Sunstroke

By JAY COCKS

92 IN THE SHADE

Directed and Written by THOMAS McGUANE

Right at the outset, a veteran charter fisherman, Nichol Dance (Warren Gates), threatens to kill his upstart competitor Tom Skelton (Peter Fonda). The remainder of 92 in the Shade is spent waiting for this inauspicious event to occur. Neither Dance nor Skelton pays any mind to fate or fortune, an attitude that makes for short suspense. This did not matter quite so much in Thomas McGuane's novel, which went heavy on atmosphere, but it pretty thoroughly confounds any movie adaptation, including, sad to say, the author's own.

Starving Actors. McGuane apparently hoped to bring off an antic, melancholy character study about Key West drifters and grifters. It turns out hopelessly muddled. Characters cut up, act cute, come on strong ("That's not the wind--it's souls in purgatory"), then have a good laugh on themselves. No body seems to have any connection to anyone else. They all stumble along in the drenching sun, not bothering about much of anything. The general drift--and one needs a memory of the novel even for this--is that a man makes his bones not by cheating death but by laughing at it. It is a wholly unworthy point to be making, which may also explain why the laughs are in such short supply.

Fonda, uncommonly relaxed, makes a good Skelton, and his frequent screen crony Gates is properly confounding and skittish as Dance. Almost everyone else in the cast (excepting the fetching Margot Kidder) was apparently encouraged to play descending levels of hysteria.

The cumulative effect is like watching the boarders scramble for their evening meal at a home for undernourished character actors.

Jay Cocks

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