Cries Hollywood

The three stars of 'Easy Rider' (I. to r.) Dennis Hopper, Pete 'Midnight Cowboy' is really a journey of innocence through the inferno of capitalism in decay, yet at a point there is, as it were, a failure of nerve by the director, an inability to see through the nightmare and he falls back on a mawkish sentimentality which is an evasion of his theme.

Banality

What promised to be a sharp and stringently objective film lapses into banality; almost with an audible sigh the issues are ducked and the Hollywood home ground of tear-jerking takes its place.

IN CONTRAST to the numbing indifference of metropolitan isolation, Goodbye Columbus' is set amongst the claustrophobia of the wealthy self-made country club Jewish community. and Jack Nicholson riding across America.

Here it is the shifting allpervasiveness of custom and family, the preoccupation with food and status.

The film is taken from the book by Philip Roth, a writer of great humour and perception, whose combination of pain and self-irony almost threatens to block his sense of indignation at the world. His recent 'Portnoy's Complaint' is the best American novel since 'Catch 22'.

The film is a rather poignant comedy of two young people who have an affair during a summer holiday.

She comes from a rich, self-made Jewish background, and he from a poorer Jewish amily, determined to break from its fetters, to make life as he wants it, free from the restrictions of custom, of what is expected of him, the good job and position. rogance, confidence, skittishness and petulance that wealth from the labour of others has privileged her with.

She is the high point of the American capitalist dream, the illusion incarnate, yet she is bound by precisely the forces that have created her.

The film and the affair end abruptly, when the demands of family, guilt and dependency assert themselves over any affection she has for him. He walks away, disillusioned, into the night.

It is a slight, well observed and muted piece with plenty of accurate detail and a refreshing and unsensational sensuality.

Contradictory

'EASY RIDER' is by far the most interesting and contradictory of the three.

It is a nakedly idealist piece with all the current illusions of drugs, the return to nature, so much favoured by the capitalist press, yet in spite of this the very seriousness with which the makers, Richard Hopper and Peter Fonda, have approached their subject, their dedication to present a real objective world, transcends their own ideological intent:For a whole layer of American society is revealed in all its contradictions.

Gleaming technology stands side by side with impoverished southern shanty towns, modish 'hip' dialogue clashes with small-town backward culture with all its suspicions, fears and hostilities; violence rupts at any moment, love ranstormed into hate, illusions into despair.

Inhumanity

What emerges is a sense of complexity, imminence of breakdown, the grotesque inhumanity of imperialism incapable of solving its contradictions, where youth's energy and idealism are shrouded in a pathetic desperation.

Hopper can see no way out; he is in recoil from the monolith where, as with his characters, the end can come arbitrarily out of the blue from the barrel of a shot gun.

All three films have in common a middle-class confusion about, but intensely felt hostility towards, the contradictions and barbarism of bourgeois culture, but they see it entirely from an individualist standpoint which offers in itself no solution.

Neither death, nor dropping out, nor walking away transforms the nightmare one iota.

Unless the situation is grasped from the point of view of dialectical materialism, where the key to the future is in the revolutionary mobilization of the working class as a class, then individual despair can be the only conclusion.

However deeply felt the protests are, they remain the impotent squeals of anguish of the middle class, which unless anchored to the revolutionary struggles of the working class must inevitably spin off into the clutches of reaction and barbarism.

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