The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 80

MOVIE REVIEW Gang Two Years Later is at heart a pretty shallot business, it has nonetheless been assembled with undeniable skill. Paul Bogart directs smoothly; a largely youthful cast performs competently, and the film make3 the most of its evocative Toronto locales. Indeed, "Class of '44" is a well-crafted film; it's just not a very satisfying one. slick sentimentality rather than going the tougher course of earning genuine emotional responses through portraying life in the round. More specifically disturbing is the awareness that the basis of much of its humor consists of satirizing college life to a degree that verges upon the anti-intellectual.

If the "Class of '44H down to the Victory Red lipstick of its pretty heroine (Deborah Winters), forms so impervious a surface reality that the effect backfires and becomes po-. sitively stifling as we grow increasingly aware of how contrived the movie really is. Of how consistently it takes the easy, evasive way out and appeals to a appearances and reality are one and the same. Now it can be argued that "Class of '44," which surely mean3 to invite much laughter and only a tear or two, is light entertainment and shouldn't he taken so seriously. But its admirably meticulous recreation of its period, right 'CLASS OF '44' A Warners presentation.

Executive producer Harry Keller. Producer-director Paul Booart. Screenplay Her. man Raucher. Camera Andrew Laszlo.

Production designer Ben Edwards. Music David Shire. Wardrobe, Pattl Unoer. Film editor Michael A. Hoey.

Featuring Gary Grimes, Jerry Houser, Oliver Conant, William Atherton, Sam Bottoms, Deborah Winters, Joe Po-rtazecki, Murray Westgate, Marion Waldman, Mary Long, Marcla Diamond, Jeffrey Cohen, Susan Marcus, Lamar Crlss, Michael A. Hoey, Dan McDonald, Jan Campbell. Running time: 1 39 mln. MPAA-rated: PG (some parental guidance advised). Mi vl i ill .7 i3 1 I si 1W BY KEVIN THOMAS Tim suff Writer With the runaway success of "Summer of '42" could "Class of '44" (at Grauman'3 Chinese and Avco Cinema 3, West-wood) be far behind? Of course not, and it's nostalgia time again as the three youths (Gary Grimes, Jerry Houser and Oliver Conant) who discovered sex in the first film are now graduating from high school and going out into a world engaged in a vast but comfortably distant war.

Grimes again is the central character, Hermie, who is sent off to college at his parents' insistence, as is Oscy (Houser). Only Benjie (Conant) succeeds in getting his father's permission to enlist underage. What lies in store for Hermie and Oscy at college, despite the war, is pretty much the same as it i was for generations before them and for at least one more generation after them. There's the introduction to fraternity: life with its tiresome and silly but generally, harmless hazing, the pursuit of a campus beauty and the putting up with the idiosyncrasies of various professors. Once more writer Her- and respects both Delon and Scofield and they him.

Through their interactions there emerges the question of one's loyalty to one's self, one's country and one's opposite numbers who, perversely enough, have become friends. Writers David W. Rin-tels and Gerald Wilson have given director Michael Winner too much territory and too much of it threadbare to cover. "Scorpio" begins in Paris and thereafter jumps back and forth between Washington, D.C. and Vienna, juxtaposing a plethora of well-staged action sequences with moments of intimate conflict.

The pace is rapid, but eventually all sense of continuity is lost. This may have been done deliberately to help express the film's spiraling sense of paranoia but if so "Scorpio" does not. come up with enough fresh insights to justify such incoherence. Directing Traffic At times Winner seems reduced to directing traffic, so much is going on all the time and against such photogenic locales. However, Lancaster is staunch, a figure of dignity and even sympathy, and Delon is well-cast as a cool yet not unprincipled killer but his English is often unintelligible (But then the soundtrack is muddy from start to finish.) It is Scofield, however, who dominates as a warm, full-blooded man who has faced all the evils of communism squarely but still believes in it.

Heading a huge supporting cast are John Colicos as Lancaster's steely superior and Gayle Hunnicutt as Delon's lovely American girlfriend. KEVIN THOMAS fart April 1 1 1 973 MOVIE REVIEW 'Scorpio' I Cold War I Paranoia 'Scorpio (city wide) follows a tritej formula on an unduly large, far-: flung scale that it finally gets out of hand, leaving the viewer confused and therefore indifferent. It's one of those overly 'familiar international espionage capers that utilizes an incredibly convoluted plot to invoke a tsense of Cold War paranoia as a background for intense drama of conflicting loyalties. handsomely mounted, deeply cynical. United Artists release pro-duced by Walter Mirisch opens dramatically with CIA agent and Mideast specialist Burt Lancaster staging the assassination of an Arab leader with the help of professional killer Alain Delon, known as Scorpio.

Delon, In turn, has been hired by the CIA to knock off Lancaster, who is suspected of "selling out to the Russians. Vienna Hideout When Lancaster hides out in Vienna until he can hopefully prove his innocence if, indeed, he is innocent he encounters Russian agent Paul Sco-field, who has been sent there by the KGB to persuade Lancaster to come over to the Soviets. The heart of the matter is that Lancaster knows man Raucher blends humor and pathos to tell what must be at least in part an autobiographical story. However, the point of "Class of '44" seems not to suggest the timeless-ness of coming of age but to indulge in nostalgia for nostalgia's sake, a phenomenon that's rapidly beginning to cloy. Nostalgia- expresses a yearning for times that seemed simpler.

"The Last Picture Show" turned nostalgia back upon itself, asking us to consider that maybe the past wasn't quite a3 good as we remembered it, "Class Of '44," insists that PG Technicolor CtkbftlinWirMrarM.MAAiMirMry A Wirntr CMnmunuMM CwtaMy iJ LOS CERRITOS MALL U.A. CINEMA 2, 124-I01A NORTHRIDOE FASHION CINTCff CINEMA t.fM-eill SOUTH PASADENA kialto LAHABRA FASHION SQUARE t.71f1M33 REDONDO BEACH MARINA CINEMA 3. 37M10 ROSEMEAD esEMCAO tTs-eaie TARZANA THEE MOVie tS-t3IH) WESTMINSTER CINEMA WEST I14M2-4MS IASTDAY 4 I Procol Harum Set England's Procol Harum will be in concert May 25 at the Anaheim Convention Center. Fl SunijlI EXTERMINATING ANGEL 2 ACADEMY AWARD WINNERS (1972 1971)' THE GARDEN OF THE with THE GARDEN OF THE wmMrfWW FIMZI-C0MTIM1S Th alNtim bstIling novtl is now a captivating motion picture. MUST THE MUSIC LOVERS" "MAUATDE SADE" RICHARD CHAMBERLAIN.

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