Disaster Area

By JAY COCKS

THE CRAZY WORLD OF JULIUS VROODER

Directed by ARTHUR MILLER Screenplay by DARYL HENRY

They may be crazy, but they sure are cute. All the inmates of the veterans' hospital in which much of The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder takes place are emotional casualties of war. Few have physical injuries, and every man jack of them is charming. No homicidal rages here, no suicides, just a bunch of fellows acting whimsical. None is more jolly than the hero, Julius Vrooder (Timothy Bottoms), who spends much of his time in a hooch he has built for himself on the hospital grounds.

Vrooder dashes about looking boyish and playful and winning the heart of Nurse Zanni Willis (Barbara Seagull). He tells her his story: in Viet Nam he sat out heavy fire in a dark hooch on top of the bodies of a dead child and a dying old woman who had earlier helped him. Given a Silver Star for having done away with a couple of V.C., Vrooder kept his mouth shut, took the medal and had himself committed. The hospital was a good way to escape memory.

The movie is a nursery-school distillation of Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, heavy on the saccharin. It suggests that the only sane response to societal madness is to freak out. That idea has lost most of its novelty by now, but the people involved with this film do not seem to care. In the denouement, cops storm his hooch in a heavyhanded parody of jungle war. But Vrooder still has a few stunts up his sleeve, and since this is a fairy tale with a social conscience, he triumphs.

The film is given some authentic attractiveness by the presence of Bottoms, who has gained some skill to match his wounded spontaneity, and Seagull, who is sexy without pushing it, sweet without coating it. They put up a good, if losing, fight. Jay Cocks

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