From Oregon to Manhattan to Eraserheads If You're Staying In This Weekend

The Grey Fox

This tale of a train robber in turn of the century Oregon and southwest Canada contains the most spectacular landscape scenery of any movie in recent memory. The film essentially follows the trains which are the source of the Grey Fox's (Richard Farnsworth) plunder as they wend their lone ways through the small towns and steppes of the Yukon and British Columbia.

Most of this breathtaking scenery is not gratuitous, for it adds to the image of the Grey Fox as a lone renegade who is at home amidst the elements. The film's flaw is its reliance on the scenery as a substitute for a full plot. At the end of the film, we are left, consequently, feeling unsatisfied, though somehow aesthetically and spiritually elevated.

Diary of a Mad Housewife

Carrie Snodgrass and Richard Benjamin star as a married couple living an unsatisfied life in the ranks of the upper middle class on the upper West Side of Manhattan's West Side. He is a lawyer with a seemingly bottomless ability to dish out verbal abuse to his wife, and is a thoroughly repellant figure. She, on the other hand, is a static person, spending her days wandering through museums and selecting the correct pattern for that year's Christmas cards.

Oddly, Snodgrass is no more static than the other characters in the film; her husband seems headed for a life of merely annoying everyone around him, and the "celebrities" with whom they associate are fools caught up in fads. Despite the film's humor and high sarcasm, it captures the dark, oppressed life inside the mind of its heroine. She is a selfunderstanding alien in this land of shallow monsters.

But she is held back by her womanhood, and in this way, Diary of a Mad Housewife is the most honest and biting depiction of the daily mental battering endured by women.

Eraserhead

This is David Lynch; you're not supposed to understand it.

Eraserhead, Lynch's first film, is a bizarre college of disturbing surrealistic scenes. The plot focuses around Henry (John Nance), his wife Mary (Charlotte Stewart) and the deformed creature that is their premature baby. The beast dominates their lives, driving Mary back to her parents' house with its incessant wailing. Henry, left to care for the monster, seeks an escape through his imagination only to discover the same beast within his own self. The tortuous story culminates with Henry's accidental destruction of the child as he tries to cut away the bandages that shroud it.

The black and white cinematography, sparse dialogue and unpredictably strange plot twists of this cult classic prefigure all the weirdness of Lynch's later flicks. While the shadowy sets and often unintelligible action can be excruciatingly frustrating at times, the movie as a whole delivers a hunting message about the search for a meaningful existence in the technological desolation of the post-modern World.