Swiss Cheese

By R. S.

THE END OF THE GAME

Directed by MAXIMILIAN SCHELL

Screenplay by MAXIMILIAN SCHELL and

FRIEDRICH DUERRENMATT

The End of the Game asks us to contemplate the following unlikely but not entirely uninteresting proposition: that in 1946, in Istanbul, a young man destined to become a master international criminal murders a young woman in front of a friend who is destined to become a master Swiss detective. He does so in such a way that a rap cannot be pinned on him, but his former friend pursues him for three decades. Finally the detective maneuvers his ancient adversary into a situation where he must inevitably take the fall for one of the few crimes--oh irony of ironies--he did not commit.

Frittered Away. All of this might have been made into a trim mystery of the puzzle-solving variety except for two factors. The first is that it is based on a novel by Co-Scenarist Duerrenmatt, who must cloud the simplest scenes with a thick layer of existential gas. Director Schell, who helped anesthetize the script, compounds that error by directing in a style that is virtually an anthology of antique art-movie cliches as practiced on the Continent.

Schell is fatally dependent on fog machines for atmosphere, never makes a simple cut when he can use a stately and portentous camera movement. He loves strange visual juxtapositions -- a leopard roaming around a mansion or a violinist sawing away under a tree in a meadow -- because jarring imagery, though it conveys no useful informa tion, is fondly believed to wow the impressionable.

Some interesting and normally intelligent actors are involved in this nonsense. Robert Shaw is the master crook, and Martin Ritt, better known as a director (Hud, Sounder, Conrack), plays the Swiss cop who is his nemesis. Jon Voight plays Ritt's assistant -- and unwitting tool -- while Jacqueline Bisset does time as lover to both Shaw and Voight. Their skills are all frittered aimlessly away in a movie that offers slowness of pace as an earnest of artistic integrity. The only emotion that the audience is likely to work up watching this unconscionable bore is an irresistible desire to be almost anywhere else but in the theater.

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