Rushes

BUTTERFLY

The ostensible plot of Butterfly has to do with incest in the boondocks. Or rather the possibility of same, since things are finally worked so that no taboos are actually violated. But all of that is much too complicated and silly to go into with a straight face. The real suspense of the film derives from the troubles that Leading Lady Pia Zadora keeps having with her wardrobe. Sometimes it seems to have a will of its own and just starts sliding off her. On other occasions, when there is some feebly logical reason for her to shed it (taking a bath, going to bed), you may be sure that Stacy Keach, as the father figure she has for some reason taken it into her head to seduce, will be around to catch a tantalizing glimpse of this or that secondary sexual characteristic. Since Zadora is the principal backer's wife, and this is nothing if not a vanity production, poor Keach is required at these moments to go slack-jawed with awe and wonder. As her looks may most charitably be described as an acquired taste, his persuasiveness in these scenes cannot be praised too highly. This is acting! But one cannot help thinking that if Zadora did less wriggling, slinking and twitching, propriety--not to mention the audience's sobriety--might have been more easily maintained.

LOVE AND MONEY

There are two character types that American movies have never believably portrayed: the international financier and the Third World revolutionary. By putting both in the same picture, Love and Money hardly doubles anyone's fun. Writer-Director James Toback labors under the delusion that he is a man of ideas, a Conrad or Dostoyevsky of the silver screen, and will go to any convoluted lengths to get a strained or totally phony argument going. In this case, the great mogul (played with a flashy show of menacing teeth by Klaus Kinski) wishes to bump off the revolutionary (Armand Assante) and hires the rebel leader's old Harvard roommate to do the job. This character (Ray Sharkey) pretends to go along with the scheme because he is a victim both of existential ennui and of a sudden obsessional letch for the financier's wife. Much show-biz Big Think ensues, but it is not quite stupid enough to be truly funny. Interestingly, there are several nice, quirky moments of domestic comedy involving the protagonist, his grandfather and his live-in lady in an innocent but funny menage a trois. The old gent is played by the great director King Vidor, who may have given a tip or two, since these scenes indicate that were Toback to rein in .his ambitions, he might have a gift for conscious, rather than unconscious, comedy of an interestingly eccentric kind. sb

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