Cinema: Diversionary Tactic

• Share

THE VISITORS

Directed by ELIA KAZAN Screenplay by CHRIS KAZAN

These have not been good times for Elia Kazan. He has not had a critical or popular success in films or the theater for years. His second novel, The Arrangement, was a huge bestseller, but the movie he made of it was a costly debacle. More recently, books about the blacklist, like Eric Bentley's Thirty Years of Treason, have revived the memory of Kazan's cooperation with congressional Communist-hunters in the early '50s. One looks to his work for reflections of these crises but finds only camouflage and confusion. The Arrangement, apparently intended as a kind of confessional, became instead a convoluted piece of self-justification.

The Visitors is an attempt at a new beginning. It is based on a script by Kazan's 33-year-old son Chris. Kazan shot it without the usual elaborate trappings of professional film making. His locations were in and around his own home in Connecticut. His crew consisted of five men. The actors he used were unknowns. The total cost of the film was $170,000. Kazan, in other words, made all the right moves, but The Visitors still isn't the right movie.

The screenplay concerns a Viet Nam veteran named Bill Schmidt (James Woods) who is living a quiet rural life with his girl friend (Patricia Joyce) and their newborn baby. Unexpectedly he is visited by two Army buddies. This is no sentimental reunion, but a tense, eventually violent rite of retribution. The friends have only recently been released from prison terms stemming from their participation in a wartime atrocity. Bill was a key witness against them at their court-martial.

It seems for a time that The Visitors, like On the Waterfront, will be a defense of the morality of informing. But then the Kazans veer off into other themes—national guilt, war crimes, the human potential for violence—whose weight cannot be supported by the glib script.

Kazan is generally known as a "realistic" director, but The Visitors is a reminder that his style is really much closer to a kind of operatic melodrama reminiscent of Luchino Visconti. Sometimes this works well for him. His first shot of one of the Army buddies is from close behind, as the man stares at some distant hills; the image conveys an intangible sense of menace. More often, though, the style amounts only to mannerism. Even the performances—guiding actors has always been Kazan's greatest strength —are surprisingly disappointing. Only Steve Railsback and Chico Martinez, as the visitors, bring to the film any substantial credibility.

What Kazan's previous work lacked in depth, it made up—at its best —in brute energy. In Waterfront, say, or A Face in the Crowd, he keyed the action at such a pitch of intensity that the films seemed to gain substance from sheer force. This technique, which amounts to a diversionary tactic, becomes transparent in The Visitors. Kazan raises a lot of significant issues, then exploits them without truly engaging them. The Visitors makes one wonder, in fact, if he ever really has engaged them. ∙Jay Cocks It is no surprise to find another Kazan in show business. The only surprise about Chris Kazan is that he came to it so late. After all, his father is a famous director and his mother Molly, who died in 1963, was a playwright with at least one Broadway show (The Egghead) to her credit.