Word: portnoy
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...THAT ferocious and self-annihilating way," wrote Phillip Roth in the voice of Alex Portnoy, "in which so many Jewish men of his generation served their families, my father served my mother, my sister Hannah but particularly me. Where he had been imprisoned, I would fly: that was his dream...
...Ernest Lehman's debasement of Roth's novel isn't funny either. As the movie version of Goodbye, Columbus proved, the controlled hysteria with which Roth cauterizes his past is hard to translate into film. Actors, scenery and background music only dilute the intensity of Portnoy's brilliant lie-down comic routine on the psychoanalyst's couch. Roth's re-Joycing in the scenes of Portnoy's heroic masturbations lose their hilarious dimension and descend pathetically into the baggy-pants scatology of the oldtime burlesque skit...
...Grant as Sophie Portnoy, the carnivorous Jewish mother, and Jack Somack as the resentfully respectable father can do no more than gesticulate their way through the clichés of Jewish parenthood. Surreal projections in Portnoy's mind, Sophie and Jack were never meant to be seen...
Neither was the Monkey (Karen Black), the fulfillment of Portnoy's teen-age sex fantasies. But as the West Virginia coal miner's daughter who lusts after Portnoy's intellect with as much guiltridden fervor as Portnoy has for her body, Black offers the film's best performance. Her face has those interesting imperfections usually found in the faces of nameless actresses who play in such smokers a Hillbilly Heaven. She also seems to have a real feeling for hostile profanity, which is about as extreme her as one will find in a general-release movie...
Richard Benjamin as Portnoy is no more credible with his clothes off. He looks the part: his high, shiny cheeks and full, wavy hair give him the bright man-child appearance to complement the 33 -year-old character's infantile emotions. But when Benjamin opens his mouth, he seems about as out of place as Howdy Doody in Hamlet. His readings of Roth's lines are pure balsa wood...