Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 33

DETROIT FRiE PRESS Sunday, Feb. 12, '78 7-C I i 0 roii mice JJJ lj HoUywood Looks 'Blue Collar' Puts Black Humor On the Line 'The Betsy' Says Sex Is the Secret Entertainment BLUE COLLAR Area Theaters Or Making Autos tm ii i 1 hr-. wf hi few Prvor Keitel Yaphet Kotto Bwtev Jr. Jerry Smokey Bobby Joe amir -w SIT bH 54i Artene i Lucy Sarovan A Unlveriel Pictures release, produced bv Don Guest and t'lrected by Paul Schrader; executive Ra bin French: screenplay bv Leonard Schrader and Paul Schrader; photography bv Bobby Byrne; music 'ibv Jack Nltzscht. In color.

Rated R. I BY SUSAN STARK Pnt Prut Hm Crffle No matter how resourceful the filmmaker, no matter how gifted the performers, there is Just no way to make Junk look like class. That, succinctly put, is the unresolved dilemma behind the movie version of Harold Robbins' "The Betsy." All the expensive window dressing, lush music, high-priced talent, furtive camera cutaways and quirky, not to say unintelligible, structuring cannot dissuade one that one is looking at rancid stuff. One leaves feeling soiled, in need of a long steam In the tub. STANDING IN as the principal characters are such notables as Laurence Oil vler as auto magnate Loren Hardeman Robert Duvall as his grandson, Loren Hardeman HI; Katharine Ross as nw' L-4J Vi All THE BETSY Area Theaters Lertn Hardaman Olivier Lortn Hardeman III Ouvall Sally Ron Anaelo Lea Jones Alicia Hardeman Alexander Lady Bobby Ayret Leiltv-Anne Down Dan Herrmann Betty Hardeman.

Kathleen Belter Loren Hardeman Paul Rudd An Allied Artljts release, produced by Robert Weston and directed by Daniel Petrle; screenplay by William Bast and Walter Bernstein, based on the novel by Harold Robbins; music by John Barry; photograpy by Mario Toil. In color. Rated R. Sr. daughter-in-law, Sally, and Jane Alexander as Hi's ill-used wife.

The public humiliation they suffer in being associated with this movie makes them deserving of every penny they got and let's hope they got plenty. In this particular opus, Robbins' 10th (and he has an 11th and 12th in the wings), the author addresses himself to the auto industry his way That means we get nothing of the hard thinking, not to mention hard labor, behind the Roy Poole, Laurence Olivier and Tommy Lee Jones (above, from left) look at car plans in "The Betsy.9 At left, Olivier is joined by grandson Robert Duvall and BY SUSAN STARK Free Press Film Crffle The giant freeway sign continues, inexorably, to tick off the number of cars produced 5,204,109. It all seems very clean, orderly, dull. Back on the assembly line, where the cars are actually being produced, it is neither clean nor orderly. Dull it Is.

So dull that the worker who cannot generate his own excitement has a better-than-even-chance of going bonkers, of becoming as lifeless as the equipment around him, after years of performing some brainless, unchanging chore in an airless, noisy environment. PAUL SCHRADER gives the feel of life on the line so well in "Blue Collar" that one who has never been there comes away from the movie sweating a little. The vigor and all-out commitment to realism of a movie like Schrader's or Miguel Pinero's recent prison drama, "Short Eyes," puts one too close for comfort. "Blue Collar" centers on three assembly line workers who, individually and as a band, do generate the kind of excitement for themselves that breaks the tedious routine and keeps them strong, fully functioning individuals. When Richard Pryor's smart, glib, high-strung Zeke is around, there Is always something happening.

A laugh is just short for A fight An adventure of some kind. Yaphet Kotto's hulking Smokey, less articulate than Zeke but no less smart, is a rock, steadier and more experienced than the others. Harvey Keitel's Jerry, the filling of the trio that comes to be known as the "Oreo Gang," has something of both Zeke and Smokey. Like them, he has far too much brain for the work he does. Like Zeke, he has a short fuse.

