Word: cosmo
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...Life in Hell's Kitchen has been heaven," rhapsodizes Sylvester ("Sly") Stallone. The Italian Stallion is back on location in the tenements-this time not on the Rocky roads of Philadelphia, but on Manhattan's West Side. In Paradise Alley, Stallone plays Cosmo, a 1940s street hustler who hangs out with a beautiful hooker (Joyce Ingalls). The dialogue, raw and raunchy, is written by-who else? But not content with being both author and star, Sly is also making his directing debut. His early impressions: "I'm learning how the other half lives through others from...
...gondoliers' wives (Katherine Kean and Mary Jane Robbins) have more comic personalities. Their physical appearances cor trasting well, the two have the luck to wear with elan honeymoon negligees that would--well, that would never be seen on the body of a Cosmo Girl...
...Negligence. That worthy sentiment seems to turn Davidson's prose to pulp. When her irony departs, she sounds as preposterous as Cosmo fantasy: "He was a full professor, and yet there was about him a spirit of hijinks." The women's sex lives - their entire lives, in fact - seem like nothing so much as an interminable game of pinball- careening from one man to another with an awful earnestness, a flashing of lights and banging of flippers. Susie, who solves her frigidity with a vibrator, decides eventually that having slept with more than 100 men, "it was probably...
...Save Your Own Life is written in six or seven different styles, ranging from academic hauteur (she says she was "amanuensis to the Zeitgeist") through Cosmo cute ("Bed reared its ugly headboard") to bewilderingly lifeless porn. The author's mind seems to have been softened by too many hours in a Malibu Jacuzzi. As if searching for a new definition of vulgarity, Jong writes that hostile criticism of her first novel makes her think of "Jews gassed at Auschwitz." (Actually, Fear of Flying was extravagantly overpraised.) She also contrives to turn the tragic suicide of Poet Anne Sexton (named...
...always, the acting is superlative. Gazzara's Cosmo catches all the paradoxes and puzzles of the character, the wired ambition and the rapture over doom. Cassavetes' hoodlums, notably Seymour Cassel, are all unfailingly polite. The one exception is Timothy Carey as a fang-toothed, philosophical hood who eats dinner wearing white gloves and likes to quote the great thinkers. Cassel is curious about why Carey declines to fulfill his assignment and kill Gazzara. Carey curls his lips over his gums, lets a little foam drip, and says, "Like Karl Marx said: opium is the religion of the people...