Bursting in Air

If you're looking for the normal gunslamming, Dirty Harry with a .44 magnum taking aim at the streets of San Francisco, you won't find it in Bronco Billy. What you will find is a hard luck story--with a plot as an excuse for satire.

And mixed in with all the corn, of course, are a few good laughs. At one point, when the perfectually prissy and platinum (Sondra Locke) cuddles up to Bronco Billy in the back of his trailer, Eastwood gets all soft and sentimental and tells the story of his life. He went on the road, it turns out, after he went to jail. And he went to jail, it turns out, because he tried to kill somebody.

"I caught my wife in bed with my best friend," Billy explains to a wide-eyed Lily.

"What did you do to him?" Lily asks.

"I shot her."

Fame

Directed by Alan J. Parker

At the Paris

WHAT IF a writer lured you into a tantalizing, suggestive paragraph, and abruptly ended it?

And then led you into another, only to end that one, too?

And continued to do so for two hours?

Alan J. Parker leads us along an analogous cinematic path in Fame. Despite inherently interesting material and an alluring score by Michael Gore, Fame is mired in an endless series of camera pans and scenes that beg a batch of questions. Parker leaves his audience hanging--for two hours--drawing us into his den with upbeat music and rousing clips of rhythmic, euphoric chaos. But characters rarely develop, and when they do, their plight and the plot remain exasperatingly unresolved.

The drama teacher at High School for the Performing Arts tells the freshman class they will need three things to make it: a strong technique, a good agent, and a thick skin. By the time graduation rolls around, the oncenaive wunderkinder have developed the latter. At its center, Fame is really a monument to modern-day egoism. What has the Me Generation wrought at PA? A bunch of conceited, albeit talented, immortality-seekers who think of nothing but themselves.

From Manhattan, the South Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn the raw come to audition. Some have been sheltered, some have been hardened. But four years later, in the film's well-orchestrated finale, they join together to sing:

...I toast to my own reunion When I will be one with the stars And in time, and in time We will all be stars

In fact, the use of the first person sticks out during the entire film, always reminding the audience of these would-be stars' priorities. The lyrics to the film's title song go something like this: "Fame--I'm going to live forever. Fame..."

Which really is a pity, because the young actors who compose the cast exude talent. Barry Miller plays Ralph Garcey (ne Raoul Garcia), a Freddy Prinze worshipper, with precocious elan, displaying a range of emotions unusual at such a tender age. And Gene Anthony Ray, as dazzling dancer Leroy Johnson, shows an uncharacteristic ease with his role. But none of the characters is capable of shattering the wall of self-centeredness the script erects around each of them. As the mundane screenplay often says, they "can't relate."

Perhaps Parker wants the movie's style to reinforce its content; maybe he wishes to convey that the road to fame is riven with unpredictability and adversity. Most viewers, however, realize that; and this choppy, self-indulgent work fails even as an adolescent Chorus Line. While Parker has a good eye for projecting spontaneity--several scenes evoke the chilling chase through the streets of Istanbul in his Midnight Express--he has a cloying tendency to content himself with flirt and skirt, inadvertently erasing any semblance of passion that leaks through the surface.

Blue Lagoon

Directed by Randal Kleiser

At the Cinema 57

ON THE THEORY that Americans won't sit still for two hours of National Geographic outtakes, the producers of Blue Lagoon added the following to their film--

Two lithe, tanned bodies. Brooke Shields and Chris Atkinson go from baby fat to puberty in the waters of a tropical bay. At first they swim in their underwear. Later, they shuck their clothes. They are growing up. Still later, they learn to make love. For the next 20 minutes, all they do is couple, on the beach, in the mango grove, behind the bamboo hut, and everywhere. They are almost adults now. The movie end when they intentionally overdose on red berries, the Fijian equivalent of Miltown. Totally grown up.

Three or four sharks, who appear to fill the occasional lapses when our young stars decide they have had enough of each other. The sharks, one of whom somehow manages to steal the oars to the only rowboat in paradise, scare only the parts of the audience that have seen Jaws, a classic case of guilt by association.

A dozen or so dark-skinned natives who appear only once, for about 40 seconds. Despite living on the same island for a dozen years, the two groups have managed to avoid each other. Determined to make their screen time count, the natives bob and weave around a campfire like so many loinclothed Travoltas and then sacrifice one their number to a hook-nosed Easter Island statue.

Even with the sharks, the savages and the suntanned insatiable teenagers, Blue Lagoon (which should be called Green Lagoon since that it the color of the water there) drags.

One way to spend the two hours is trying to figure out metaphors. No one from paradise is allowed to "go over to the other side" where the "bogeyman" lives. Should the bogeyman cross into civilization, Mr. Atkinson promises to "spear him" in the head, the guts, and other areas. Man name of John Foster Dulles wrote much the same script in his day, but lacked the underwater photography necessary to produce this thriller.

The other allusions in the film are to the creation story, but here the trail is twisted. Certainly it is not carnal knowledge that does in our heroes, or the film would last only 45 minutes. On the other hand, they 'lude out on the red berries, the island's only forbidden fruit. And they celebrate Christmas, so maybe you have to read the New Testament to understand.

Whatever their intent, the men who made Blue Lagoon blew their only shot at success when they decided to use sound. Our bleached blond hero discusses knowledge in these terms: "There are so many things I don't understand," he says. ". . . Why are all these funny hairs growing on me?" And later, angered at her lover's South Pacific hijinks, Ms. Shields shouts the classic words "I'll get you for this."

Urban Cowboy

Directed by James Bridges

At the Sack Cheri

WHY DO THE CREDITS always come when the hero is driving down a highway? What is it about highways and Hollywood?

CLOSE-UP: Travolta's bearded face, impassively surveying his childhood home for what could be the last time. Then we

PAN OUT: To reveal the countryside once again, rows and rows of corn and other delectable green things that, presumably, have already been sprayed for bugs.

MEDIUM SHOT: The road, a thin white (should we? yes) ribbon sprinting toward the horizon.

LONG SHOT: Urban Cowboy.

Travolta moved with strobe-lit energy in Saturday Night Fever, woofing his dialogue in a clipped, arrogant, street dialect that matched the simplicity and pant-leg vision of his character. But he brings none of that same energy to director James Bridges' Texas hoedown, which attempts to show where them high-paid redneck rig-works head when the lights go down on the Lone Star prairie. Without a central character who can do anything more than look dumb--convincingly--Bridges has nowhere to take his film.

At first, he seems fascinated by the Southern notion of kin, families that bind when the shit starts flying. But then he turns to Southern sex, and then Southern drinking, and finally to Southern marriage. The men in this seedy world dominate the women and think nothing of taking a fist to the source of their romantic troubles. They are full of guts and fighting nerve, the leathery types who jumped at the chance to wade through the rice paddies near Da Nang. Watching them at leisure makes them no more appealing.

All of them, and their women, are obsessed with being cowboys. But Houston is a city of crude, not dudes, and so these men dress up in pointy boots, fat belts and straw stetsons to swig beer and suffer the whine of C&W at Gilley's, the biggest nightclub in the world. At Gilley's Travolta manages to fall in and out and in love with a cute kid named Debra Winger. For some reason, their parents don't attend their wedding, which takes place, naturally, at Gilley's. This all purpose saloon reeks of Coors and looks like a Shriners' club with the lights turned low. It leaves us pining for more highways and more credits.