Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...flicks on at will, the massive shoulders shrug at circumstances beyond comprehension. But under the actor is the lava of black rage. When it erupts, the other players are inflamed. When Jane Alexander appears with Jones, she is a common-law Desdemona, the only believable white character in the film...
...Baby Maker begins as if it should have been titled Regeneration Gap and scripted by Timothy Leary. It unabashedly bills itself as a "social comedy of today's world." As the audience absorbs that modest claim, the film opens on Tad (Scott Glenn), mustachioed and lank-haired, wailing with a guitar in his dingy L.A. beach pad. His chick Tish (Barbara Hershey) is off to check out an uptight middle-class couple whose triplex in Brentwood is without child. Seems Mrs. Triplex has had a hysterectomy, and Tish is to audition for a possible rent-a-womb job with...
...that, the viewer who can wade through an implausible situation, a clutch of cardboard dropouts and painful patches of dialogue will discover a film that is curiously sensitive and affecting. Screenwriter James Bridges (The Appaloosa, The Forbin Project) makes his debut here as a director; his sympathetic approach to the principal characters and an admirable sense of directorial pace eventually overcome his stereotypes and his tin ear for conversation. Even so, Bridges could not remotely have succeeded without engaging performances from Miss Hershey (the willful teen queen from Last Summer) and Sam Groom and Collin Wilcox-Horne...
...never resorts to cheap, boudoir-farce gimcracks where fundamental relationships are concerned. Jay does not run off with Tish, nor is Tish transformed into a Supermother who demands the baby at birth. However outlandish the situation's premise, it proceeds and climaxes with such natural logic that the film becomes unconventional Hollywood. The trio's art oddly imitates life and elevates The Baby Maker from garish absurdity to touching humanity...
...Classicism is health," wrote Goethe. "Romanticism a disease." By those very rigid standards, First Love is a sick film-admirably sick with love. It is also the robust debut of a film maker to be admired and watched. Just about every actor insists that "what I really want to do is direct." Maximilian Schell has not been content merely to yearn; he has made it happen...