The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 39

Friday, Deccml! I. 1995 B-3 UMrovies 'Wild BUT: Shot in the dark iL Walter Hill film just another litany of injustices By Barbara Shulgamr EXAMINER MOVIE CRITIC SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER a 4444 rrt, Cumby and The Clayboyi perform a benefit for the farmers. 'Gumby' movie has feat of clay I ILD BILL" is the latest issue in that arcane sub-genre, the art-house West ern. "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and "The Left-Handed Gun" were successful productions.

"Wild Bill," written and directed by Walter HUl the maker of such patience challengers as "Johnny Handsome" and "Red Heat" is a failure. Jeff Bridges, still in the bad mood that struck him in "The Fabulous Baker Boys," is Wild Bill Hickok, the legendary gunman of the rowdy Old West A marshal as often as he was a murderous criminal, Bill had a way of making enemies. This movie is a document, complete with dates and locations, of how he earned them. Opening with a wearying series of nasty and violent episodes attesting to Bill's predilection for solving problems by shooting at them, and his nearly comic indignation at having his hat touched (men have died at his hand for committing that transgression alone), the movie quickly establishes a pattern of bad decisionmaking on the part of the writer-director. John Travolta, Kelly Lynch and family BURDEN from B-l 'Burden': Racial switcheroo to deliver a package to Thomas' house and is spied momentarily looking at Thomas' beautiful wife through an open window, Thomas casually requests that Pinnock never again be sent to make deliveries at the house.

Someone takes this as a tacit request for Pinnock's head on a plate, and Pinnock is fired. Pinnock, a proud breadwinner who won't even allow his wife (Kelly Lynch) to work, repeatedly drags himself to the unemployment office looking vainly for work. He is evicted from his house. CROSSING from B-l 'Crossing Guard': (Not so) good grief void. So while at times, Penn's film is moving and insightful about the way the heart survives tragedy, at other times it seems to have been made by a gifted schizophrenic who thinks that weird behavior is perfectly normal.

If one character in this movie behaved oddly, you could assume it was part of a deliberate portrayal of a strange personality, but because most of the characters behave oddly, you have to assume that the strange personality portrayed here is the director's. Nicholson's baggy, furrowed face looks like it's been hoed by the devil. Fred is a damaged specimen, a jeweler who wears several thick ropes of gold arrfr nd his neck and fcHiKarnnnfi Mii.iiiimnTI. ig Zm fr. v.

i i 7 m. it and Ellen Barkin as Calamity Jane in film, he is being stalked by Jack McCall (David Arquette), a young man out to avenge the honor of his mother (Diane Lane). Years before, Bill had seduced and abandoned her. Not only that, but in flashback we Bee that after leaving, he went back to town to kill her new boyfriend. Bill looks like a guy who deserves whatever he gets, so when he's killed, honestly, who car js? Belafonte is a marvel.

Approaching 70, he is still disarmingly beautiful and he plays the smooth, sophisticated and enlightened Thomas with just the right touch of savoir faire and liberal guilt. Travolta's hair is dyed a strange red and his accent verges on black English (although few of the other white actors speak this way). His performance is strong and, unshaven and thick around the middle, he looks the part. The flaws in this film are many. The dialogue verges on silly when parodying cliches that white people use to denigrate blacks.

And most of the acting is just inadequate. After Thomas escapes his captor, he breaks into a house seeking safety Why risk the wrath of the inhabitants? He needs friends, not out recognizing Huston's real and evidently justified anger at Nicholson, with whom she lived for nearly 20 years. She left him when he made another woman pregnant, the story goes. The primary conflict is between Fred and John (a sweet performance by David Morse), the killer who is haunted by his guilt The villain, it seems, is a much nicer guy than the victim. In fact, Fred is such a loutish, vulgar, nasty piece of work that you can't imagine he and Mary were ever a happy couple.

You can't look at his large gold pinky ring and imagine that sleek, sophisticated Mary would have looked twice at him, never mind had his children. And when Fred walks into that suburban house, the idea that he once lived a happy domestic life there with a wife and three kids seems laughable. Fred looks like a member of a species who has sturrf)led into the wrong k3 1 "Wild Bill Movie Review 'Wild Bill' CAST Jeff Bridges, Ellen Barkin, John Hurt DIRECTOR Walter HII WRITER Hill, based on works by Thomas Babe and Pete Dexter RATED THEATERS Kabuki, Century Plaza (South San Francisco) EVALUATION 'j Writer-director Desmond Nakano more enemies. Later, this plot development is awkwardly exploited. When he's recaptured, Thomas says to Pinnock that he can't understand how a good man can turn to crime; Pinnock reminds him of the breaking and entering.

Also, to underscore the movie's point, Travolta plays a good man. He was employed, a responsible, loving husband and father who played by the rules. Epithets flung against such a law-abiding citizen seem all the more unjustified. But Pinnock lives next door to a bunch of skinhead thugs who sell drugs and terrorize the neighbors. What if this movie had been about them instead of about the virtuous Pinnock? The ugly racial generalizations made by the well-heeled blacks in "White Man's Burden" wouldn't sound quite so absurd.

Nakano takes pains to make it clear that Thomas is also a good man. He has a conscience and tries to make amends to Pinnock, but the ultimate revelation is that society is so badly structured that even good people perpetuate bad policies. I hope his next movie tells us what to do about it. habitat. You can perhaps believe a father might want to kill the driver who ran down his daughter.

