Cinema: Strictly Nonkosher

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PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT

Directed by ERNEST LEHMAN Screenplay by ERNEST LEHMAN

Whatever the merits of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint as a novel, it is certainly the greatest closet nightclub act of our time. In sketch after sketch, Roth cuts into the family and sex life of a Jewish neurotic until funny bone and inflamed nerve ending become indistinguishable. "I'm caught in the middle of a Jewish joke," cries Alexander Portnoy to his psychoanalyst, "and it isn't funny."

Being caught in the middle of Ernest Lehman's debasement of Roth's novel isn't funny either. As the movie version of Goodbye, Columbus proved, the controlled hysteria with which Roth cauterizes his past is hard to translate into film. Actors, scenery and background music only dilute the intensity of Portnoy's brilliant lie-down comic routine on the psychoanalyst's couch. Roth's re-Joycing in the scenes of Portnoy's heroic masturbations lose their hilarious dimension and descend pathetically into the baggy-pants scatology of the oldtime burlesque skit.

Lee Grant as Sophie Portnoy, the carnivorous Jewish mother, and Jack Somack as the resentfully respectable father can do no more than gesticulate their way through the clichés of Jewish parenthood. Surreal projections in Portnoy's mind, Sophie and Jack were never meant to be seen.

Neither was the Monkey (Karen Black), the fulfillment of Portnoy's teen-age sex fantasies. But as the West Virginia coal miner's daughter who lusts after Portnoy's intellect with as much guiltridden fervor as Portnoy has for her body, Black offers the film's best performance. Her face has those interesting imperfections usually found in the faces of nameless actresses who play in such smokers a Hillbilly Heaven. She also seems to have a real feeling for hostile profanity, which is about as extreme her as one will find in a general-release movie. Oddly, when it comes to actions rather than words, the sex in tame, sometimes to the point of ab surdity. The most torrid encounter, a moaning simulation of cunnilingus, oc curs with both Portnoy and the Mon key fully clothed — she in pants.

Richard Benjamin as Portnoy is no more credible with his clothes off. He looks the part: his high, shiny cheeks and full, wavy hair give him the bright man-child appearance to complement the 33 -year-old character's infantile emotions. But when Benjamin opens his mouth, he seems about as out of place as Howdy Doody in Hamlet. His readings of Roth's lines are pure balsa wood.

The novel's plot remains more or less intact, but it is laden with Lehman's heavy touches of sympathy and maudlin sentimentality. These do little to focus Roth's savage vision: Jewishness as a perpetual circumcision of the psyche.