Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 4

SATURDAY l.JrtrfBbur0 vTimro JiO 0 I lit' Family Home Leisure The Arts Saturday, Docombor 28, 1974 SB benbow on television IN MY ytif mmM TV picture worth thousand words except after the game By CHARLES BENBOW St. Petersburg Times Television Writer The American press has been called "biased" in its reportage of public events. But you can't fault a television camera with this. A newsman would be charged with "coloring" the news if he had adequately described how warmly Palestinian guerrilla chief Arafat had hugged the Soviet Ambassador during his recent visit to the United Nations. Yet there it was for the world to see on televi Freebie (James Caan, right) and the Bean (Alan Arkin, left) chatter away at the same time, nd as a result the pace sf their film is muddled and confused throughout.

xFreebie' one of year's worst sion. NO WOKDSMITH could reconstruct the strain on the faces of witnesses before the Senate "Watergate" committee as seen by the nation's eye television. And Hubert Mizell, The St. Petersburg Times Sports Editor, could strain mightily for a fortnight at his typewriter and yet not make our hearts beat as fast as when we watch the closing minutes of the football season's playoff games. His job has been altered, too, by TV.

To illustrate the point I'm making, let us imagine a revolutionary achievement in television technology a sub-subminiature, wireless camera, a solid-state midget nicknamed "Tiny Probe." It would be so small that, in order to protect individual privacy of citizens, the government would issue permits for its use only to the networks, the FBI and the CIA. Tiny Probe would really put TV viewers in the center of sports action. During the Water Bowl classic, for example, a Tiny Probe mounted on center Beau Buck's buckle, aimed downward, could bring the epitome of human drama to football fans, that is, the look of anguish and doubt on the face of star quarterback Flip Reest just before the ball is snapped. NETWORK OFFICIALS would be delighted with Tiny Probe because it cuts down the number of smiljanich IN MY Rush, the movie, like a woman in pre-liberation days, changes its mind with great consistency but does not encompass multitudes. It is, at one point, an outrageous spoof of every chase film ever made, with cars, appearing out of nowhere to sail into an enormous pile-up and characters being one-dimensional, comic book creatures.

By DOROTHY SMILJANICH St. Petersburg Times Drama Critic One measure of a movie's quality is how lightly the pieces of it fit together. Ideally, there should not be a single wasted word, let alone line; not a single wasted shot, let alone sequence. be discerned. This pitiful attempt to create the sound of authentic conversation results in gibberish and many wasted lines.

Paul Koslo as Whitey and Valerie Harper as Consuelo create credible and even interesting characters but the movie is such a hopeless confusion of styles and tones and wasted effort and undirected energy that it requires a great deal more than good performances to save it. The very foundation is flawed. on film Mini-review One of the great strengths of Ingmar Berman's films is their tight cohesiveness. Nothing is revealed that is not essential and everything revealed is crucial. That is one of the reasons they seem to shimmer with significance each element reflects and illuminates the other.

A movie, in that way, is like a poem short, abbreviated and hopefully with all its elements conspiring to one common end. AND IT IS just those criteria that "Freebie and the Bean" violates to its detriment. The film is the most recent in a whole THE NEXT MOMENT, it is a brutal, tough film with real people bleeding and dying. The shifts in mood and tone destroy whatever integrity the film might have had. Robert Kaufman is the man responsible for what must be one of the year's worst screenplays, that is muddled even more by the predilection of Arkin and Caan to speak over one another's lines.

The effect is the same as walking into a crowded laundry room: Everyone is talking but nothing can series of buddy-buddy cop films, which include "Busting" and "Law and Disorder." Male-male friendships seem now to be the "in" thing and here Alan Arkin plays Bean to James Cann's Freebie. They are two big city, undercover cops about to make their big bust and harassed, as usual, by the police brass, the prosecutor's office and assorted underworld characters. Produced and directed by Richard Rated "Freebie and the bean" it playing at th Square Six Theatre In St. Petersburg. It contain! profanity and violence.

ross on music Yii-i cameramen required for each game. All the salary budget could go to the director, the play-by-play and color announcers with enough left over to hire real talents guests like Bob Hope, Sammy Davis Jr. or even high-salaried Barbara Walters. These guests' comments would be at least as valuable as those we hear now from guest coaches. We could expect these innovations in football telecasting: a Tiny Probe on the bare toe of field goal kickers; end zone coverage from Tiny Probes mounted on the goal posts and Tiny Probes in the navels of each majorette for an exciting halftime spectacular.

