Daily News from New York, New York • 31

fwr i- Hf) Donald Sutherland i innate" V. row Altaian's Latest Is Just TRASH "2. a Hi aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaMaaaaaaaaajaawaaaaaa P3 to junkies and peddlers, predators and victims, the lowly and the tortured people who have no defenses because life has beaten them into submission. In the unyeilinr of their lives, there is a lesson about the dark sides of human nature that lie dormant in every man. Alan Pakula provides an emotionally charged freedom in the atmospheres of his films which allow his actors to work out natural reactions to written situations from some storehouse of inner strength.

Klute is charged with a wonderful, crisp, improvisational to What hell has Robert Altman, the once-talented director of MASH showered upon us now? I was willing to dismiss his vomitous Brewster McCloud as a bad acid trip resulting in temporary brain damage, hoping he'd get the monkeyshines out of his system and get back to serious work. But now there's McCabe and Mrs. Miller an incoherent, amateurish, simple minded, boring and totally worthless piece of garbage that opened yesterday at the Criterion and I'm sadlv convinced MASH was an accident. McCabe and Mrs. Miller is one of the worst movies ever made an insult to the intelligence of anyone stupid or masochistic enough to sit through it.

At the screening I attended Wednesday night, there were so many boos and hisses and progrrms thrown at the screen I thought the enraged audience was going to burn down the theater. I wouldn't have blamed them. Warren Beatty, looking like a Yale sophomore posing for a box of Smith Brothers cough drops, impersonates a gunfighter-cum-gambler-cum-moron who sets Julie Christie up in a bordello in a ramshackle western boom town phony right down to its two token Negroes. For two hours of interminable gibberish, he urinates, burps and engages in other obscenities, drinks double whiskeys with raw eggs in them like a Sally Bowles imitation of Yosemite Sam, and finally gets his raccoon coat riddled with holes. When he dropped dead in a fake snowstorm like the last scene from The Ballad of Baby Doe, the audience cheered.

Miss Christie ends up in a Chinese opium den playing Florence Reed in Shanghai Gesture. That i3 all there is to this laughable catastrophe, except for some flat, nasal and tone-deaf singing by Leonard Cohen that should cause a strike at ASCAP. The wedding of Altman and Beatty is catastrophic. Beatty has always needed strong directors who won't let him mumble, men with vision and certainty who know how to hold down his petulant self-indulgence. Altman is the kind of director who lets actors do whatever they feel like doing.

The result is that most of the dialogue sounds filtered through wet toilet paper and the acting is on the general order of a high-school freshman play. Julie Christie has enough trouble even in professionally directed movies; in this mess, she comes across like Kim Novak playing Somerset Maugham and it is possible to decipher only about 3 out of every 10 words she speaks. I've never heard a poorer recorded sound track or seen a worse photographed excuse for a film. The quality of the color is obviously faded and grainy because Altman wanted to give the tall-tale ballad the feel of old pioneer newspaper lithos, but the effect leaves only eyestrain. The color is like old Republic Roy Rogers serials in ghastly Trucolor and thr film is so hard to see it looks photographed through mayonnaise.

Altman is a master of obscenity and vulgarity whose sole purpose as a director seems to be to shock, humiliate and assault his audience. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller he has thrown a pail of rotten swill at everyone in the theater and they're throwing it right back at him. Does anyone remember ever seeing a good Blake Edwards movie? I don't but none of the fiascos he's turned out in past years quite sink to the level of weary banality that snores off the screen in The Wild Rovers. Three theaters (Astor, Juliet II, 34th St.

East) waste their valuable screens on this pap about an old cowboy and a young cowboy who rob a bank. You'd think even an ordinary, second-rate picture made by a director who never heard of the advances made in westerns like Will Penny and The Rounders might not be a total loss if it contained a bank robbery, a brothel and some guns going off. But Blake Edwards manages to blow all three. William Holden and Ryan O'Neill fight some sheep herders, a woman throws a pot of urine over a balcony that lands on their faces, and everybody vomits a lot. And I'm told Rachel Roberts said four lines somewhere, but I was asleep by then.

This is not only a bad movie, it's a bad movie that steals things from other bad movies. In Ryan O'Neal's final death scene, a slow-motion flashback has him romping in the snow in a scene right out of Love Story that woke the audience up long enough to guffaw. O'Neal finally gets to play Ali MacGraw and this time, William Holden gets to say "Love means never having to say you're sorry." Or something like that. O'Neal is a charming and likeable actor, but these scripts have got to get better. Whatever else Jane Fonda has been up to lately, she's obviously been polishing her craft, because there is no better performance on the screen these days than the one she's giving in Klute (at the Cinerama and Murray Hill).

This is a haunting, intelligent and powerful suspense thriller that is better than anything Alfred Hitchock has turned out in ten years, a throat-clutcher that I urge you not to miss. Miss Fonda plays a stylish call girl pursued by a pathological killer who falls in love with a small-town private eye (Donald Sutherland) investigating the disappearance of a friend in the big city. If that sounds confusing, remember that this is no ordinary mystery; Klute digs deep into many fertile layers of psychological soil to unravel several simultaneous pieces of a compelling puzzle. On one level, it is a tough, muscular tale of a cop on a case who meets a call girl in the line of duty; on a deeper psychological level, it is an illuminating portrait of people trapped in New York, quality that shows up beautifully in the scenes between Miss Fonda and her analyst. Donald Sutherland is perlect as Klute, the emotionless cop who learns something about his own weaknesses and strengths through a brush with the seamy, sordid side of life, but it is Miss Fonda who burns a hole through the screen with a searing cinematic psychoanalysis of the middle-class dreamer.

She drinks ginger ale, goes out on hopeless modeling rounds for Harper's Bazaar, relaxes after a hard night hooking with a client her gloomy walkup with a brandy and a joint, listening to WNEW news and reading Linda Goodman's "Sun Pakula's cameras observe her every nuance through the tops of elevator cages and in the dark corners of creepily lit hallways, through the windows of pay phone booths in front of the J.C. Penney Building and caught in the crowds of Seventh Avenue. His way of making love with a camera makes the audience care and in the triumph of Miss Fonda's warm, natural playing there's a lovable, human quality to this bad girl trying to get ahead that makes Klute a memorable experience. There are flaws: Rita Gam is totally miscast in an unconvincing lesbian role. Jane Fonda comes home sick and dissipated and you never know why has she been taking drugs, is she on LSD, or what? And the big climactic scene, in which she meets the psychopathic killer vis-a-vis in a deserted Garment Center cutting room, is so easily set up it's fishy.

Quitting time comes, the secretary wants to make a movie feature on time, and that showroom is deserted faster than you can say Bill Blass. Nobody would leave a strange girl in any New York office after cloting time with no night watchman on duty just to make a phone call. Apathetic New Yorkers would be too busy worrying about burglary or the cost of message units. Still, Klute is so interesting, so fresh and so sus-penseful you're willing to forgive it almost anything. It's a movie that stays with you after the lights come on.

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