A witty, sad, satirical fable

Press, 28 July 1987, Page 22

A witty, sad, satirical fable

By

DAVID WILSON

Recent releases from Warner Home Video include:

“Blume in Love” (R). “To be in love with a woman who scorns you is a problem. To be in love with a man who scorns you is a dilemma. But to be in love with your exwife is a tragedy.” Stephen Blume, who muses these words in a Venice cafe, is a man desperately in love with the one woman in the world who won’t have anything to do with him — his ex-wife, Nina, who caught him in the act of a little hanky-panky homework with his law firm secretary. For a divorce lawyer, divorce comes easy, but Blume suddenly wakes up to what he is losing and realises he will do anything to get her back. Paul Mazursky’s “Blume in Love” is a witty, sad, satirical fable of love and marriage, but not in that order. In six years of married life, Blume took happiness for granted. Unmarried, he

flops about like a fish out of water. How far will Blume go to become a husband again? Murder, of course, is out of the question — but rape is a definite possibility. George Segal delivers a fine performance as the lovesick hypocrite, Blume, who grows on one’s affections despite a lack of character often approaching perfect vacuum. Susan Anspach plays the beautiful Nina, who wakes up to her own worth "as a woman as she patches together a new life of her own; and Kris Kristofferson plays Elmo, the musician who drifts into Nina’s life and drives Blume to jealous distraction. “Soup for One" (M). Allen Martin is young, unmarried, unattached, unloved, and hot on the trail of the perfect girl. Unfortunately, he has never even laid eyes on her — but he did spell out her vital statistics to a police missing persons artist, whose pencil sketch is carried next to Allen’s eager heart. All he has to do Is find the real-life woman who corresponds to his fantasy drawing, and Alien’s lonely soup-for-one existence will instantly transform into married bliss. Or will it? “Soup for One” is a sharp satirical comedy that happily reminds us that the course of true love never does run smooth. In Alien’s case, that is something of an understatement as he stumbles through a psychological minefield on his way to the altar. “Class of ’44” (M). In “Summer of ’42” movie-

goers were first introduced to the nostalgic, comic adventures of three teen-age boys as they stumbled and groped their way through puberty. Now, two years later, the same “terrible trio” — Hermle, Oscy and Benjy — have graduated and it’s time for them to stumble and grope their way to manhood.

As writer Herman Raucher continues his saga about the pleasures and pains of growing up, the story itself grows up. Not only do these high school grads face the normal uncertainties about their future, they also face the fact that there may not be a future, for the world is at war.

Shy and overly protected Benjy (Oliver Conant) is the first to find the courage to break away when he secretly enlists in the Marines. Meanwhile, Hermie (Gary

Grimes) and Oscy (Jerry Houser) are reluctantly forced to watch the war. from the sidelines as they take the more conservative path to manhood down ivy-covered corridors.

They are about to discover, however, that unexpected perils lurk even in those hallowed hallways. Wild and outrageous fraternity hazings, phone-booth stuffings and other collegiate shenanigans seem tame in comparison to the ultimate fatality — falling in love. Hermie’s rite of passage into manhood is marked with poignancy when he falls head-over-heels for a brash young co-ed (Deborah Winters), while Oscy’s passage is marked with hilarity when he meets his match in a seductive older woman, who teaches him more than he has ever learned in any classroom. “A Little Romance” (PG) is about two lonely, gifted children. He is 13 and lives with his father, a Parisian taxi driver; he daydreams over American movies and predicts horse-race winners. She is beautiful, reads philosophy, is not quite 13, and lives with her mother, an actress already on her third husband and working to acquire a fourth.

“A Little Romance” brings these two children together in a charming, sentimental adventure that carries them across Europe to act out a fantasy of eternal love under the Bridge of Sighs iin Venice. Surrounding the two leading players (Diane Lane and Thelonious Bernard) are veteran stars Laurence Olivier, Arthur Hill, Sally Kellerman and Broderick Crawford. Portraying the elderly diplomat (and pickpocket) Julius Edmond Santorin, Olivier reminds us again that he is one of the finest and most versatile actors. “Casanova,” the romantic legend of history’s most famous lover stars Richard Chamberlain and Faye Dunaway. Bom Glovannie Casanova in Venice in 1725, he is depicted in this movie as a sly yet ingenious rascal whose dalliances and deceits cost him careers in the law, the priesthood and the army. So Casanova proceeds to make a career of pleasure which lands him In a formidable Venice prison as a notorious profligate and corruptor of public morals. When he died in 1798, two months after his seventy-third birthday, most people had never heard of Casanova. Then, 22 years after his death his great-nephew sold the memoirs for a pittance to Brockhaus, a Leipzig publisher, and public response was sensational. Denounced as scandalous and frequently banned, Casanova’s memoirs became one of the most widely read books of the nineteenth century. Though fewer than a third of his anecdotes concern amorous escapades, Casanova quickly earned the reputation as an erotic writer.

His daring and factbased escape attempt from his fortress Is one of the highlights of the movie, which also dramatises more fanciful escapades.