Cinema: Non-Compos Comedy

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A Fine Madness. "He's writing this big poem, and it just won't come out," says Joanne Woodward, pleading with Psychiatrist Patrick O'Neal to take an interest in her husband's work. As the sleazy wife of a roughneck Greenwich Village poet, Joanne belts out her best lines with actressy intensity and proves only that she is too bright a blonde to play dumb. Somewhat more at home with his role—a poet with a sex life as breezy as James Bond's—is Sean Connery, who displays some proof of his versatility by shouting a lot. While earning a buck on the payroll of Athena Carpet Cleaners, Connery seduces a private secretary in a private office that slowly fills up with suds. Sent away to a mental rest camp where Lady Psychiatrist Colleen Dewhurst spoils him with massage, he reaps greater benefits from hydrotherapy by coaxing Dr. O'Neal's neglected wife (Jean Seberg) into a ripple bath.

Though the resemblance of Madness to Bondomania is otherwise superficial, Director Irvin Kershner savors the joke to excess. The rest of Elliott Baker's screenplay, adapted from his own 1964 novel and filmed with careful fidelity on the seedy side of Manhattan, is a fitfully funny satire based on a portrait of the artist as the natural enemy of all Establishment norms. This voguish half-truth worked well enough in book form, where nearly every character was a well-managed mass of lunatic impulses. In the movie, everyone seems to be racing against the threat of imminent condensation. Director Kershner pounces upon an idea without developing it, and his commendable desire to do a different sort of comedy boils down into more of the same old wheeze—just another nonconformist nut matching wits with even nuttier psychiatrists.