' Arts •
Great white monster
Clancy Sigal The White Buffalo (London Casino and General Release) One on One (Warner West End, ABC Shaftesbury) Like a cat burglar my senses quicken when a film slips onto the circuits without the presumed advantages of a critics' screening and the usual ad fanfare, my first thought being: What are they trying to hide? Sometimes I's because the distributor knows the picture is an awful dud, and figures he may as 'yell cut his losses by not inviting critical hoots; but sometimes it's because the picitire doesn't fit the industry's ultraConventional expectations. I have no idea Why The White Buffalo (X) wasn't giveh the Equus or The Deep treatment, since it is Much better than either. But it Ls a little out of the way, both geographically (in the further-flung ABCs) and thematically.
Charles Bronson, hidden behind dark glasses and an unusually depressed grimace, Plays Wild Bill Hickok on his way back West to find the elusive albino buffalo Which has dogged his nightmares ever since he retired to join Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as a performer. The picture opens With one of these dream sequences, a strange bare Colorado landscape over Which is heard the thunderous portent of the white buffalo's all-destroying attack. This Moby Dick of the plains is a symbol of Aronson's guilt for having murdered so litany men, possibly also of his nostalgic Yearning for a purer, more open West he helped defile by decimating the Indians and buffalo.
Perhaps a rather too heavy premise for an action western and there are further problems for the western purist. The dialogue is Often as fancy as the symbolism. 'Hell or heaven, this is the night I was born for', Aronson murmurs portentously, surveying the chosen ground for his encounter with the white buffalo. And when he finds a scarlet woman shot dead in a stagecoach he Muses, 'This lady is walk in' the streets of glory'. The soundtrack is full of such Pseudo-western poesy. There is also a good Indian, Chief Crazy Horse, renamed Worm by the tribal elders because he hasn't yet caught the white buffalo that killed his child and destroyed their village.
Ordinarily I'd run a mile from a western !o arch and frankly fantastical. The reason I liked The White Buffalo is that it is essen tially a tight, three-man drama played with a sttbdued pitilessness by Bronson, his grizzled and cruel trapper buddy Jack War den and Will Sampson (Chief Bromden in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest). As seldom before, the camera catches the fear and sadness, even a kind of disguised effeminacy in Bronson's incredible face; his sombre perception that he has so few options left to him pervades the film. (If I don't kill this buffalo, it will kill me.) That's why he is willing to cooperate with Crazy Horse to track down this huge white nemesis whose killing is, for both men, a supreme act of expiation for an ambiguous, unacknowledged guilt. By contrast, Jack Warden is refreshingly down-to-earth as Bronson's friend who can't abide 'red niggers' (Indians) or the subtle balances of life-and-death Bronson trails behind him on , this trip. Warden Would just as soon shoot Crazy Horse in the back as look at him, and when Bronson tries to explain the complicated reasoning behind his quest and the Indian's place in it, Warden just mutters: 'Bullshit'. At the end, when Bronson and Crazy Horse have worked together to bring down the great white monster, and the Indian sets up his ancient cry of triumph over its heaving, bloody carcass, Warden turns his back on both of them in disgust.
This is director J. Lee Thompson's best film for a long time. It also has Kim Novak (back after a long retirement), John Carradine and the ever-watchable Slim Pickens. In spite of its murky mysticism it moves, and I haven't seen Bronson this effective for a long time. Recommended.
Sports may be war carried on by other means, but they are also politics under another name. That is why Watergate unlocked a flood of films attracting the win-at-any-price ethic most Americans are used to in their major athletic contests. Paul Newman's Slap Shot, about rough-housing in pro ice hockey, was a foul-mouthed crack at gutter sportsmanship. By contrast One on One (A) is more like The Sound of Music or Bambi: pure, noble, innocent. A little too corny and la h-de-dah for my taste but undeniably a junior Rocky, a winner.
Robby Benson (who wrote the Boys' Own script with his father Jerry Segal) is a relatively tiny five-foot-ten state basketball hero who wins a four-year athletic scholarship to a big California university. Although he led a wide-eyed, unblemished life back at his hick-town high school, Robby discovers that in exchange for the scholarship he's now expected to be a 'jock' Who lives basketball twenty-four hours a day, takes orders like a robot and in return gets bribes from the alumni in the form of ticket rake-offs, sex and marijuana parties and meaningless jobs he never has to work at. All this is a shock to his idealistic, bumpkinish character: his only ambition is to play his heart out for his childhood hero, the coach, portrayed as a tight-lipped Hitler by G.D. Spradlin.
Naturally it's a pert, busty coed, his assigned tutor to keep him up to scratch in grades, who wakes Robby to The Real Meaning of Life. Her taunts at the low intellectual calibre of 'jocks' spurs him to crack a book for the first time in his life. But his romantic involvement With the girl, plus his new mental pursuits and his small size create problems on the basketball court where he's up against ferocious, man-eating seven-footers. Suddenly unable to cut the mustard, he pops pep pills which make him so manic he comically explodes all over the gym. The coach, who has no time for oddballs, fires him — but Robby's no quitter. Despite the coach's harassment, including setting the team yobbos on him in a bloody fight, Robby jumps in at the last minute to win the final basketball game for the college — and then tells the coach where to shove his scholarship. It's a fairytale finish, like the end of The Front when Woody Allen tells the Congressional witch-hunters to go to hell — predictable and mechanically heartwarming.
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