Like Smokey, he exudes strength. x' SCHRADER OPENS with the trio going about business as usual. Jerry, a welder, puts on his goggles, takes up his torch, and goes to work amid the fire and the whining. Smokey, a utility man, zips up his grease monkey's suit and goes off to whichever part of the plant he is assigned. Zeke stands in his place on the line, working at working until his hourly encounters with the foul-mouthed straw boss give him a chance to work his mouth.

During breaks, the trio gathers at the closest bar, a place they and the others from the plant have made their own, even to the graffiti by the wall telephone: "UAW means Ain't White," At the union meeting, all get amusement (and relief) from Zeke's performance, a brilliantly shaped monologue on the perils of a locker that has been broken for weeks and is still broken. The speech, which specifically details the locker's threat to Zeke's little finger, is delivered to the shop steward, a smirking, impotent patsy for management. After the shifts, Smokey goes to his own place, where there is never a shortage of women, cocaine and good rye whisky. Zeke goes home to the wife, children and color TV. The color TV, not yet paid for, stays on all day at Zeke's place, even if It shows only test patterns; he's determined to get his money's worth.

And Jerry goes home to his wife and children. One night marks the end of business as usual for all three men. Zeke gets a visit from the IRS man, who comes with information about Zeke's fraudulent deductions and a bill for more than $2,000 in back taxes. Zeke takes home $210 a week. Jerry learns that his daughter needs braces.

His take-home can't be much more than Zeke's, and the bin has to run to four figures. 4 jsf i XJ great. Next day, itt still another effort to get his locker fixed, Zftke pays a call on the president of the local antf, in passing, notes an easily accessible safe. 1 The pressure tn Zeke and Jerry, always there but never before too much to bear, leads to a wild evening at Smokey's and a vague scheme to empty tliiat union safe. As the days pass the vague scheme grows firm and three veryrnervous burglars, dressed by Zeke in five-and-dime disguises, pull off the job, only to find themselves with a grand total of $600.

Six hundred; in cash plus a notebook detailing illegal loans made with union funds. From there, blackmaf 1 becomes the name of the game, and it is only a matter of time until all three men, full of high! hopes, discover that they are up against an enemy so big, so powerful and so unscrupulous that there is no way to win. CERTAINLY, there is humor in this film, from the good times the men share and also from Pryor's manic character, not a conventionally humorous character but a serio-comic one. That monologue about his little finger is funny and it is not funny; same for the crack about why he watches test patterns on his color TV. There are also elements of a thriller in "Blue Collar," particularly from the midpoint on, when the workers turn crooks and attempt to take on their corrupt local, not realizing the endless supply of thugs and government agents who can be summoned against them.

The film Is most remarkable, however, for its description of the life of workers who have enough to buy a forkful of the American pie, enough to whet their appetites but not enough to fill them np. Guys like Zeke, Jerry and Smokey can handle the boredom at work. What they cannot handle is not being able to get the goodies after work. The situation could not be more familiar, nor more peculiarly American, and yet one cannot think of any film that lays it all out before us more forcefully than "Blue Collar." The lead actors, all three of them, are marvelous, working both with and off each other in performances of great integrity. Pryor has by far the showiest character, but his Zeke, like the film, is striking only in context; Kotto and Keitel provide a helluva context INTEGRITY is the right word for Schrader's first directorial effort, too.

His special gift seems to be setting a mood, creating an atmosphere. However, Schrader needs to jack up his self-confidence in himself, and one looks forward, in future films, to less labored efforts at getting across his meaning, less overly insistent music, less repetition of statements. For instance, Smokey tells the others, at one point, "Everything they do, the way they pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the black against the white, is meant to keep us in our place." Then the words are used again, as a kind of coda to the movie. The beauty of Schrader's "Blue Collar" is that Smokey doesn't need to say that, even once; the material itself is the message. Kathleen Beller at her birthday party.

Below, Yaphet Kotto, Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel arpie over evidence of union corruption in "Blue Collar.9 1 Ml creation and production of cars. The assembly line, in this movie, is worth a fleeting, split-screen sequence shot at the American Motors assembly plant in Kenosha, Wis. Don't yawn or you will miss it. What we do get, aplenty, Is the chance to sniff the dirty linen dropped by four generations of an auto magnate's family. Take Robbins at his word and we might well conclude that cars somehow result from a propensity on the part of their inventor and his progeny for fornication.

