Quick Cuts

By J.C.

ALFREDO ALFREDO has Dustin Hoffman looking squirrelly and speaking Italian. More exactly, it is spoken for him, in a dubbed voice that is not synchronized to his lip movements but superimposed on them. Robbing an actor of his voice is like chopping off an acrobat's legs. Hoffman remains undaunted, even though watching him is like seeing Jerry Mahoney doing a solo act.

The movie, which is divertingly diabolical, is the work of Pietro Germi, who once again (as in Divorce, Italian Style) makes social slapstick out of Italian law. Hoffman appears as a shy bank clerk whose beautiful wife (Stefania Sandrelli) floods him with killing affection. She is an embarrassment at the table, where she delights in sucking fish heads, and in bed, where she screams like an air-raid siren during orgasm. Months of this kind of married life, plus a hysterical pregnancy and intrusive in-laws, are enough to drive Hoffman into the arms of another woman (Carla Gravina). Hoffman's life thus becomes a long, wearing series of legal combats with his estranged wife, who hauls him before the bar on a variety of charges, most of them torturous in their surreal logic.

Germi indicts not only monolithic Italian marriage laws--most of the movie consists of flashbacks to the period be fore divorce became legal in Italy--but also marriage itself. The trouble with it, according to Germi, is mostly women. That is the trouble with the movie, too, in a way. It is constructed around a sour, myopic kind of misogyny, not quite deft or witty enough to cut through the un pleasant taste of bile.

FANTASTIC PLANET is a splashy French animated science-fiction story. The animation is slightly halting, the style derived a little from the late Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher (TIME, April 11, 1972) and owing quite a lot to Edward Gorey. The script is too much in the debt of a lot of standard sci-fi ideas, most prominently the notion that there is a distant planet where humans are kept as pets or treated as wild animals by the native humanoid types. Fantastic Planet is about how the humans win their independence and all creatures come to live in harmony. There are some pretty pictures, but the graphics do not make the ideas any fresher.

THE SEVEN-UPS are a squad of special cops operating inside the New York City police force. They are brutally efficient, although they could hardly be called an elite corps; their tactics owe as much to football fields and medieval dungeons as the precinct house. The movie, coarse and hammer hard, follows the cops as they bust up an underworld kidnaping ring and avenge the death of a squad member. Director Philip d'Antoni, who produced Bullitt and The French Connection, has cut The Seven-Ups to pattern. The chase scene measures up just fine against its predecessors, and may go them a little better in the department of spleen-shattering spectacle. But perhaps there did not have to be one in the first place. Similarly, a better locale might have been selected for the final shootout, one that did not duplicate the seedy denouement of The French Connection quite so closely.

Still, The Seven-Ups is by far the best of the current blotter of cop movies. It deals more directly than any, including Serpico (TIME, Dec. 31), with the criminal pathology of some police men. Roy Scheider, the leader of the Seven-Ups (and Gene Hackman's part ner in The French Connection), has just the right grave, anonymous face for the part, the right quality of eruptive violence. There are no heroes here. The movie has been made with the dogged intensity that cops can bring to their work, which explains why you have a feeling of having been worked over once the movie is done.

.J.C.

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