Newsday (Nassau Edition) from Hempstead, New York • 226

MOVIE REVIEWS Christopher Plummer Beside Himself ULY LOVE (PG-13) Christopher Plummer in a funny tour de farce about a pompous actor wtio downs himself into a domestic comedy of errors Plummer is excellent and so is Maggie Smith as his wife The story set in New York and Budapest is mostly an excuse for the looney-tune predicaments At area theaters By Leo Seligsohn "Lily in has a plot like a party game and the sparkle of Champagne if not its kick a heady little concoction nevertheless that goes its fizzy way in the guise of a sophisticated domestic comedy The romp belongs mostly to Christopher Plummer a joy to behold playing a magnificent buffoon named Fitzroy Wynn a celebrated classical actor with the offstage persona of a 200-pound ham Naturally this booming bundle of bravado cant resist the opportunity to pull off the most outrageous charade to come along since wearing lampshades became old hat The game is to fool his wife Lily (Maggie Smith) into believing he is somebody else A successful playwright she is as worldly-wise as Fits is world-class foolish more Lily loves the old windbag Well the general idea Specifically the joke is this: Lily has written a screenplay with a lead role for a youthful romantic lover A gentle Continental in fact is what she in mind Full of himself after a Broadway triumph blustering Fits believes he is perfect for the part But Lily says no So does affable Jerry (Adolph Green) their manager and close friend But the irrepressible egotist insisting there is no role he cannot play soon convinces buddy Jerry to be his co-conspirator and help dupe Lily Thereupon Fits puts on a blond wig a putty nose and an air that would charm the birds off the trees As Italian lover Roberto Terranova he sweeps lily off her feet gets the part and soon in production outside Budapest with Roberto playing opposite a sexy actress named Alicia (Elke Sommer) Maggie Smith and Christopher Plummer in In her belief in the authenticity of this gross apparition Toward the end as she wises up and the game moves toward something of a draw the fieriness begins to subside But Plummer and Smith are too much the consummate artists to let it go flat And Adolph silvery hair and silvery smile help brighten the screen too as he plays Jerry with the perpetually worried look of an untethered straight man about to be carried out to sea FUke Sommer is appropriately decorative and the supporting cast of Hungarian actors handles the low-keyed comedy well Director Karoly Makk trusts Plummer to go slightly wild and maintain comic discipline at the same time with the result that Frank rather frail screenplay comes up with more meat on its bones than one suspects is really there More complications develop when unsuspecting Lily becomes infatuated with Roberto and Fits becomes insanely jealous of himself so to speak The strength of this contrived farce is its ability to keep tongue firmly in cheek while playing the nonsense earnestly Everybody seems to be having quite a good time Plummer gets to pull out all the stops as he oscillates between being Fits and Roberto And a big part of the joke is that nobody could look at this fake northern Italian in broad daylight for a minute and think he was real Plummer has him tiptoeing on eggs and affecting a flaky soulfulness reminiscent of Danny Kaye as Anatole of Paris The overly strong too-straight putty nose henna hair and big shoulders help Plummer carry off the clowning while Smith proves her skill by getting us to accept Red Riding Hood With a British Accent 'a THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (R) Less than the sum of its parts werewolf story fairy tale sexual allegory tongue-in-cheek farce this British shaggy dog story about the beast within us is gorgeous but dumb Angela Lansbury David Warner Sarah Patterson (Some nudity and graphic violence) At area theaters all of this on the way to the payoff: the explicit retelling of the Red Riding Hood fairy tale as a sexual encounter between a werewolf and a complaisant virgin Rosaleen wears the famous cloak and carries the basket to through the woods meets the wolfman (Micha Bergese) who readies cottage before her beheads Granny and welcomes Rosa- leen who discovers she prefers his company to that of her parents (David 2 Warner Tusse Silberg) and the vil- 5 lagers Its baroque visual atmosphere is the most impressive accomplish- a ment a genuinely menacing magical' feeling to the forest The movement of camera and characters in -it is choreographed with dreamlike fluidity And two gruesome transformations of men into werewolves are technically effective Like another werewolf fable at area theaters "Hie Company of is strong picto-rially but lacks emotional involvement or dramatic momentum Yet "The Company of was re- 1 portedly the most popular movie in jg London for a time in 1984 That may jr be attributable to the popularity of Lansbury a Brit and to chauvinism since sadly so few British films are being made these days I the English were sufficiently amused by droll performance to overlook the pretentions as allegory and horror story By Joseph Gelmis The Company of is 95 minutes of outrageously overwrought psycho-sexual variations on "Little Red Riding a jumble of farce and fairy tale and horror movie The movie has two virtues Angela Lansbury is a hoot as a prissy Granny who prattles incessantly to her granddaughter Rosaleen the version of Red Riding Hood double-entendre warnings about men as ravening sexual monsters And writer-director Neil Jordon has an extraordinary knack for supervising the creation of a densely textured fantastic vision The movie haw two flaws It tries to be too many things And it overembellishes everything so that even its few virtues become defects Granny is just one of a pack of compulsive storytellers in "The Company of After listening to several of tall tales her granddaughter (Sarah Patterson) tells a whopper I stopped Angela Lansbury left as Granny telling tales to Sarah Patterson experience of a childhood dream The beginning and end of "The Company of shows the dreaming girl lying in her bed in contemporary Britain The movie ends with her waking and the dream spilling out to engulf her The fragmented scenario rambles through repetitive anecdotes about wolves werewolves and the devil counting eventually but there are perhaps another half dozen stories within stories all of them illustrated And the principal setting a primitive forest village in some unspecified distant past is a dream world being dreamed by the young heroine Clear so for? If so wrong The movie is a feverish muddle meant to give the confused.