Spiritual Disease

In Mike Nichols' musical The Apple Tree, the biggest laugh came when the naked Adam bit the apple--and instantly snatched a towel to his loins. In a sense, all of Director Nichols' work, from Virginia Woolf to The Graduate and Catch-22, has included the same scene: knowledge precedes shame. On the surface, Nichols' new film, Carnal Knowledge, is an unfettered sexual farce. But the subtext carries the chill of fastidious puritanism: sex is dirty; touch it and you get a disease.

Here the disease is not venereal but spiritual. Its scarlet lettermen are types rather than individuals, traced from undergraduate days to their adulterous 40s. Nichols opens with a series of kinetically hilarious sketches, starring Campus Smoothie Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and his pre-med buddy Sandy (Arthur Garfunkel). Cinematically, Nichols has never been less tricky or more acute. With dazzling focus he watches Sandy light upon an icily gorgeous WASP named Susan (Candice Bergen). The naif spills every intimate detail to his roommate; with metronomic two-timing, Jonathan moves in on Sandy and with Susan. But the Ivy rake has only one real amour: the mirror. Eventually he abandons Susan to Sandy, who marries her and lives happily never after.

Ultimate Weapon. Years later, in a comedy of Eros, Jonathan uncovers an arouseful blouseful named Bobbie (AnnMargret). Here at last is a girl with whom a man can share his ambitions --and Jonathan's main ambition is to make love 25 hours a day. But after a while, as girls will, Bobbie begins thinking the unthinkable. The very notion of marriage is enough to make Jonathan forsake her bod and board. But the "relationship" persists until Bobbie releases her ultimate weapon: sleep. She snores on for eight, ten, finally 15 hours a day until, in the film's most effective crescendo, Jonathan pops like a light bulb, scattering shards of himself around the screen.

At the conclusion, both Jonathan and Sandy have become fatuous travesties of the American male, a creature, the film implies, who loathes the apposite sex. Sandy is a superannuated swinger, complete with stash, burns and a 17-year-old hippie on his arm. Jonathan is even more pathetic. In the final semi-surrealistic scene, he lies on his back awaiting the ministrations of a prostitute (Rita Moreno). As she sinks slowly, agonizingly slowly, to her knees she recites a ritual of masculine domination: "You have ... an inner power so great that every act, no matter what, is more proof of that power." If the text varies by so much as a word, Jonathan cannot achieve orgasm. The great swordsman, the contemptuous user of women, has become impotent.

Impossible Four. Clearly, Scenarist Jules Feiffer and Director Nichols had more than facile satire in mind. Judging by FeifFer's acidulous cartoons and Nichols' previous work, they are men with considerable powers of observation. But in Carnal Knowledge, their vision is scan deep. Save at the beginning, men and women address one another and are treated as mere organs. Coupling is viewed with righteous distaste. Sex, though essentially joyless as practiced by these characters, must be followed by punishment. The film does glitter with explicit wit, but far too often it is reduced to attitudes posing as people, glimpses pretending to be insights.

Given all this, Nichols has done the impossible--and he has done it four times. With Carnal Knowledge, Folk Singer Arthur Garfunkel has become an authentic screen presence--one of the few American actors who can portray naivete. As for Nicholson, it is no secret that he can take lines and make them assume almost any shape. But this is the first time he has been called upon to age 20 years in the span of two hours. It is more than merely his hair that thins; it is his amour-propre, his attitudes, his ego. Feiffer has composed a cartoon, but Nicholson has created one of the screen's few straight misogynists.

Despite the excellence of the men, it is the women whose work demonstrates why many performers would forsake salaries to work with Nichols. Candice Bergen is, at last, the Fitzgerald heroine she was born to be --her laughter brimming with money, her eyes and mouth full of promise that betrays frigidity. But it is Ann-Margret who presents a genuine shock to the viewer. This overripe Barbie doll, this vanilla Raquel Welch has become, with one switch of the flick, an actress of persuasion. The singles barfly, the joyful mattress, the worn mistress --in each phase she refuses to succumb to caricature or mockery. She is almost the only sign of humanity in the heartless Carnal Knowledge--a passive, pitiable woman who evokes two kinds of sadness: one for the character she portrays, the other for the wasted years of a foundering career. At last, she and her audience receive their Nichols' worth.

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