Word: callow
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Candice Bergen plays (she can never be said actually to portray) T.R. Baskin, a callow young thing from Ohio, so fresh faced that she looks like a Clearasil testimonial. T.R. gets a job in the typing pool of some Kafkaesque neon-lit office. A friend finds her a date with an affluent racist, whom she fearlessly denounces. After that it is home to her crummy one-room apartment and endless nights falling asleep in front of the television...
...they are juvenile leads when they discuss the director with terror and awe. Better still is Ford himself regarding Bogdanovich with rue and deflecting questions about his aesthetics with "Yeah," "No" and "Cut." Ford knows what Wordsworth knew: "We murder to dissect." Damned if he will assist this callow intern in his operation...
...Elkin's body as seen by Alex through a shower curtain; postured bit-playing by effete types at Hirsh's house. For the most part, however, Schlesinger has not overpowered his script, but served it. With the aid of Peter Finch (Daniel), Glenda Jackson (Alex), and despite the too-callow Murray Head's Bob; with Mozart arias on the soundtrack which give musical dimension to the trio's cultural separateness; and with graceful camera plotting which tie the characters to the shape of their environment, be it park or townhouse. Schlesinger serves Miss Gilliatt inspiredly well...
...goes on to criticize those artists who invite interpretation, Bergman, for example, whose "lame messages about the modern spirit" and "callow pseudo-intellectuality" contradict "the beauty and sophistication of his images." Sontag's first experience as a film director, however, indicates a reappraisal of the concrete cultural situation. Duet for Cannibals openly invites the interpretations that are inevitable anyway and uses them as traps, frustrating slaps in the face with each contradiction designed to break us of our interpretive habit (and of our humanist consciousness...
With the exception of one callow actor, the picture's youngster is Kirk Douglas, 54, playing with an outrageous auburn hair rinse and grinning like a Steinway with 88 white keys. He and the rest of the over-the-hill gang try to bust out of a federal pen presided over by Warden Henry Fonda, a lame graybeard with advanced ideas about penology. These notions are the only flickers of intelligence in the film...