The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 71

i 1 San Francisco Examiner Friday, November 8, 1985 E-3 0 mm fit- Target' should have been a contender better to keep them from follow Movie review 'Target Starring: Gene Hackman, Matt Dillon Director: Arthur Penn Writers: Howard Berk, Don Petersen Rated: Theaters: Galaxy, Serramonte Critic's evaluation: A i A Matt Dillion asks Gene Hackman for a few straight answers This film's inherent supcrficiali-l ty leads the director of two of the most daring "family" movies of all time, "Bonnie and Clyde" and "AI-; ice's Restaurant," into some dubi-! ous pontifications. Those movies' showed the relativity of family-; based morality, and peoples at--tempts in our fragmented age to forge new family groups with friends and colleagues. In "Target" everything pales be-' fore the nuclear family. The gener-1 ation gap becomes a joke on a fish-, ing trip. Dillon accuses Hackman's generation of screwing things up, and Hackman quips, "Don't worry, yours will too." And before too' long, Dillon is taken with the macho romance of dad having been a CIA man.

I I didn't sense a hint of irony. All that counts here is the family. May-' be that's what Penn means when he says the film's about "a tightening moral order." It comes off more; like moral tightwaddary to me. home his theme (or his excuse for making the movie), he simply has Dillon say something like, "This family's in a lot of trouble." You can see Penn had all sorts of parallels in mind: Hackman's old CIA partner, played by Josef Som-mer, refers to the Company as a family, too, and the action hinges on another family's disaster that occurred when Hackman was still in the service. But Penn doesn't really explore his theme he just parades it around.

By Michael Sragow EXAMINER MOVIE CRITIC TODAY'S BIG STAR, major-studio opening, the Gene HackmanMatt Dillon thriller, "Target," gives us one of the saddest cases I can remember of a brilliant, individualistic director Arthur Penn rebounding from a commercial and artistic disaster 1981's "Four Friends" with a movie that's probably just as hopeless commercially and far less ambitious artistically. In career terms, "Target" might have seemed to be just what the doctor ordered. But where oh where was the script doctor? It's basically a straight-line thriller with a few quasi-artistic curlicues. The action begins when the wife of an ex-CIA man is kidnapped by an enemy spy who never quite came in from the cold. The kicker is that the couple's disaffected son doesn't learn about his father's past until he becomes dad's only trustworthy ally.

Penn has said that this father-and-child reunion was for him the heart of the film. "Old-fashioned family values have their place," he told that repository of homely virtues, "Daily Variety." "It's the most primary experience." Unfortunately, the screenplay by Howard Berk and Don Petersen sketches the relationships in primary colors and Penn and his actors don't bring any shadings out of them. Hackman delivers only an amorphous intensity to the role of the uptight father who's screwed even tighter by his secret history. Dillon grimaces and grunts his way through the role of the hang-loose Courtship behind FROM EXAMINER STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS ALBANY, N.Y. A New York psychologist confirms what shoppers at San Francisco's Marina Safeway and Nob Hill Cala have long known: a supermarket's frozen food section can be a hotter place to meet Mr.

or Mrs. Right than singles bars or other "pick-up joints." To prove his point, Dr. Robert Wishnoff, a psychotherapist specializing in corporate counseling, arranged for a supermarket to make its largest Albany-area store available for a singles night last night. Wishnoff, 35, said shoppers in supermarkets are less likely to put on false airs when buying toilet paper than when buying drinks in a singles bar. A supermarket may also provide a more relaxed atmosphere in which to strike up a conversation, he said, relieving many of the pres CITY SKIING: OUR PASTEL SNAP JACKET ''Wx 69.00 SPECIAL Yellow, pink or white polyester- cotton with polyester fill.

i Drawstring neck, elasticized cuffs 3f and pockets S-M sizes I By Braetan. Color selection may vary by store. Contemporary Collections MBA Vri r( i 'fen, Ore step behind a By Tom Dowling EXAMINER BOOK EDITOR Metal Men: Marc Rich and (he 10 Billion-Dollar Scam. By A. Craig Copctas.