The film makes a feeble attempt to add Interest to the tediously repetitive material by presenting various rounds in the game-of sexual musical chairs In haphazard, as opposed to chronological, order. After sorting out the rounds, no mean chore, we have this: LOREN HARDEMAN SR one of the Industry pioneers, makes it with a giggling French maid and is seen in the act by his daughter-in-law who is, at that very minute, supposed to be downstairs dancing at a big party in honor of her marriage to Loren Hardeman Jr. Time passes. Loren Hardeman Jr. manages to father a son, Loren Hardeman TO, but Jr.

turns out to be a homosexual and so he blows his brains out, Just as any self-respecting Robbins homosexual would, with III, age six or so, looking on. Little tootles upstairs to tell Mommy about Daddy only to find Mommy In bed with Grandpa where, she has confessed, she has been longing to be ever since she caught him atop the giggling French maid. Hi grows up to be the kind of tough, womanizing character his father was not and so, with typical Robbins logic, he enjoys a certain success in the car business, diversifying it with more than a dozen non-automotive divisions while fathering a daughter by his wife and keeping in shape with a ravishing, titled English mistress. in his dotage, decides to step la and bring the business back to basics. To that end, he hires a kid named Perlno, a ear racer and the grandson of one of his Mafia cronies from the good old days, to design a lightweight, hiel-efflcent, sporty-looking family car.

Perlno and compete for power and for the favors of that ravishing, titled Englishwoman. Perlno also makes it with Ill's daughter, last of the Hardemans, called Betsy, from whence proposed wonder car and, indeed, the movie get their names. Sr. Is screwing his wife, the French maid, Li's wife Sally and who knows who all else. Jr.

is screwing Sally and his boyfriend until he shoots himself. Ill Is screwing his wife and Bobby, the Englishwoman. Pajro is screwing Bobby and Betsy. And, of course, Sr. and Perlno are trying to screw in while HI, in turn, does his damnedest to screw them first.

They should have called this movie "The Big Screw" nice ring of hardware to that, perfect for a picture about the auto industry. TO BE FAIR, It should be said that director Daniel Petrle keeps the camera away from the action as much as possible, showing couples before or after the fact whenever possible and, in some instances, such as the one pairing II and his male lover, simply dealing with the situation through talk. Suggestion, conversation and innuendo are not what make Robbins' alleged novels worldwide best-sellers, though. One appreciates the filmmaker's attempts at delicacy, but it doesn't help much; outright smut simply becomes cheap titillation. One sequence from the first half of the film pretty well defines the character of the whole, In terms of both content and style: Perlno has Just become best boy and is visiting the family manse in Grosse Pointe (which Is, in fact, a family manse in Newport, since the filmmakers apparently couldn't find the right thing in the right place).

A nymph in a robe Betsy approaches the pool. She Is a slim, small-boned girl with, we discover as she disrobes, surprisingly and disproportionately large breasts. Then we remember. This Is Harold Robbins country, where all females have disproportionately large breasts. But not for Perlno.

The camera catches him ogling Betsy and all but licking his lips. The camera then moves up the facade of the mansion to an oversized window behind which stands Sr. that's Betsy's great grandfather, mind you, a white-haired old coot who can barely get around after suffering a stroke. His expression precisely matches Perino's. And that, folks, is the low-down on the auto Industry and those who make cars go from our main man, Harold Robbins, in a movie that would definitely bring in more at the concession stand if barf bags were stocked in place of popcorn.

AMEN APPEL ARP BASKIN BUFFETi TODAY, SUNDAY FEBRUARY 12th CALDEI CHAGAl a. fff tv 1 I mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm CEZAN DUPREI DAL I Somerset Inn Troy 2601 W. Big Beaver Troy, Michigan EARLI F0L0N FINI "The Betsy" author addresses himself to the auto industry his way. That means we get nothing of the hard thinking, not to mention hard labor, behind the creation and pro-duction of cars. The assembly line, in this movie, is worth but a fleeting glance.

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