Stage Business

A Thousand Clowns, like most Broadway comedies submitted to the camera's cold scrutiny, changes for the worse in transition. No longer a play and not quite a movie, it falls victim to the war between incompatible techniques. Producer-Director Fred Coe, alert to the opportunities suggested by a housebound play in which the hero says he likes nothing better than to rove the streets of New York, frequently moves the action outdoors. He tries zoom shots, jump cuts, overlapping sound, running wild-and-free sequences and other New Cinema gimmickry (for no particular reason a cheese sandwich pops out at the Automat to the booming accompaniment of The Hallelujah Chorus). Such razzmatazz, rather selfconsciously wedged into Clowns' wordy theatrical bedrock, solves the problem of inertia but ultimately splits the film in two. Neither half survives.

For the conventional interior scenes, Playwright-turned-scenarist Herb Gardner retains much of the warmth, wit and likable sentiment that stamped his original work a success. Gardner wrote with disarming ambivalence of a hack gag writer (Jason Robards) who quits his job in protest against all of society's threats to individualism and specifically his indenture to a TV show called Chuckles the Chipmunk. "Actually," Robards explains, "it was not so much that I wasn't reaching the boys and girls out there in televisionland, but the boys and girls were starting to reach me."

In a frowzy Manhattan flat, Robards has settled down with his collection of curios and his sister's twelve-year-old illegitimate son (Barry Gordon). Soon a male-female team of social workers arrives to determine whether a whimsical nonconformist who disdains steady employment is a fit guardian. The girl social worker (Barbara Harris) becomes so attached to her case that she stays the night. Robards, in turn, comes to terms with the girl, the nephew and his old job.

Any veteran Hollywood duo--say, Jean Arthur and James Stewart in their light-comedy heyday--might have sopped up such moonshine with ease and squeezed a harmless message out of it. Unhappily, Director Coe's players come on larger than life and a good deal louder, as if to test the suicidal hypothesis that stage and screen acting are precisely the same thing. In a fidgety movie debut, Actress Harris flits around the edges of her role but appears unable to define it. Young Gordon hard-sells precocity with some sense of truth, but Martin Balsam, as the writer's go-getting brother, and Gene Saks as the aboriginal Chuckles, somehow make every speech sound like an applause cue. Only William Daniels, playing Barbara's child-welfare teammate, gets comfortably close to the role of the creep who admits: "I am not one of the warm people."

Clowns' worst tumble, and a crucial one, is taken by Robards, who re-creates his stage performance with a stilted, humor-killing delivery apparently aimed at the top balcony. Because he fails to charm the audience into believing that his eccentricity is any less dreary and tiresome than the workaday world, he seems to have little to lose or gain. In the end, it is easy to second Barbara's suggestion that her jobless jackanapes may be merely a self-inflated windbag.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.