Word: garfein
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Something Wild (Prometheus; United Artists) is somewhat woolly. Director Jack Garfein and Novelist Alex Karmel are listed as the men who wrote the movie, but it plays as though the script had been done by three other people...
Like Tennessee Williams, for one. The picture begins with a casual case of rape. The victim is a college girl (Carroll Baker, in private life Mrs. Garfein) who goes skipping through a New York City park alone after dark. When she comes to, she tidies her clothes, staggers home, sneaks upstairs past her prudish parent (Mildred Dunnock). In a meticulous ritual of hysteria, she cuts up her torn clothes, flushes them down the drain, pops into bed as if nothing had happened, as if out of sight were really out of mind...
...easy to understand the relief it would give a reviewer to be able to pin some sort of label on the film. The director, Jack Garfein, and the scriptwriter, Calder Willingham--who reworked his own 1947 novel and his 1953 Broadway play, both called End As a Man-- appear infuriatingly unwilling to commit themselves about what they are doing. All that can be said with complete confidence is that, in a style which captures much of the spontaneity of a really first-rate documentary, they present a story which centers on the career of one Jocko De Paris, a cadet...
...Garfein and Willingham present only the bare facts of the story and refuse to construct any sort of frame of reference which would help in interpreting it. While a pure thriller in many ways, the film cries out for interpretation. This necessity, however, does not in any way detract from the quality of the picture, but in fact adds an extra dimension to its interest. If I may still be permitted to voice a bit of sociological jargon of my own, the story of De Paris seems at bottom to represent the conflict between a very tightly organized society...
Whatever may be its "meaning," The Strange One is unquestionably something of a technical achievement. Garfein's direction is brilliant. With an acute sense of timing, he carefully constructs each scene to extract the greatest possible amount of tension from it; and although this is his first motion picture, his camera work, which makes extensive use of probing close-up shots, is that of an expert. Equally accomplished is the acting of Ben Gazzara, who in his first film makes De Paris into an intense and haunting, if not exactly lovable, figure...