Putnam. $17.95. 224 pages. A' LOT OF people have never heard of metals trader Marc Rich. They hadn't of him when he made his first billion brokering oil in the 1970s.

They hadn't heard of him when he bought 50 percent of Century Fox in the early 1980s. They hadn't heard of him when he cheerfully ate a contempt of court fine for failure to cough up sub- poenaed documents during his 1984 tax evasion trial. And, now, they still haven't heard of him, even as he's luxuriously ensconced and non-extra- xhtable in Switzerland after having copped a $90 million plea in the case not to mention drawing a 300 year jail term for good measure. It just goes to show how much obscurity you can buy with a $10 billion nest egg. A.

Craig Copetas has set out to strip away the veils of anonymity in which Rich has so laboriously cloaked himself. Off the evidence of "Metal Men" we can report that Rich remains the world's most least known fugitive billionaire. After a year of self-proclaimed relentless pursuit, including an educational stint as a commodities broker, Copetas has failed to lay a glove on the elusive Rich. Indeed, after 224 variously sulfurous and laid back pages, it 1s possible to say that Rich's essential nature, his obviously formidable trading techniques, even the precise degree of his criminality evade clarity of focus in exact proportion to the amount of biographical terrain covered. We learn, for example, of Rich's boyhood in Belgium and Kansas City, of his grade-school urtiveness, of his memorably un-memorable summer camp experiences, of his spectacular rise as a commodities trader at the staid and powerful Phillip Brothers, of his betrayal of his original patron there, the legendary Ludwig Jes-selson, of Rich and Pinky Green founding their own high-flying trading house.

But this is a commonplace enough pattern in the commodity business. More to the point, it's exactly the sort of picked-over biographical bones even a man of Rich's secretiveness is prepared to feed to the dogs on his trail, the White to leave Arts Museums EXAMINER STAFF REPORT I AN MCKIBBIN WHITE will retire in July 1987 as director of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums. White, 55, who joined the fine arts museums in 1967 as assistant director of the Legion of Honor, made known his intentions Wednesday at a regularly scheduled meeting of the museums' board of trustees executive committee. White said he announced his retirement plans well in advance to allow for an orderly transition. He said he would remain until three major projects are completed.

They are: installation at the De Young Museum of the Santa Maria de Ovi-la, a 13th century Spanish chapter house, and an Elizabethan room; and the renovation of the Legion's billionaire ing more dangerous spoors. After all, what made Rich unique was his methodology, his ethic after he hit the big time on his own, That gripping, indeed central as pect of his career is absent here. Something of Copetas' problems are duly encapsulated in this account of his sole meeting with Rich in a Swiss restaurant: 'The dining area was reasonably empty, so when he walked by me I stood up and said calmly, 'Mr. but I never finished. He looked at me, frightened, his chill brown eyes flashing the agony of ripped flesh.

Hunching over, he bounded quickly through the kitchen and then backtracked slightly to reach the bathroom. Marc Rich, the man who the U.S. Justice Department privately called the most corrupt corporate executive in America, never returned to finish his lunch. He was gone. Marc Rich, king of the commodity cowboys, had heaved himself through the washroom window of a Zug pizzeria to avoid comment, leaving his blue cashmere overcoat, a Florentine leather briefcase and an unfinished lunch of capcllini d' angel All the details are there except the important ones.

