Small Change

By JAY COCKS

THE FORTUNE

Directed by MIKE NICHOLS Screenplay by ADRIEN JOYCE

Oscar (Jack Nicholson) and Nicky (Warren Beatty) would figure very high up on any list of incompetent con men. It takes some of Oscar's and Nicky's own talent for self-destructiveness to bungle a story about their mismanaged capers, and Mike Nichols has spared no effort to this end. The Fortune is a bleak, frostbitten farce, desperate for invention and rather a sham.

The story can be quickly told, although not, unfortunately, by Nichols or his pseudonymous Scenarist Adrien Joyce (Carol Eastman, who wrote Five Easy Pieces). The movie is barely 90 minutes long, but it lingers badly. Oscar and Nicky latch on to a rich girl (Stockard Channing) whose worldly goods they hope to inherit. She is the heiress to a sanitary-napkin fortune, and to get her money one of the boys must marry her. Although Nicky has eyes for the girl, he is already wed. This leaves Oscar, who consents out of deference both to the caper and to the Mann Act. The heiress is not yet 21.

Oscar may be the husband of record, but it is Nicky who shares the new bride's bed. This gets Oscar a little crazy, at first because he appears to be losing his best friend, then because he starts to get interested in his bride himself. Via plane and Pullman (this is the 1920s), the trio work their way out to Los Angeles, where they set up housekeeping in a new but already tumble-down garden apartment. The usual jealousies and rivalries flourish and take on fresh coloration, until Oscar and Nicky roll on the kitchen floor, battling furiously with each other, while the excluded bride yells, "Let me alone, let me alone!" After the temporary cessation of hostilities, she announces her decision to leave the whole fortune to charity. So Oscar and Nicky quickly--and not entirely reluctantly--realize that murder is their only answer.

Comedy of Murders. This plot bears marked similarities to Elaine May's first feature, A New Leaf (1971), and the difference in the two movies reveals something about Nichols and his former partner. A New Leaf was dark, crazy and exhilaratingly wacky. The Fortune, which also becomes a comedy of murders, is safe and smug. When the boys first try to kill the girl, they dump her in a tiny fountain in two inches of water and creep away, expecting her to drown. The gag does not work because it is clear that the girl is in no peril. Elaine May put her heroine directly in harm's way, and managed to make the murderous husband funny at the same time. Nichols just plays it all too cozy.

It is also difficult to determine exactly what he and Eastman wanted this movie to be about. A sermonet on the wages of greed seems altogether too trite. A satire on the still flourishing genre of buddy films seems a little more likely. Oscar closes the triangle one day when Nicky is away by seducing his bride. The fact that she is wearing Nicky's vest, shirt and knickers at the time only seems to add piquancy to the situation. The boys have given her the nickname Fred die, which makes a further contribution to the coy confusion of sexual identities. Like everything else in The Fortune, though, this is a direction that leads nowhere. Indeed, all the couplings in the movie, whether implied, attempted or interrupted, are gloomy and joyless. Passion is a ploy, and sex is a matter of control. This sort of acrid cynicism smothers the exuberance farce must have.

For laughs, The Fortune offers arch vintage dialogue ("I refer to it `a propos that little cream catcher on your lip" or ";Why did they have to go and call the police? Boo hoo") and a full catalogue of recycled sight gags. There are jokes about lovers parking at the beach, about not being able to slip a wedding ring onto a finger and about the new bride's poisonous efforts in the kitchen.

There are also snoopy landlady jokes, and some primitive visual puns. "I'll just give you a little peck on the cheek," Freddie says coyly to Oscar, as the cam era pans over to her pet chicken pecking away at some seed. Watching this, one is hard pressed to remember where Nichols ever got the reputation for being clever. The Fortune is not even smooth enough to be called glib.

The best arid clearest indication of this can be found in the acting. Instead of being funny -- which requires some degree of seriousness -- Nicholson and Beatty act funny. Beatty flails around in his part, trying to bag jokes like a man catching flies. Nicholson is more successful because he is more comfortable with character work. Although he is given to making pained funny faces, he has at least one fine moment: buckling immediately under the most casual police inquiry, he blurts out a confession to a murder that has not taken place. Newcomer Stockard Channing also mugs, but she has neither the confidence of Beatty and Nicholson -- which can come with experience -- or their charm, which cannot.

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