Clean Old Man

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BOARDWALK

Directed by Stephen Verona

Screenplay by Stephen Verona and Leigh Chapman

Boardwalk begins as an essay in the quotidian and ends as an exercise in symbolic gesturing of the least realistic sort. It is ineptly done in both modes.

Lee Strasberg is presented as an incredibly clean old man, much beset, yet al ways patient and cheerful. He is a Jew attempting to maintain the manner of life he has practiced for half a century in what has become a "transitional" neighborhood near Coney Island. Business is bad at his cafeteria, because his coreligionists are moving away, his beloved wife (Ruth Gordon) is dying, his middle-aging daughter (Janet Leigh in a part that makes one aware of time's flight) is about to enter into a second marriage that looks to be as disastrous as her first, and her grown son acts as if he has inherited her incapacity for reasonable relationships. In short it looks like a long evening with the dismal problems of dreary people.

There is another element. Director Verona introduces a gang of (mainly) black juvenile delinquents, whom he insists on visualizing for us in the most studied fashion. Often they look like vengeful demons in some old-fashioned religious lithograph. They focus all their anger ar bitrarily on the Strasberg character. They firebomb his restaurant, they beat him up on the boardwalk, they desecrate his synagogue and vandalize his home. Finally his anger flares. He confronts them and, in one of the most improbable sequences in recent movie history, strangles their leader to death, just as if Strasberg were Charles Bronson.

Of course, he is not. He is a tiny little old man, and his antagonist is a huge adolescent, with muscles so hard the sun seems to glint off them. Their confrontation is not meant to be taken naturalistically. Strasberg, in this moment, is a symbol of all Jews rejecting their roles as victims. His oppressor is intended to be a representative of anti-Semitism as a historical force. The whole business is ludicrous, a forcing of issues never meant to be contained in a movie that is ba sically a big bowl of chicken soup. Board walk means well, but that does not excuse its utter wretchedness of design and execution. -Richard Schickel

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