Summer Leftovers

AS USUAL, Boston is the sticks for moviegoers. Pictures of which New York audiences have long been weary still haven't opened here; others dropped in and out over the summer. Still others--a few--are actually on display downtown.

The most left-over of the left-overs is Mel Brooks' The Producers, a professionally written, professionally staged, but miserably filmed comedy starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder. In spirit, the picture is happily reminiscent of the Marx Bros., and it has ten minutes of genius-within-genius under the title Springtime for Hitler, a musical about the Third Reich. Here, working on stage, Brooks is at his best as a director, and achieves the very tricks of timing which elude him on film. His lyrics for the show's title song ("Springtime for Hitler and Germany/Winter for Poland and France/We're marching to a faster pace/Look out, here comes the master race.") deserve enshrinement. But The Producers dies a slow and painful death, a half-hour at least without a laugh, and by the time it's over Brooks' short tenure at the front rank of movie comedies has ended also.

Less funny if more consistent is Gene Saks' filmed version of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. A dull bunch of character actors takes the edge off the comedy, and Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon don't work nearly so well together as in Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie. By chance this assertion can be tested since The Fortune Cookie is on re-release at the Orpheum. It, rather than The Odd Couple or The Producers, is the legitimate '60's heir to the best tradition of Hollywood comedies.

PAUL NEWMAN has approached his first directing assignment with an attitude sensibly balanced between ambition and restraint. His subject matter, highly conducive both to boredom and pretension, is the plight of a 36-year-old virgin (at least the ads say she's 36), played by Joanne Woodward. He works in a straight stream-of-consciousness style, using quick flashbacks intended to depict in reasonable measure the drift of his main character's mind. Sometimes these are a little irritating, but rarely more than that, and sometimes they're downright effective. Newman's use of camera is, in contrast to the fancy editing, routinely tasteful. The result is an intelligent and mildly absorbing movie of a sort not often seen nowadays. If not glistening with promise, Newman's bow as director nevertheless lacks the arrogance characteristic of a Mike Nichols or a Francis Ford Coppola, both more conventional Hollywood prodigies.

The intelligence of Rachel, Rachel is distributed evenly over its manifold parts. Miss Woodward's performance is typically thoughtful and typically first-rate. Estelle Parsons appears fleetingly and to good effect, and the rest of Rachel, Rachel's small cast is fine as well as suitably anoymous in character. Jerome Moross has written a score that would be more noteworthy if the themes and orchestration weren't so similar to The Big Country, for which he also wrote music. Stewart Stern's screenplay is consonant in its intelligence with Newman's direction.

It may be that for Newman Rachel, Rachel represents a kind of exorcism of the plots and parts thrust on him in ten years as a successful movie actor. He has gone further than merely not casting himself in his first try at directing; he has cast no one remotely like himself--no slick stars--and given his actors no slick dialogue. With a little more humor and a lighter touch all around, Newman could become a really good direcor, though maybe not to the point of contributing more to a picture as director than actor. So it might in any case not be worth the effort.