Calculations

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE FORMULA Directed by John Avildsen Screenplay by Steve Shagan

"Is that him?" "Naw, can't be." "Sure it is. Listen." "By golly, I think you're right."

Once Marlon Brando's disguise has been penetrated and the great eccentric has been identified, such suspense as The Formula manages to generate comes to an abrupt and early end, though whatever fun and frolic the film offers depends solely on his occasional presence as the comically menacing leader of an oil cartel. Perhaps one should say the oil cartel. The movie traffics heavily in this kind of simple-minded paranoia. It insists that evil lurks in a single all-powerful force possessing the power to warp men's minds, condition their behavior and, of course, bump them off wherever they live in the world and whenever, over the course of many years, it suits the conspiracy's purpose.

For the record, Brando is the character wearing granny glasses and a hearing aid, the one whose fringe of white hair curls cunningly around a large bald spot and whose corpulence is encased in a wardrobe that seems to have been picked up at a thrift sale managed by the estate of Charles Foster Kane. Brando has also got himself up with a down-home country-boy accent that makes his cynicism terribly appealing--especially in the bloody and lugubrious context of this emotionally unpunctuated movie. His performance is not truly good--it lacks a real edge of sharpness--but it is often funny, a kind of comment on the heavy-handedness of the film.

The title formula is for a synthetic fuel invented by Nazi scientists. The conceit is that it has been kept off the market since World War II by the oil interests in order to keep up the price of crude. A sometime Los Angeles cop and his wife are killed when it looks as if they are about to go public with the secret. The search for their killers--and the precious equations they were killed for--leads Detective George C. Scott to Germany and Switzerland and to involvement not only with remnants of the Third Reich but with modern terrorists as well, among them Marthe Keller, who is assigned to seduce and then betray Scott.

It is all terribly convoluted, but not especially interesting; John Avildsen's direction alternates between flatness and strain. Scott gives an imitation of his old force, but there is a lack of conviction in his playing that is, perhaps, understandable. If he is going to make this kind of film, he should learn from Brando how to take the money and hide out behind the makeup. As for Keller, she is just impossible, an actress whose monotony of tone dims everything she touches.

Like so many movies and books that try to graft topical subject matter onto the obsessive mass-market interest in the Nazi past. The Formula requires too much exposition. By the time all the improbable explanations for its linkages between a fast-receding past and today's headlines have been laid out, all the false trails explored, the action lies buried under a pile of verbiage. It used to be that detective stories were lean and laconic. The attempt to give them spurious importance by having them address what are thought to be big subjects is ruining them. They really must get back to their Bogartian basics. --By Richard Schickel

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