Word: bakshis
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Cartoonist Ralph Bakshi softens up the story. He makes Fritz into a harmless NYU romantic, circa 1967. (The date is a needless hedge, and a more potent campus might have made Fritz dangerous.) This doesn't work for much of Fritz: under Crumb lies agony, under Bakshi gas. The screen Fritz enacts the essential Crumb pose of a phony out for pleasure under moralistic guises. He sees through all the other phonies and beats them at their game by living out his fantasies in fact. But this Fritz is enveloped with his animator's love (he's even cuter facially...
...BAKSHI has picked a perfect locale to set the film's first third. From MacDougall to St. Mark's, from Washington Square to the Lower East Side... are the spots where high school girls go for experience, and college jazz artists (and sometimes real musicians) give it to them. Here also lies the East Coast seedbed of escapist counter-culturism and intellectual voyeurism--fit for an Abbie Hoffman (remember Abbie?) even more than for a Fritz. If Bakshi, unlike Crumb, speaks from such a milieu's heart, still that milieu indicts itself...
...fanfared social jibes don't emerge from essential themes, (there are none), but from the droppings of Crumb's bathroom wit that Bakshi slaps into his narrative. (A Ph.d. candidate will someday call Fritz 'picaresque'). Fritz's black-talking, muscle flexing crow friends are the natural men of his world, though Fritz himself is far from psychotically WASP-ish. All the traditional Americans--pig cops and hardhats and a hound dirt-farmer--are sweating ignoramuses so whacked-out by work that they can't ever get it together. Radical politicos and Hell's Angels join paws in the headiest...
Hrundi V. Bakshi is an Indian actor who was imported from New Delhi to play a heroic bugler in a new Bengal Lancer-Gunga Din-style movie being shot in California. This is his big chance, but he blows it-first with his bugle, when he wrecks a scene by continuing to blat out battle calls instead of dying of his wounds, then by blowing up the fort that is about to be stormed in the film's big fight scene. The enraged director fires him, and arranges to have the name Hrundi V. Bakshi inscribed on Hollywood...
...short time later, after a visit to New Delhi, Bakshi arrested and supplanted his master as Kashmir's chief of government. Quite a few Kashmiris died rioting for their Lion and hero. Since then, Bakshi has built a powerful police force, New Delhi has poured in millions of dollars' worth of public works for the lovely, lake-jeweled Vale of Kashmir, and Kashmir's memory of the Lion has faded. Last fall Nehru confessed himself "pained and hurt" by his onetime friend's long imprisonment. Last week he judged it safe at last to allow...