Without Rules

"IT'S AN easy thing to be a director," John Landis told an audience at the Hasty Pudding Theater last Saturday. "There are no rules."

Such could be the sum total of Landis' career, which took off after his epochal 1978 film Animal House. In that picture, we were told, "It was the Deltas against the rules. And the rules lost." Since then, Landis has continued to break rules, whether by making an R&B picture during the height of disco (1980's The Blues Brothers) or by running roughshod over MTV's 3-minute video format with a 20-minute musical short subject (Michael Jackson's Thriller).

Landis' contempt for rules, however, has had less entertaining results. The deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two child extras on the set of Landis' Twilight Zone--The Movie segment four years ago suggested that, indeed, there are some rules to which even cinematic iconoclasts ought to adhere. Landis has admitted that the two young extras were working in violation of California's child-labor laws, and now he and several of his colleagues are on trial for involuntary manslaughter and criminal negligence in the three deaths.

Speculations on Landis' prospects for acquittal were on the lips of all who attended the Pudding seminar, but, as judicial prudence would have it, the trial was the one subject made off limits. David Lane Seltzer '87, who has organized the Pudding's new directors series, asked the audience not to mention the case, before introducing Landis as "a man who is responsible for bringing us a lot of laughs."

FOR TODAY'S young adult, that can hardly be denied; an entire generation of college students has received much of its pop-cultural indoctrination from Animal House and such Saturday Night Live gang spinoffs as Trading Places. Landis' most successful work has come from his association with the late John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy and other SNL types. The Landis picture screened before the seminar, An American Werewolf in London, is a comedy-horror riot, simply plotted and masterfully executed, and laced with the kind of suburb-smart dialogue that engenders instant identification, from Great Neck, N.Y., to Encino, Calif.

For all Its laughs, American Werewolf displays a classic Landis weakness. Almost every one of the film's creative elements, from characters to special effects, shows a degree of thought and attention to detail most youth comedies do without. Yet all the effort--clever dialogue, gruesome special effects, expertly choreographed car crashes--exists to propel an idea that is, well, dumb. Landis made a werewolf movie that is nothing more than a werewolf movie; a pity, because it could have conveyed more profound sentiments than "Yikes!" Landis said he got the idea in 1969, when while traveling through Yugoslavia, he saw a ritual peasant burial to guard against corpses rising from the grave. "What would happen if that body got up?" he recalled asking himself. "I'm totally unequipped to deal with the living dead."

AND THAT WAS it: superstition made metaphysical reality, through artful and intelligent craftsmanship. Landis is far from the most offensive practitioner of this cinematic strand--few could equal Steven Spielberg's contributions to mass know-nothingness--but it is unfortunate to watch so much talent put to so little good. In his own mind, Landis is a subtle social commentator who is also able to sell tickets. He said he viewed Trading Places as a statement against racism and Spies Like Us, a film universally dismissed as lame, as the first picture to take a stand against President Reagan's "Star Wars" project.

Indeed, Morrow and the children perished in pursuit of another pithy Landis message against intolerance. Morrow played a Middle-American bigot who miraculously finds himself placed in the positions of the Blacks, Jews, Asians and others he hates. In the end, Morrow was to be redeemed by his experience, but due to the accident, the segment was left with a more ambiguous ending. Still, Landis' Twilight Zone prologue, with Aykroyd and Albert Brooks driving along a deserted road, is a wonderfully effective piece of American Werewolf-like comedy-horror. Likewise, his other pictures have often been flawed but given a sense of anarchistic earnestness that, like the many misfiring SNL sketches, earns an audience's indulgence. If only there were a point to the continuous car crashes in The Blues Brothers or the kilotons of carrion in American Werewolf.

Throughout his seminar and the reception for students that followed, Landis unconsciously reiterated his central theme. To the legions of sycophantic admirers who asked for tips on entering the movie business, Landis repeated that directing is "greatly overrated as a profession. There are no rules." Some in Hollywood might wish there were.