Howard Cosell could be put on the playing field, as a referee, with Tiny Probes strung on him like medals. He knows as much about football as most referees. The Goodyear blimp could be replaced. It is the only thing about football that hasn't changed lately anyway. Unmanned Tiny Probes could be mounted on surplus barrage balloons left over from the London blitz.

To honor fans who still bother to come see the games in the stadium, and to add to the festivities, a rain of crushed Dixie Cups and soggy peanut shells could be loosed upon them from the balloons. TINY PROBES also would eliminate the controversy about female reporters in the locker room. Permanently mounted Tiny Probes hidden in the lockers and showers would greatly increase the number of women viewers who follow football. Without reporters trying to guide the discussions, post-game followups from the locker room would be more colorful and candid. NOW, ALL JOKING ASIDE, only television can serve up sports events with the heart-stopping impact of immediacy.

Sure, film cameras equipped with long lenses could reach into the action on the field. However, only TV shows it while it is happening (and again and again in "replays" for differing angles) long before the teletype wire can spell it out or the film can be processed. Maybe you never thought about how much this immediacy contributes to your appreciation of televised sports. Remember, then, how incredible it seemed to be seeing the Munich Olympics via satellite? We've come a long way from the simple play-by-play descriptions on radio. Now we can study the anxiety on the faces of both coaches, via split TV screen, simultaneously.

And by the same electronic method, the passer and the receiver in football, the baseball pitcher and the runner trying to steal second base. BUT TV HAS yet to figure out how to cope with locker room interviews after the games. Maybe it is too much to expect the players to be articulate so soon after such elation, but the TV interviewer should be able to ask better questions than "Tell us about that pass with four minutes to go in the game." Here the sports writers for the print media still Whip up New Year's treat with heavy Cream dominated the defiant field of power trios. The concert film shows both the attraction and the limitation of this format. The first tune on the screen is Cream's most golden classic, "Sunshine of Your Love," with its 10-note basic riff that every young electric guitarist knows and repeats.

But only Cream made it sound worthwhile and that lasted a relatively short time. SINCE FLORIDA fans had almost no opportunity to see this maniacal act during its lifetime, the film made by rock entrepreneur Robert Stigwood gives the true-blue psychedelic music fan a chance to glimpse what he missed back then. "They just don't play stuff like that anymore," lamented one member of the movie audience Thursday night. There was Jack Bruce, energetically thumping his odd six-string bass and wailing into a piercing sound system. Bruce looks almost as unhealthy as drummer Baker a skeletal madman who flails with blurring rapidity, driving himself and his partners into frenzied, extended climactic rushes of violent intensity.

By BOB ROSS St. Petersburg Times Music Writer For two stormy, brilliant and exhausting years, the late-60s acid-head speed-freak generation of hard rock music fans nurtured a legend. This New Year's weekend, local survivors of those crazy times can reminisce with the band that coined the word "supergroup." They called themselves the Cream and they claimed to be just that with Ginger Baker on drums, Jack Bruce on bass and Eric "01' Slowhand" Clapton on guitar. PLAYING THROUGH New Year's Eve at the Beaux Arts Gallery, 7711 60th St. Pinellas Park, the concert-documentary "Cream" is mostly a film of Cream's farewell concert at London's Royal Albert Hall, recorded four or has it been five already? years ago when the volatile trio knew that it could maintain its pressure and pace no longer.

To appreciate this movie and its perspective, one must recall Cream's heyday wherein adolescent refugees from real-life turmoil sought escape through their brand of super-hard rock. That era was a peak experience of sound. It was raw, driving, frenetic and very, very loud. Along with Jimi Hendrix, Cream surpass television. They get significant, revealing statements to report, comments that go beyond that moment, that game.

We know more about the players and coaches as persons with professional commitments and frustrations. This kind of journalism re quires time, thoughtful reordering of statements, editing with linking mood phrases, a fuller context than can be found in the "immediacy" of the locker room chaos. But nothing not even a seat on the 50-yard line The Cream Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce. One of the first "supergroups," Cream found that it could no longer sustain the energy and momentum to keep the group going. with Howard Cosell, a raccoon coat and hip flask can give you the action which television brings into your living room.

(See CREAM, 6-B).