Black-and-Tan Fantasy

By JAY COCKS

MAHOGANY Directed by BERRY GORDY Screenplay by JOHN BYRUM

So it shouldn't be a total loss, Mahogany contains one pearl: a romantic interlude between Diana Ross and Anthony Perkins. Ross appears as Tracy, a poor girl from the Chicago ghetto who has made it big as a model in Rome. Perkins plays Sean, a former combat correspondent who has made it big as a fashion photographer. Sean's sexuality remains moot through much of the film --until the moment when he forces a chilly Tracy down on a bed and mutters, "I understand the needs of a woman."

Cut to next scene: a tight closeup of Perkins lying wide-eyed and morose, staring at the ceiling. Ross raises herself on one elbow and consoles him with the hollow reassurance of a nurse returning doom-laden X rays. "Don't worry," she sighs, "it's not the most important thing in the world."

The equally unimportant Mahogany, blatantly concocted as a sequel to Miss Ross's success in Lady Sings the Blues, owes a great deal to John Schlesinger's Darling (1965). Indeed, its debt is so considerable that Perkins, who performs with wit, takes to addressing Miss Ross as "D-a-r-r-1-l-i-n-n-g," stretching the syllables to the breaking point. Miss Ross, however, is no Julie Christie. She may be more persuasive as the fictive Tracy than as the authentic Billie Holiday. But she remains an uneasy actress who pushes everything past endurance --including the audience. Ross laughs eagerly but never with a semblance of spontaneity, weeps without sorrow and rages without passion.

Movies as frantically bad as Mahogany can be enjoyed on at least one level: the spectacle of a lot of people making fools of themselves. The film marks the directorial debut of Berry Gordy, the Motown Records whiz, who has slapped scenes together as if he were laying down tracks for an album: one fast, one slow, one happy, one sad, one up, one down. Gordy has also permitted Miss Ross to design her own wardrobe, a series of costumes apparently inspired by some Oriental version of Star Trek.

The movie comes down hard on the notion of its heroine's overweening ambition and demonstrates that a good girl has no time for all those fancy European airs when she could be back in the ghetto, helping her man (the agreeable Billy Dee Williams) win political office. For Mahogany, that kind of moral--cynical, and wholly bogus--is the perfect clincher. Jay Cocks

...

Whatever the critics say about Mahogany--and they have few compliments--the film has just broken Broadway theater records held by Jaws and The Godfather. The receipts have made Berry Gordy Jr., 45, the most powerful new director in the business. That power derives from his triple role as founder, chairman and 95% owner of Motown Industries. The company was founded in 1960, shortly after Gordy quit the Ford assembly line in Detroit. The ex-professional featherweight boxer started with $800 borrowed from his father, a Georgia-born plasterer. Motown grossed $48 million last year on the combined earnings of its record label, one of the country's largest music-publishing companies, an artists' management concern and a TV and movie production arm, whose only previous theatrical release was the immensely profitable Lady Sings the Blues, also starring Gordy's close friend and protegee Diana Ross.

Director Gordy arranged his debut by talking the producer of Mahogany --one Berry Gordy--into firing Tony Richardson (Tom Jones) ten days after shooting began. Richardson, complained Producer-Critic-Sociologist Gordy, was "losing all the subtleties" of ghetto life and humor. The not-so-sub-tleties were supplied--at inflationary prices. Did Ross, doubling as her own clothes designer, require more yard goods and seamstresses to realize her visions? She got them. Did the film maker require an outdoor theater for a few atmospheric shots? He hired the 17th century theater at Spoleto for a week and transported the whole cast and crew thither in pursuit of the desired images. Was the script not quite right? Gordy took pen in hand and wrote the line that he says encapsulates Mahogany's philosophical essence: "Success is nothing without someone you love to share it with." Such creativity sent Mahogany $1.25 million over its original $2.5 million budget.

White Listeners. One should not dismiss too lightly any of the director's musings on success. It is one subject that he knows all about. Students of the Motown sound have long contended that it was Gordy's basic gimmick--the smoothing and packaging of rhythm and blues--that drew white listeners to his label. Essentially, he applied the same formula to his profitable production of Lady Sings the Blues, turning the hard life and times of Singer Billie Holiday into a muzzy backstage love story. It is also what happens in Mahogany. "I wanted to bring the same romantic feeling that movies used to have," says Gordy.

