Soggy Daydreams

Almost everyone involved in the spectacular success of Easy Rider--Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson --has won the privilege of making his own film. The latest to do so is Henry Jaglom, a Hollywood unknown who was rumored to have worked miracles on the lengthy Rider footage, trimming it down and making it work. The release of Jaglom's own pretentious and confusing film, however, suggests that the rumors of his expertise were greatly exaggerated, or at least that it does not extend to directing.

A Safe Place concerns the soggy daydreams of a rich little hippie who is known alternately as Susan and Noah (Tuesday Weld). S/N has a button-down suitor (Philip Proctor), a lover named Mitch (Jack Nicholson) who may or may not have recently murdered his wife, and an unhappy penchant for remembering an old Jewish magician (Orson Welles) who told her parables one day long ago in Central Park. Jaglom spends most of his time cutting abruptly back and forth between scenes of fantasy and reality with a technique that is about as experimental as your cousin's old Chemcraft set. Eventually S/N, unhappy with her life, either flies away or poisons herself in a bubble bath.

A Safe Place, at any rate, represents a new first in the career of Orson Welles. He has been many things--wonderful, outrageous, overwhelming--but never before boring. Miss Weld, an actress of great talent, is disappointing, Philip Proctor congenial and Jack Nicholson apparently stoned. At one point Welles announces, in a transparently phony Yiddish accent that merits the censure of the Anti-Defamation League, that "there is no such thing as an empty hand. There's no such thing as nothing." But there is something that comes close to it --these 94 minutes on celluloid.

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