Bed & Beard, International

Greenwich Village Story is about Brian and Genie, who live together in a borrowed loft. They are painfully in love and hopelessly beat. Brian is writing a book called Get Ready to Crawl. "I don't care who reads it," says Brian. "I just care what it says." Genie is a dancer. She practices on the roof with a plastic geranium for inspiration.

Brian and Genie live a life crammed with riots ("Hey--you kids coming over to the Square for the fallout protest?"), romance ("So who gets married?") and rationalization ("People call us beatniks. I suppose we do look wild."). For kicks there are marijuana orgies, round-robin poetry readings, coffeehouse-hopping. And lots of why, why, why.

According to Writer-Producer-Director Jack O'Connell, many scenes were shot right on the streets of Manhattan's Greenwich Village, "the lines being recorded by small microphones hung around the actors' necks, the wires trailing from their pants cuffs." If the dialogue is strictly trailing from pants cuffs, the photography by Baird Bryant is often poetic, and even the acting is haltingly expressive so long as the actors keep their mouths shut. Somebody might salvage the whole project by dubbing it into French, blocking in a set of sophisticated subtitles, sending it to Cannes and smuggling it back under the title of Brian et Genie.

Run with the Devil is about bohemians--Italian style. Their credo is: when in Rome, do as the Villagers do. But the painters and their girl friends who live in the Via Margutta are mentally a lot healthier than their MacDougal Street counterparts; they know their limitations. Says one: "In five years, not one of us has become a good painter."

One of them almost does. He leaves the Via Margutta with his girl friend Donata, and the next thing his old pals know, he has a one-man show at a fancy gallery. Says a crony: "I'm pleased for Donata--she's had a hard time, but at last she's found the right bed." But Donata's bed turns out to be the wrong one. When their friends throw a celebration for them in the old neighborhood, the truth comes out with the wine: the artist's show has been paid for secretly by a middle-aged antique dealer who had taken a fancy to him. And it was the dealer who had bought all the paintings.

Although the bed-and-beard similarities are inescapable, Run with the Devil is a more ambitious and professional undertaking than Greenwich Village Story. But perhaps to Romans it seems just as silly and unreal.

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