Quick Cuts

By J.C.

WHITE LIGHTNING concerns a good old boy named Gator McKluskey (Burt Reynolds) who is serving time in the Arkansas pen for messing around with illegal liquor. Word reaches him that his younger brother has been murdered by a local sheriff (Ned Beatty), who has been getting a substantial skim off the moonshine profits. McKluskey turns state's evidence in order to get himself out of prison and get the goods on the sheriff. There is grim melodrama and folk comedy here, but Screenwriter William Norton sloughs off the more serious themes of an informer working inside a situation for which he has the strongest sympathy and of a whole system of free enterprise that exists outside the law but is still a strong part of it. Reynolds shows dash and comic cunning, and Director Joseph Sargent, though hindered by some of the sloppiest cinematography of the year, engineers the action scenes well enough. It is a pity, however, that the potential substance and conflict of the film have been passed over in favor of car chases and a little backwoods sex.

Tom Wolfe's dandy magazine piece about the Southern stock-car circuit, The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes! Yet the movie seems to be derived less from factual material than from other old racing melodramas, where owners are crooked and slippery, drivers cool and competent, and races are really contests for the affections of a certain woman who sits watching tensely in the stands (in this case, Valerie Perrine). The hero (played by Jeff Bridges, with advice from Johnson himself) starts out running moonshine for his pappy (Art Lund) and playing chicken with the cops. Pappy gets busted, and Junior takes to racing -first in demolition derbies, then working and brazening his way up to the big time -to get some money to soften Pappy's prison term.

Bridges, whenever he is not overburdened by the script's Snuffy Smith dialogue ("Don't write checks with your mouth your ass can't cash"), can cut through to real depth. He is especially good in-one sad, lingering scene in an amusement arcade. He goes into a "Make a Record of Your Voice" booth and speaks a message to send home, full of empty good spirits and a struggling, almost desperate optimism. It is a small moment of truth amid mostly synthetic sentiment and a drearily predictable plot.

THE NEPTUNE FACTOR dives several leagues under the sea with a sleek submersible that is hunting for a party of stranded aquanauts. The members of the crew and anxious onlookers up top include Walter Pidgeon, Yvette Mimieux and Ernest Borgnine, variously outfitted in starchy white smocks that bespeak technical competence or clinging T shirts that display reassuring reserves of sexuality or brawn. But Ben Gazzara, captain of the Neptune, appears in blue oxford shirt and cranberry cardigan, as if he had suited up for a Sunday brunch. Gazzara further emphasizes his distance from this whole sodden scientific adventure by remaining resolutely unimpressed whenever some monster fish is loosed upon the Neptune by the special-effects department. Instead of gaping on cue like the rest of the cast. Gazzara merely looks disgusted. As well he might.

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