Screen Picks

Skidoo

by Sam Adams

Groovy Movies (Fri.-Sun., March 4-6, International House. 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) WIP critic and Movies Unlimited guy Irv Slifkin has plenty of credits on his resumé, but none quite as impressive as the fact that he once lived in Russ Meyer's pool house. Whether his brain was already warped or got lost in the bottomless cleavage of the Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! auteur's other houseguests, Slifkin has cultivated an unhealthy appreciation for all things cult, wild and otherwise off-kilter. Slifkin's extra-sensible perception pays off in spades in Videohound's Groovy Movies: Far-Out Films from the Psychedelic Era (Visible Ink), his wide-ranging anthology of writing on movies of, about and inspired by the 1960s. Where else can you find Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend placed on equal footing?

This weekend, Slifkin hosts a tie-in series at I-House, even though only three of its five films are in his book. Meyer is represented not with Pussycat or Valley but with the obscure The Seven Minutes (Fri., 7 p.m.), a courtroom censorship drama that apparently finds Meyer playing it relatively straight. (Like most of the weekend's movies, it was not available for preview.) The doozy is Otto Preminger's ultra-maudit Skidoo (Sat., 9 p.m.), a 1968 oddity which finds the director of Anatomy of a Murder doing his best to keep up with the counterculture (and no doubt pry a few dollars out of their resin-stained fingers). Making Zabriskie Point look like Easy Rider, Preminger and screenwriter Doran William Cannon (also responsible for Robert Altman's Brewster McCloud) misconceived a story involving a mob hit man who is recalled from retirement to take out a jailed ex-colleague, a plot which for some reason involves Jackie Gleason taking LSD and seeing God in the form of Groucho Marx (although, to be fair, we should point out that God is merely his name, not his profession). With his unerring feel for the taste of stoned teenagers, Preminger loaded up his cast with a bevy of bloated B-list stars, from Carol Channing to Cesar Romero to Frank Gorshin, not to mention a loony Mickey Rooney, whose lysergic dance number is one of the movie's "highlights." The movie's total unavailability has turned it into a cult object, a status it hardly deserves, although its mind-boggling ineptness is impossible to tear your eyes away from. The print to be screened is Preminger's own copy, reportedly pristine, doubtless because his heirs would prefer to forget the movie exists.

Also in the series: Milos Forman's Taking Off (Sat., 7 p.m., double-billed with Skidoo), his first, and least tiresome, Film About America; The Jokers (Sun., 2 p.m.), Michael Winner's Swinging London satire; and Billion Dollar Brain (Sun., 7 p.m.), with which Ken Russell put a brightly colored stake in the Harry Palmer series.

Hearts and Minds Film (through Sun., March 6, Wilmington, Del., www.heartsandmindsfilm.org) Harry Shearer and Peter Davis present their movies Teddy Bears' Picnic and Hearts and Minds at this small but precise Wilmington festival devoted to films on social issues. The four-day lineup includes documentaries and features on subjects from AIDS in Kenya to the battle against Wal-Mart.

Bitter Victory ($19.94 DVD) Revered by cinephiles (not least The Dreamers' Theo and Matthew), Nicholas Ray has been roughly treated by the home video market. Moody masterpieces like They Live by Night, On Dangerous Ground, The Lusty Men and Bigger Than Life turn up occasionally on cable, but they've never been released on video, let alone DVD.

So all hail Bitter Victory. Filmed as alcoholism and hard living were beginning to consume Ray's life, the 1957 story of a group of British soldiers carrying Nazi documents across the African desert is unstable at times, but its volatility just adds to the sense of unease. It's easy to interpret the conflict between Curd Jürgens' Brand and Richard Burton's Leith in simple terms, seeing Jürgens as a vain coward primarily interested in protecting his career, and Burton, a civilian archaeologist who volunteered for military service, as the voice of decency and determination. But the movie keeps throwing you off balance, leaving the impression that courage in wartime is impossible to define and harder to achieve.

The defining moment comes as the soldiers sneak into German headquarters. A German sentry passes by, closest to Brand, but instead of killing the man, he freezes. It's left to Leith to do the deed. After a bizarre close-up in which his knife-wielding arm becomes a jagged slash across the screen, he plunges his knife into the German's back, and a groan at once horrified and unmistakably orgasmic escapes from his lips. Leith and Brand's mutual antagonism, previously established through their mutual love for Brand's wife (a mannered Ruth Roman), immediately blossoms. Leith is convinced he's seen Brand for the coward he really is, while Brand fears the end of his career if his hesitation is made public.

The trek across the desert becomes an ordeal as starkly existential as the frozen chase in On Dangerous Ground (though Sony's middling transfer bleaches out the desert whites more than Ray probably intended). By the time it's over, all pretense of heroism has evaporated, a perspective Brand endorses when he pins his newly awarded medal on a stuffed dummy. Leith had previously compared his adversary to just such a dummy, but now it seems to stand in for the absent Leith, perhaps suggesting that his self-righteous moralizing is as much a pose as Brand's fitness to command. Bitter Victory's greatest anti-war statement is not that war inverts moral certainty, but that it perverts it: When the rules of war dictate that it's better to watch a wounded man die rather than finish him off, morality becomes an affront to humanity. Though Ray initially wanted Burton to play Brand, his insufferable smugness works perfectly for Leith, ensuring that we never side too fully with him, tacitly encouraging us to find ways of understanding Brand's reluctance to kill. Set against the backdrop of the "good war," Bitter Victory must have been a bitter pill in 1957, but its anguished cynicism seems perfect for our time.

Misc. Picks The Chestnut Hill Film Group unspools a 16mm 'scope print of Costa-Gavras' 1965 The Sleeping Car Murders — dubbed, but better than the nothing otherwise available.