Gordy is disdainful of all criticism, personal and professional. The harsh reviews? They are merely "attacks on an uppity black." As for frequent rumors that Motown is Mob financed, Gordy counters: "We have a choice of suing people for such stories or ignoring them." Employee resentment over his dictatorial managerial style is not so easily dismissed. "If I ever wrote a book," says one Motown staffer, "I'd call it God Is on Extension 274--that's Berry's."

God does not often give at the office. His official address is the old Red Skelton estate in Bel Air, which features a rock pool stocked with exotic fish, an aviary full of rare birds, peacocks and llamas stalking the lawn. But the twice-divorced Gordy is frequently on the move, traveling under an assumed name. Last week, under the nom d'entrepreneur D. Thompson, he barely paused in mid-career to count himself "pleased" with having made a woman's picture at a time when male stars dominate the screen. He does admit to being "thrilled" by Mahogany's fast getaway at the box office. As ever, Berry Gordy's emotional highs seem to stem less from the heart than from the bottom line of his all-black ledger.

Second Time Around

LET'S DO IT AGAIN

Directed by SIDNEY POITIER Screenplay by RICHARD WESLEY

Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby, amiable enough fellows in last year's Up town Saturday Night, were not so memorable that anyone would want to meet them again, especially as soon as this. But the same Poitier-Cosby characters are on view in Let's Do It Again, an other comedy full of tired jokes and fairly high spirits.

This time Poitier plays an Atlanta milkman named Clyde. Cosby is his best pal, a factory worker called Billy. With their wives, they take a weekend's jaunt to New Orleans, where they hope to raise money for the Sons and Daughters of Shaka, their ailing lodge back home. Their scheme does not promise success -- or an especially funny movie: they hypnotize an emaciated, canvas-backed middleweight contender named Bootney Farnsworth (Jimmie Walker) to give him inner and outer strength. Then they put their money on the unlikely pug to beat a nasty pro named 40th Street Black. The odds are long, but Poitier's hypnotic skills are considerable. Bootney flattens the champ in the first round. The boys clean up.

If this sounds like the end of the movie, bear in mind that its title is Let's Do It Again. The whole caper is recycled. Poitier and Cosby are hauled back to New Orleans by Kansas City Mack (John Amos) and his boys, who feel they got bilked and want to work the same ploy on a rival gambler named Biggie Smalls (Calvin Lockhart). Now this is not a movie with jokes to spare. By the time Poitier and Cosby have rerun their plot, the meager supply has been totally exhausted. So has the audience. J.C.

A Bintel Brief

HESTER STREET

Directed and Written by JOAN MICKLIN SILVER

It is a question of scale. Hester Street, about the lives of some Jewish immigrants in the New York of 1896, is what is commonly considered a "little movie." Specifically, this means a film made with little money, cast with unfamiliar actors and confined to a narrow scope. The customary response to little movies is the halfhearted, affectionate encouragement bestowed on a distant relative who wants to go into show business. Rather than making a virtue of its modesty, however, Hester Street trades on it. The movie demands to be liked for its good intentions.

Director-Writer Joan Silver, who used to produce educational shorts and is making her feature debut, has a palpable affection for her characters and a passion for period detail. She has made excellent use of limited resources, kept much of the dialogue in Yiddish (translated in subtitles) and evoked a persuasive sense of the past. Indeed, Silver has little trouble with her "little movie's" practical problems. It is quite another kind of challenge that confounds her.

The script, adapted from a period novel called Yekl by Abraham Cahan, concerns a small group of transplanted Jews painfully adjusting to the promised city. Yekl (Steven Keats) now calls himself Jake, works in a sweatshop and courts Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh, an actress of spirited sensuality). He takes in a boarder, a subdued former Yeshiva student named Bernstein (Mel Howard), and prepares for the coming of his wife Gitl (Carol Kane) and infant son from the old country. Jake is not exhilarated by their arrival. They remind him of an older life now past; more important, he cannot break Mamie's erotic spell.

It is in Jake's story that the trials and compromises of assimilation are most easily perceived. But Writer-Director Silver gives as much attention to Bernstein and Gitl, even to Mamie, and so loses her central conflict. Most crucially, she is unable to resolve the basic emotional dilemma of Jake's confusion. It cannot simply be the new country and Jake's urgency to be part of it that turns him away from his wife and from tradition. Yet that is all the motivation Silver supplies him. It is just this short sightedness,this emotional skimpiness, that makes Hester Street a truly "little movie." It is not a matter of size, really, but of depth.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.