Fearless Fonz

By Frank Rich

Directed by Jeremy Paul Kagan

Screenplay by James Carabatsos

Henry Winkler is the biggest star on prime-time TV and understandably so. As Fonzie, the motorcycle-crazy greaser of Happy Days, he raises '50s cool to the boiling point. The Fonz is no different from the hero of any other ABC sitcom, but Winkler does not settle for mugging his way through the role. Instead he galvanizes the tube with shrewd comic timing and swaggering sexuality he gives the audience Bugs Bunny crossed with James Dean, and each week some 47 million Americans go wild.

Becoming a movie star is something different. As such talented TV comics as Mary Tyler Moore, Carol Burnett and Dick Van Dyke have learned, high Nielsen ratings do not necessarily pave the way to a successful film career Television fans don't like to pay good money to see stars they can see at home for free, nor are they fond of watching their favorite performers playing new roles. Winkler is surely aware of these potential pitfalls, but he has nonetheless jumped into the fray. In Heroes, a determinedly high-minded movie, he drops his Fonzie mannerisms to play Jack Dunne, a crazy Viet Nam veteran who escapes from a VA psycho ward to traipse across the country and find himself.

Winkler's ambitions are admirable. His greatest fans are kids, and he deserves credit for leading them to a film that does not pander to the Fonzie hysteria. His performance is not bad, either. He works hard, in the manner of an intermediate acting student, and occasionally his character comes alive. The same cannot be said of Heroes. This film is as flat as an average made-for-TV movie, though considerably more pretentious than most.

If Heroes were not so dull, it would be a cause for outrage. Director Kagan and Writer Carabatsos borrow freely from other movies--notably It Happened One Night, Morgan!, and Five Easy Pieces--without ever advancing any insights of their own; there are more cute platitudes along Jack's road to self-realization than there are toll booths. The film's final ten minutes are a minor scandal. After wasting an audience's time for two hours, the movie unleashes a gory, cathartic fantasy sequence in which the hero relives the horrors of his Viet Nam combat. Film makers who exploit the tragedy of war to prop up an otherwise listless picture should be ashamed of themselves.

The ruse does not work in any case, for at the end of Heroes one does not pity the Viet Nam dead so much as the casualties in the movie's cast. Chief among them is Sally Field, the film's love interest and an actress of considerable skill. In Heroes she plays a young woman who is also on the road to find herself, but the character is so clumsily defined that she is a blur upon the screen. Harrison Ford, the witty Han Solo of Star Wars, fares no better--but such is Kagan's touch that Heroes could probably reduce Robert Redford to the stature of Troy Donahue.

Despite two mad scenes and numerous other opportunities to embarrass himself, Henry Winkler does manage to survive Heroes--but barely. In the future he would be wise to apply the Fonz's cagey bike-riding style to his fledgling movie career: while TV actors have every right to burst out of the 21-in. screen, they are more likely to land safely if they look before they leap.

--Frank Rich

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.