Instead of Rich himself, we get his wardrobe and accoutrements, all of it packaged in a hyped, vainglorious prose that leaves the unsupported impression that the "frightened" Rich isn't man enough to face up to the "calm" author. What is just as likely is that Rich correctly sensed that Copetas would be fully satisfied with a clownish bathroom vignette in lieu of a potentially troublesome interview. And, in fact, Copetas seems to have made no subsequent effort to beard Rich, and precious few attempts to illuminate the man and cohorts in the commodities business. Instead, thel)ook is largely given over to dazzling descriptive flights of the go-go metal trading business, much of which finally begins to sound like an aggressive customer's man at full-sales-throttle over the phone. We hear of traders hopping flights for Nigeria in the middle of the night, of $25,000 petty cash spent on a night of call-girls and cocaine, of 25-year-old brokers with hands already palsied from the relentless pressure of life in the trading pits, even of the grisly, if irrelevant murder of some Thailand-based countertrader who once worked for Rich.

But everything is peripheral, and Rich himself fades gradually from view, like some smiling Cheshire cat who has perfectly orchestrated his own disappearance. Ah, well, they don't call it the shadowy world of high finance for nothing. Not at least when Copetas is writing about it and Marc Rich is staying one step ahead of him. S.F. Fine in July 1987 Ian McKibbin White He'll stay on to finish three major projects sures, the Vatican collection and the upcoming Impressionism exhibit scheduled for April 1986." White, a Harvard grad, with graduate work in architecture and industrial design, began his career in 1959 as an administrative assistant at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.

He later joined the Brooklyn Museum, where, as assistant director, he designed the Frieda Schiff Warburg sculpture garden in 1966. uau vi laii lo 1 worse than a bad pr. of shoes orthopedic design chairs From 9-6 wkdys 543-5575 258-9880 San Rafael San Francisco i $79 i i 1 1 I I ask lof 7 ipV. ouf ne brochure son who hangs even looser because, well, Dillon is playing him. The most intriguing family member is Gayle Hunnicutt's sensual, flirty wife and mother and she disappears 10 minutes into the movie.

Penn says, "High action doesn't interest me in itself, only when the action clarifies the characters." That's a good position to take, but it doesn't translate into the movie. Once the would-be adventure moves from Hackman's Texas home to Paris and Germany, it becomes a series of routine chases punctuated by reaction shots of Dillon as he's thinking, "I didn't know the old man had it in him," or of Hackman as he's thinking, "There's my boy." Whenever Penn wants to ram shopping carts sures common in singles bars or clubs. "The supermarket has a common element for everybody," Wishnoff said. "The food, the products you buy say a lot about you, whether it's a light bulb or a croissant." By comparison, he said laundromats are not always frequented by single adults because many use private laundry facilities. Health clubs are often expensive to join.

"Supermarkets are safe, open, well-lit and interactive by nature," he said. "They're also alcohol-free. People there are clear-headed and positive and will know exactly what they're doing. Nothing can be written off by saying did that because I drank a Wishnoff planned last night's three-hour experiment to include various "ice breaker" games and food sampling, plus counseling on assertiveness, how to meet new people and "how to flirt." 145 Jackson St. SAN FRANCISCO 1 99 SnflwffIbffnflB SsiEflifiidDfln 1 W4 lit ip jm A EXPERT ELEMENTS, OUR BLACK WOOL CREPE SUIT SEPARATES 4 Mipdt AJ many times of day Braid-edge mmH cardigan jacket 116.00, soft-pleat skirt with pockets 59.00.

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Board of trustees president Alexandra Phillips paid tribute to White at the meeting, stating that he "had made superb contributions to art, to San Francisco and the fine arts museums. "He led the merger," she said, "of the M.H. De Young Memorial Museum and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, one of the first major steps in bringing our museums to national prominence. "He attracted the renowned Rockefeller collection of American paintings to San Francisco, as well as the outstanding H. McCoy Jones collection of tribal rugs.

"On behalf of the museums, he has made friends for us around the orld, which, in turn, led us into an era of tremendously successful exhibitions, including the Dresden, Tutankhamen, Tiffany, Irish trea- 611 San Ramon Valley Blvd. DANVILLE Bon Appetil is i registered Trtdemailt ol the Bon Appetlt Publishing used by permission. Effective November 8 thru 12, 1985..