The Termite & the Butterfly

Crazy Quilt. Henry (Tom Rosqui) is a realist. "He knows," says the narrator (Burgess Meredith), "that God is dead, that innocence is a fraud and guilt a disease, happiness a myth and despair a pose. And that vice is no more interesting than virtue." Henry works as a termite exterminator and looks like a large unshaven blur. Lorabelle (Ina Mela) is an idealist. "She believes in everything. In Providence and butterflies, romance and statuary." She plays all day long, sniffing flowers and feeding ducks, and looks like the dew on the wings of a wish.

Henry and Lorabelle meet in San Francisco. She sighs: "You have lovely eyes." He snorts: "I have granulated eyelids." Though they don't know it, Henry and Lorabelle have begun a dialogue that will last a lifetime. Though the spectator may not know it, he has begun to watch a deliberately minor masterpiece. Written, directed, photographed and produced for less than $100,000 by a 30-year-old TV producer named John Korty, Crazy Quilt is an almost perfect little film that says something both funny and profound about one of life's larger ironies: the painful and yet wonderful difference between what people seek in the world and what they find.

What Henry seeks is a hole in the ground; what he finds in Lorabelle is a way to the light. What Lorabelle seeks is a castle in the air; what she finds in Henry is a way back to earth. Though they marry, Henry and Lorabelle at first refuse their double destiny. When she imagines a life full of love and beauty, Henry scoffs at her "elegant mirages" and pulls back into his hole. When he pulls back too far, she flies off to her air castle and shares it with a succession of inappropriate inamorati: a thieving thespian, a dim-witted trigamist, a great white hunter who inconsiderately gets swallowed by a lion.

After ten years of this, both members of the marriage see the error of their ways. As Lorabelle settles down, Henry takes wing. Together they build a house and a family; together they remain till the end. Yet till the end she remains a romantic and he a cynic. "In all that he did," the narrator concludes, "he could see himself striving toward a condition of love or truth or goodness that did not exist. But he stayed with it because he knew there wasn't anything else."

U.S. cinema has seldom produced a picture as sophisticated in style as Crazy Quilt. Director Korty speaks an ultramodern language of film with a fluency that refuses flamboyance; every part of his art is resolved in the whole of his work. Korty's camera keeps the eye informed and exercised, but never offers it extraneous excitement. Peter Schickele's score flows so congruously out of the images that the spectator sometimes feels he must be seeing with his ears. And the actors--Rosqui is a member of Manhattan's Lincoln Center Repertory Theater, and Mela an off-Broadway starlet who recently taught Latin in a Long Island high school--move with a fine unregarding spontaneity that turns parts into people. In the relations between these two people Director Korty achieves the fullest realization of his theme. He demonstrates day by day, crisis by crisis, how fear and lust and ignorance transform at last into the sacred mystery of marriage.

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