Quick Cuts

By J.C.

WICKED, WICKED is a shopsoiled piece of Guignol tricked up with a split-screen technique the distributor has christened Duo-Vision. The film is as unimaginative as that label. Since there are two separate images on the same screen, the ads promise, "Twice the tension! Twice the terror!" A little elementary multiplication furnishes the melancholy reminder that twice zero is still nothing. Two images only reinforce the suspicion that Writer-Director Richard L. Bare had difficulty filling even one screen, and had to resort to all sorts of scraps off the cutting-room floor. While a maladjusted youth (Randolph Roberts) scurries about a California seaside resort slicing up comely blonde lodgers, an organist (Maryesther Denver) appears on whichever side of the screen is unoccupied and plays the organ score from The Phantom of the Opera--1925 version. Miss Denver has the gruesomely businesslike air of the nurse who used to assist your childhood dentist with extractions and appears totally transported as she pulls out the organ stops. Wicked, Wicked is so obstinately mundane that it takes a while to decide whether Miss Denver's presence was meant in a spirit of fun or whether, like those split screens, it is just another gimmick. Finally it becomes clear that she is there for laughs, although by that time it is also apparent that the movie is hardly worth making fun of.

THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES means to be taken seriously. The heroine just wants to be taken. The girl is Georgina Spevlin, portraying a suicidal virgin who finds herself in limbo, on her way to damnation. She talks Lucifer's regional vice president (John Clemens) into giving her a chance to wallow in lust be fore being whisked off to her fate. The film is all about her wallowing, rendered in vivid detail by Director Gerard Damiano, the man responsible for pornography's biggest-gross film, Deep Throat. Having titillated curious audiences and outraged the courts with his previous effort, Damiano has now decided to teach a moral lesson, a touching presumption. What his sermonette comes down to is that the wages of sin are sex, a lesson that he preaches with cloying sobriety and lengthy illustration. Spevlin employs all manner of props and partners (including a rather amiable snake) to slake her desires, but she pays for it all in the end. She is imprisoned in a windowless room (Sartre will surely be pleased to know that Damiano has dipped into No Exit). Her only companion is a jabbering paranoid who is too thoroughly spaced out to respond to her pleas and advances. Damiano's heavy moral is that Georgina will have to spend eternity in a frenzy of frustration. Not quite as bad an actress as one might expect, Georgina performs in sequences of sexual transport very much like a professional.

THE BOOK OF NUMBERS has a raucous, picaresque, raunchy kind of charm, at least initially. Two black con men (Raymond St. Jacques and Philip Thomas) descend on an Arkansas town called El Dorado during the early '30s to start a numbers bank. Thomas has a rather meandering love affair with a "high yellow" woman (Freda Payne), leaving him little time to help St. Jacques fight off racist law officers and greedy white gangsters. St. Jacques, who also directed, works in some nice period feeling and a couple of quick, glancing social asides about the daily indignities of being black. After a promising few first minutes, though, the movie begins to lose pace. Characterization, even coherence, disintegrates. It looks as if some one had dumped the film into a thresher, then tried pasting together the pieces that first came to hand.

WHITE SISTER, never certain whether to be a farce or a tearjerker, finally settles for being just absurd. Sophia Loren appears as the most ravishing nun in Eu rope; she gave her life to mother church after her boyfriend got deep-fried in an oil fire. She ministers to the sick and the infirm as head of an Italian hospital, which is riddled with both political strife and human tragedy. The movie is unrelentingly simpleminded, and treats all subjects from cardiac ar rests to brimming bedpans with a jovial mixture of high spirits, low comedy and bad taste. Loren breezes through it all beautiful and oblivious, doing a dirty job with imperturbable elegance.

sb J.C.

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