Movies

    Great expectations often grow sour. Looking at things that way, Papillon was a bitter lemon. The film was adapted from Henri Charriere's best selling novel-autobiography, a mostly true saga of a French safecracker sentenced for life for killing a pimp. The jail is the world's worst- a work camp island fortress in the French Guineas. I haven't read the book, but have been assured by generally reliable characters that it is a fantastic and frightening thriller, doubly powerful because so much of it is true.

    The film was made on a budget of $13,500,000-- with about three and a half of those millions going to box-office draw Dustin "Weasel Eyes" Hoffman and experienced movie escape artist Steve McQueen. The rights to the book cost a million or more. That leaves about $9,000,000 to pay some executives and get everyone down to shoot the film in Jamaica. The trip to Jamaica is what makes the film worth seeing-not Dustin Hoffman, certainly not Steve McQueen, and not the aborted version of the adventure novel.

    For the first two-thirds of the film I found myself caught up in the suspense of Papillon's attempts to escape and to live through the various tortures devised by the machine-like prison administrators. Duck your head when they guillotine the prisoner, hold your stomach when Papillon eats the cockroaches, and figure out how fake the blood looks in various torture sequences. But after adjusting to these staged nerve-curdling scenes, you are left with very little.

    The disappointment of the movie is that it had promises of being an exciting and well-written story of a prisoner's determination for freedom. Despite the millions of dollars, it carne nowhere near the grand old Hollywood tradition of the exotic jungle adventure, and despite its well-known screenwriter, it also side-stepped its potential depth of characterization. The film was co-authored by Dalton Trumbo, a man, now in his late sixties, who was sent to prison for eleven months in the early 1950's. He and nine other screenwriters and directors were charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to answer the House UnAmerican Activities Committee question: Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

    Trumbo and the others claimed it did not matter what their politics were because in this country supposedly one has the right of personal political belief. The Hollywood Ten were major talents of the film industry, and the prison sentences and related hoopla destroyed many careers. For years they were blacklisted, and to earn a living they wrote under pseudonyms with the aid of a few still-principled people in the movie business. Trumbo won an Oscar under the name "Robert Rich" for his film The Brave One. No one knew who this Robert Rich was, and no one came up to that glamorous podium to accept the award.

    The whole story of the Hollywood Ten belongs elsewhere. What it amounts to in the case of Papillon is that one would expect that a experienced and talented screenwriter (29 screenplays) who had undergone extreme political persecution, including a prison term, would write a film that went beyond a superficial understanding of prison, and the prisoners' desire for freedom.

     But Papillon doesn't. Steve McQueen is not much more than his usual small words-big actions escape character, and Dustin Hoffman stumbles through the movie trying to figure out what physical disabilities he should use to augment his characterization. The events of the movie are strung together with the minor adhesive of the thrill of blood and horror. The major virtue of the movie is the ironic contrast of Papillon's attempted escapes from a true paradise of the Caribbean. Paradise, but still a prison.

    Starting Wednesday January 23 at both the Fifth Forum and Wayside Theaters is Chariot of the Gods, a feature film about the many ancient buildings, earth mounds and other structures which indicate that there was contact between earth and other planets thousands of years ago. The film is based on Danishman Erich Von Daniken's three books on this subject, and it is the full length version of a television show aired in the United States last year. If Daniken's readings of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Mayan pyramids and the mammoth stoneworks on Easter Island are correct, ancient peoples of this planet certainly beat our astronauts to the secrets of the universe. The Sim is bound to be fascinating, and it is playing for only a week so don't miss it.

                Ellen Frank