But you can't believe, knowing what we know about Mary, that Fred would think she'd be happy to hear he was planning such a murder. Penn seems to think that most people are like Jekyll and Hyde. Fred nostalgically reminisces to Mary about their great marriage and then suddenly interrupts himself by vehemently wishing that Mary would die. Just as hard to swallow is a scene in which John returns to reconcile romantically with JoJo (Robin Wright, Penn's ex). He pour his heart out But she just turns up the boom box and says, "Let's dance." If this is what Penn has learned about relationships, let's just say I'm not surprised that Penn and Wright are no longer living togetljir.

Wrf If1'! if- i 'x r.w' I 1 i. -A Jl Jeff Bridges as Wild Bill Hickok and The narrator is Charley Prince, played by John Hurt, whose proper" British voice seems jarringly out of place describing Bill, Calamity Jane (Ellen Barkin with dark hair) and fellow frontiersmen. Using flashbacks shot with the camera turned on its Bide in grainy, overexposed black-and-white (to make it arty), Hill characterizes Bill as a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy. By the end of the ponder a "what if" future. His wife takes the kids to her mother's and, as this movie puts it, Pinnock is "driven" to seek "what's coming to him" from the man he blames for his downfall, Thomas.

Demanding the paltry sum of $3,000 from a man worth millions because that's what's "fair," the gun-waving Pinnock leams Thomas hasn't got that much cash around. He has to kidnap Thomas and hold him over the weekend until the banks open. Already we're getting into foggy territory. Was Pinnock really "driven'? Did he have anything coming to him? Well, never mind, this is a parable and much of it is to be taken as delivered. It's a wake-up call.

When the alarm rings you don't question whether the bell is a little off-key. takes home strippers from his nightly hangout to sleep with him at his lonely studio apartment. He lives for the day when his daughter's killer is released from a five-year prison sentence. As that day approaches, he pays a visit to Mary, who lives with their two young sons and a new husband in the nice suburban house she once shared with Fred. Fred proudly tells Mary that he plans to kill John Booth (where's the Wilkes?) as soon as he gets out of jail.

She is sick of his dramatics. Mary mocks Fred's commitment to killing Booth; it's too little too late. If he loves his children so much, she asks, why doesn't he visit the ones who are still alive, the ones who call her new husband Huston contorts her face painfully to spit out her lines. The effect is chilling. The scene aVt be viewed with a A' our toys might behave if they had a life of their own.

In "Gumby: The Movie," Clok-ey expands upon the slightly updated setting he and his wife, Gloria, created for the little green fellow's '80s comeback. Conventional computers and other trappings of "90s life sit side-by-side with the kinds of things folks in the '50s thought the future would hold: lifelike robots, cloning devices, matter-scrambling machines. Even with all the futuristic knick-knacks, "Gumby" feels like a willfully corny anachronism, a preserved reflection of a mid-20th-century childhood we desperately wanted to believe was innocent and pure. The plot is typically childlike and strange. While traveling through a book titled "Down on the Farm," Gumby and his pals encounter farmers whose land has been foreclosed by the Blockheads.

Gumby's rock group, the Clayboys, decide to perform a benefit concert for the farmers. During the show, the Blockheads spot Gumby's dog, Lowbelly, crying "real" pearls and later steal him away for money-making purposes. When they discover that the dog only cries during live performances of the band, the Blockheads manage to clone the entire group. This charmingly awkward antidote to today's super-slick computer animation may test your cuteness tolerance. Although the action is slow by contemporary wham-bam standards, the drama eventually picks up as the kooky plot complications pile up.

But the pacing is episodic, and the nonstop whimsy gets to be overwhelming: Every few minutes, you can feel yourself anticipating even hoping for a commercial break. Movie Review 'Gumby: The Movie' DIRECTOR Art Clokey WRITERS Art and Gloria Clokey RATED THEATER Opera Plaza EVALUATION y2 Wright): For a killer, Hp seems nice. 1 By Barry Walters EXAMINER STAFF CRITIC YOU HATED what they did to "The Flintstones." You enjoyed "The Brady Bunch Movie" despite your worst fears, and you refused to even think about "The Beverly Hillbillies" remake. But what are you going to do about a feature-length film starring your favorite childhood lump of clay? "Gumby: The Movie" proves the belief that nearly 'anything from 50s, '60s and '70s TV will eventually make it to the silver screen. (What's next? Quentin Ta-rantino's celluloid treatment of those "Plop-plop, fizz-fizz, oh-what-a-relief-it-is" Alka Seltzer commercials?) In case you don't have total TV recall of what happened during your Wonder years, Gumby is a 7-inch green clay boy with a slanted head (which, believe it or not, is meant to represent the Buddhists' bump of wisdom.) His best friend is an orange horse named Pokey.

Together they travel through the covers of books and find themselves in odd predicaments involving historical figures, space-age time machines, antiquated toys and other rationality-defying stuff. Pokey tends to be cynical and pragmatic, while Gumby remains naive and happy. And like all good animated characters, they are forever enduring grave physical disfigurement and walking away unharmed. The original episodes that appeared between the mid-'50s and the early '70s were marvels of surreal cuteness. Created by Art Clok-ey, the man who went on to engender those other claymation critters, "Davey and Goliath," "Gumby" brought the weirdness of experimental film to banal Saturday morning kids' programming.

The show merged real-life objects with moving, magical clay to create a bizarre netherworld that fused a child's ordinary reality with the fantasyland of our imaginations. Decades before "Toy Story," "Gumby" gave us an idea of how John David Morse) arAJoJo (Robin I i I I I 1 "4'. I i if I -J i. i.