Quick Cuts

By J.C.

THEATRE OF BLOOD is the giddy tale of a sugar-cured Shakespearean actor named Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) who sets out to eliminate the London critics who have mocked and vilified him during his career. He kills each of them in a quite elaborate and grisly fashion, every slaughter based on a scenario provided by the Bard: one hapless critic, for example, has his heart cut out (the pound of flesh in The Merchant of Venice), another is stabbed to death on the Ides of March. Worst torture of all, perhaps, is that the poor struggling wretches must listen to Lionheart declaim passages from the pertinent play before he kills them. Besides Price, who is at his most enjoyably fulsome, the large cast includes a bounty of fine British players: Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Milo O'Shea, Eric Sykes and, as those viperous but ill-fated critics, Harry Andrews, Coral Browne, Robert Coote, Jack Hawkins, Michael Hordern, Arthur Lowe, Robert Morley and Dennis Price. The movie is bright and, a good deal of the time, quite funny. It is farce as broad as Shaftesbury Avenue, but its high spirits are not entirely consistent with the great gobs of gore that Director Douglas Hickox leaves smeared about. Violence, under the circumstances, ought to have been a charade, but often it is so brutal and lingering that it spoils the joke.

FISTS OF FURY is such a shambles that Five Fingers of Death, the other Chinese battle hymn to Kung Fu that is currently cleaning up in the U.S. (TIME, May 14), looks by comparison like The Seven Samurai. The fights, which are plentiful but somehow lackadaisical, are all generated by the disappearance of several brothers who work down at the icehouse, where envelopes of white powder are frozen in the middle of each cake. Pressed to explain this, the plant manager says guilelessly: "There's no profit in ice. In dope, plenty." The hero, Bruce Lee, may be furious of fist, but he is decidedly slow on the uptake. He spends an extraordinary amount of time tracking down the archvillain. Finally, the two lock in combat on the villain's lawn. While they kick, chop and clobber each other, the road right beside the field of battle is fairly clogged with traffic. No one bothers to take a look, much less stops to help, an inadvertent suggestion of how quickly boredom can beset the martial arts.

L'AMOUR Paul Morrissey-Andy Warhol movies are always something of a stalemate. It is impossible to determine exactly who receives more contempt and abuse, the people in the movies or the ones watching them. L'Amour ("presented" by Warhol, written and directed by Warhol and his protege Morrissey) features the wrecking crew from The Factory, Warhol's New York homestead, transported to Paris, where they scratch and stammer through a plot that might be a low-camp rewrite of La Ronde. Michael (Michael Sklar) and Max (Max Delys) are lovers. Michael, wanting to get married for appearances only, becomes involved with Donna (Donna Jordan), while Max makes lanolin passes at Jane (Jane Forth). All have been encouraged to play someone approximating themselves, which does not mean there is any recognizable humanity to be seen. Warhol and Morrissey specialize in an especially vicious kind of ridicule, to which the actors eagerly sacrifice themselves.

WALKING TALL. Anyone looking to set up a neighborhood vigilante group can get a good jolt of moral inspiration from this extravagantly violent saga of a lawman who fights the good, lonely fight against entrenched forces of vice, corruption and cussedness. The screen credits insist that the movie is based on fact, although there is little in the film that seems human. There are, however, a great many sequences of mayhem, so the film makers are careful to make up in shock whatever may be lacking in verisimilitude.

The hero of the hour is an ex-Marine and itinerant wrestler named Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker), who gets bashed and robbed in a roadhouse brawl. The constabulary is sympathetic but hardly helpful. Buford carves himself a truncheon, then goes back to bash some heads himself and reclaim what is rightfully his. Impressed with this display of retribution, the citizens of McNairy County, Tenn., elect him sheriff.

Buford embarks on a campaign to bring all the villains to justice, using a strategy that leaves no room for the niceties of law. Walking Tall is as smugly and viciously self-righteous as its hero. By the film's end, when Pusser and the aroused citizens storm the gangster stronghold, the film has ceased to apologize for lawless reprisals and turned to openly supporting them. *J.C.

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