceremony and whispering the vows to each other. There is even an unhappy ending, meant to be touching, but so laughably illogical that it becomes merely maladroit.

In Making It, the film makers added a couple of years to the protagonist and a lethal dose of cynicism to the script. Kristoffer Tabori plays an adolescent Alfie with vigor, humor and great promise, qualities that the movie itself lacks completely. He spends most of his time bounding around Albuquerque, sleeping with a high school coach's wife, seducing pliant teeny-boppers and--understandable after all the frenetic activity--nodding out in class. Aficionados of Hollywood bad taste will have much to cherish in Making It, but nothing will please them so much as the scene in which the Tabori character feels closer to his mother after he is forced to assist at her abortion."

The Buttercup Chain is a leaden comedy-melodrama about the intramurals two young couples play as they wander around England, Spain and Sweden. The characters are in their early 20s, but by comparison to the children in the other youth pictures, they seem to be drifting into senility, an impression strongly reinforced by their mummified acting. Jane Asher and Sven-Bertil Taube are attractive and easy enough to take, but Hywel Bennett looks like a cross between Paul McCartney and Elmer Fudd. Then there is doe-eyed Leigh Taylor-Young, an actively bad actress who improves only when she takes her clothes off.

Summer of '42 is a piece of machine-tooled sentiment about an adolescent's first stirrings of love and initiation into tentative adulthood. There is a standard form for films like this, and Summer of '42 seems to have been the model. It has gauzy, soft-focus photography and saccharin rhapsodies on the sound track. The writing is appropriately wretched and includes such Deathless Words to Live By as "Life is made up of small comings and goings." This wisdom was provided by Herman Raucher, co-scenarist of Anthony Newley's Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe, etc., who now has apparently forsaken fake Fellini for pseudo Salinger. Give him one thing, though, he's the equal of Erich Segal -- in art, if not in commerce.

The best way to appreciate what is good in Roger Vadim's Pretty Maids All in a flow is to make your way through some of the nonsense listed above; it's a terrible price to pay and may not be worth it. But by comparison, Pretty Maids is truly comic relief -- a kinky, funny, often on-target sat ire about libidinous teen-agers and their equally eager elders. Director Vadim constantly undercuts himself with the kind of sleazy eroticism (many shots of panties and nubile cleavage) that has made him a cinematic Flo Ziegfeld, but his decidedly black sense of humor has not been so finely honed since he made Les Liaisons Dangereuses ten years ago. The plot concerns a high school guidance counselor and football coach (nicely played by Rock Hudson) who relates to students in a decidedly intimate fashion. The film does not completely work, either as thriller or farce, mostly because Vadim insists on treating his actresses like so many rhinestones in the buff, but there are good supporting performances by John David Carson as Hudson's protege and Telly Savalas as a grimly ironic cop, some agile plot twists, and an abundance of savage little insights into affluent California adolescents. Pretty Maids All in a Row ought to have been a lot better, but Vadim's limited success at least suggests that humor is a lot more helpful in dealing with youth than mindless sentimentality.

. J.C.

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