Rose Dud

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

ROSEBUD

Directed by OTTO PREMINGER Screenplay by ERIK LEE PREMINGER

Just before young Margaret goes aboard to begin a Mediterranean cruise, her mother comments that Rosebud is an odd name for a yacht. Yes, the girl replies, it has something to do with some film. It has something to do with Citizen Kane, of course. After Margaret's annunciation of such cultural obliviousness, it is difficult to work up too much alarm when she and her four equally dim-witted friends are kidnaped by Arab terrorists who start trading their lives, one by one, for compliance with ever-increasing demands.

The captive chicks are no more spiritually attractive than they are mentally alert. Nor are their hardships exactly heartrending. It is true that their cellar prison lacks fresh air, sunlight, comfy mattresses and a flush toilet and that the food is just not up to international cruise standards. Still, one cannot help thinking that a little down-and-out living may be good for them.

Be that as it may, they obviously bored Director Preminger long before they could bore an audience, and he expends most of his footage on the multinational attempt to rescue the girls. This effort consists largely of showing their parents worrying, actors entering and leaving buildings, and vehicles moving in various colorful locales. Such activities are neither menacing nor novel and never develop into sustained or amusing action.

Every once in a while. Peter O'Toole acts flaky as the CIA man in charge of the case, but more often he merely looks undernourished and hung-over.

Cliff Gorman, as an Israeli intelligence officer, is what he is: a good comic actor in desperate need of a gag. Richard Attenborough, as the cracked mastermind of the plot, gamely gives more of himself than his small role calls for or can sustain. John V. Lindsay plays a U.S. Senator, the father of one of the kidnaped girls, pretty much as he played being mayor of New York City -- like a B-picture leading man. At that, he is not the worst thing about this flaccid, fatuous film, though with such wealth to choose from, it is hard to say who or what deserves the nod.

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