No way out

No Way Out

IT IS NOT the stuff that is being attacked as garbage, blutted as our screens are with it, that is depressing these days. What truly depresses is the stuff that gets praised by critics who ought to know better. One such supposedly adult entertainment is Roger Donaldson's No Way Out, although some of the encomia are hedged with "as summer movies go,' as if dog days were automatic justification for dogs. Compared to much of what is around, the film may indeed be better; but is it any good?

No Way Out has style, but it ought to have heeded Paul Valery's warning: "There are nasty styles. . . . A good style presupposes a sort of organization of singularity, a harmony that rejects the excess of fantasy. . . . Everyone concedes that a tiger has quite a different style from a monkey: he has magnificent balances; the other is all instability, pointless capers, leaps without a goal.' A triumph of the simian style, No Way Out is remotely based on Kenneth Fearing's novel The Big Clock, which, under that title, was filmed, more faithfully and better, in 1948. John Farrow's movie dealt with passion and crime in the world of publishing, which in itself gave it a certain novelty and idiosyncratic flavor --publishing, like books, being terra incognita to most moviemakers. Robert Garland, the screenwriter and producer of the new film (beware of producers who do their own writing!), transfers the locale to politics, Washington, and, in particular, the Pentagon. Though crime remains crime--becomes, indeed, even uglier--passion is diluted to mere carnality.

The new version concerns the Secretary of Defense, David Brice, who is keeping his mistress, Susan Atwell, a party girl, in considerable luxury, but insists that she show up, glamorous and unescorted, at the big Washington parties he attends with his wife, so he can look at her. (Improbable, yes, but wait, wait!) At an inaugural ball, a young Navy officer, Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell, accosts Susan, and, despite an initial rebuff, the two are carrying on like bunny rabbits a few minutes later in a stretch limousine. In a civilized movie, the pair would be allowed some conversation of interest, perhaps even wit; and they might prefer some other venue to Susan's limo, with the driver smirking in the rear-view mirror until Tom remembers to have the partition rolled up.

For more serious sex, they adjourn to the apartment of Susan's friend Nina, a vendeuse in a high-fashion boutique and, for plot purposes, a South African black, though, as played by the international model Iman, closer to Givenchy than to Johannesburg. In the limo, despite frantic removal of various garments, Susan kept her camisole on; arriving at Nina's, with whom she swaps apartments for the night, she is revealed naked under her fur. Along with faulty continuity, faulty logic: what good is changing apartments if Secretary Brice calls or shows up and finds only Nina at Susan's?

Eventually, Tom has to go back on duty; one stormy night at sea, in waters infested by Russian submarines, a shipmate is about to be swept overboard. Tom performs a rescue meant to be heroic, but so hokey as to be only humorous. Quite implausibly, this rescue is written up big in the papers, complete with Tom's picture, and Brice, who met Tom briefly at said inaugural ball, decides he needs a hero as an intelligence liaison man, and commandeers the lieutenant commander from Manila to Washington, pronto. Tom calls on Susan and, again, after less than a paragraph's worth of conversation, he carries her off to bed. By now their love is in full bloom, but it still takes a while for Brice to catch on that Susan is cheating on him with an unknown man. In a jealous rage, Brice kills her.

Some sympathy must be preserved for this unsavory fellow, so the killing has to be accidental. In the sumptuous house he has bought for her, there is an open staircase with a wooden balustrade, which breaks during their fight, and the horrified Brice sees Susan hurtle to a very pretty instant death (no blood, no unphotogenically broken neck), though from this modest height crippling would be more likely. The balustrade death has become one of the worst movie cliches in recent years, but perhaps it is meant as a comment on our present sloppy workmanship in carpentry, if not in filmmaking.

Pritchard, Brice's general counsel and evil genius--he seems seldom to leave the Secretary's side--masterminds a way to get his boss off the hook. He revives the old canard of Yuri, a Russian mole in the Pentagon, and also manages to make it look as if this fellow had been Susan's killer. By further unlikely manipulation, Tom Farrell is handed the task of tracking down his beloved's murderer, with all signs beginning to point toward Tom himself as the culprit. This could be exciting if the Pentagon were not turned into your ordinary office building where people run around relatively unimpeded; if the two men who could identify the killer were not (instead of being stationed at the exit) led around, almost like bloodhounds on a leash, from room to room, causing chaos; and if Tom didn't hide in an air vent in his office ceiling to escape detection. Without a little credibility, there is no suspense.