Quick Cuts

By J.C.

A WARM DECEMBER is framed in spun sugar. Sidney Poitier, who also directed, stars as a brilliant physician who deserted a booming private practice in Boston to work on a ghetto medicine program in Washington, D.C. When the widowed doctor first appears in the film, he is on vacation in London, living at a posh hotel in a style suitable to a vice roy. He falls in love with a lovely, intelligent young woman (Esther Anderson), whose uncle is an ambassador of a newly emergent African state. She is being devoured from within by sicklecell anemia, which happens to be the doctor's specialty. He lectures his small daughter -- and the audience -- on the disease and even shows microscope slides of the cells swimming dangerously about. The romance flourishes, but so does the disease. Despite the med ical seminars and discussions about black identity, Africa, and medicine to help the poor, A Warm December is no angry social document. It is very much in the old tradition of star-crossed Ruritanian romance, with overtones of Love Story. Poitier deals with grave matters, but in such a cushy way that he makes them all seem frivolous.

EXTREME CLOSE-UP is a lubricous, opportunistic piece of business about a TV newsman (James McMullan) who gets hooked on surveillance equipment and turns into a very well-equipped Peeping Tom. The writer, Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain) and the director, Jeannot Szwarc (whose previous credits include no features but a great many episodes on TV shows like Marcus Welby and Ironsides), affect a certain air of importance and urgency.

They want us all to know that our rights to privacy are daily and dangerously threatened, but they raise the alarm with a true voyeur's relish. Extreme Close-Up has a sort of coy seaminess that says less about the hero's obsessions than the hang-ups of the film mak ers, who stage each detail of erotic dalliance even more fondly than the newsman spies on it. The cast is hopelessly eager to please and includes, be sides the continually perspiring McMullan, several young women who reveal various portions of their anatomy with the zeal of go-go dancers taking a last shot at the big time.

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