Quick Cuts

By J.C.

CAHILL: UNITED STATES MARSHAL is John Wayne, a Texas lawman who scours the Panhandle for bad guys while his two young sons languish at home, yearning for a little fatherly affection. The sons fall into bad company, get mixed up in a bank robbery and have to be extracted from their trouble by Duke, who promises to spend more time at home in the future. Cahill is a poky, disorganized sort of western, typical of the work of Andrew V. McLaglen (The Way West, The Undefeated), a director on whom Wayne seems to call as he might summon a foreman to keep an eye on his ranch. There are a great many saddle-sore jokes but occasional nice moments too, as when Wayne buffaloes his way through a lynching party. He also spars well with the kids, and he invests an absurdly sentimental recollection of Cahill's dead wife with enough rough dignity to make it pertinent and moving.

BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES once again pits simians against mankind in the fifth installment of a series that with any luck will not include a sixth. The humans are the scarred survivors of nuclear disaster, led by Severn Darden as the kind of consciously hammy villain that kids love to giggle at during the Saturday matinee. The apes make a curiously pallid bunch of heroes. Roddy McDowall, a veteran of three other Ape epics, appears as Caesar, the idealistic ape who led his species out of bondage to man with a few fiery speeches and some sensible ideas about equality. In Battle, Caesar is trying to turn his no tions into a workable social philosophy. He is hassled not only by Darden and his dark forces but by his own comrades, especially a band of war-loving gorillas who are apparently supposed to symbolize the Pentagon. There is some mild fun in a ragtag convoy of bad guys who ride to battle in a couple of old cars and a battered school bus -- all that remains of the visual stunts that distinguished earlier Ape efforts.

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