Monday, Mar. 12, 1973

Quick Cuts

By J.C.

PAYDAY chronicles 36 hours in the life of a minor country-and-western singer called Maury Dann, a sort of Orpheus pretending who boozes, wenches pops pills and passes along the old payola. As played and sung by Rip Torn --eyes bulging, teeth bared until they look like a couple of upended harmonicas--he seems less gifted in music than m hog calling. Like A Face in the Crowd, Payday tries hard to be about the spiritual bankruptcy of American life, but Director Daryl Duke emulates only the hysteria, not the theatrical fervor, of the 1957 Kazan film. The wretched photography uses a style known as "television light," meaning that the frame is burned with bright light so that everything will show up clearly on the home screen. In a theater, where the image is much larger, such a misconceived technique makes the actors look as if they were being paraded through a police lineup. Scenarist Don Carpenter has provided some pretty good redneck dialogue, and there is a well-observed performance by Michael C. Gwynne as Maury's tense, troll-like manager, who looks as if he regarded the daylight hours as a direct threat to his health.

LOLLY-MADONNA XXX is a love-and-kisses signature at the end of a note that leads two Tennessee hill families into range warfare. The plot is infernally complex, while the idea-- an allegory about aggression and the mad carnage it can cause-- is simpleminded, like symbolizing the Viet Nam War (or any war) by a skirmish in a papaw patch. The feuding families are so grossly caricatured in the writing and direction that by comparison the Jukes and the Kalli-kaks seem like the Cabots and the Lodges. Robert Ryan and Rod Steiger appear as the opposing patriarchs, Ryan looking stunned, Steiger wallowing in mean ingless excess, a puppet dedicated to self-parody. Jeff Bridges, as a sensitive son, is decent enough-- a triumph under the circumstances--and a newcomer named Season Hubley is something more than that. In the thankless role of a teen-age girl who is spirited off by the Steiger clan, she is fresh, sexy and very sprightly.

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