Summer Clearance

By JAY COCKS

Some movies, made especially for the undemanding, easy-living days of summer, contrive to linger on after the season has passed. Finding them in a local theater is like shaking forgotten grains of beach sand out of a shoe. A few survivors still on view:

FUTUREWORLD is a sequel to Westworld, a movie that concerned a sinister amusement park called Delos. The place was staffed with robots that were controlled by a bank of computers tended by some frosty-eyed scientists in immaculate white smocks. Delos was dedicated to the fulfillment of adult fantasy: pay the hefty tab for a stay at the park and one could be a gunfighter in the Old West, say, or a knight preparing for a joust. The robots eventually rebelled, however, and hay wired the whole park.

In Futureworld, Delos is back in business, run by the sinisterly avuncular Arthur Hill. Everything seems to be humming smoothly, but there is more than a hint that Hill is using the place for his own dastardly purposes. Two ace journalists--an irreverent newspaperman (Peter Fonda) and an anxious, abrasive broadcaster (Blythe Danner) --trace down the truth to the very bowels of Delos itself. Futureworld is daffy and easy to take, with a relaxed, ingratiating performance by Fonda and a very witty, rambunctious one by Ms. Danner, who is altogether one of the niftiest actresses around. Resemblances between Ms. Danner's deft caricature and a couple of real live newswomen named Barbara Walters and Sally Quinn are probably not coincidental.

THE GUMBALL RALLY is a car stunt comedy about an informal but highly ritualized coast-to-coast race. The competition, organized by a bored businessman (Michael Sarrazin), is joined by a loose freemasonry of friends, rivals and fellow speed freaks. Among them: a libidinous Italian race driver (Raul Julia), a Pennsylvania housewife (Susan Flannery), a crazed motorcyclist (Harvey Jason), even a mechanic and his obstreperous girl friend (nicely played by Lazaro Perez and Tricia O'Neil) who yell and argue from the Hudson River to the Pacific. The course is the superhighway system of America. The object is to get from Manhattan to the dock of the Queen Mary in Long Beach, Calif., preferably without being busted by a perennially thwarted cop named Roscoe (Normann Burton). The best time for the race is a shade over 34 hours. There are no rules.

This loud and largely dismal exercise represents the culmination of one direction contemporary American movies have taken. Despite the functional presence of actors, the cars are the true heroes. Romantic interludes are represented by automobiles pulling up alongside each other at midnight on a long stretch of highway. Car crashes must do double duty: they serve as both spectacle and comic relief. This film, as mechanical as a lube job, gives the distinct impression that it could have done without characters completely. A good thing that people are still required to get cars started and keep them on the road. Otherwise, Rolls-Royce and Ferrari would have been battling for billing above the title.

ODE TO BILLY JOE, an extrapolation on Bobbie Gentry's 1967 back-country ballad about the young boy who jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, is a nice surprise. Director Max Baer (Macon County Line) has a good, close feeling for the rural South, and the movie--shot on location in Mississippi--is careful about people, sharp in selecting and using details of landscape: hushed green fields, a sinuous, umbilical river, a house perched on the edge of woods as if waiting to be enfolded in the trees. Herman Raucher's screenplay concerns the real reason Billy Joe threw himself off the bridge, an eventual revelation that is dramatic without being hysterical.

As in Raucher's previous Summer of '42, much of the dialogue written for the adolescent lovers (well played by Glynnis O'Connor and Robby Benson) is coy chatter, polyunsaturated Salinger. Many of the big scenes, in contrast, are levelly written and directed with a certain reluctant reserve that gives them true intensity. The last scene especially, which reveals all about Billy Joe's tragedy, has a fine force that goes well be yond the modest limits this movie has set for itself. The scene belongs mostly to the man who brought about Billy Joe's death, a character acted by James Best with a kind of desperate dignity that does not permit self-pity. Best's performance contributes in large measure to the film's strength, which comes not so much from the surprise itself as the lingering impact that it has.

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