Psychic Homicide

By J .C.

MAN ON A SWING

Directed by FRANK PERRY Screenplay by DAVID ZELAG GOODMAN

At first, it is a very bumpy ride over territory that is long past familiar. Flashing blue lights of a squad car; cops milling about the scene of a crime, being both professional and a little delicate about the corpse on the floor of the Volkswagen; a police chief (Cliff Robertson) of a small town, pretty much stymied as he is pressed for a quick solution; friends and relatives of the victim, hysterical with grief, baffled over the brutality and arbitrariness of the killing. Then the film makers play their trump and pull themselves out of the hole.

The trump is called Franklin Wills, a clairvoyant who phones the police and volunteers his psychic resources to help solve the killing. He relates certain details of the crime only the police chief knew. The chief is suspicious, but he calls Wills in. Throughout the remainder of the investigation, he remains uncertain whether Wills is a madman, a visionary, an opportunist--or perhaps the murderer.

This ambiguity gives Man on a Swing its suspense and makes it a rather entertaining diversion. What makes it something more than this is Joel Grey's Franklin Wills, a performance of such menacing subcurrents, so shrewdly and subtly conveyed, that it galvanizes the entire film. Grey won an Oscar for his nightclub M.C. in Cabaret, a splendidly sleazy characterization that seemed to grow out of his years in the musical theater. Here he takes a considerable risk, moving in an entirely different direction. He has a lot of broad, bizarre business to carry off-- like passing into a trance or going quickly, slightly berserk over a small incident--that is particularly troublesome because it must be made to look easy. Grey has worked out his character totally, from his fussy clothes to his eager, elusive eyes. When Wills floats off into a trance or plucks some bit of information out of the psychic void, it is not only true but chilling because Grey has built up to it so smartly.

It is in all a performance of such thorough excitement that the rest of the movie cannot compete with it. Except for a fine, low-key characterization by Peter Masterson as a dutiful station-house cop, Frank Perry (Diary of a Mad Housewife, Play It As It Lays) has cast the movie rather haphazardly, and his heavy direction encourages a sort of collective actors' hysteria. The writing is without much enterprise; in deed, why make another movie about a police chief at all? It would have been far more interesting to use the same material for a film about Wills -- that is, both a psychological and psychic speculation. But on the evidence at hand, such a project would have been beyond the range of almost everyone involved with Man on a Swing -- firmly excepting Joel Grey's.

J.C.

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